Explaining the world one sketch at a time

Simplifying complex ideas through fun and insightful sketches. Explore topics from science, creativity, psychology, and more explained in pictures.

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Learn something new in a sketch each Sunday

Recent sketches

Manager time, maker time

In Manager Time a day is neatly sliced up into hourly chunks according to the calendar. Meeting someone is as easy as finding a free slot that coincides. You don’t have to worry too much about what you’ll be doing next as your calendar will tell you. In Maker Time a day is an open book to get something hard and meaningful done. Even thinking when a meeting might be and remembering to go can distract from getting on with making. Long, uninterrupted chunks of time, not sliced and diced by meetings on the hour are ideal to make progress on hard problems and tackle something new. Even a single meeting in the middle of an afternoon can disrupt that long meaningful chunk into two that make it harder to tackle something big as you have to context switch and pick up where you left off. Most modern offices operate on Manager Time. It’s great for meetings but comes at a cost for getting meaningful work done. If you’re a maker you may associate with the feeling that to get some real work done you feel you need to do it at the weekend, or in an evening after everyone’s gone home, when you’ll be free of interruptions. If you’re a manager, consider your makers when you schedule your next meeting. If you haven’t already, you should read the original article Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, by Paul Graham from whom this excellent observation is from.…In Manager Time a day is neatly sliced up into hourly chunks according to the calendar. Meeting someone is as easy as finding a free slot that coincides. You don’t have to worry too much about what you’ll be doing next as your calendar will tell you. In Maker Time a day is an open book to get something hard and meaningful done. Even thinking when a meeting might be and remembering to go can distract from getting on with making. Long, uninterrupted chunks of time, not sliced and diced by meetings on the hour are ideal to make progress on hard problems and tackle something new. Even a single meeting in the middle of an afternoon can disrupt that long meaningful chunk into two that make it harder to tackle something big as you have to context switch and pick up where you left off. Most modern offices operate on Manager Time. It’s great for meetings but comes at a cost for getting meaningful work done. If you’re a maker you may associate with the feeling that to get some real work done you feel you need to do it at the weekend, or in an evening after everyone’s gone home, when you’ll be free of interruptions. If you’re a manager, consider your makers when you schedule your next meeting. If you haven’t already, you should read the original article Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, by Paul Graham from whom this excellent observation is from.

22 Aug 2020

Forcing functions in design - 2 examples: a hotel room with the lights controlled by key card and a lawnmower that needs both hands to turn it on

Forcing function — design

Forcing functions are a super way to help make things foolproof, or better, errorproof — as all of us make mistakes with designed things without being fools. You may have used your own forcing function when, in an attempt to make sure you remember your passport or tickets before a flight, you put them directly in front of the door so you couldn’t open it without noticing them. That little dialogue that asks you if you want to save your changes before closing your work, that’s a forcing function too. My first memory of understanding a forcing function was when working with a giant machine capable of cutting through 100 pieces of paper at a time. The two buttons to operate it were on opposite sides of the machine. I couldn’t start the machine without spreading my arms out wide. There was then no way to also accidentally have your fingers in with the paper and near the blades when it started. Smart. I learned this sense of forcing function from Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things. Also from Don, see Mapping. The other sense of forcing functions for productivity is also really useful: helping kick ourselves into action.…Forcing functions are a super way to help make things foolproof, or better, errorproof — as all of us make mistakes with designed things without being fools. You may have used your own forcing function when, in an attempt to make sure you remember your passport or tickets before a flight, you put them directly in front of the door so you couldn’t open it without noticing them. That little dialogue that asks you if you want to save your changes before closing your work, that’s a forcing function too. My first memory of understanding a forcing function was when working with a giant machine capable of cutting through 100 pieces of paper at a time. The two buttons to operate it were on opposite sides of the machine. I couldn’t start the machine without spreading my arms out wide. There was then no way to also accidentally have your fingers in with the paper and near the blades when it started. Smart. I learned this sense of forcing function from Don Norman’s classic The Design of Everyday Things. Also from Don, see Mapping. The other sense of forcing functions for productivity is also really useful: helping kick ourselves into action.

16 Aug 2020

The BS asymmetry principle

Also known as Brandolini’s Law, this is the simple observation that it’s far easier to produce and spread BS, misinformation and nonsense than it is to refute it. In fact, the iSchool at University of Washington launched a course on Calling Bullshit with the first class being booked up within one-minute of registration. The professors, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West have since written a book: Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. Phil Williamson in Nature also wrote a nice article emphasizing that we should take the time and effort to correct misinformation where we can. In it, he proposed the idea that “The global scientific community could…set up its own, moderated, rating system for websites that claim to report on science. We could call it the Scientific Honesty and Integrity Tracker, and give online nonsense the SHAIT rating it deserves.”…Also known as Brandolini’s Law, this is the simple observation that it’s far easier to produce and spread BS, misinformation and nonsense than it is to refute it. In fact, the iSchool at University of Washington launched a course on Calling Bullshit with the first class being booked up within one-minute of registration. The professors, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West have since written a book: Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. Phil Williamson in Nature also wrote a nice article emphasizing that we should take the time and effort to correct misinformation where we can. In it, he proposed the idea that “The global scientific community could…set up its own, moderated, rating system for websites that claim to report on science. We could call it the Scientific Honesty and Integrity Tracker, and give online nonsense the SHAIT rating it deserves.”

9 Aug 2020

RACI

This acronym acts as a handy checklist to consider and clarify roles and responsibilities for projects. You could even build a table — a Responsibility Assignment Matrix — with what needs to happen and the people who are involved identifying what relationship each person has for each task. In particular, sometimes making it clear who doesn’t have a say can be the most helpful thing to do. It breaks down somewhat like this: Responsible Who will actually be responsible for doing the task. Accountable Who is accountable for it being completed and achieving its goals. Consulted Whose opinion will be sought for the task, though they won’t be doing it themselves. Informed Who doesn’t get a say in the task, but will be kept informed of how it’s going.…This acronym acts as a handy checklist to consider and clarify roles and responsibilities for projects. You could even build a table — a Responsibility Assignment Matrix — with what needs to happen and the people who are involved identifying what relationship each person has for each task. In particular, sometimes making it clear who doesn’t have a say can be the most helpful thing to do. It breaks down somewhat like this: Responsible Who will actually be responsible for doing the task. Accountable Who is accountable for it being completed and achieving its goals. Consulted Whose opinion will be sought for the task, though they won’t be doing it themselves. Informed Who doesn’t get a say in the task, but will be kept informed of how it’s going.

1 Aug 2020

Schadenfreude

Ah, that satisfying, superior, at once gleeful and slightly sinful feeling when the aggressive driver that blazed past you a few miles back is pulled over by the police at the next exit. That feeling is schadenfreude (a nifty German word made up of “schaden” for damage, harm or hurt and “freude” for joy) to describe the act of taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes. I hadn’t thought much of it before reading some excerpts from Tiffany Watt Smith’s book Schadenfreude. She makes a compelling case for the benefits of examining the moments when we feel superior at another’s expense as a small window into ourselves. A little twinge of joy when a colleague doesn’t get a promotion might reveal your jealousy of their situation or a deep-down resentment of unfairness. If the person who pushed in front of you in line drops their ice cream right after buying it, your secret twinge of joy might be a sense of justice and equity for obeying the rules when they didn’t. Schadenfreude can be a little boost to your own self-esteem or a valuable window into your own weaknesses. For a mini-intro, try Tiffany Watt Smith’s TED Ideas article: Do you secretly feel good when others stumble? 5 ways to make peace with this very human emotion. I revised this sketch for the book Big Ideas Little Pictures.…Ah, that satisfying, superior, at once gleeful and slightly sinful feeling when the aggressive driver that blazed past you a few miles back is pulled over by the police at the next exit. That feeling is schadenfreude (a nifty German word made up of “schaden” for damage, harm or hurt and “freude” for joy) to describe the act of taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes. I hadn’t thought much of it before reading some excerpts from Tiffany Watt Smith’s book Schadenfreude. She makes a compelling case for the benefits of examining the moments when we feel superior at another’s expense as a small window into ourselves. A little twinge of joy when a colleague doesn’t get a promotion might reveal your jealousy of their situation or a deep-down resentment of unfairness. If the person who pushed in front of you in line drops their ice cream right after buying it, your secret twinge of joy might be a sense of justice and equity for obeying the rules when they didn’t. Schadenfreude can be a little boost to your own self-esteem or a valuable window into your own weaknesses. For a mini-intro, try Tiffany Watt Smith’s TED Ideas article: Do you secretly feel good when others stumble? 5 ways to make peace with this very human emotion. I revised this sketch for the book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

26 Jul 2020

Survivorship bias

So the story goes, as told by Stephen Sigler, Nature May 1989: "The US military studied fighter planes returning from missions to try to improve their survival rate and were considering adding heavy armour to those parts of the plane that tended to show the greatest concentration of hits from enemy fire, until statisticians pointed out the fallacy of that argument. The more vulnerable parts of the plane were those with the fewest hits; planes hit there tended not to return at all. The single most vulnerable part, the pilot’s head, was without serious scar in the sample of planes that returned." It’s easy to draw correlations from what we see in front of us. But what we see usually represents just a small part of what has happened. Focusing on the evidence we can easily see at the expense of that we can’t leads to survivorship bias. To say it another way, when Bill Gates drops out of college and starts Microsoft it might seem like dropping out is a path to success for others too, but that ignores all the dropouts who didn’t create Microsofts and consequently you didn’t hear about. Silent evidence — the evidence that we don’t or can’t easily choose to consider — is a term from Nicholas Nassim Talleb. When trying to discover the veracity of the planes story I enjoyed Bill Casselman’s American Mathematical Society article on The Legend of Abraham Wald. The postscript points to some of the source behind the story including a mention of Stephen Sigler’s letter in Nature quoted above. I covered survivorship bias before, but I like this story so much I thought it was worth doing again.…So the story goes, as told by Stephen Sigler, Nature May 1989: "The US military studied fighter planes returning from missions to try to improve their survival rate and were considering adding heavy armour to those parts of the plane that tended to show the greatest concentration of hits from enemy fire, until statisticians pointed out the fallacy of that argument. The more vulnerable parts of the plane were those with the fewest hits; planes hit there tended not to return at all. The single most vulnerable part, the pilot’s head, was without serious scar in the sample of planes that returned." It’s easy to draw correlations from what we see in front of us. But what we see usually represents just a small part of what has happened. Focusing on the evidence we can easily see at the expense of that we can’t leads to survivorship bias. To say it another way, when Bill Gates drops out of college and starts Microsoft it might seem like dropping out is a path to success for others too, but that ignores all the dropouts who didn’t create Microsofts and consequently you didn’t hear about. Silent evidence — the evidence that we don’t or can’t easily choose to consider — is a term from Nicholas Nassim Talleb. When trying to discover the veracity of the planes story I enjoyed Bill Casselman’s American Mathematical Society article on The Legend of Abraham Wald. The postscript points to some of the source behind the story including a mention of Stephen Sigler’s letter in Nature quoted above. I covered survivorship bias before, but I like this story so much I thought it was worth doing again.

19 Jul 2020

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