An eponym is a word named after somebody or someplace.

An eponym, almost by definition, comes with a story, making them some of the most intriguing words. Knowing what an eponym is also allows you to use the word eponymous, which is always a good way to sound smart.

Some of my favourite eponyms are now commonplace products that took the inventor's name. Some examples:

The Rubik's cube is an invention by Hungarian architecture professor Ernő Rubik. The cube has the fascinating property of being a solid object that's also fluid.

This year (2024), the Rubik's Cube turned 50, celebrating around half a billion cube sales, scores of speed-cubing championships, and documentaries. When Rubik first invented the cube, he wasn't sure it was solvable and only managed it for the first time several months after creating it.

In 2020, Rubik told the story of the cube in his book, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All.

The fabulously named jacuzzi, or more generally the hot tub, is named after the Italian Jacuzzi family. The seven brothers of the family—there were also six daughters—trained to become engineers, making plane propellers, irrigation systems and pumps before one of the brothers created a homemade bath to help his two-year-old son who was suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. The rest, as they say, is history.

Saskia Solomon tells some of the brothers' story, which includes the court case Jacuzzi vs Jacuzzi, and the invention of the jacuzzi in the 2023 New York Times article, The Frothy Saga of the Jacuzzi Family.

After so long as what seems the most basic of foods, it was remarkable for me to learn that the humble sandwich was named after a person: John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich. Though he probably spent most of his time in London, the title itself is associated with the small town of Sandwich in Kent, in Southeast England.

The story goes that the Earl liked playing cards and wanted food he could eat without having to leave his game and that wouldn't give him sticky fingers that would damage the cards. Incarnations of open sandwiches appeared much earlier elsewhere. For example, the trencher—something I had to look up when reading Game of Thrones—involved serving food on top of old bread as a sort of plate. But it took the Earl's dedication to card playing, or at least desk work, to take the next step many years later.

László Bíró was a Hungarian-Argentine inventor who created the first truly successful ballpoint pen. In the US, the BiC is more common, an eponym this time from Marcel Bich.

It's said that Lázló experienced his fountain pen leaking from heat—fountain pens being very common before the ballpoint—and was inspired by a printing press that used a cylinder to spread the ink. All it needed was to go in all directions. Enter the ballpoint.

While the invention seems obvious in hindsight, perfecting it for robust, commercial use was challenging. For example, finding suitable ink for the tiny ball bearing to spread, which doesn't leak or clog and isn't overly affected by heat. Lázló teamed up with an aviation company—who use a lot of ball bearings—which also provided a great use case of finding a pen that wouldn't leak from the air pressure changes in planes. Later, BiC licenced the technology from Biro. A Bic Cristal® Ballpoint pen is part of the collection at the MoMA.

I only learned that silhouette was an eponym while preparing this sketch, but it's perhaps the best of all. Étienne de Silhouette, a French government finance official tasked with curbing a French deficit in the 1700s, unwittingly gave his name to the classic black-on-white simple outline image of a person. His severe frugal policies of taxes, curbing royal spending and even melting down gold and silverware earned him the reputation of doing things cheaply. Hence, a cheap method of creating a portrait, cutting out black paper and laying it on a white background, became known as a silhouette.

Nearly everyone will recognise the fuel that Rudolf Diesel gave his name to and his diesel engine. Diesel created a breakthrough engine that was more efficient than typical steam engines while being smaller and weighing less.

Curiously, I learned that Diesel died in mysterious circumstances, disappearing on a journey across the English Channel in 1913.

An excellent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast featuring Helen Zaltzmann of the Allusionist raised several interesting questions about eponyms I hadn't considered. Here are a few to think about:

Eponyms are common in medicine, for example, when we name a disease or condition after those playing a part in the discovery. However, the name, for example, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, tells a medical practitioner very little about the disease compared to a name that relates to the symptoms of the sufferer or the cause. Should examples like these be replaced with more practical names?

Eponyms almost always have a way of oversimplifying a story, often wrapping up complex histories with the names of white males. For example, rarely are products invented or diseases identified solely through the actions of one person. Yet an eponym chooses one, or some people, at the expense of others.

Eponyms may be the name of someone later discredited or who develops a tarnished reputation from other actions in their lives. Should someone who did evil deeds be remembered in an eponym or should it be changed?

Who knew eponyms could be so interesting?

Know some good eponyms with fun stories? I'd love to hear them.

Eponyms are distinct from the fun concept of Nominative determinism—an aptronym—where someone's name seemingly influenced their future actions or career choices (for example, Les McBurney — Volunteer firefighter).

I've covered a lot of eponyms over the years, far more than I realised. Using the handy list page on the site, I've collected some other eponym examples, which include a lot of my favourites:

Eponym

Vorfreude is a delightful German word for the pleasure of anticipation. It combines vor, meaning "before" or "in advance", and freude, meaning "happiness". It's the joy from the anticipation of joy.

How to get more happiness from the same activity? Vorfreude!

For me, the magic of Vorfreude lies in how it stretches out the pleasure of any upcoming event or experience. Once I hit 'Confirm' to book a trip, it kicks off joy for months whenever I think about the trip. And the great part about it, if we're organised, is that a trip in December can bring 'anticipatory joy' from when we book it in January. I need only reflect on my positive feelings about the trip, and life seems better.

I've often found that the Vorfreude may surpass the joy of the actual trip. With my Vorfreude glasses on, I never worry about the mosquitoes, the heat, or the inevitable waiting on the journey.

Germans have a saying that reflects this: "Vorfreude ist die schönste Freude," or Vorfreude is the best joy.

Thanks to something called fading affect bias, the emotional weight of negative memories tends to fade faster than positive ones. This leaves us with a rose-tinted view of past trips and may conveniently erase the niggly parts we didn't enjoy, allowing us to focus on just the good parts of a trip coming up. Or perhaps it's our optimism bias (we had a fun podcast about optimism bias).

Vorfreude doesn't only apply to big events like a holiday or wedding. I find anticipatory joy in small things, too. I look forward to the first coffee in the morning every day. Sometimes, the coffee won't live up to what I'd hoped for, but hey, I'd already been enjoying the idea of it since I finished my last coffee the day before.

I look forward to meeting friends and loved ones. I look forward to a dinner out. I look forward to weekends. I look forward to the next football match. I look forward to a cake coming out of the oven. Many people look forward to 5 o'clock each day. By simply reflecting on these moments of future joy, we can experience happiness right now, no matter where we are.

We can even work to cultivate and enhance our Vorfreude. As a child, nothing built anticipation like an advent calendar, ramping up excitement for Christmas day as I opened each new window. Sharing photos of your holiday destination with friends and family before you go and planning activities increases vorfreude. Getting good things in the diary can kick us out of languishing.

In some ways, Vorfreude mirrors the benefits I get from fear-based training plans or the forcing function of signing up for endurance events later in the year—having signed up for the event, I start to benefit from it as soon as I get out training with friends.

Of course, you may not be looking forward to the trip that's coming up. Perhaps upcoming events are filling you with dread. Anxiety is an emotion perhaps closest to the opposite of Vorfreude, or anticipatory anxiety more specifically.

I've also seen Vorangst proposed—with Angst being strong anxiety or fear—which seems a very suitable alternative.

While thinking fondly about upcoming events can give you Vorfreude, a reader pointed out to me the dangers of thinking too much about how good something will be in the future.

It's easy to slip into setting expectations in your mind about how good something ought to be. If it then doesn't live up to your expectations, it could affect your enjoyment in the moment.

I guess the sweet spot is expectation-free Vorfreude.

It's not just the Germans who thought of giving a word to the joyful anticipation and excitement before an event. The Dutch use the word Vorpreet for the same concept.

But don't forget to enjoy the moment. I'm sometimes reminded of Calvin talking with Hobbes about the enjoyment of his favourite breakfast cereal, Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs:

"Ahhh, another bowl of chocolate frosted sugar bombs! The second bowl is always the best! The pleasure of my first bowl is diminished by the anticipation of future bowls, and by the end of my third bowl, I usually feel sick."

While it’s great to savour the anticipation, remember to enjoy the moment when it arrives.

More tips for Vorfreude in this excellent article by Rachel Dixon: The Vorfreude secret: 30 zero-effort ways to fill your life with joy

If money doesn't make you happy you're probably not spending it right

a simpler vorfreude picture with text (which works rather well as a message on a clock)—to be honest, this is probably better =)

Vorfreude

Every creation is a mirror, reflecting something of its creator. If you and I were to paint the same subject, your painting would reflect some of you, and mine would reflect some of me. If we both write stories, each one will carry something of ourselves—our personality, our experiences.

The writer is in the writing. The artist is in the art. The musician's in the music.

Take writing as an example. If we're writing authentically, we can't help but share a bit of ourselves in our work. Our past experiences affect what we notice. Our timidity or confidence is reflected in the tone and style. Our education in the choice of words. Our kindness and patience, or cynicism and frustration, is revealed to the reader. And the choice of what you write or paint reflects you.

Not if we're trying too hard. Not if we're writing to sound like a writer or if we're adopting a "literary" style because we think that's how it should be done. And not if we focus more on pleasing a search engine or ticking off marketing goals than connecting with readers. But if we write honestly and directly, the writer shows through.

This phrasing hit me while reading Brenda Ueland's book If You Want to Write. She calls the writer the Third Dimension. I believe she means that when you read a book, there are the characters, the reader, and also, inescapably, the writer's personality. She writes that readers can tell when writing isn't authentic, when it's not really you, but instead, a performance to meet someone else's expectations of how one should write—or perhaps a creation of an AI's sycophantic personality.

The presence of the writer in the writing, or the artist in the art, leads Ueland to say, "…I have come to think the only way to become a better writer is to become a better person."

I believe this principle also holds true across other creative disciplines, though I thought "the cook is in the cooking" didn't quite have the same ring. Still, it holds a ring of truth if I consider a musician and their music, an entrepreneur and their business, a podcaster and their podcast and others.

It's hard to write this without wondering what I'm sharing about myself (and what gets scrubbed out and cleansed by Grammarly proofreading). In Sketchplanations as a project, I've come to think that sooner or later, everything I know of value will be there. So, in some way, the whole thing reflects me. Shall we go for a beer?

More sketches about writing — it always surprises me, for a designer and product developer, how many I have. 35 at last count.

Here are images for each alone in case you're more one than the other:

In addition to prints of this sketch, I added an individual print of the writer's in the writing and an individual print of the artist's in the art.

The Writer's in the Writing. The Artist's in the Art.

Writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor explains fauxtomation as "the process that renders invisible human labour to maintain the illusion that machines and systems are smarter than they are." (Faux means false or fake in French).

Taylor gives an example of standing in line to collect food and the person in front of her expressing amazement at how the app knew his order was done 20 minutes early. The server replies, "I sent you a message."

With the rise in incredible abilities driven by AI chatbots and tools, it's tempting to believe that AI can run anything. But, in many situations, claims of AI magic and sophisticated automation disguise work done by people—often outsourced and poorly paid.

An example of fauxtomation is content moderators, whose job is to review and filter objectionable content from the web when the claim is that sophisticated algorithms and AI are doing the work. Other examples are tagging or searching images, transcribing audio, responding to customer queries, making decisions, or, ironically, training machine learning models. In another twist, ordering on the app or touchscreen at McDonalds or the self-checkout at a supermarket, you, as a customer, become the labour of a server or waiter.

Some have argued that automation polarises work into vast quantities of small, menial tasks feeding the machines on one end and sophisticated, high-skilled work in designing and maintaining the machines at the other.

Amazon has long offered its Mechanical Turk service, which crowdsources assignments with a distributed workforce—they called it artificial, artificial intelligence. The original Mechanical Turk was a hoax from the 1700s where a concealed human chess player fooled onlookers into believing a machine was playing.

As a design and UX professional, I've used the Wizard of Oz prototype technique. Named after the infamous wizard secretly controlling impressive machines from behind a curtain, the idea is to give the appearance of a working software prototype by discreetly controlling what people see based on their actions.

AI promises instant automation, but that's rarely the case. As you work to automate and remove inefficiencies, it's natural that systems should be supported by people.  Human-augmented work may be a more appropriate term. In many domains, especially where safety is at stake, such as in self-driving cars, reviewing legal documents, or automated background checks, oversight by people may remain critical.

Alongside the AI revolution, a quiet revolution nearly as significant for our everyday experience is the tying together of different tools for automation. Tools like Zapier, Google Sheets, Notion, and the growth of APIs allow us to automate workflows across systems, saving massive amounts of time and effort.

While the vision of machines reducing our labour persists, history shows that they often drive increased productivity instead of reducing work. This echoes Jevon's paradox, where fuel efficiency gains usually result in increased fuel usage rather than less.

I saw an excellent talk by machine learning and AI expert James Smith, in which, before you try machine learning ("I hear you have Magic Pixie dust. Can I have some?"), he would ask, "Have you tried 50 IF statements?" These programmed rules will be more maintainable, less complex, and result in responses that are easy to understand.

I learned about fauxtomation from Tom Humberstone's remarkable visual essay What Luddites Can Teach us About Resisting an Automated Future in the MIT Technology Review. Fauxtomation is similar in concept to Potemkin AI, a term from researcher Jathan Sadowski.

You can read Astra Taylor's article, The Automation Charade, or watch her discuss fauxtomation at the AI Now 2018 symposium.

Sketchplanations continues to be done by me, by hand. If you'd like to support me, I'm improving my Patreon, which makes such a difference in helping creators like me keep creating. Thank you.

Here's a fauxtomation sketch by ChatGPT in case you're interested =)

As well as fauxtomation prints, you can get AI department prints

Fauxtomation

Trench warfare dominated the fighting in WW1. After the initial hasty digging of trenches in the early days of the war, as each side dug in to defend their lines, trenches evolved to be more complex and sophisticated, including digging them in a stepped or zigzag shape.

Why were trenches dug in a zigzag pattern? Zigzagging trenches with sharp corners helped remedy several fatal flaws learned from early trench warfare:

One of the key advantages of a zigzag trench is its ability to contain blasts. In a straight trench, the blast from mortar or artillery fire would travel unimpeded to either side. However, a trench with frequent bends could confine explosions to smaller portions of the trench, reducing casualties.

2. Zigzags help slow an enemy down after capturing a trench

A straight trench meant that breaching a portion of it gave a long line of sight and the ability to fire down the trench which could aid attackers. Angles and corners from the zigzag or wavy shape of a trench meant that line of sight was reduced and gave better defensive positions with cover and concealment.

So, the simple change from a straight trench to a zigzag gave defenders significant advantages, and both sides used the design during the war. It's painful to imagine the tragic lessons that led to this evolution in design.

I learned about zigzag trench design from a children's book about WW1: 50 Things You Should Know About The First World War, by Jim Eldridge. It's striking how such a simple design change can have a significant effect. It's also a great example of how a simple solution can seem so obvious in retrospect and yet may take time to develop.

One of the trends of evolution identified in the theory of inventive problem solving that always fascinated me and has myriad applications is how straight lines in products typically evolve to jointed or bent, then wavy lines. As the theory would say, a straight line has unused potential, and someone will find an advantage in introducing a bend or bends. I sketched a similar trend about flat surfaces having unused potential.

The Imperial War Museum has a great 9-minute video explaining trench warfare, which discusses the zigzag or stepped design in this sketch.

Zigzag trenches

Hanlon's Razor is the adage: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Or sometimes, "Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence."

It appears in a similar form by the inimitable Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as, "And I have again observed, my dear friend, in this trifling affair, that misunderstandings and neglect occasion more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence," in The Sorrows of Young Werther. The same sentiments are also shared by William James, Churchill, and H.G. Wells. More recently, Douglas Hubbard gave a more modern version in his book The Failure of Risk Management: Why It's Broken and How to Fix It: "Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system."

The mistake of assuming bad intentions was brought home to me when puzzling why people kept leaving paper towels in the sinks of the bathrooms at university. How hard is it to put them in the bin?? A year after assuming my fellow students were either lazy or inconsiderate or both, I was washing my hands when another student dried his hands on the towel, walked to the door, opened it by covering the handle with the paper towel — presumably to avoid the germs — and then aimed his paper towel at the bin which was between the sinks. He missed, and it landed in the sink as he walked off down the corridor. Suddenly, it was clear to me that the hygiene of the door handle was higher in consideration of towel-in-the-sink people than whether or not their towel hit their target (and whether it was worth checking if their towel had hit the bin). It made sense. Someone later moved the bin next to the door, and it didn't happen again.

Besides towels in sinks, I've seen people get mad at others pushing in line when the pushers-in didn't realise other people were queuing. I've seen drivers shouting at another driver who's in blissful ignorance of the trouble they've caused. I've seen agents blamed for terrible customer service when the system is at fault, and customer service blame users when the product is at fault. I've seen people despairing at others leaving litter in the park or on the street when animals had dragged out the mess overnight. I've seen people vilified for not moving down on a train when they weren't aware of the squeeze at the other end. And, usually, I think people aren't smart or capable enough, or in fact wicked enough, to carry out the conspiracies that people credit them for. Very often it's the person assuming bad intentions and getting mad who suffers the most.

To be sure, there are different degrees of negligence. We can all make mistakes, but if you're doing your taxes, it's not okay to make a mistake because you didn't read the instructions. If you're standing on a busy train, you owe it to others to be aware that you may be blocking an aisle, and we should do our best to make sure our rubbish stays where we put it. But none of us are perfect and so often I think Hanlon's Razor has some truth to it.

Perhaps a better formulation of Hanlon's Razor would be, "Before attributing to malice, try attributing to incompetence." But I'm not a fan of the wording with 'stupidity' or 'incompetence'. Awareness is so often the necessary start and what's missing.

Since posting this a few people also shared with me, Clarke's Corollary:  "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice." And another relevant name for a similar situation is Cock-up Over Conspiracy.

Hanlon's Razor, which encourages us first to consider innocent mistakes rather than assuming ill will, was a submission to Murphy's Law, book two: more reasons why things go wrong, by Arthur Bloch (p52). Murphy's Law is "If anything can go wrong, it will." I've also previously covered Muphry's Law, where, when criticising spelling or grammar, you will make a spelling or grammar mistake yourself.

Fundamental Attribution Error (someone shared Hanlon's Razor with me on posting this)

More conjectures and thinking named after people:

Hanlon's Razor

Kawaii is the word for the Japanese culture of cute, adorable and childlike. When you see a sushi roll with a cute smiley face, that's Kawaii at work. You might also find it in an innocent, high voice like a child's.

I love how, by adding a couple of big eyes, maybe with a couple of little highlights, a smiley mouth and perhaps a little shy blushing on the cheek, it's possible to transform a cactus or a pencil case into something adorable. As a family, we've enjoyed the card game Sushi Go, which includes cute wasabi, fried shrimp, and even a chopstick holder. It's a bit like the magic of adding googly eyes to anything to make it fun.

The childlike simplicity, sweetness and cute artwork of Kawaii is also in Sanrio's Hello Kitty.

I liked chindogu, the art of unuseless inventions, so much I accidentally sketched it twice: chindōgu back-scratching t-shirt, the 3 tenets of chindōgu

Kawaii

It’s always been mind-boggling to me how some of the largest and heaviest things we build on Earth are ships that float on water. Cruise ships are like floating towns, some able to accommodate over 5,000 people. How can it be that these gigantic, impossibly heavy objects made of steel can float on water? The key is displacement and realising the considerable weight that the water already supports.

In a lake or ocean, each drop of water is supported by the water around it. 1m³ of fresh water weighs 1 metric tonne, which is 1,000 kg. If a ship displaces 1m³ of water, the buoyant force of the surrounding water supports 1 tonne of the ship’s weight. Therefore, a ship weighing 50,000 tonnes will just float if it displaces 50,000m³ of water.

Sea water contains salt, which makes it denser than freshwater. As the denser water supports a greater weight, a ship will float slightly higher in salt water than in fresh. The International Load Line, previously called the Plimsoll line, shows how deep a boat sits in the water.

To realise the immense power of water, you can try submerging a biscuit tin in a bath. It’ll put up quite a fight.

Buoyancy

Kitchen table survival skills are survival skills you can put into practice from your kitchen table. I humbly submit my set of tried and tested (and at times learned from bitter experience) non-glamorous, but effective, kitchen table survival skills:

There's not always a choice, but having a good handle on the weather (know your clouds) can mean the difference between a nice day out and a disaster.

As Alistair Humphrey's writes in his book Local, "Unfolding a map is the ritual that launches all good journeys." There's art and science in route planning—considering the needs and abilities of your party, the terrain, the effect of the weather or altitude, availability of water, interest and views, access, timing, trail condition and more. So many varied aspects go into it. When planning a family hike now, we weigh up a very different set of factors than we did for two fit twenty-somethings happy to endure a little hardship.

If you're going to the wilderness, go with somebody if you can, and leave your intended plan with friends or family back home. If you're not back when expected, at least you'll have someone looking out for you, and a rescue party will know where to start looking.

OK, so it doesn't seem like a survival skill exactly, but going with a local guide will work wonders for your survival. You might not need one for a walk in the local woods, but if you fancy hiking on a glacier or venturing down a river, and it's not something you do too often, then hiring a guide will be the best survival decision you make.

Sure, you can head out and figure it out when you're out there, but mountains, and wilderness generally, are capricious places. There's so much a good hiking book, or a recent trip report can teach you before you set out. Is a river crossable? Is there still snow on a pass? Are the mosquitoes out in force? How long is it likely to take? How much up and down will there be? Where can you camp? And on and on.

Whenever I've been on semi-serious expeditions, I've been very impressed with the kit lists provided by our guides. Every item is carefully chosen—like, say, bringing the 10 essentials—and lists are refined and revisited after each trip. It's rarely exciting assembling your kit and running through lists, but if it means you remembered spare batteries, the water filter, mosquito repellent, or a fire lighter it may prove your saving grace in the wild.

More mundane perhaps, but still helpful, is packing your gear in the right places and order in which you'll use it. You're much more likely to stop and put on sun lotion or a warm hat if it isn't stuffed under your sleeping bag in the depths of your backpack.

When we're tired, it's easy to make poor decisions. The best defence I know for this is to plan trips within your limits so you aren't trying to find a camp spot in the dark, feeling too tired to filter the water, or too tired to keep track of where you're going. After a long day, it's easy to start skipping the things that keep us safe, like putting on an extra layer or stopping for water. A guide once told me, "don't be too lazy to be comfortable."

A small, but very useful practice, I've adopted is having a good awareness of time on your excursions. Plan in advance and estimate how long different sections may take. Making a mental note of when you set off from the trailhead or from a rest stop gives you a sense of your progress, lets you know what it might take to get back if you need to, and teaches you how far you might get ahead of you. If your pace is changing, you'll have a good idea of how strong everyone is still feeling. Knowing when the sun rises and sets and how much daylight you have left means you're less likely to find yourselves in the dark without a headlamp.

I'm sure you might have more to add to the list.

This set came from reflecting on our survival skills before a brilliant chat with Brendan Leonard of the excellent Semi-rad about all things Ultra on the Sketchplanations podcast (episode out in Autumn 2024). Growing up in the 80s, for me survival skills were things Crocodile Dundee had, or perhaps MacGyver. More recently, Bear Grylls would demonstrate making a shelter in the jungle, starting fires, or catching salmon to survive in the wild. However, I realised that my survival skills were much less glamorous, but still rather effective, and most of them are used before I head out on a trip. In other words, my survival skills are ones that mean (touch wood) I don't get into a scrape that need the traditional survival skills most of us think of.

As with so much in life, it's often the unglamorous stuff that makes the difference, like showing up every day, replicating before innovating, writing a rubbish first draft, or re-writing.

I hope this set may keep your expeditions Type I or Type II fun, rather than Type III.

Don't make important decisions on an empty stomach

Perhaps you were really expecting something about a kitchen table: how to set a table

Kitchen table survival skills

The Gestalt principles of visual perception describe how our brains make sense of what we see. For example, they explain how we associate a photo with the text of a newspaper article or understand a series of words as a sentence on a billboard. These principles originated from the field of Gestalt psychology in the early twentieth century.

In laying out sketches, I try to consider how a viewer will understand what connects with what, the order in which the viewer will read the sketch with their eye, and how colour or formatting link related elements—skim through the back catalogue to see it in action. In creating each sketch, consciously and unconsciously, I use many of the standard Gestalt principles of design.

There are many Gestalt principles and some variations in the names. I chose seven common principles to illustrate:

Proximity
Objects that are close together are perceived as a group

Similarity
Similar objects are perceived as a group

Continuity
Elements on a line or curve are related

Closure
Completing missing parts of images to create a whole

Figure-Ground
Identifying what's in the foreground or background

Symmetry & Order
Perceiving symmetrical or orderly elements as a group

Common Fate
Objects moving together are perceived as part of a group

The Gestalt principles are helpful for information design, user interface design, user experience design, graphic design and just about any design. It is also fascinating to spot how you unconsciously use them when interpreting designs you see. For example, look at the signs in an airport, a menu, or a page of your favourite app and see which principles are in play.

The Interaction Design Foundation has a great article on the Gestalt principles that explains their use in design in more depth. You'll also find many others.

Gestalt principles

The Olympic Flag, which consists of five interlocking coloured rings, was created by Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic games, and unveiled in 1914.

Coubertin said that the five rings represent the five parts of the world embracing "Olympism" and competing against each other: Africa, The Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania. The interlacing of the rings represents the unity and coming together of athletes from all parts of the world. Coubertin did not associate individual rings with individual continents.

The six colours of blue, dark yellow, black, green, red and white—the field on which the rings are set—"reproduce the colours of every country", and at least one is found on every national flag (I believe that’s still true).

I was thinking of including a sketch of each of the Olympic sports, but depending on how you count them, there are 32 sports and over 300 events.

You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about the history of the Olympic Flag in The Story of the Rings by Karl Lennartz (pdf). 

Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom - eh?

The Olympic Flag

While travelling in Southeast Asia, I was in awe of the open-air kitchens of street restaurants. Just by wheeling out a few carefully stocked trolleys and some prepared ingredients, one person was able to run a bustling street-side restaurant serving a score of customers delicious, fresh-cooked food each night. It's a remarkable feat of ingenuity and efficiency.

Some of the attributes I noticed about the best ones:

Menus with prices visible from a distance

We made some of the decision about whether a place looked good as we approached a stand. A clear menu with large prices you can see as you walk up is a simple way to slow down the right customers before they've walked past.

Seeing the fresh ingredients at the front of the stall builds trust in what you're about to eat and whets the appetite.

Pre-chopped ingredients and giant rice cooker

Having boxes of pre-chopped ingredients to throw in makes cooking super speedy, and as so many dishes were served with rice, a single giant rice cooker enabled preparing meals in moments.

Trolleys on wheels and everything within reach

Having everything on wheels allows quick and easy deployment and packing up, and a chef can adjust each unit to have everything in easy reach.

A single high-powered gas stove with a large wok cooks nearly all the dishes

Trolleys stacked with plates, bowls, cups and utensils

A waste bin handles scraps and excess liquids

A multi-use towel wipes surfaces and hands

We had a delicious meal from an old lady in Vietnam who'd just carried her entire restaurant on a bamboo pole over her shoulder, with two large baskets at either end. The pole held everything necessary to cook, including several small stools to sit and eat on.

It helps to have the right kind of weather. A warm and generally dry climate means you don't need to rent indoor space, heat it or cover it. This enables so much creativity with food, reducing prices and barriers to entry and increasing selection. Alas, I'm in the UK for this one.

It also suits food that is quick and simple to cook, often using pre-prepared, flavourful sauces and fresh ingredients that cook quickly, as opposed to dishes that require long preparation, ovens, or simmering times. Thai and Vietnamese food, in general, lend themselves well to this.

It's remarkable how these simple yet effective setups can spin up a restaurant at the side of the street, turning a few trolleys, some carefully chosen gear and a talented chef into a culinary treat.

Arrange kitchen storage to minimise excess travel

And all sorts of other food and drink sketches

The open-air kitchen

The Automation Paradox is that the better our machines get, the more we struggle when they fail.

When heading out for a hike in the woods, it's tempting to skip the map and compass and rely on our phones and apps for navigation. Yet when we encounter no signal or lose power, we can find ourselves in a sticky situation. Or perhaps, like me, you've come to rely on popping your destination into the satnav or Google Maps whenever you get in the car and have nearly forgotten the ability to navigate without it.

These situations illustrate the paradox of automation, where the more sophisticated and automated our machines and technologies become, the more bewildered we find ourselves when they inevitably fail. Or: the smarter the machines get, the dumber we might get.

In his book Messy, Tim Harford suggests three strands to the paradox as our machines get more sophisticated:

Automation covers up our mistakes, hiding our incompetence, meaning we may not learn to correct ourselves—consider autocorrect cleaning up our typos as we go.

When we rely on automation, we get less practice for our skills, so even highly skilled individuals may find their expertise diminishing—perhaps you've found yourself using your phone calculator for a trivial calculation.

When the easy scenarios are taken care of, failures may occur in complex or unpredictable ways that we may find especially difficult to recover from—like a subtle but persistent failure in the steering of a passenger plane, recovering from a skid on an icy road, or when you're deeply lost in the wilderness.

More sophisticated technology can even make it useless or more dangerous when it fails. Older cars used to be reparable forever. Now, if your vehicle fails, it's likely to need plugging in at the dealership to figure out what's up. How many electronic devices are thrown away because somewhere inside, some tiny loose connection or component makes the whole thing worthless? Were pilots and flight crews better prepared and able to improvise before the autopilot became ubiquitous?

I often wish our devices would fail more like an escalator or an electric toothbrush. If an escalator fails, you can still walk up it. If your electric toothbrush dies, you can still use it to brush your teeth. These could be called Technology-Enhanced Products, perhaps. But when most of our devices die, they're often rendered worthless.

Automation and sophisticated machines help me so much. I did use Grammarly to help check this post. I use Google Maps nearly every time I put in my destination to home, and I often use a calculator to check my maths. But I do pay attention to grammar corrections, bring a paper map when I can, and keep trying to do the maths in my head.

But as Tim Harford explains it, we still face "the paradox of automation: the better the machines get, the more bewildered we are when the machines fail."

The Dunning-Kruger effect (send me proof of purchase of Big Ideas Little Pictures, and I'll send the sketch to you)

Tolkein-style landscape inspired by the excellent Lord of Maps.

The Automation Paradox

Point Nemo is the furthest point in the ocean from any land.

Imagine falling overboard and needing to swim to the nearest shore; the longest possible swim would start at Point Nemo. This puzzle, known as the Longest Swim Problem, finds its solution far into the Pacific Ocean at Point Nemo.

The furthest point from land is a point with a maximum equal distance to three points of land. If you moved in any direction from there, you'd be closer to one of the points. The three nearest landmasses to Point Nemo, each about 2,688 km away, are:

Moto Nui, a small islet off the coast of the well-known Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Maher Island, off the coast of Antarctica

If you’ve ever been somewhere with only the sea in all directions, imagine what it would feel like to begin a 2,688 km swim from there.

The antipode to Point Nemo, the point directly opposite it on Earth's surface, lies somewhere in Kazakhstan.

Croatian survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela identified and named Point Nemo after Captain Nemo from Jules Verne's classic "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." Lukatela faced challenges in determining its exact coordinates, such as choosing the edge of Ducie Atoll's tidal sandbar and Maher Island being beneath ice for most of the year.

Being so remote, space agencies use the area around Point Nemo as a spacecraft cemetery, sending old satellites and space debris to fall there. Likely, the closest people to Point Nemo are often those in the International Space Station passing overhead a mere 400km above.

Point Nemo is also known as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. In contrast, the continental point of inaccessibility—the point on land furthest from the ocean—is in northwestern China near Kazakhstan, a remarkable 2,645 km from the nearest shore.

Point Nemo has a lovely spread in Simon Kuestenmacher's book Marvellous Maps. Writing about Point Nemo makes me want to rewatch Life of Pi (and listen to the captivating music).

Point Nemo

Nearly every iceberg you see in a picture or diagram is probably floating the wrong way. This was what I learned (from Megan Thompson-Munson) after sketching Biz Stone's brilliant saying about the myth of overnight success.

With some approximation, the density of ice is around 900 kg/m3, and seawater is around 1,000 kg/m3. Therefore, the fraction of an iceberg that's submerged is around ~900/1000 or 0.9. So, about 90% of an iceberg is below the surface and 10% above, which is partly why they can be so dangerous. While most iceberg pictures get this part more or less correct, most of these icebergs will be floating vertically. In reality, a tall, thin iceberg will likely topple, so most icebergs end up floating on their side, not their tips, even though we rarely draw them this way.

I remember learning about a fascinating experiment with children of different ages estimating which glass holds more water: a tall, slender one filled high or a wider glass filled to a lower level. Younger children almost always chose the glass with the higher water level as the most water, even when it was significantly less than the shorter and wider glass. I wonder if it's part of why we draw icebergs vertically, at least when we're using them as a metaphor. It's easier to grasp quantities vertically, and we commonly underestimate volume spread over a wider area.

We may still want to draw our icebergs tall and deep to make our point, but now, at least, we can do so with the knowledge that they're not like the real ones.

If you want to see it yourself, Joshua Tauberer made a brilliant draw-an-iceberg-and-see-how-it-will-float game. I recommend you give it a go so it sinks in forever (sorry).

Know your poles: penguins or polar bears, frozen ice or land

Iceberg orientation

"Pillars of Hope" is a tongue-in-cheek name for steel starter bars, also known as starter rods or rebar extensions, that protrude from the roofs of houses after construction. Leaving starter bars sticking out is a pragmatic approach, saving time and money when adding the next floor, as the structure is already partially prepared for the expansion. The "hope" in the name reflects the anticipation and optimism of adding to their homes in the future when the family grows or their financial situation improves.

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