Here's a helpful technique when you want to freshen-up some clothing at a hotel and need it to dry quickly. It's useful when you've packed one day short or need an extra day's wear out of something.

Wash the item in the sink/shower. Rinse out as much as you can directly with a squeeze.

Lay a towel flat and place the item on top.

Roll the towel up tight, making multiple layers of clothing, towel, clothing, towel.

Wring the towel well, working your way up and down. A lot of the water will transfer from the clothes to the towel. Repeat as necessary, perhaps placing the item in a different, drier patch of the towel.

Leave the item to dry that last bit overnight while you sleep.

With any luck, your underwear will be wearable again in the morning. And if it's not quite there, there's often a hair dryer to help finish off.

Of course, the technique works anywhere, but it's convenient in hotels where you don't have to worry about drying the towel afterwards.

This tip was discovered by my wife—like many of my most handy lifehacks—in this case while backpacking together in Central America.

Also see: Hotel HQ; Enjoy your hotel room more

Hotel Drying Technique

A self-serving bias is one where we attribute our failures to external factors and our successes to our own admirable qualities and efforts.

So, a tennis player might internally credit their athleticism and skill for their victory, while the loser may blame the umpire's decisions, their racket or the court. You might have seen it in professional sports.

Self-serving bias may be rational and positive, maintaining our self-esteem and a positive view of ourselves. Conversely, it can hide reality (and give referees and umpires a more draining job) or cause us to reject negative but objective feedback.

Self-serving bias is a form of attribution bias where we misattribute behaviours or events to characteristics rather than circumstances or vice versa.

Self-serving bias is covered nicely (pdf) by Donelson R. Forsyth in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd Edition.

Self-serving bias

The Overton window is a simple device to consider the full spectrum of policy ideas and identify the range of politically acceptable ones.

Attitudes generally change slowly, as does policy to support them—with exceptions. Ideas that seemed radical or unthinkable at one time may gradually become plausible and popular. As this happens, the Overton Window shifts or expands.

Consider how attitudes have changed towards slavery, segregation, women's rights, animal welfare or gay marriage. Or consider policies made alongside the development of driverless cars or supporting sustainable energy. At one time, prohibition—banning the production and sale of alcohol—was popular enough to become policy in the US, though it would be unlikely to be proposed now.

Generally, the public is unlikely to elect politicians if they stand on policies too far outside the Overton window. And elected politicians will have difficulty enacting policies outside the window.

Named after Joseph Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the original model was a cardboard window that could slide over paper, and looking through the window, you could see policy options in one direction towards more government control and in the other towards less government control. He called it the window of political possibilities. The Centre named it after him after his death. He made the slider vertical to avoid associations with the political left or right.

The Overton Window

A camel is a horse designed by a committee, so the saying goes.

It's not fair on camels, which are remarkable animals, but the idea that meeting everyone's requirements leads to a weaker product without a strong vision has a lot of truth to it.

Like a remote control with 50 buttons or a policy so watered-down by different requirements that it has no effect, design by committee can be the death of an initiative. Part of strong product leadership and creating designs that wow is having an opinion, saying no, and not trying to please everybody. Much easier said than done.

To bring it home, the movie Pentagon Wars has an entertaining satirical scene about the evolution of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle (11 mins). The clip shows how the plan for an infantry transport vehicle became "a troop transport that can't carry troops, a reconnaissance vehicle that's too conspicuous to do reconnaissance. And a quasi-tank that has less armor than a snow-blower but has enough ammo to take out half of D.C." Perhaps most informative is the effect on the motivation and morale of the designers—"Can you make it amphibious?"

Also see: groupthink, the tyranny of small decisions, the Abilene paradox, the bandwagon effect.

Or Jeff Bezos' guidance: Be stubborn on vision. Be flexible on details.

Design by committee

The Droste effect is an endless picture-in-picture—a part of the picture contains the whole picture, which contains the picture, which contains the picture, and on.

Most of us are likely familiar with it from the fun visual effect you often see when sharing your screen on a video call, which contains the video call where you're sharing your screen, on which is the video call where... Always entertaining. Google calls it an infinity mirror.

The name derives from a Dutch brand of cocoa powder, Droste, where the classic advert was a picture of a nurse carrying a tray with a box of the cocoa powder, with the picture of the woman on it carrying the tray with a box of the cocoa...

Articles about the Droste effect often mention the amazing M.C. Escher's Print gallery, a picture without beginning or end.

The Droste effect

Chihuahua syndrome refers to messy data from variations in spelling or input—Chihuahua is easy to misspell. The quality of your data matters—errors can creep in anywhere, particularly when people enter data. Garbage in, garbage out.

Here's Chris Groskopf quoted in Seeing with Fresh Eyes—Meaning, Space, Data, Truth by Edward Tufte:

"There is no worse way to screw up data than to let a single human type it in, without validation. I acquired a complete dog licensing database. Instead of requiring people registering their dog to choose a breed from a list, the system gave dog owners a text field to type into, so this database had 250 spellings of Chihuahua. Even the best tools can't save messy data. Beware of human-entered data."

Capitals, spaces, misspellings, hyphens, numbers stored as text, numbers entered as letters (I, O), accents, straight/curly apostrophes, dates out of order, languages, dialects, abbreviations, and more are all routes for misleading your analysis.

The name The chihuahua syndrome is from Edward Tufte.

Chihuahua syndrome

Dark patterns are when people design interfaces intending to deceive or trick. Sadly we are all familiar with these. They're everywhere. 

It could be the free trial that unexpectedly led to a subscription or the subscription that was easy to sign up for but had to be canceled by mailing in a letter. Or it could be an outward attempt at giving control over privacy but with options so confusing as to do the opposite. Perhaps you tried to adjust cookie preferences on a news website but could only find a button to 'Accept all' after editing your preferences—grrrr! Tricking people like this into sharing more information than intended has come to be known as Privacy Zuckering.

Remember popups that could only be closed once you found a tiny 'x' that moved around the screen?

I recently wanted to pause a subscription only to be told it would invalidate all the accumulated unused credits I'd paid for (I'm still paying). The Pudding published a great analysis of unsubscribing from online services. At times this may be unintentional—there's naturally less incentive to work on great account closing and unsubscribe experiences than on signing up.

The example in the sketch was a real one I experienced (I wish I'd grabbed a screenshot) from an airline website where the designers buried the option not to buy insurance within the country select list.

And they're not just online. Sneaky casinos employ design in the physical world for their gain, such as removing references to time passing, such as clocks or windows, using mazelike navigation and the continual winning sounds of jingling coins. 

"Dark patterns" was coined by Harry Brignull and documented at the Deceptive patterns site and now a book.

Dark patterns

The isolation effect is our tendency to remember an item that stands out in some way from a set of otherwise similar items—you might easily guess, for example, which name we are more likely to remember from a list of Tom, Terry, Angelica, Theo and Tyler.

When presenting information, the isolation effect is practical if you wish to draw attention to specific items. By standardising the presentation of other items in a list, maybe by muting the colours, making them the same size, or removing features that stand out, you can draw people's attention and improve people's memory of your chosen items.

The isolation effect is standard in web design by using distinctiveness: red notification bubbles on a set of otherwise homogenous apps, a "most popular" plan more prominent than the other options, or a Call-To-Action (CTA) button in a contrasting colour.

The isolation effect is also known as the Von Restorff effect after the German psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff. See, for example, Hunt, R.R. The subtlety of distinctiveness: What von Restorff really did. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2, 105–112 (1995) for a summary of Von Restorff's most cited paper on the effect.

The isolation effect

Point positive is a rafting term for agreeing in advance to point towards the safe way out of danger rather than towards the dangers themselves.

So, should a raft get stuck on a rock in a rapid, pointing positive would be pointing away from the obstacles to help a raft behind navigate through safely. Or should there be an unintentional swimmer, pointing positive is pointing towards the safest channel to steer towards.

Like "Don't fix the blame, fix the problem," point positive is a valuable metaphor and reminder that it's often less helpful to dwell on difficulties and problems than to direct others and our energies toward positive ways forward and solutions.

Also see: It's easier to give privacy than to find it

Point positive

It's mindblowing to me to think at any moment, over 6,000 satellites are whipping around the Earth at terrific speeds and somehow not drifting off into space or crashing into Earth. How does this work?

An orbit around Earth is a delicate balance between the momentum of a satellite traveling at speed parallel to the Earth's surface and the constant tug of gravity towards the Earth.

If the satellite travels too slowly, gravity wins, eventually pulling the satellite back to Earth. If it travels too fast, gravity isn't strong enough to hold it, and the satellite will shoot off into space. But at just the right speed—which depends on its distance from Earth—gravity will pull the satellite towards Earth, but the satellite's speed ensures it will keep missing and instead continue its journey orbiting around Earth. In this case, gravity acts as a centripetal force, a force acting towards the centre, enabling satellites to stay in orbit.

Newton had a thought experiment known as Newton's Cannon where he imagined firing a cannonball off a high mountain at different velocities and what the resultant trajectories would be.

Most orbits are slightly elliptical or oval-shaped. For example, the elliptical nature of the Moon's orbit gives us the joys of things like supermoons.

Orbit

Mangroves are many species of tree adapted to living in salty water along coastlines and tidal rivers not far from the equator. They are remarkable in many ways and confer a host of benefits to their habitats. Here are some significant ones.

Mangroves and mangrove habitats play a major role in protecting coastal settlements from storm surges and waves. Mangroves significantly reduce the energy of waves, lowering wave height inland, including from tsunamis, and reduce surges from tropical storms. We took a boat through the mangroves in Southern Vietnam once, and it was an eye-opening maze of channels and islands. I could see how they act like a natural breakwater.

Mangroves help stabilise land from erosion. This helps plants and fauna inland make their homes. Mangrove root systems also trap sediment brought downriver or from the sea, building their environment and creating peaty soil when they decay.

Their incredible prop root network creates a wonderful sheltered space for marine wildlife to grow and develop. The nooks and crannies help protect young from predators until they are older and can better fend for themselves. This protective environment increases populations and helps local fishers and communities. The calm and sheltered waters inside mangrove habitats also provide sanctuary for birds and a host of other non-marine wildlife.

Mangroves are an excellent carbon sink. They capture carbon as they grow, and the low-oxygen sediments deposited beneath them help lock carbon away.

I've contributed to plant trees through Eden Projects with a portion of any monthly or one-off support I receive. I wanted to explain Mangroves partly because, as of July 2023, together, we've passed 26,000 trees planted, most in mangrove restoration projects in Madagascar, and provided over 350 work days for locals.

"Madagascar is one of the world's top biodiversity conservation priorities because of its endemic species and severe habitat loss rates. Restoration in Madagascar is important because the destruction of the mangrove estuaries along the coastline has caused mudflats to wash into the ocean, destroying once-productive fisheries and increasing the vulnerability of coastal communities to hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods. In the dry deciduous forests, deforestation threatens one of the world's rarest and most diverse forest systems."

Mangroves make a real difference. To everyone who's helped make this happen, thank you!

Mangroves

I always considered a checklist, a checklist, so I was interested to learn the distinction between two types of checklists: Read-Do and Do-Confirm.

A Read-Do checklist might be prepared in advance for several potential possibilities. You check off the tasks as you do them, like following a new cooking recipe. They may be geared towards helping people understand what they should be doing and in what order and helping them remember key steps in unusual or unplanned scenarios. So, for example, if a plane develops a particular type of rare fault, such as an engine failure, a Read-Do checklist could be pulled out for that scenario. The pilot and crew can use it to make the most of others' past experiences and failures. Even with training, given the situation's relative rarity, and especially if a serious situation might interfere with normal thinking, a Read-Do checklist helps steer the crew to safe outcomes without relying solely on training and memory. The calm security and simplicity of steps of a checklist can be just what's needed.

A Do-Confirm checklist is more of an aid to memory to make sure nothing gets missed. It's a safety net for normal operation catching lapses in memory. In principle, we know what to do, so we run through those steps from experience and memory and use the Do-Confirm checklist at a designated pause point to ensure we didn't miss anything. The WHO Safe Surgery checklist has helped save 1,000s of lives.

Because a simple checklist can never account for every unexpected occurrence in complex environments—for example, healthcare, aviation, building a skyscraper, or software projects—both checklist types can benefit from items that require a communication step. An item can just be to ensure that all those with the relevant knowledge have discussed things. It's a simple and powerful way to improve outcomes across a wide range of unexpected scenarios.

I learned about the simple power of checklists, the two types, and the resistance to adopting them—from Atul Gawande's, The Checklist Manifesto: How to get Things Right.

Two types of checklists: Read-Do, Do-Confirm

It's easy to want to complain at the weather. The trouble is, it doesn't have any effect on it.

Complaining at the weather

The siphon, or syphon, is a simple device that uses only a tube to seemingly pump water from a higher spot to a lower one. It's ingenious because once you start the siphon by filling the pipe to below the height of the upper reservoir level, it will continue draining the water, pulling it over the hump and towards the collection below without further help.

Most of us use siphons several times daily, as there are often two at work in the standard toilet. Sometimes there's one in the flush mechanism—one push of the handle to start the siphon drains the water from the reservoir until it runs out. And you can flush a toilet using the second siphon by pouring enough water directly into the bowl to push the water over the bend in the pipe to start it— think how the water drains by itself almost completely before filling up to the level of the bend once again. It's a clever way to power a toilet flush with just the press of a button or turn of a handle. They also minimise leaks and control the flow by running the water uphill.

We set up a greywater siphon to drain water from the bath and showers to a water butt in the garden. To get it started, we connected the end of the hose in the garden to a tap and ran water back up the hose until it shot out the top. Then, dipping it in the water, turning off the tap, and putting the end in the water butt, like magic, the siphon pulls water out of the bath until it's empty.

Surprisingly, a few effects are at work in a siphon, and its mechanism is debated. They can be made to work in a vacuum and even spray liquid upwards with the right setup.

I read that it is from the ancient Greek siphōn meaning a tube or pipe, often for drawing wine from a cask—that would be a decent situation to start the siphon by sucking on the end.

Siphon

Cake Wrecks is the blog and book of when professional cakes go hilariously wrong, by Jen Yates. But a cake wreck is also a useful metaphor for how easy it can be to misinterpret instructions—often by simply taking something literally when it was expected to be interpreted. Examples from Jen's collection include a smart-looking cake with "Nothing" written across the front, a graduation cake with "I want sprinkles" next to a graduation cap, or a cake sporting a full "Happy birthday on a gluten-free cake." If you haven't seen them, you could do much worse than look some up now. It's easy to laugh at these examples, but it's also easy to find real examples in day-to-day work.

I learned about cake wrecks from Jeff Patton's excellent book User Story Mapping. He gives cake wrecks as an all too common example of communication in software development. For example, a user story or specification for a feature is written and passed on to developers who, in the absence of other communication and with perhaps cultural or status barriers, may carefully build exactly what is written rather than what the writer intended. Cake wrecks are funny and silly—except if it was for your special occasion—but mistakes in projects are expensive in time, money and relationships and are worth avoiding.

The recipe for avoiding a cake wreck is, in principle, simple:

Don't assume that what you see is what someone else will see

Use stories and specifications as tools for talking about what's needed and not as equivalents of it

Create a safe space for everyone to question what they don't understand or don't agree with

Give everyone the 'why' behind a project and autonomy and flexibility to suggest other ways to meet the goal

Check in during a project and adjust as needed

Cake wreck

Yes, the two train track pieces are the same lengths. I know this because we have a basket of toy train tracks, and I took two identical curves and lined them up for the outline of this sketch. But it's easy to be fooled and think the one at the top is shorter than the one at the bottom.

While there may be other factors to help explain the ring-segment illusion, a common one is that our brains compare the short inner side of the top track against the longer outer side of the lower track leading us to believe the top one is shorter. Aligning the top track to the outer left point of the lower track enhances the illusion by increasing the horizontal contrast.

I like the ring-segment illusion as the name for it. It's also known as the Jastrow illusion after the Polish-American psychologist Joseph Jastrow, also known for the ambiguous figure of the rabbit-duck, who published a tapered version of the ring-segment illusion. In his paper, he gives a related example of how a square sitting on a point can look larger than one sitting on a side as we subconsciously compare the longer diagonal length with the shorter side length. You can test that in the sketch.

The ring-segment illusion

What does biweekly mean to you? How about bimonthly or biannually?

While each of us will have our own, perhaps unambiguous, reaction to it, the word biweekly is interpreted as "twice a week" or "once every two weeks." I know this from personal experience of confusing people en-masse. The dictionary even carefully, if unhelpfully, defines it as meaning either. It's a strange quirk of the English language. But it's so handy, what to do? An excellent concise solution is the word fortnightly.

Fortnightly has the helpful unambiguous quality that it means "once every fortnight," so "once every two weeks." And it's also just one word. If something happens "two times a week," I think you need to spell it out or use "twice a week" or perhaps "every Monday and Thursday."

The same source of confusion applies to the words bimonthly and biannually—to be sure of being understood correctly, it's best to avoid them. Phrases like "every second month," "every two months," "twice a month," or "two times each year" are helpful here.

Fortnightly

Richard Feynman was one of the great scientists of the 20th century, making significant contributions to physics and other related fields. Part of what made him stand out was his gift for teaching. He had a remarkable knack for explaining some of the most complex things in ways anyone could understand. He was also a model of the desire to deeply understand how things worked, often deriving a result in several ways to be more confident he was right.

The Feynman learning technique is typical of how he approached understanding something deeply and helps explain some of his teaching skills.

Spend time writing about a topic as if explaining it to someone.

Then practice explaining it, speaking and drawing as if you were a teacher at the front of the class. You may figure out some other aspect wasn't as clear as you thought and need to look into something.

Refine any gaps you reveal until you can share the topic fluently and clearly.

Then, simplify your language by replacing complex words and ideas with simpler ones and considering analogies to help people relate.

Now, you can explain it because you deeply understand it, too.

"You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird."

— Feynman's father, from Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman?

I loved the Fun to Imagine interviews to experience some of Feynman's joy and skill for teaching.

The sketch was inspired by this excellent animated video of the Feynman Learning Technique.

Though he was primarily a theoretical physicist, Feynman also made lasting contributions to the field of computation. If you want to get into those, you might enjoy the Feynman Lectures on Computation from the last course he taught at Caltech, edited, no less, by my Dad.

The Feynman Learning Technique

Writing has power. Power grows through repetition. And repetition, should you reuse the last words of a sentence at the start of the next, is called anadiplosis.

Like the amazing addition of alliteration, anadiplosis is a simple device to give more oomph to your words. Words that are barely changed but pack a lot more punch.

Even if you can't remember the specifics, there's something about Yoda's wisdom that make the logic sound impeccable and irresistible and the message deep. Deep, at least partly, from anadiplosis.

"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."

I learned about anadiplosis—and pleonasm, and ordering adjectives—from the entertaining and educational, The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. Anadiplosis is from the ancient Greek ana meaning again, and diplous meaning double. The Greeks were fond of their techniques for persuasive speeches.

Anadiplosis

The frog boil metaphor illustrates how it's easy to miss small changes that build up over time until it's too late. The scenario, as told, is that of a poor frog who would leap away from hot water but, if put into cooler water that is gradually warmed, won't respond in time to getting boiled.

As a metaphor, it describes a powerful and pernicious shortcoming in how we perceive the world. A student kitchen that gets messy mug-by-mug, a business with gradually slowing sales, a river that is slowly polluted, a road that gets busier each day, a bay that sees fewer fish each year, content that drifts, cancer that slowly spreads, a story or behaviour that becomes normal, a website that gets slower feature-by-feature, or a climate that slowly warms are all cases where we may not be happy where we end up, but we didn't notice how we got there.

It's hard to respond to gradual change, especially when it spans generations. Jared Diamond called it out as a potential fate of the Easter Islanders and how they could have cut down the last tree. One barnacle is nothing, but many barnacles can cause significant headaches for big ships.

Fortunately, there's a flip side. Many, many things are getting better without us realising. Small positive changes, such as in attitudes, education, or healthcare, add up over time—the Destiny Instinct can mislead us. Fast and slow layers make a system, like a forest, more robust. Getting one percent better each day leads to a 37x improvement in a year. And enough molehills can make a mountain.

What a frog does, in this case, is not, apparently, true—don't try it—it's much better as a metaphor, not an experiment.