In 1726, during a long voyage from London to Philadelphia, a young printer hatched the idea of using a notebook to systematically chart his efforts to become a better man. He set out 13 virtues — including industry, justice, tranquillity and temperance — and his plan was to focus on each in turn in an endless quest for self-improvement, recording failures with a black spot in his journal. The virtue journal worked, and the black marks became scarcer and scarcer.

Benjamin Franklin kept up this practice for his entire life. What a life it was: Franklin invented bifocals and a clean-burning stove; he proved that lightning was a form of electricity and then tamed it with the lightning conductor; he charted the Gulf Stream. He organised a lending library, a fire brigade and a college. He was America’s first postmaster-general, its ambassador to France, even the president of Pennsylvania.

And yet the great man had a weakness — or so he thought. His third virtue was Order. “Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time,” he wrote. While all the other virtues were mastered, one by one, Franklin never quite managed to get his desk or his diary tidy.

“My scheme of Order gave me the most trouble,” he reflected six decades later. “My faults in it vexed me so much, and I made so little progress in amendment, and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the attempt.” Observers agreed. One described how callers on Franklin “were amazed to behold papers of the greatest importance scattered in the most careless way over the table and floor”.

Franklin was a messy fellow his entire life, despite 60 years of trying to reform himself, and remained convinced that if only he could learn to tidy up, he would become a more successful and productive person. But any outsider can see that it is absurd to think such a rich life could have been yet further enriched by assiduous use of a filing cabinet. Franklin was deluding himself. But his error is commonplace; we’re all tidy-minded people, admiring ourselves when we keep a clean desk and uneasy when we do not. Tidiness can be useful but it’s not always a virtue. Even though Franklin never let himself admit it, there can be a kind of magic in mess.

…

Why is it so difficult to keep things tidy? A clue comes in Franklin’s motto, “Let all your things have their places … ” That seems to make sense. Humans tend to have an excellent spatial memory. The trouble is that modern office life presents us with a continuous stream of disparate documents arriving not only by post but via email and social media. What are the “places”, both physical and digital, for this torrent of miscellanea?

Categorising documents of any kind is harder than it seems. The writer and philosopher Jorge Luis Borges once told of a fabled Chinese encyclopaedia, the “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge”, which organised animals into categories such as: a) belonging to the emperor, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, f) fabulous, h) included in the present classification, and m) having just broken the water pitcher.

Borges’s joke has a point: categories are difficult. Distinctions that seem practically useful — who owns what, who did what, what might make a tasty supper — are utterly unusable when taken as a whole. The problem is harder still when we must file many incoming emails an hour, building folder structures that need to make sense months or years down the line. Borgesian email folders might include: a) coming from the boss, b) tedious, c) containing appointments, d) sent to the entire company, e) urgent, f) sexually explicit, g) complaints, h) personal, i) pertaining to the year-end review, and j) about to exceed the memory allocation on the server.

Regrettably, many of these emails fit into more than one category and while each grouping itself is perfectly meaningful, they do not fit together. Some emails clearly fit into a pattern, but many do not. One may be the start of a major project or the start of nothing at all, and it will rarely be clear which is which at the moment that email arrives in your inbox. Giving documents — whether physical or digital — a proper place, as Franklin’s motto recommends, requires clairvoyance. Failing that, we muddle through the miscellany, hurriedly imposing some kind of practical organising principle on what is a rapid and fundamentally messy flow of information.

When it comes to actual paper, there’s always the following beautiful approach. Invented in the early 1990s by Yukio Noguchi, an emeritus professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and author of books such as Super Organised Method, Noguchi doesn’t try to categorise anything. Instead, he places each incoming document in a large envelope. He writes the envelope’s contents neatly on its edge, and lines them up on a bookshelf, their contents visible like the spines of books. Now the moment of genius: each time he uses an envelope, Noguchi places it back on the left of the shelf. Over time, recently used documents will shuffle themselves towards the left, and never-used documents will accumulate on the right. Archiving is easy: every now and again, Noguchi removes the documents on the right. To find any document in this system, he simply asks himself how recently he has seen it. It is a filing system that all but organises itself.

But wait a moment. Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, authors of A Perfect Mess, offer the following suggestion: “Turn the row of envelopes so that the envelopes are stacked vertically instead of horizontally, place the stack on your desktop, and get rid of the envelopes.” Those instructions transform the shelf described in Super Organised Method into an old-fashioned pile of papers on a messy desk. Every time a document arrives or is consulted, it goes back on the top of the pile. Unused documents gradually settle at the bottom. Less elegant, perhaps, but basically the same system.

Computer scientists may recognise something rather familiar about this arrangement: it mirrors the way that computers handle their memory systems. Computers use memory “caches”, which are small but swift to access. A critical issue is which data should be prioritised and put in the fastest cache. This cache management problem is analogous to asking which paper you should keep on your desk, which should be in your desk drawer, and which should be in offsite storage in New Jersey. Getting the decision right makes computers a lot faster — and it can make you faster too.

Fifty years ago, computer scientist Laszlo Belady proved that one of the fastest and most effective simple algorithms is to wait until the cache is full, then start ejecting the data that haven’t been used recently. This rule is called “Least Recently Used” or LRU — and it works because in computing, as in life, the fact that you’ve recently needed to use something is a good indication that you will need it again soon.

As Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths observe in their recent book Algorithms to Live By, while a computer might use LRU to manage a memory cache, Noguchi’s Super Organised Method uses the same rule to manage paper: recently used stuff on the left, stuff that you haven’t looked at for ages on the right. A pile of documents also implements LRU: recently touched stuff on the top, everything else sinks to the bottom.

This isn’t to say that a pile of paper is always the very best organisational system. That depends on what is being filed, and whether several people have to make sense of the same filing system or not. But the pile of papers is not random. It has its own pragmatic structure based simply on the fact that whatever you’re using tends to stay visible and accessible. Obsolete stuff sinks out of sight. Your desk may look messy to other people but you know that, thanks to the LRU rule, it’s really an efficient self-organising rapid-access cache.

…

If all this sounds to you like self-justifying blather from untidy colleagues, you might just be a “filer” rather than a “piler”. The distinction between the two was first made in the 1980s by Thomas Malone, a management professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Filers like to establish a formal organisational structure for their paper documents. Pilers, by contrast, let pieces of paper build up around their desks or, as we have now learnt to say, implement an LRU-cache.

To most of us, it may seem obvious that piling is dysfunctional while filing is the act of a serious professional. Yet when researchers from the office design company Herman Miller looked at high-performing office workers, they found that they tended to be pilers. They let documents accumulate on their desks, used their physical presence as a reminder to do work, and relied on subtle cues — physical alignment, dog-ears, or a stray Post-it note — to orient themselves.

In 2001, Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg, researchers at AT&T Labs, studied filers and pilers in a real office environment, and discovered why the messy approach works better than it seemingly has any right to. They tracked the behaviour of the filers and pilers over time. Who accumulated the biggest volume of documents? Whose archives worked best? And who struggled most when an office relocation forced everyone to throw paperwork away?

One might expect that disciplined filers would have produced small, useful filing systems. But Whittaker and Hirschberg found, instead, that they were sagging under the weight of bloated, useless archives. The problem was a bad case of premature filing. Paperwork would arrive, and then the filer would have to decide what to do with it. It couldn’t be left on the desk — that would be untidy. So it had to be filed somewhere. But most documents have no long-term value, so in an effort to keep their desks clear, the filers were using filing cabinets as highly structured waste-paper baskets. Useful material was hemmed in by well-organised dross.

“You can’t know your own information future,” says Whittaker, who is now a professor of psychology at University of California Santa Cruz, and co-author of The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff. People would create folder structures that made sense at the time but that would simply be baffling to their own creators months or years later. Organisational categories multiplied. One person told Whittaker and Hirschberg: “I had so much stuff filed. I didn’t know where everything was, and I’d found that I had created second files for something in what seemed like a logical place, but not the only logical place … I ended up having the same thing in two places or I had the same business unit stuff in five different places.”

As for the office move, it was torture for the filers. They had too much material and had invested too much time in organising it. One commented that it was “gruesome … you’re casting off your first-born”. Whittaker reminds me that these people were not discarding their children. They weren’t even discarding family photographs and keepsakes. They were throwing away office memos and dog-eared corporate reports. “It’s very visceral,” Whittaker says. “People’s identity is wrapped up in their jobs, and in the information professions your identity is wrapped up with your information.” And yet the happy-go-lucky pilers, in their messy way, coped far better. They used their desks as temporary caches for documents. The good stuff would remain close at hand, easy to use and to throw away when finished. Occasionally, the pilers would grab a pile, riffle through it and throw most of it away. And when they did file material, they did so in archives that were small, practical and actively used.

Whittaker points out that the filers struggled because the categories they created turned out not to work well as times changed. This suggests that tidiness can work, but only when documents or emails arrive with an obvious structure. My own desk is messy but my financial records are neat — not because they’re more important but because the record-keeping required for accountancy is predictable.

One might object that whatever researchers have concluded about paper documents is obsolete, as most documents are now digital. Surely the obvious point of stress is now the email inbox? But Whittaker’s interest in premature filing actually started in 1996 with an early study of email overload. “The thing we observed was failed folders,” he says. “Tiny email folders with one or two items.”

It turns out that the fundamental problem with email is the same as the problem with paper on the desk: people try to clear their inbox by sorting the email into folders but end up prematurely filing in folder structures that turn out not to work well. In 2011, Whittaker and colleagues published a research paper with the title “Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email?”. The answer is: yes, you are. People who use the search function find their email more quickly than those who click through carefully constructed systems of folders. The folder system feels better organised but, unless the information arrives with a predictable structure, creating folders is laborious and worse than useless.

…

So we know that carefully filing paper documents is often counterproductive. Email should be dumped in a few broad folders — or one big archive — rather than a careful folder hierarchy. What then should we do with our calendars? There are two broad approaches. One — analogous to the “filer” approach — is to organise one’s time tightly, scheduling each task in advance and using the calendar as a to-do list. As Benjamin Franklin expressed it: “Let each part of your business have its time.” The alternative avoids the calendar as much as possible, noting only fixed appointments. Intuitively, both approaches have something going for them, so which works best?

Fortunately we don’t need to guess, because three psychologists, Daniel Kirschenbaum, Laura Humphrey and Sheldon Malett, have already run the experiment. Thirty-five years ago, Kirschenbaum and his colleagues recruited a group of undergraduates for a short course designed to improve their study skills. The students were randomly assigned one of three possible pieces of coaching. There was a control group, which was given simple time-management advice such as, “Take breaks of five to 10 minutes after every ½-1½ hour study session.” The other two groups got those tips but they were also given much more specific advice as to how to use their calendars. The “monthly plan” group were instructed to set goals and organise study activities across the space of a month; in contrast, the “daily plan” group were told to micromanage their time, planning activities and setting goals within the span of a single day.

The researchers assumed that the planners who set quantifiable daily goals would do better than those with vaguer monthly plans. In fact, the daily planners started brightly but quickly became hopelessly demotivated, with their study effort collapsing to eight hours a week — even worse than the 10 hours for those with no plan at all. But the students on the monthly plans maintained a consistent study habit of 25 hours a week throughout the course. The students’ grades, unsurprisingly, reflected their work effort.

The problem is that the daily plans get derailed. Life is unpredictable. A missed alarm, a broken washing machine, a dental appointment, a friend calling by for a coffee — or even the simple everyday fact that everything takes longer than you expect — all these obstacles proved crushing for people who had used their calendar as a to-do list.

Like the document pilers, the monthly planners adopted a loose, imperfect and changeable system that happens to work just fine in a loose, imperfect and changeable world. The daily planners, like the filers, imposed a tight, tidy-minded system that shattered on contact with a messy world.

Some people manage to take this lesson to extremes. Marc Andreessen — billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist — decided a decade ago to stop writing anything in his calendar. If something was worth doing, he figured, it was worth doing immediately. “I’ve been trying this tactic as an experiment,” he wrote in 2007. “And I am so much happier, I can’t even tell you.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger has adopted much the same approach. He insisted on keeping his diary clear when he was a film star. He even tried the same policy when governor of California. “Appointments are always a no-no. Planning ahead is a no-no,” he told The New York Times. Politicians, lobbyists and activists had to treat him like a popular walk-up restaurant: they showed up and hoped to get a slot. Of course, this was in part a pure status play. But it was more than that. Schwarzenegger knew that an overstuffed diary allows no room to adapt to circumstances.

Naturally, Schwarzenegger and Andreessen can make the world wait to meet them. You and I can’t. But we probably could take a few steps in the same direction, making fewer firm commitments to others and to ourselves, leaving us the flexibility to respond to what life throws at us. A plan that is too finely woven will soon lie in tatters. Daily plans are tidy but life is messy.

…

The truth is that getting organised is often a matter of soothing our anxieties — or the anxieties of tidy-minded colleagues. It can simply be an artful way of feeling busy while doing nothing terribly useful. Productivity guru Merlin Mann, host of a podcast called Back To Work, has a telling metaphor. Imagine making sandwiches in a deli, says Mann. In comes the first sandwich order. You’re about to reach for the mayonnaise and a couple of slices of sourdough. But then more orders start coming in.

Mann knows all too well how we tend to react. Instead of making the first sandwich, we start to ponder organisational systems. Separate the vegetarian and the meat? Should toasted sandwiches take priority?

There are two problems here. First, there is no perfect way to organise a fast-moving sandwich queue. Second, the time we spend trying to get organised is time we don’t spend getting things done. Just make the first sandwich. If we just got more things done, decisively, we might find we had less need to get organised.

Of course, sometimes we need a careful checklist (if, say, we’re building a house) or a sophisticated reference system (if we’re maintaining a library, for example). But most office workers are neither construction managers nor librarians. Yet we share Benjamin Franklin’s mistaken belief that if only we were more neatly organised, then we would live more productive and more admirable lives. Franklin was too busy inventing bifocals and catching lightning to get around to tidying up his life. If he had been working in a deli, you can bet he wouldn’t have been organising sandwich orders. He would have been making sandwiches.
Image by Benjamin Swanson. This article was first published in the Financial Times magazine and is inspired by ideas from my new book, “Messy“. (US) (UK)

Como entender os filtros solares?

O que são filtros solares?

São substâncias que aplicadas sobre a pele protegem a mesma contra a ação dos raios ultravioleta (UV) do sol. Os filtros solares podem ser químicos (absorvem os raios UV) ou físicos (refletem os raios UV). É comum a associação de filtros químicos e físicos para se obter um filtro solar de FPS mais alto.

O que significa um filtro de amplo espectro?

Existem dois tipos de raios ultravioleta que podem danificar a pele: UVA e UVB. Um filtro solar de amplo espectro deverá proteger a sua pele dos dois tipos de radiação e são a melhor opção na hora de escolher o seu protetor solar.

O que é FPS?

FPS significa Fator de Proteção Solar. Todo filtro solar tem um número que determina o seu FPS, que pode variar de 2 a 100 (nos produtos comercializados no Brasil). O FPS mede a proteção contra os raios UVB, responsáveis pela queimadura solar, mas não medem a proteção contra os raios UVA.

O que significa o valor do FPS

A pele, quando exposta ao sol sem proteção, leva um determinado tempo para ficar vermelha. Quando se usa filtros solares com FPS 15, por exemplo, a mesma pele leva 15 vezes mais tempo para ficar vermelha, se for usado um filtro com FPS 30, levará 30 vezes mais tempo para ficar vermelha, e assim por diante.

A partir do FPS 15 todos os filtros são iguais?

Não. Esta é uma idéia que foi divulgada de forma errada. O filtro solar com FPS 15 bloqueia a maior parte dos raios UV e o aumento do FPS realmente aumenta pouco o bloqueio destes raios. No entanto, como explicado acima, usando um filtro solar com FPS 15 a pele levará 15 vezes mais tempo para ficar vermelha e usando um filtro com FPS 60, levará 60 vezes mais tempo. Se o tempo para a pele ficar vermelha aumenta, significa que protege mais e melhor.

Como devo escolher o FPS do meu filtro solar?

O filtro solar deve proteger a pele evitando o dano causado pela radiação solar. Se o filtro que você utiliza permite que sua pele fique vermelha após a exposição ao sol, isto é sinal de que a proteção não está sendo eficaz. Neste caso, você deve aumentar o FPS ou então reaplicar o filtro solar com um intervalo menor. O fator mínimo para uma proteção adequada é o FPS 15, aplicando o filtro generosamente sempre 20 a 30 minutos antes de se expor ao sol e reaplicando a cada 2 horas. Entretanto, como o FPS é determinado em laboratórios, sob condições especiais, recomenda-se dar uma margem de segurança, usando sempre um filtro solar com FPS igual ou maior que 30.

“Oil free”? Hipoalergênico? Entenda os filtros solares.

A linguagem utilizada nos rótulos dos filtros solares muitas vezes deixa o consumidor confuso na hora da compra. Aprenda abaixo o que significam os termos mais frequentes e escolha aqueles mais indicados ao seu tipo de pele:

• Anti UVA e UVB: filtros que protegem contra os raios ultravioleta A e ultravioleta B.
• Hipoalergênico: utiliza substâncias que geralmente não provocam alergias.
• Livre de PABA ou “PABA Free”: filtros que não contém a substância PABA, que tem alto poder de causar alergias.
• Livre de óleo ou “oil free”: filtros cujos veículos não contém substâncias oleosas. São os mais indicados para pessoas de pele oleosa ou com tendência à formação de cravos e espinhas.
• Não comedogênico: filtros que não obstruem os poros, evitando assim a formação de cravos. São também indicados para pessoas de pele oleosa e com tendência à formação de cravos e espinhas.

Atenção: filtro solar que protege não deixa queimar

Se você usou o filtro solar e mesmo assim se queimou, ou usou um FPS menor do que deveria, ou não aplicou o filtro da forma correta. Clique aqui e aprenda a usar o filtro solar corretamente.

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Every now and then, we remember that there are poor people in the world, and sweatshops become news. Jonah Peretti — the click-accumulating mastermind behind The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed — got his start in viral journalism 15 years ago by baiting Nike with a chain of witty emails requesting that his personalisable Nike trainers be emblazoned with the word SWEATSHOP.

Peretti having moved on to grander projects, the stage storyteller Mike Daisey picked up the baton, delivering a riveting monologue, “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”. It was about Daisey’s heroic unmasking of appalling working conditions in the Chinese factories that make iPads. It made compelling radio when This American Life aired it in 2012. It was even more compelling when This American Life retracted the episode shortly afterwards. Ira Glass, the show’s host, wrote: “Daisey lied to me.”

Economics, of course, offers a less click-worthy perspective. We shouldn’t be surprised if people making sneakers and iPads are paid badly to do tough, hazardous work, because they live in countries where such work is everywhere. And since people are moving away from grinding and precarious rural poverty to work in these grim factories, perhaps they see them as an improvement? The pithiest account of this view comes from the great 20th-century Cambridge economist Joan Robinson: “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”

But while sweatshops are probably better than nothing, that doesn’t mean that nothing is better than sweatshops. Is there a plausible alternative to low-wage exploitation? Towards the end of her life, Robinson was attracted by Maoism. It’s not an approach that has fared well.

Other alternatives might. One idea is to promote better labour standards. That might help badly paid workers, or it might harm them by encouraging companies to avoid the reputational risk of producing in the poorest countries. Another possibility is to encourage small-scale entrepreneurial enterprises. They’re emotionally appealing — but are they merely a distracting Etsy-fication of the serious process of industrial development?

Researchers recently published a fascinating study that sheds new light on the sweatshop debate. Chris Blattman, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stefan Dercon, the chief economist of the UK’s Department for International Development, decided to run an unusual experiment in Ethiopia after teaming up with five different employers.

Ethiopia is an example of early-stage industrialisation: still one of the poorest places in the world, it’s been liberalising its economy and growing very quickly for the past decade. International investors from Europe to Bangladesh are eyeing up Ethiopia as a possible base for low-wage manufacturing. But what are these tough jobs like for the workers who do them?

Here’s where the experiment comes in. Faced with a long queue of job applicants, all apparently equally qualified, an employer would normally choose arbitrarily. But guided by Blattman and Dercon, the Ethiopian employers randomly assigned applicants (typically young women) into one of three groups: those given a job offer, those turned down for a job, and a third category that we’ll discuss in a moment.

This randomisation allows for an unbiased comparison of people who got jobs and people who did not. What Blattman and Dercon found surprised them. Despite the fact that there were long queues for these factory jobs, people didn’t stick with them for long. By the end of the year, two-thirds of people offered a job had not just quit that particular job, but quit working in the industrial sector entirely.

“In terms of earnings, industrial jobs are not worse than the alternatives,” says Stefan Dercon. “We just thought they would be better.” The sweatshop jobs offer a mix of benefits and costs: steady work but low rates of pay, even by the standards of Ethiopian companies, and often hazardous conditions — for example, cotton fibres in the air frequently cause breathing problems. Young people often use them as a fallback — a good option to have if you’re low on funds, but not the sort of job you’d want to stick with. And the companies themselves seem content to cope with the turnover. This pattern — treating workers as interchangeable cogs in an industrial machine, to be replaced as they quit — was common 100 years ago in the UK and the US and seems to be a standard feature of this stage of industrialisation.

Could we do better? Perhaps. Remember the third group in the experiment? These were people who applied for a job and were told instead that they’d won a little lottery — $300 with no strings attached, plus five days of entrepreneurship training. The lottery winners, on average, managed to start a business or otherwise get themselves into a position where they were earning substantially more than people who’d been offered factory jobs. Industrialisation will always be a mainstay of a country’s economic development — but it’s worth remembering that with finance and advice, people can prosper in other ways too.

Overall, the experiment suggests that there’s something in the “sweatshop” criticism: these are hazardous, poorly paid jobs that people tend not to stick with for long. But there’s also something in the economists’ instinct that workers can take these apparently exploitative jobs and turn them to their advantage. In short, it’s complicated. Who knew?

Written for and first published in the Financial Times.

My new book “Messy” is now out and available online in the US and UK or in good bookshops everywhere.

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Applied Capitalism For Fun And Profit

I'm a capitalist. A friend of mine is a devoted Marxist. I think we mutually agree that, considering any particular employee, it is in that employee's personal interest to stop selling hours of labor and start renting access to his accumulated capital as soon as humanly possible.

I don't mean just monetary capital -- having $100,000 in your 401k is awesome but that's not the type which is really interesting to me, simply because rates of return on that sort of capital are so low. There are many types of capital that are no less real just because you can't conveniently reduce them to a number.

Human capital -- the skills you've built up over time and the value you're able to create as a result of them.

Social capital -- the ability to call on someone who trusts you and have them do something in your interest, like e.g. recommend you to a job.

Reputational capital -- the way your name rings out in rooms you aren't even in, simply when your topic of expertise comes up. (Hopefully in a good way!)

A lot of day jobs structurally inhibit capital formation. If I were a Marxist I'd say "And this is an intended consequence of Capital's desire to keep Labor subservient to it", but I honestly think it's true even without anybody needing to twirl their mustache.

There's a great line from Jack Welch to the effect of "You work for a week, collect your paycheck on Friday, and then you and the company are even." Corporate America has embraced it with a vengeance. I'm too young to remember an America where "company loyalty" wasn't a punch line.

If company loyalty were a bankable proposition (and it might still be at some places -- I know a smaller company or two where "we treat our employees like family" means exactly what it says on the tin), you'd get a wee bit of capital every week you worked. That's one more week towards your boss' good impression of you. One more week towards your pension. One more week towards that gold watch.

Japanese salarymen still have that sort of arrangement.

At some point at my ex-employer, I realized that I couldn't possibly work at a salaryman job until retirement, because it was going to be the death of me. (I won't belabor that period of my life because it was pretty rough, but suffice it to say if you pull 6 months of 90 hour weeks, towards the end of it the periodic blackouts start to get a little distressing.)

Once I came to the conclusion that I'd probably quit, and therefore discounted the till-your-death-do-us-part slow accumulation of firm-specific capital, I realized something which is fundamentally true of a lot of day jobs. Nothing I did at the job mattered, in the long run.

Sure, in the short run, I was writing XML files and Java classes which, knock on wood, successfully let my employers ship an examination management system to their client (a major university). I was a really effective Turing machine which accepted emails and tickets as input and delivered (occasionally) working code and Excel files as output. But no matter how much I spun, nothing about my situation ever changed. I worked my week, got to the end of it, and had nothing to show. The next week there would be more emails and more tickets, exactly like the week before. The week after that would be more of the same. And absolutely nothing about my life would change. I'd end the week with nothing.

Don't end the week with nothing. Prefer to work on things you can show. Prefer to work where people can see you. Prefer to work on things you can own.

Prefer Working On Things You Can Show

One of the reasons developers have embraced OSS so much is because it gives you portable capital between companies: if your work is sitting on Github, even if you leave one job, you can take it with you to your next job. Previously this happened pretty widely but generally under the table. (Is there any programmer who does not have a snippets folder or their own private library for scratching that one particular itch?) One of the great wrinkles that OSS throws into this is that OSS is public by default, and that's game changing.

Why? Because when your work is in public, you can show it to people. That's often the best way to demonstrate that you're capable of doing work like it.

Telling people you can do great work is easy: any idiot can do it, and many idiots do. Having people tell people you do great work is an improvement. It suffers because measuring individual productivity on a team effort is famously difficult, and people often have no particular reason to trust the representations of the people doing the endorsements.

(Quick: if you had credible evidence that a mid-level engineering manager at a company you've never heard of in Nagoya thought I was a really effective employee, would that make you markedly more likely to hire me? Right, without the context of knowing him, that recommendation is almost useless.)

Work you can show off, though, is prima facie evidence of your skills. After your portfolio includes it, your ability to sell your skills gets markedly better. Given that most people's net worth is almost 100% invested in their personal capital (i.e. if you're a young engineer the net present value of all future salary absolutely swamps everything in your bank account), this is a fairly radical improvement in your present situation for not a very radical change in how you go about things.

Thus my first piece of advice: if you have the choice between multiple jobs, all else being equal, pick the one where you are able to show what you've worked on. This could mean working on a language stack where work biproducts are customarily OSSed (e.g. Rails) versus one which isn't (e.g. C#). This could mean working on particular projects within the organization which like external visibility (e.g. Android) rather than projects which don't (e.g. AdWords plumbing -- presumably Google will pay you a lot of money to do that, but consider it compensation for not being able to talk about it). This could mean working in industries which default to being open rather than those which default to being closed.

OSS isn't nearly the only way to be able to show what you've worked on. In the creative industries, where the end product is customer-visible, people keep very close eye on whose name ends up in the credits. Academics spend lots of time worrying about citation counts and directed graphs.

More prosaically, establish an expectation early that you're simply going to talk about what you're doing. I think at Fog Creek / Stack Exchange they call this "producing artifacts" -- conference presentations, blog posts, OSSed software, and the like, centered around the work. Even at very open companies there exists lots of secret sauce, but most of the valuable work of the company is not particularly sensitive, and much of it has widely generalizable lessons. Write about those lessons as you learn them. If at all possible, publish what you write. Even if it is published to an audience of no one, you will be able to point people back to it later.

Some of my most effective writing in terms of career growth was back in 2006 through 2008, when I was struggling through not understanding anything I was doing, and where I -- quite literally -- had less readers than my younger brother's blog on writing superhero novels. Why was toiling in Internet-obscurity still valuable? Because I was able to point to particular experiments that I started in e.g. 2008, and then point to the followups in 2009 and 2010, which showed those experiments were really successful. The failures and false starts aren't extremely interesting to most people, but having some successes under your belt credibly demonstrates that you're capable of either reproducing them in the future or experimenting your way to new successes in your new environment.

If you cannot build things you can show at work, you should build things you can show outside of work. Companies in our industry are gradually becoming more reasonable about IP assignment clauses -- there's less of the "we own everything you think of at any point in your employment" nonsense these days. Even at my very straight-laced Japanese megacorp, they were willing to write an exception into the employment contract for a) OSS work that I did outside of company hours and b) Bingo Card Creator. I offered them this in exchange: "If you let me continue working on these, I'm going to learn lots of skills which I can put to the use of the company. Normally you invest lots of money sending engineers to conferences and professional training. This is even better for you: I'll learn more with no operating expenditure and no decrease in billing efficiency." That's an offer you can make to substantially any employer.

I prefer being upfront with people rather than doing the "It is easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission" route a lot of folks suggest. Sure, you can just roll the dice and pretend your employer is unlikely to notice your side project. Unfortunately, the odds of them noticing your side project go up sharply if the side project is ever successful, and then your lack of forthrightness about it give you unbounded liability extending far into the future. Just ask. The worst they can say is "No."

You might consider asking in the context of a more general compensation discussion than just "Hey boss, can I work on OSS?" That way, if they say "No side projects", you'll say "OK, in lieu of the side projects, I'll need more money." It's easier to be sticklers for the stock agreements when there's absolutely no cost to the company to insist on the usual boilerplate, but minor concessions on the boilerplate are often easier than concessions on things which actually appear on the company's books.

Prefer To Work Where People Can See You

I used to phrase this as "work in public", but when people think about folks who work in public, they think of rock stars and figure "Well, I'll never be a rock star."

Vanishingly few people in our industry have the profile of rock stars. They can still have substantial profile among the audience of "people professionally relevant to them." That might be as tightly scoped as "people with hiring authority for front-end developers in my metro area", which might be a set of, what, a couple of dozen folks?

How do you develop that profile? I'd suggest, all things being equal, working at places and on projects which have above-average visibility.

Many engineering projects are deep in the bowels of late-stage industrial capitalism. Then there's writing the Facebook mobile app. I have no clue what engineers actually worked on the Facebook mobile app, but I'm betting that if I were a Silicon Valley hiring manager in iOS or Android development I'd a) know their names and b) have them at or near the top of my personal poach list.

Side note: A poach list is my informal name for "The people who, if I had infinite money and they had no other commitments, I'd hire to work on a particular project." I have several mental poach lists -- the best people I know on Rails programming, on A/B testing, on writing email, etc. When people ask me for advice on what to do about those topics, I often say "You know who is really great at this? <%= poach_list.pop() %> You cannot possibly waste your time taking them out to coffee." Brokering coffee dates cannot possibly work out poorly for the people who go to them. (My interest? Helping people out is fun, and -- funny enough -- people often seem to remember when you get them a job or a key employee.)

You don't have to optimize for "sexy" projects. You know, sexy projects: I don't know how to describe them but I know it when I see it. Most engineering work isn't intrinsically sexy. I would, however, optimize for impact and visibility.

Don't try to make a career out of optimizing the SQL queries to display a preference page on a line of business app at a company that no one has ever heard of. That is not the straightforward path to having other people learn you are capable of doing meaningful work. Instead, work at higher profile companies/organizations -- AmaGooFaceSoft, startups or small companies with anomalously high profile (locally, nationally, whatever), or in positions where by your nature you're exposed to lots of people.

I have a few friends who are developer evangelists, which is a funny job created at API companies where your brief is basically "Go demo our product to a group of developers. Now, do that again, every day, for the next several years." Sentiment on the actual job is decidedly mixed. Keith Casey gives a pretty good account here.

(Side note: I'd be remiss if I didn't note that Keith just got his work shared with 10,000 people because Keith did the work and made it easily shareable, and also because Keith knew me, through his previous job at Twilio. I'm a customer there. Everyone can play six degrees to Kevin Bacon in our industry, but actually putting in the work makes it much more likely that other people will play six degrees on your behalf.)

Anyhow, developer evangelism. An observation: every developer evangelist I know goes into a much better job right after they quit being an evangelist. This is not true of other engineering jobs with checkered reputations, like e.g. The Build Guy. Why do developer evangelists get upgrades but The Build Guy(s) not? My bet is because evangelists literally spent years meeting thousands of people and showing them "Hey, I'm going to live code in front of you while also making my employers fat stacks of money. You run a company and could use both engineers and money. You should probably remember my name, you know, just in case." The Build Guy(s) suffers in underappreciated solitude, except when maven bottoms out or RubyGems goes down and it is somehow The Build Guy's fault.

If you cannot gain exposure at your day job, try to get some exposure outside of it. Network actively. Go to local meetups of technical folks, but also go to the (often separate) events where the business side of your industry talks shops. Speak at conferences. Take the things you have created (see above) and actively show them to people to solicit feedback. You don't have to have an audience of thousands for an audience to be worthwhile -- for landing a new job, having an audience of one hiring manager is a darn sight better than having no audience at all. Blog and collect an email list. It's old and hackneyed advice but it freaking works, particularly when you can compound improvements over years.

Amy Hoy has a great metaphor for this -- "stacking the bricks". Seen from the outside, you might say "That person with an impressive career? It's like they have a sheer wall made out of awesome. I could not hope to ever have a wall like that." Seen from the inside, it looks like one day of delivering a single good conference talk, a few weeks spent writing an OSS library, another day writing the definitive blog post on getting multiple Ruby versions playing together, a few months shipping a product used by many people, an hour recording a podcast. Brick by brick, stone by stone, the wall gets higher.

Prefer To Work On Things You Can Keep

The employer/employee relationship is generally "You give us an hour and, in return, we give you some consideration for that hour." As an employee, you very rarely get to keep hours, bank them against the future, or have them redound to your benefit years later.

I'm not generally a fan of the Silicon Valley model, but I'll say this in their defense: widespread employee ownership of the enterprise is one of the single best innovations in the history of capitalism. Non-managerial employees own plus or minus 20% of Twitter, Facebook, etc. They own plus or minus "rounding error" of almost all other publicly traded companies, with very rare exceptions.

I think that's an improvement on the "no shared stake" model of employment, but I don't think it is the last word in it. For one thing, it overconcentrates employee wealth with one company. As an employee, your short-term cash flow generation is tied to the continued health of your employer. If a large portion of your net worth is tied to their stock, you're magnifying the impact of a secular or firm-specific shock should one occur. (This is, relatedly, why I'm not a fan of buying the stock of an employer in a company-sponsored DRIP or IRA. You've got plenty of exposure to their future already without buying more of it with your own money.)

The explicit understanding among professional investors is that 90% of all shares of early-stage startups are worthless. It seems more than a little self-serving for professional investors to tell employees "While our general partners would laugh us out of the room if we suggested betting the entire fund on a single investment, even if we thought it was a sure thing, you are going the be the lucky ones and you should certainly have 99% of your net worth tied up in the illiquid shares of one particular company."

So if not hard assets directly awarded by employers, then what?

Well, obviously, sock away money like every financial advisor ever will tell you to. (Here's everything you need to know: buy broad market index funds in your tax-advantaged accounts. If that sounds too complicated, get a Vanguard target retirement fund where the number most closely matches the approximate time you'll retire.)

There's another, harder option with higher returns: the side project. You can "buy" them with sweat equity, one bead at a time. They provide you with many benefits, including the direct financial benefits (if you sell things to people for money, you get money, which can be useful), the compounded benefits of investing the financial benefits (my first $2,000 from Bingo Card Creator turned into Chipotle stock at an average price of $50 a share -- don't buy stocks, buy index funds, but that decision worked out pretty decently for me).

There's also intangible -- but no less real -- benefits to having an artifact which is yours. This is one reason why, while I love OSS, I would suggest people not immediately throw their OSS on Github. That makes it very easy for developers to consume your code, but it does not make it easy for you to show the impact of that code to other people, particularly to non-technical stakeholders. To the extent that people's lives are meaningfully improved by your code, the credit (and observable citations) often goes to Github rather than going to you. If you're going to spend weeks or months of time writing meaningful OSS libraries, make a stand-alone web presence for them.

Example: my A/Bingo was once probably the best option for Rails A/B testing, by dint of being the only serious option for Rails A/B testing. It is a little old in the tooth now, but being The A/B Testing Guy got me several consulting gigs. The effort to make e.g. documentation, a quickstart guide, a logo, and a branded web presence beats the heck out of having a junior engineer at a potential client just git clone my Github URL and never have my work exposed to a decisionmaker there at all.

(Much love for Github, guys. Great company, great product, great impact on the industry. I only suggest not using them for a portion of one's projects, for a fairly simple reason: I don't work for them, I work for me. If I don't work for myself, it is unlikely anyone else will.)

If you want to learn more about the actual mechanics of building a side project, my blog covers it in a lot of detail. For a much briefer overview of it, I really recommend Jason Cohen's presentation at Microconf 2013. His formula is "Predictable acquisition of recurring revenue with an annual pre-pay option with a product which solves a demonstrable, enduring pain point for a business." That idea is developed at the above link for an hour, and a lot of the advice given is specific and wildly actionable. I highly recommend it.

Consumption Is Sometimes Valuable, But Creation Moves You Forward

I'll close with my usual advice to peers: reading this email was valuable (knock on wood). Watching Jason's video is valuable. Rolling up your sleeves and actually shipping something is much, much more valuable. If you take no other advice from me ever, ship something. You'll learn more shipping a failure than you'll learn from reading about a thousand successes. And you stand an excellent chance of shipping a success -- people greatly overestimate how difficult this is.

Just don't end the week with nothing.

If there's ever anything I can do to help you out, whether you're the CEO of a multi-million dollar a year SaaS company or just getting ready to stack your first brick, drop me a line. Nothing makes me happier businesswise than being able to help people, particularly those who are getting started.

Until next time.

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie

P.S. Next time I plan to go back to my usual beat of "tactical suggestions for optimizing SaaS businesses."

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Can we have a little common sense about children and smartphones, please?

A report by the American Academy of Pediatrics concludes that there is a link between the time children spend using devices such as smartphones, tablets or computers, and the number of times fail to turn in their homework.

The findings have been seized on by some to demonize the use of such electronic devices, who see them as an evil that distracts children, prevents them from completing their homework and turns them into little more than “connected idiots” with little chance of success in life. For many parents, the warning is a wake-up call, a need to consider a change of habits and to rid their children of their devices and strictly ration their use.

What the study is really saying is that such devices are very appealing to children and that adults don’t teach their use properly to their offspring. All too often they are used to pacify children, and that if allowed to use them all day, everyday, children will.

The real problem is a failure to understand what education should be about. Smartphones and tablets are an ally of education, not its enemy. The idea of telling kids they can “play” with their devices when they have finished their homework is absurd. Knowledge is no longer to be found in textbooks, but on the internet, and children should be taught how to use their devices to find information. Instead of accepting this, schools trying to ban them from the classroom.

Furthermore, these devices are already at the center of our children’s lives, and will continue to be, increasingly so in fact. The only thing the American Academy of Pediatrics has proved is that it is completely out of step with the times and that anybody who takes any notice of its recommendations will be severely limiting their children’s ability to socialize and fit into the world.

It seems that each day we hear some institution rooted in the last century discovers a new threat to mankind, insisting that we carry on doing things as they have been done in the past.

With this in mind, perhaps I could offer some advice to parents:

• These devices are an important part of today’s world. the sooner your children learn to use them well and responsibly, namely to solve problems, as well as understanding how they work, the better prepared they will be. They will be less ignorant.
• These devices open the door to endless activities, are very addictive, and need to be used carefully. Obviously it is not a good thing for children to spend all their waking hours staring into a screen. Children need to be taught how to prioritize.
• These devices are not pacifiers. If your children are bored or disruptive, sticking them in front of a screen is not the solution.
• These devices provide access to information and knowledge. Teach your children that they can be used for other things than games. Teach them search strategies and how to apply critical thinking to the information they find. We live in a connected world, so what sense does it make to disconnect your child from it?
• These devices are the gateway to a new social environment, but children need to understand that the world isn’t going to stop turning if they do not answer a message immediately, and that they can finish their meal, a conversation of even watching the sunset first. If you don’t teach your children how to use the internet properly, then they run the risk of misusing it.
• These devices can be used to read books. If your children are not reading, suggest that they use their device to do so. Teach them to order books and comics, to read, to mark the parts they like. Books are an anachronism: teach your children to read on a device or however they want.
• These devices should be used at school, and desks should have USB ports fitted to them. If the school your children attend insists on teaching them based on methods from the last century, consider a change of school. If that’s not possible, think about how you’re going to make up for the shortfall in this vital part of their education.
• These devices are not harmful. What is harmful is to allow a child to spend all day playing with them and not talking to those around them. It is up to parents to teach their children how best to use these devices. If children misuse them, by not understanding that they are simply one of many tools at their disposal, parents have only themselves to blame. The sooner children familiarize themselves with computers, tablets and smartphones the better, and the sooner they will learn the full potential of these devices.

But above all, apply your critical faculties to studies such as that of the American Academy of Pediatrics. For as long as education is behind the times, which is certainly the case at the moment, we will continue to see any number of misleading correlations, such as that smartphones distract children in class. It goes without saying that if smartphones are not used as part of the educational process, having 20 or 30 children with phones on them is a recipe for disaster. They will disconnect from the class and connect with the virtual world.

No, things are not as simple as «yes smartphones, smartphones no». Things begin with «smartphones, of course» because they are a fundamental element of the ecosystem in which we must educate children, and continue by «and since smartphones themselves, adapt methods to extract their party, and educate in its use». Only then, when the transition is complete (or at least advanced, because complete, in fact, it never will not be), we can speak of significant correlations.

In short, smartphones are part of our reality and our children’s reality. As such, they must be incorporated into the educational process, and children taught how to use them to their full potential. Only then will we be able make the right links between smartphones and our children’s homework

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celsitude
n. height; elevation; altitude

faineant
n. one who does nothing; an idler

ataraxia
n. a pleasure that comes when the mind is at rest

Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant / 37·560755°, –5·331908° / This Overview captures the Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant in Seville, Spain. The solar concentrator contains 2,650 heliostat mirrors that focus the sun’s thermal energy to heat molten salt flowing through a 140-metre-tall (460-foot) central tower. The molten salt then circulates from the tower to a storage tank, where it is used to produce steam and generate electricity. In total, the facility displaces approximately 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year.

In December of 2013, an Instagram account called Daily Overview began to catalog a wide spectrum of satellite images that capture the many ways people have transformed the face of Earth, for better or worse. The account is run by Benjamin Grant who uses imagery taken from DigitalGlobe, an advanced collection of Earth imaging satellites that provide data to services like Google Earth. The project gets its title from a phenomenon experienced by astronauts who spend extended periods of time in space and what they describe as a “cognitive shift in awareness” as they continuously view the world from above dubbed the overview effect.

As Grant’s Instagram has swelled to nearly a half million followers, some of the best images from the project have been gathered into a new 288-page hardcover book called Overview. The book includes images of our collective impact on Earth, a collection of interlinked systems often too difficult to grasp including aspects of industry, agriculture, and architecture.

All images © 2016 by DigitalGlobe, Inc. from Overview by Benjamin Grant, published by Amphoto Books. Used with permission. (via Twisted Sifter)

Tulips / 52·276355°, 4·557080° / Every year, tulip fields in Lisse, Netherlands begin to bloom in March and are in peak bloom by late April. The Dutch produce a total of 4·3 billion tulip bulbs each year, of which 53% (2·3 billion) is grown into cut flowers. Of these, 1·3 billion are sold in the Netherlands as cut flowers and the remainder is exported: 630 million bulbs to Europe and 370 million elsewhere.

Olives / 37·263212°, –4·552271° / Olive tree groves cover the hills of Córdoba, Spain. Approximately 90% of all harvested olives are turned into oil; the remaining 10% are eaten as table olives. With rising temperatures and phenomenal weather variations in growing regions, olive groves on high hills or slopes will probably suffer less, but groves located on low altitude areas or plains could become totally unproductive.

Moab Potash Evaporation Ponds / 38·485579°, –109·684611° / Evaporation ponds are visible at the potash mine in Moab, Utah, USA. The mine produces muriate of potash, a potassium-containing salt that is a major component in fertilisers. The salt is pumped to the surface from underground brines and dried in massive solar ponds that vibrantly extend across the landscape. As the water evaporates over the course of 300 days, the salts crystallise out. The colours that are seen here occur because the water is dyed a deep blue, as darker water absorbs more sunlight and heat, thereby reducing the amount of time it takes for the water to evaporate and the potash to crystallise.

Marabe Al Dhafra / 23·610424°, 53·702677° / The villas of Marabe Al Dhafra in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates are home to approximately 2,000 people. Located in one of the hottest regions of the world, the record high temperature here is 49·2°C (120·6°F).

Port of Singapore / 1·237656°, 103·806422° / Cargo ships and tankers – some weighing up to 300,000 tonnes – wait outside the entry to the Port of Singapore. The facility is the world’s second-busiest port in terms of total tonnage, shipping a fifth of the world’s cargo containers and half of the world’s annual supply of crude oil.

Ipanema Beach / –22·983606°, –43·206638° / Ipanema Beach is located in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Recognised as one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, the sand is divided into segments by lifeguard towers known as ‘postos’.

Nishinoshima Volcanic Activity / 27·243362, 140·874420 / Nishinoshima is a volcanic island located 940 kilometres (584 miles) south of Tokyo, Japan. Starting in November 2013, the volcano began to erupt and continued to do so until August 2015. Over the course of the eruption, the area of the island grew in size from 0.06 square kilometres (0.02 square miles) to 2·3 square kilometres (0·89 square miles).

There’s still time to enter this year’s Halloween contest! I’ll be choosing winners on Sunday night just before the clock strikes Halloween, so submit an entry or entries today!

Vertical | Squarish

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BAHFEST IS NEARLY UPON US!

Congratulations are in order to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom, winners on 10 October of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Even though economics is not a full-fledged Nobel Prize, it has been earned by some splendid social scientists over the years — including a number of people who are not economists at all, from Herbert Simon and John Nash to Daniel Kahneman and Elinor Ostrom.

But one of the Ig Nobel’s charms is that this ridiculous research might actually tell us something about the world. David Dunning and Justin Kruger received an Ig Nobel prize in psychology for their discovery that incompetent people rarely realise they are incompetent; the Dunning-Kruger effect is now widely cited. Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith won an Ig Nobel in physics for their discovery that hair and string have a tendency to become tangled — potentially an important line of research in understanding the structure of DNA. Most famously, Andre Geim’s Ig Nobel in physics for levitating a live frog was promptly followed by a proper Nobel Prize in the same subject for the discovery of graphene.

A whimsical curiosity about the world is something to be encouraged. No wonder that the credo of the Ig Nobel prizes is that they should make you laugh, then make you think. In 2001, the Ig Nobel committee did just that, awarding the economics prize to Joel Slemrod and Wojciech Kopczuk, who demonstrated that people will try to postpone their own deaths to avoid inheritance tax. This highlights an important point about the power of incentives — and the pattern has since been discovered elsewhere.

Alas, most economics Ig Nobel prizes provoke little more than harsh laughter. They’ve been awarded to Nick Leeson and Barings Bank, Iceland’s Kaupthing Bank, AIG, Lehman Brothers, and so on. The first economics prize was awarded to Michael Milken, one of the inventors of the junk bond. He was in prison at the time.

Fair game. Still, surely there is something in economics that is ludicrous on the surface yet thought-provoking underneath? (The entire discipline, you say? Very droll.)

Where is the award for Dean Karlan and Chris Udry? These two bold Yale professors wanted to figure out whether lack of access to crop insurance was damaging Ghana’s agricultural productivity, so they set up an insurance company, sold insurance to Ghanaian farmers, and accidentally got themselves on the hook for half a million dollars if it didn’t rain in Ghana. (Happy ending: it rained. Also, crop insurance is very helpful.)

Psychologists Bernhard Borges, Dan Goldstein, Andreas Ortmann and Gerd Gigerenzer found they could construct a market-beating portfolio of stocks by stopping people on street corners, showing them a list of company names, and asking which they recognised. Surely an Ig Nobel in finance?

Another psychologist, Dan Ariely, already shared an Ig Nobel prize for medicine in 2008 for demonstrating that expensive placebos work better than cheap placebos. But in recent research with Emir Kamenica and Drazen Prelec, described in Ariely’s forthcoming book Payoff, Ariely paid people to build robots out of Lego. The researchers’ aim: to examine the nature of the modern workplace by dismantling the Lego in front of their subjects’ eyes, to see if they could dishearten them. (They could.) An Ig Nobel in management beckons.

Richard Thaler deserves an Ig Nobel in economics for his long-running column Anomalies, in which he asked his fellow economists a series of questions that seem straightforward but are enormously difficult for economics to answer. Why do investment banks pay high wages even to the receptionists? Why do people overpay in auctions? Why are people often nice to each other? If the Ig Nobel committee wants to repeat the Andre Geim trick, it should hurry up: Thaler may well win the economics Nobel before his Ig Nobel can be awarded.

But my preferred candidate for an Ig Nobel prize in economics is Thomas Thwaites. A few years ago Thwaites set himself the simple-seeming task of replicating from scratch a cheap Argos toaster (retail price: £3.99). He smelted iron in a microwave, tried to produce plastic from potato starch, and generally made a colossal mess. His toaster cost £1,187.54, resembled a disastrously iced birthday cake and melted when plugged into the mains. (“A partial success,” says Thwaites.)

Thwaites’s toaster project thus tells us more about the brilliance and dizzying complexity of the interconnected global economy than any textbook could. He is a shoo-in for the economics Ig Nobel. Perplexingly, however, the Ig Nobel committee awarded him this year’s prize for biology instead after he attempted to live life dressed as a goat. How silly.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times.

My new book “Messy” is now out. If you like my writing, why not buy a copy? (US) (UK)

A inteligência vale mais do que a espada  OU a arte de arregar e ainda sair com a vitória moral.

O post Mentirinhas #1055 apareceu primeiro em Mentirinhas.

– Uau! Que coleira inteligente!

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