October 2009
4 posts
1 tag
Annoying the user can be a feature
Google typically has a minimalist aesthetic, so why does Gmail display an obnoxious yellow box whenever you go “invisible” in Talk? Economics to the explanatory rescue!
For those of you who don’t know, when you’re “invisible,” you can see and IM other people who are online but other people can’t see you. This asymmetry can yield a classic free-rider...
URL aesthetics
Maybe this is just me being weird, but I have pretty strong opinions about the way I like URLs to look. Let’s look at some URLs:
http://www.vimeo.com/4576896
Vimeo has great attention to detail in their UI; part of that is great URLs. No implementation details are visible. It’s obvious what the page is — it’s a watch page for one video on vimeo. Better, the URL is so...
1 tag
Changing my mind about GDP alternatives
I now think switching to a measure of well-being that includes some objective and subjective measures of happiness is probably a good thing on balance.
France commissioned a nobel-rich group to look at it. The report offers three broad categories of problems with GDP that an alternative measure might address:
Classical GDP Issues - issues with GDP everybody agrees on like pricing an...
Do we understand religion and science the same...
Some people view religious beliefs and scientific facts as derived from distinct mental processes. Facts are derived from some sort of cognitive, rational evaluative process, while beliefs are based on faith or revelation.
As with most questions about our minds, I’m interested in what neuroscience has to say about the question. Coincidentally, there’s a new study in PLoS one...