Not much to explain…just a fun random thing from the Internet: One Million Checkboxes. You can either check boxes or uncheck boxes. That’s it! It’s actually surprisingly addictive and exhibits a microcosm of social human behavior…are you checker or an unchecker?).
Its creator @eieio has made some other really cool stuff.
Visual Frameworks is a library of “pictorial mental models”—a sort of visual toolbox to help visualize information. Anybody that loves to communicate visually (through a whiteboard!) should find it incredibly stimulating!
Here’s a video of the most amazing thing I saw at the Oregon Zoo last weekend. One of the elephants was using its trunk to blow crumbs of hay together and make an easily graspable pile!
Here’s another example from elephants in Japan:
Seems like this was a pretty novel discovery (!?) as we see findings about it published in the scientific journal, Animal Cognition in 2015.
I learned today that in the US, according to federal regulation, the only traffic sign that is allowed to be round is the “Railroad Crossing Ahead” sign.
The “Do Not Enter” or “X is prohibited” signs are not round! They are white rectangular signs with round images.
Edit (5/29) - Why is this the only round sign? According to Richard C. Moeur’s Manual of Traffic Signs:
The greater number of sides on a sign, the more critical a message it conveys. This is why a circular shape was adopted for the Railroad Advance warning sign (i.e. infinite number of sides), as a collision between a train and a typical vehicle will nearly always end badly.
On March of 2014, the world was gripped with the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370. How could an airliner simply vanish in a world of ubiquitous tracking with radar and GPS?
The Green Dot Aviation channel released this nerve-racking, hour-long video using flight simulation software with conjectures on what might have happened within the cockpit. Of course, a lot of the video is unproven and it simply shows what a plausible scenario could have been.
The deductive reasoning based on incomplete information used to build a scenario on how aviation instruments were used/manipulated is pretty interesting.
Not sure if it’s just me, but I have found it extremely difficult to remember what the laundry care symbols mean. Being paranoid about not wanting to ruin a piece of clothing, I find myself Googling what each of the icons represent: “what does the dot inside a circle inside a square mean again? Is it dry clean or no dry clean? Is the dot a good thing or a bad thing?”
The American Cleaning Institute (!!) has created a guide that actually helps! Instead of remembering every single permutation, you simply need to remember the following 5 symbols:
And the following modifiers:
Nonetheless, still incredibly confusing, since not all the icons adhere to this syntax. What does this mean?
The vertical three lines: drip drying; the diagonal lines: in the shade
I try to avoid flying Southwest Airlines because of its open seating policy. Open seating brought out some weird behaviors: setting an alarm to immediately check-in a second after online check-in is open, calculating in your mind if it’s worth sitting in the middle seat to risk no one sitting next to you, judging fellow passengers that have boarded before you as you decide where to sit…
Thankfully, there’s news that it might go away.
Nonetheless, this CGP Grey video shows how finding an effective boarding procedure is a surprisingly complex problem. Also, it’s interesting that the “common-sense” system of boarding back-to-front is actually slower than boarding in a random order(!).
More interestingly, the theoretically best solution is not feasible because of social implications.
Maybe airlines have an incentive to make boarding as painful as possible as it gives them opportunity to sell boarding related perks like priority boarding or even seat selection…
This WSJ article reminded me of how confusing hotel light switches are such a visceral example of mismatched mapping with controls. Watch this TikTok video and tell me…how does that make sense?
@chelseazeferina why are hotel lights so complicated #hoteltour #hoteltok #solotravel #solotravelfemale ♬ original sound - 🍓 CHELSEA 🍓
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Definitely a throwback to Jakob Nielsen's 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design, namely #2: Match Between the System and the Real World. It’s nostalgic to see the stovetop as the example on that page, as it was my first “aha!” moment when I realized that it was bad design that led me to turning on the wrong stove over and over.
Maps not only serve as visualizations of space but also of context and culture.
In this video learn why limited information, laziness, literary fantasy, and lopsided incentives lead to misrepresentations in maps (even in the age of satellite imagery!).
Know that you’ll find guaranteed chuckles with every Map Men video.
I particularly enjoyed learning about how a novel about the New World led to (Baja) California being shown as a massive island in so many older maps.
