Hello lovely friends, hope all’s well. I have not moved much since last we spoke, what with the heatwave, the motor going into the workshop and the snooker being on. In these humid conditions my chair takes on my inverse likeness, so right now there can be no mistaking my place in the universe.
🕊 Peace on Earth: The biblical phrase “peace on Earth and goodwill to all men” is probably a mistake, a mistranslation because of a single missing letter.
🧱 The UX of LEGO Interface Panels: a spectacular piece of analysis by interaction technologist George Cave. These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
🎸 Why Did We Ever Think Smashing Guitars Was Cool?: It’s as rock ’n’ roll as anything gets, but isn’t it kind of like keying your own car? It’s part of the iconography of rock music, a demonstration of excess. An axeman bringing his instrument crashing down onto the stage, smashing it into pieces, is so worn into the stereotype of the rockstar that it’s easy to not think about how weird it is.
📽 CamJam: I love this. Near-live streams from London’s ‘jam cams’, offered up at random, provide a hypnotic oversight of the city’s streets.
📨 About Feeds is a straightforward getting-started guide for web feeds and RSS. It’s important for non-technical people to get familiar with technologies like this if we’re ever going to decentralise away from a handful of tech giants. You can use web feeds to subscribe to this nonsense at blast.red/rss.
🏥 Scotland’s ‘Navigators’ Transform Lives in the Emergency Room: Patients involved in violence may find a pink-shirted Navigator at their bedside, gently asking what led to the incident, and how they can help.
💣 The Bomb: Excellent new podcast. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the culmination of years of research, beginning with the man who first conceived a nuclear chain reaction: Leo Szilard. That makes him one of very few men who could have prevented the most devastating bombings in human history. This podcast tells the story of the atomic bomb through his unique lens, and asks what could have been if decisions were made differently.
👖 Sweatpants Forever: How the Fashion Industry Collapsed: Even before the pandemic, the whole fashion industry had started to unravel. What happens now that nobody has a reason to dress up?
🪑 Vintage Ikea is the Cool New Design Trend: The Swedish mega furniture maker’s back catalog includes some greatest hits of Scandinavian design.
The cult of personality testing
Many organisations have come to rely on personality testing as a means of assembling cohesive teams. The most well-known is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which files participants into one of 16 personality types based on their preference for opposing characteristics such as either judging or perceiving. The fact that the Myers-Briggs test has remained wildly popular for decades is interesting, because it’s totally useless.
The MBTI personality test is pseudoscience, with no greater reliability and validity than a horoscope or Tarot-card reading. Yet even though the results are meaningless, two million people a year use a MBTI assessment tool, generating $20 million or so for its publishers. Part of its enduring popularity is down to the Barnum Effect: like horoscopes, it self-reinforces by giving participants complimentary but universal truisms.
Katharine Cook-Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs-Myers weren’t trained in psychology nor psychometrics. They extrapolated their personality-testing theory from Carl Jung’s book Psychological Types, itself a work of introspection and anecdote rather than scientific study.
But in their effort to define how we differ, perhaps Briggs and Myers happened upon something we all share: a need to discover and define ourselves. Even if the process doesn’t stack up, there’s comfort in being a type.
