the art of conversation

Beach Reading

 It was David Ogilvy in Confessions of an Advertising Man who (roughly) said when on holiday read; but read something that's unrelated to work. Reading will keep the mind ticking over and give it space to de-clutter. 

Asking round the office, we've pulled together some beach reads we will be taking with us this summer to depressurise to some near and some far-flung climes. 

 If you're looking for American urban grit and a fan of The Wire (as quite a few of us are) then David Simon's Homicide and the Corner have come highly recommended. Although looking out to a sunbright sea may be more therapeutic.

 Wolf Hall, Man Booker Prize for 2009, has received mixed reviews by those who have already read it here.  Although giving us a pretty vivid picture of the early 16th Century England some have found it confusing to follow at times. Compared to Joyce's Ulysees though, it's a doddle.  

A Feast of Conversation

 

Theodore Zeldin, our hero and the author of  'An Intimate History of Humanity' and 'Conversation: how talk can change our lives', was interviewed on the Today programme on Friday to discuss his 'Feast of Conversation', held on July 3 at the Olympics site in a venue made from old shipping containers. 

Attendees chose from a menu of 25 conversation topics, and talked about what they find interesting. "It is for people who want to have two hours to think about what is important to them".

Professor Zeldin claimed that "we live in an age where we don't know what to talk about" hence his idea to "have a new kind of conversation where we are trying to discover what we think and to discover other people ... [which is] the most exciting adventure of our time ... to discover who inhabits the world". 

The professor bridled at the suggestion that his event was like speed dating. He felt it was the opposite of the inane babble of speed dating or something like Twitter (ahem) "...It is about thinking, not jabbering".

We look forward to reading the reviews.

Not on Twitter, though.

The Planning Fallacy

 

 

If a group of people aim to get the same plane, they will arrive at the airport at different times. Some will be early and some will be on time; others will leave it until just before the check-in desk closes. 

This doesn't just happen when catching flights, of course. The completion of the new Wembley Stadium was delayed by over a year, from a March 2006 opening date until May 2007 ready for the FA Cup Final. Even the Sydney Opera house was planned for a 1963 opening, but opened 10 years later.

Why is this? Why do things take longer than we want?

In Kate Fox's 'Watching the English', she calls this 'the Planning Fallacy": people underestimate the time it takes to complete a task. Fox suggests it is because we have an emotional bias that leads us to wish for a goal that in practice is unrealistic. We may want to please someone or be under pressure to meet somebody else's deadline. Or we may not take in (or want to take in) all the external factors (like staff holidays or traffic jams) that may delay our plans.

iPad later

Apple's launch of the iPad was announced earlier this week and here in the office, we've been wondering what to make of it. 

The general consensus has been to wear our steady-Eddy hats until the next generation of the iPad comes out, when all the technical creases have been ironed out and the enthusiastic early-adopters have tried and tested it. And when, as our colleague Siamack has noted, they make one with a camera built in.

Expectations are high, of course. Apple have transformed certain products into must-have status symbols. Take what the iPod did for MP3 players, what the iPhone did for the Smartphone; will the iPad do the same for tablet laptops/e-Readers?

No doubt, we shall be blogging about it when it does (or doesn't!)

Simon