Week 21
Aristocratic tutoring, Geigy’s Sterazolidin packaging redesign, an audio reactive typeface with a strange inspiration, the podcast boom, the arcane language of legal contracts and Saharan's work.
[Articles] Why we stopped making Einsteins - Erik Hoel
This was one of my favourite articles from 2022, introduced to me by Adam Mastroianni in his recent article: How to keep cakes moist and cause the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.
Erik’s article, Why we stopped making Einsteins, presents an interesting correlation between high amounts of aristocratic tutoring and intellectual development (to the point where someone could be considered a ‘genius’).
He initially discusses how getting into a fancy school may make no difference to education outcomes for the student by building on Freddi deBoer’s work, who says:
Parents in many cities are obsessive about getting their kids into competitive exam high schools, but when you adjust for differences in ability, attending them makes no difference. The kids who just missed the cut score and the kids who just beat it have very similar underlying ability and so it should not surprise us in the least that they have very similar outcomes, despite going to very different schools.
Then, Erik builds upon his case by presenting various examples of how people who are considered ‘geniuses’ today were intently tutored one-on-one by experts from various fields. Bertrand Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Voltaire, Ada Lovelace, Descartes (who literally died from tutoring) Einstein, Hannah Arendt, John Stuart Mill … the list goes on. The article basically argues how with the fall of the aristocratic system of tutoring (and the growth of modern-day classroom education), the number of ‘geniuses’ have come down, even with the massive population explosion.
I am no one to comment on the validity of this science. However, I found the premise to be quite interesting. When I think about my life, the people who have had a considerable impact on my life were the ones who (for lack of a better word) ‘tutored’ me one-on-one usually in informal settings.
Whether it was my father who persistently trained me in the outdoors, or the devoted climbing coach who taught me what real athletic sacrifice looked like, or all the academic mentors in college who lovingly took me under their wing to teach me the ways of my craft & life.
Having mentors from beyond one discipline could be an important contributing factor to the development of one’s intellect. When I read this article, I was almost relieved that I didn’t end up going to a big school. As Erik put it:
The first real intellectuals that most children meet in person are their college professors—already at eighteen and stuck in a class with dozens of other people (even at Harvard, introductory courses are often in the hundreds).
Even though it happened when I was 17, at least I was a part of a nurturing environment which allowed me to interact intimately with my professors, who were experts in their fields. When I see what I’ve become now, I can almost draw direct connections between my college life and my current personality, and can even trace it back to which professor contributed to that particular trait.
[Cool Projects] Geigy’s Sterazolidin packaging redesign
I recently stumbled upon Flat File, a weekly publication that features one piece of work from the Herb Lubalin Study Center. Very interesting archive.
One project that I found extremely cool was the Sterazolidin packaging design done by Geigy in the 1960s.
Geigy used a forward-thinking graphic style to package innovative pharmaceutical products. There’s an interesting article that talks more about what they did, here.
[Experiments] Audio reactive typeface
Took some time out this week to play around with the idea of converting existing typefaces to points that react in real-time to music or sound.
While writing this article, I realised where this idea came from and I was pleasantly surprised by my brain. The past week, me & a friend from work, decided to do a Harry Potter movie marathon. A 21-hour ordeal that both of us were pretty unprepared for.
Anyway, there’s a scene in one of the movies where Voldermort comes out from a physical form, as if he’s a soul trapped in someone else’s body. I can’t find that exact visual but it would look something like this:
Turns out, my idea for the audio-reactive typeface was also to have the existing physical form of the word displayed but another layer being displaced by the amplitude of the audio track.
Funny how the brain takes inspiration, right? How there are so many different dots and we somehow manage to find a link, even if it’s between two polar opposite ones like Voldermort and a side-project.
[Observations] Constant information seeking to fill up whitespaces
This has been an ongoing observational exercise for me for quite a while now but it was recently triggered when one of my mentors mentioned that she’s started to listen to podcasts while driving back home.
When I started working at TinkerLabs, I observed how accessible this whole podcast thing was. Everyone was listening to one or the other and when I enquired further, I realised it was deemed to be “more fruitful than wasting hours listening to music while doing cognitively easier tasks”.
It’s funny how people want to cram information into their heads just because it’s so easily accessible nowadays. Learn when you’re working, learn when you’re reading but now, learn while you’re doing laundry, cooking, cleaning, sitting, commuting, walking, waiting. Learn, all the time. Time for absorption? None.
While writing this blog, I’ve realised that I am exposed to so much new information on a daily basis. I’m sure this stands true for a lot of other people as well. This is without a podcast or audiobook playing in the background. I have also realised that a lot of people around me have read more books, listened to more famous people speaking, seen more lifehack videos on YouTube and just generally have a lot more information that they’ve been exposed to.
However, when it is time to apply that particular information, it somehow doesn’t come naturally to them. Maybe they have more nodes in their heads, but those nodes don’t make sense to them.
I think it’s a rather simple question to ask, isn’t it? When do you make sense of all of this information that you take in, barring the podcasts and the audiobooks? Do you have this time or is this time spent again seeking new information, on your never-ending quest for more?
[Experiences] The arcane language of legal contracts
This past week I also signed a bunch of legal stuff for work. When I read through some clauses, I was quite shocked at the inhumane nature of legal language. I wondered why people would write things like that and treat human beings like mere transactional objects.
Went on an internet deep dive and found a nice answer to this Quora thread:
"Learned this from a patent lawyer.
Once, the exact meaning of a word or phrase has been litigated, and a court has given a definition, that word or phrase can be relied upon to have only one meaning.
Lawyers are paid to know exactly what the meaning of a document is that they are writing; as the document is always read in a way most favorable to the person who did not write it.
The language is arcane, because no lawyer wants to stick his neck out a write a phrase that might mean the same thing that the arcane phrase meant and then find out that a court didn't read it that way."
[Cool People] Saharan’s work
Saharan is a Japanese developer who made this mind-blowing interactive webpage called: Life. If you visit it, just scroll and enjoy his/her rendition of Conway’s Game of Life.
His/her website is also so cool, probably one of the coolest websites I’ve seen all year. It features clever design, some extremely interesting projects and some generative experiments that just elevate the level of his/her website.
What an inspiration to get started on my own personal website development.