Russell Davies

September 2016

September 2016 from russelldavies on Vimeo.

Vigilance Decrement

“If you’re sitting there watching the system and it’s doing great, it’s very tiring.” In fact, it’s extremely difficult for humans to accurately monitor a repetitive process for long periods of time. This so-called “vigilance decrement” was first identified and measured in 1948 by psychologist Robert Mackworth, who asked British radar operators to spend two hours watching for errors in the sweep of a rigged analog clock. Mackworth found that the radar operators’ accuracy plummeted after 30 minutes; more recent versions of the experiment have documented similar vigilance decrements after just 15 minutes.”

This is somehow related to this - about how an audience might pay attention.

Breakfast

I would love to be able to draw like this. And then I would draw this. Sir Osbert Lancaster.

It's funny because it's true

A neat summation of a real IOT issue.

Snooker loopy

Timehop showed me this picture, which reminded me I used to bunk off work, many years ago and play snooker with my mate Ben. A different Ben.

There's no way the snooker club could have survived the creation of the massive cross-rail hole yet, surprisingly there's little evidence of its absence on the internet.

A bit of casual googling would lead you to believe it's still there. I'm refusing to look any further, I'm going to convince myself it's still going. 

Lull! Lull! Lull!

Related to yesterday's thing. There's also a great bit in the Mark Watson interview where he talks about the 40 minute lull you often get in one hour stand-up shows. He once, apparently, specifically addressed this by giving an audience member a stopwatch and asking them to chant LULL! LULL! LULL! at 40 minutes. That is genius. Thinking about the rhythm of attention is important and not something people normally do when they're writing a presentation. They tend to assume everyone's going to be focused for as long as they're going to talk. They're not. You have to design some peaks and troughs, assume there'll be some bits where they're not listening as hard.

Trust Me, I'm A PowerPointer

I've been listening to the Comedian's Comedian podcast recently and I've chanced across the odd thing that might be relevant for those thinking about presentations.

For instance, 6 minutes into the Dara Ó Brian episode there's talk about how we always starts with a couple of 'Trust Me I'm A Comedian' jokes. Nothing complicated just guaranteed laughs before he gets into anything improvisatory or fancy. 'Trust Me I'm A Comedian' is a good way to look at it. Establish some trust. Establish you know what you're doing. That's why banging straight in with a story, or maybe even a fanfare, is useful - it shows that you've done this before.

Interesting past

It occurs to me that there might be many who are new to Interesting and might not know it has history. Well, it has, and if you'd like to delve back in time - it's here.

Tampon homework for boys

Ella's found an Interesting thing, related to Alice's talk.

Ikea: Wrath of God

Have just been to see Akira for the first time in 25 years or so. Reminded me that when the Swedish furniture giant arrived in the UK I thought it was called Akira. And that, for a large number of years, I've been confusing Akira and Aguirre.

Not interesting, but true.