Stuff you must read today (Fri, 3 Aug 2012)

Fri, 3 Aug 2012
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  • The Power of Habit | Slate Magazine
    This article single-handedly inspired me to buy the book, which single-handedly inspired me to change my life. I exaggerate, of course, but believe me when I say that the article – and the book – are good reads that must be taken with a pinch of salt.

  • Why women lose the dating game | The Age
    “‘We arrived at the top of the staircase,’ Bolick wrote, ‘finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up – and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.'”

  • 21st-century girl | Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science
    “‘Do you dream of mammoths?’ a talk-show host once asked me. I knew not to give him my first choice of answer; that would have enlightened his audience over the course of three and a half hours — so long as they had the basic grounding in biosciences required to understand it. I also knew enough to avoid my second answer, which was that his question was unintelligent, and that the entire interview had taken time I could have spent better in the laboratory.”

  • The Eye Test | PUEBLO Crew In Captivity in North Korea
    I seriously cannot remember how I came across this site but this anecdote, along with many others like it, is painfully hilarious.

  • Adam’s “rib” a Biblical euphemism | Improbable Research
    “In a letter to the editor in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, two authors suggest that the story of Adam’s rib being the humble beginnings of Eve is the result of a mistranslation. In reality, they suggest, the story is an explanatory myth for why humans are one of the few mammals lacking a baculum, or penile bone.”

Gmail Meter

Wed, 1 Aug 2012
2 min read
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So I’ve been using Gmail Meter on my work account for a couple of months now because I’ve always been interested to know how and whether email at work is used efficiently.

I don’t have any conclusive data (because I’ve not been actively tracking things!), but I thought I’d share some interesting statistics which recur every month, without fail (the graphs and pie chart I’m using are from July 2012, BTW):

Daily Email Traffic
Daily Email Traffic
  • From the visual above, most email is sent in the morning and just before lunch.
  • People enter the office after lunch and try to send a bit of email but they’ve more or less cleared their quota for the day.
  • Work is still done in the evening, after dinner. Work-life balance, anyone?
Monthly Email Traffic
Monthly Email Traffic
  • LOOK AT THOSE PEAKS! The most emails are sent at the start of the week, on Mondays.
  • Thankfully not a lot of traffic on weekends, though you can see some traffic from me last weekend – I was clearing stuff in preparation for the surgery I underwent on Monday.
Email Categories
Email Categories

Last but not least, most email messages I get are not exactly… relevant to me. Either that or I don’t like storing a lot of mail in my inbox.