I first came across Edward H. Adelson’s maddening checker shadow optical illusion while reading Kathryn Schultz’s fascinating book “Being Wrong”. The squares labelled A and B in the following picture are the exact same shade.

You don’t have to take my word for it, you can watch it on YouTube – in all its maddening glory!

This process appears hardwired. It doesn’t matter how many times you see this illusion, your brain still gets it wrong!

I recommend the book. It’s rather humbling to realise how wrong you can be; from what you hear, what you see and what you think!

Thanks to Sam Owen telling about the YouTube video.

This question has occupied academics for centuries. Some people perceive deep differences between languages, which affect the minds of the people who speak them. Others argue that the differences are superficial and, linguistically speaking, all humans are essentially equal.

I’ve often pondered on how programming languages affect the people who program them, so I found Guy Deutscher’s delightful book “Through the Language Glass” both fascinating and enlightening.

He explores two centuries of research from William Gladstone puzzling over the lack of colour in The Iliad and The Odyssey, to the latest brain imaging experiments.

Gladstone’s noticed the black-and-white nature of the Homer’s world; blues or greens are never mentioned. One popular explanation at the time was that the ancient Greeks were partially colourblind and full colour vision had yet to evolve. Scientists even pointed to the lack of colour words in many “primitive” languages around the world as evidence. Obviously, we now know that evolution doesn’t work so fast. Differences in colour vocabulary reflect cultural rather than biological development.

So where are we on this debate today? Noam Chomsky has argued for the past 50 years that the universal rules of human grammar are encoded in our genes and variation between languages has no cognitive consequence – all languages are equally complex.

In fact languages vary markedly in complexity. In general small, illiterate societies have languages with smaller vocabularies but more complex grammatical structures. Such differences can affect the way people think. The latest brain scanning experiments show that If a language distinguishes between two colours, as Russian does between dark and light blue, then its speakers experience more of a difference between them than people whose language uses the same word for both.

And, then after all this, I saw Mark Pagel’s TED talk postulating that language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation:

Thanks to Mark McKergow for recommending this book.

The “Not The Agile 2010″ conference is on the 10th August at 7pm. We’ve got some interesting talks. It’s free, but sign up here so we know who is coming: http://skillsmatter.com/event-details/home/not-the-agile2010-conference/

Hope to see you for a chat and some beer.

I loved Matt Ridley’s meme of “Idea’s Having Sex”.  A fabulous talk exploring the importance of collaboration and exchanging ideas – the power of the collective brain.

Lewis Pugh’s incredible Mt. Everest swim to highlight melting glacier ice.  An amazing story.  
I’ve started sending this to people who ask me to help rolling out a standard agile software development process – showing the pitfalls of a standard process.

The most captivating speaker was Elif Shafak, talking about the politics of fiction. Such a wonderful story teller. I’ve ordered a couple of her books as a result!

A mind-blowing bit of technology …

He starts at midnight so he can talk to people in hong kong. The door to our new “secure” location would only open during London Office hours.

Lucky for us that the other door to the same “secure” room does not have a lock.

Dave’s now uploaded a version to YouTube… Fantastic stuff. I love the deadpan humour.

Talk starts at 7:30 on the 13th Jan at The Counting House pub (50 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3PD).  It’s free, but please  signup on the XTC website.

Just to whet your appetite:

The Solutions Focus approach is creating a stir in the fields of psychology and management. Whereas conventional approaches assume stable environments and predicable outcomes, SF is bringing a new, simple and effective flavour to the workplace and the therapy room with a view on ways to make progress while everything changes. Surprisingly, the approach is as effective, if not more so, than conventional methods.

In this session Mark will share his experiences of using SF in many business settings and help us to experience the approach in some quick interactive exercises. We will discuss how SF sits alongside Agile, how the two philosophies reflect each other and how Agile processes like retrospectives might be even more agile with the inclusion of some SF techniques. This will be a session to appeal to both the pragmatist and the philosophical.

Well worth reading. Nice work.