Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]

27/05/08 Book: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is ever-so slightly off topic for me, but I like combining ideas from other mindsets. It’s all about how less information is more and how in the blink of an eye you can make extremely good decisions. The subconscious brain is able to very quickly determine a situation before the concious kicks in. This is the difference between an expert with a gut feeling and an amateur who has to reason things.

There’s always a line in a book that I think *bingo* and have to write down, and in this case it was morse code ‘fists’. Fists are the tapping patterns made by a person sending morse code. Even though the codes are the same dots & dashes, everyone has an individual tapping pattern, speed, spacing, etc.

All telegraphists unconsciously develop personal quirks, or characteristics, which collectively are called one’s “fist.” While it is easy to send a jerky or “choppy” code with any type of keyer, as well as to make inconsistently longer or shorter dits or dahs overall or in certain characters, the type of key in use may greatly influence one’s sending as it sounds to the receiving operator. –Wikipedia

In WWII the British learnt the fist patterns of the Germans and were able to identify and track the telegraphers over months (and more importantly their platoon) around France. They could then tell the direction of German troops rather than just current locations.

For a while I’ve been thinking about the “Robin is typing…” message you get on Instant Messenger when I’m writing to you. I’m now renaming it my ‘IM Fist’.

Even when I don’t say anything, can you tell what I’m thinking? Have I typed something then deleted and I’m rethinking? How long do I wait from reading to starting typing? How long from typing to hitting send? Do I type, stop, think, type again? What input device am I using? Slow? Fast?

Is there a niche-app awaiting in this space? What else could be determined from this little status message we are inadvertently sending?

Here’s my 10 slides of things I wanted to take away from this read…

I’ve also just finished Malcolms ‘The Tipping Point‘ and have started ‘Chip & Dan Heath: Made To Stick‘ and I’m wondering if I can finish it before Monday.

-Robin.

Tags: blink, book review, Books, fist, fists, im, information, instant messenger, malcolm gladwell, morse code, tipping point

2 Comments

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05/06/08 gregory

i pretty much despice gladwell’s books, much ado about not much, blink is a good example …. you don’t need to think so much, and then as your slide show illustrates, comes a bunch of thinking about not thinking … no thanks, in short, to what ever he writes in the future, and god knows he is a brand now

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05/06/08 Robin Blandford

I found it enjoyable!

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