MetaFilter lead me to Rodcorp's How We Work site, and although it is not the kind of thing we usually point out here at TATT, but although it's not about specific work, it's about the process to get us there, and it's kind of glorious itself.
From J.G. Ballard, to the Coen Brothers, to Malcolm Gladwell, to Walter Benjamin, the site has catalogued the methods of what people do to create. Although it is definitely a white male centered list, it is fun place to browse through, and may very well lead to some new habits. They have posted a list here.
We're interested in the habits, rituals and small (and occasionally big) methods people and teams use to get their work done. And in the specific anecdotes and the way people describe their own relationship to their own work.It's a brilliant concept!
One research team has found that how readily people rally their approximate number sense is linked over time to success in even the most advanced and abstruse mathematics courses. Other scientists have shown that preschool children are remarkably good at approximating the impact of adding to or subtracting from large groups of items but are poor at translating the approximate into the specific. Taken together, the new research suggests that math teachers might do well to emphasize the power of the ballpark figure, to focus less on arithmetic precision and more on general reckoning.
“When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is married to a physicist. “They’ll ask, how many piano tuners are there in Chicago, or what contribution to the ocean’s temperature do fish make, and they’ll try to come up with a plausible answer.”
