LET’S BE FWENDS ISSUE #78:

METRICS AND MAPS

“My normal routine is pretty much putting out fires all day.”

~ Vera Wang

Start by counting things.

My favorite thing of all times is: Shittyfirst drafts.

The idea that whenever you’re starting with something, at first it will suck. It will be bad, it might be even truly horrible. But it’s a start. It gets you going, it allows you to learn, adapt, and make it better.

People opposed to the concept underestimate the speed with which you can improve a shitty first draft and make it into something astonishing. It is much quicker than agonising trying to find the perfect starting point.

What happens when you combine that idea with metrics? A great way of getting you and your team from gut feeling to measuring things.

Hidden Information in Maps

As you might know, it’s an old habit of cartographers to include harmlessly incorrect information in their maps to expose plagiarists. But sometimes, cartographers do it just for fun. It might come as a surprise that even the Swiss - a people whose products are generally known for their precision, and therefore, a certain lack of humour - are not above making a practical joke now and then. Here’s a delightful collection of topical illustrations that somehow made their way into official maps.

An Alphabet made of letter-shaped Buildings

Of course, you can make an alphabet of all different kinds of symbols (as long as you have 26 of them, for our modern, latin-derived one). Even trees.

But apparently, you can find all kinds of oddly shaped buildings which floorplans look exactly like letters. That’s what Johann David Steingruber did, in 1773. And thanks toarchive.org, we can now all write our names in buildings.

Connected Devices make for impossibly complex OpSec

There’s a new president of the U.S. and he’s moving into the White House. Apparently, he’s also some kind of fitness geek and likes to work out on his stationary cycle trainer. So, that thing comes with him. No big deal, eh?

Unless that cycle trainer is a Peloton bike, that is used for interactive online spinning classes. Then, that cycle trainer has both a high-resolution video camera as well as a microphone installed.

And that seemingly innocent piece fitness equipment suddenly becomes a major headache for the Operational Security of the President of the United States of America.

How to easily become a Suspect by being at the wrong Place, at the wrong Time (multiple Times)

And in case you shrug this off as a problem from the world of spies and double-agents, here’s how fitness equipment phoning home can adversely affect your own, personal OpSec, too.

Valuable nutritional Supplement or Snake Oil?

Health- and/or performance-conscious people tend to use some sort of nutritional supplement or the other. Wether it’s pills with vitamins in them, or the latest superfood promising benefits well beyond the standard benefit promised by food: not starving to death.

The good people of Information Is Beautiful put together a collection of the evidence available for and against all kinds of supplements and super foods, including a handy_“don’t bother with it if it is below this line”_-line.

And here are some other categories of supplements/superfoods/treatments that might be worth checking out.

Really bad Firefighters getting some Expert Feedback “in situ”

As you know, I’m a big fan of mastery (being myself the master of nothing and no-one). So, of course I enjoy a firefighter giving feedback and advice to some other, presumably much worse, firefighters.

That’s it from this edition of Let’s Be Fwends, let’s continue to put out those fires! 🔥🧯👩‍🚒