Happy new year!
Hope all things are good for you :)
Ayn Rand
This last month I read the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I think her books are really charming for people that like building things. If you haven’t read it before I’d recommend giving it a go.
From the philosophical point of view though, I’m still making my mind about her.
Ayn Rand’s philosophy, objectivism, aims to define what is objectively good. In her view extreme individualism is the only moral way of living.
Intuitively the set of values that she promotes resonate with me.
I’ve been reading and discussing about her method of doing philosophy and the main criticism is that she isn’t that formal. When criticising other philosophers she does a lot of strawmanning - and her reasoning always starts with justifying something she already thinks.
I think in the next months I’ll try and lay down her inconsitencies in a more formal way
Interior design and retail
While reading the Fountainhead I’ve started to think a lot more about physical spaces.
My current interest is in learning more about the interior design tricks shops use to increase their revenue and customer satisfaction.
Here’s a couple of things I learned:
Fitting rooms for men and women have different distortion on mirrors to make you look better. For men the distortion increases the perception of a V shaped body. For women the distortion makes you look slimmer.
White lighting makes you not see imperfections on the skin. This is for the same reason we take photos with a flash
The background colours also matter. For example orange emits a warm glow that makes skin look healthier and tanned
I’m looking for books about retail interior design more widely - would love a recommendation if you have one
Blockchain chicken farm
Yesterday I started reading this new book by Xiaowei Wang (thanks Vinayak for the gift)
It’s a very interesting collection of stories of how technology impacted the most rural places in China. Unfortunately the author slips in some bad takes on politics and social theory, making far fetched comparisons between China and the US
Don’t have other updates on my side, this month I’ve been working all of the time on June
We’ve been publishing a weekly changelog and I’m really happy of our shipping velocity