Speed demon

I recently passed the local library for the first time in a couple of years (just no time!) and picked up Tony Buzan’s Speed Reading book.  I’ve been working through the exercises and self tests and have jumped from 271 words per minute to 385 since Monday.  For someone who reads so much I was disappointed to find that my reading rate was only average!

The art of reading fast isn’t voodoo, Buzan reckons it goes back to the fact that most of us learned phonetically or by subvocalising, and then we never learned to increase this speed.  There’s a big correlation between education level and reading speed, and it’s not because they’re more intelligent necessarily, more that they’ve had to read more things in a limited amount of time.  Because of this, anyone can learn to read faster.

The basic principles are: our eyes and brain process words very quickly up to about 1/500 of a second per word.  They also take in information over wide area at once, meaning you can read more than one word at a time.  So as you improve, you learn to read along a line without stopping at each word, then take two lines at a time, then scan downwards through the page.

Although the next challenge is to make sure all your reading material is laid out optimally!  I found a web app, Spreeder, that takes a chunk of text and presents it to you word by word, in chunks at a speed and size you prefer.  So you can play with the settings and see what 220 wpm (average) looks like.  Then adjust the speed, size of text and size of the paragraphs to train.

What I’d like now is a Firefox plugin for this so I can take any page and Spreederfy it with my normal settings!  There’s a bookmarklet that just about works, I can live with that I suppose.

Coffee in Paris

Next time there’s an offer on Eurostar perhaps… Phillip describes having to choose between scathing looks from Parisians when asking for a coffee to go, or scathing looks from Parisians when he patronises a chain coffee house. The economics of coffee featured in Tim Harford’s book “The Undercover Economist“, which I read recently. A real eye opener and very accessible!

He uses the price of a cup of coffee to illustrate some significant economic, psychological and marketing principles. E.g. whereas in London you have the option of a premium coffee (at a price of your choosing) from a high street chain, there are also ample opportunities for finding a cheaper coffee close by, if you’re prepared to spend a few minutes searching or know where to look.

This illustrates David Ricardo’s Law of Rent, amongst other economic principles. Basically the rent is higher on the high street as the “land” is more productive, i.e. there are more people passing and more opportunities for sales. But because the rent is high, the price of coffee is high. On the other hand, people rushing down the high street are less price sensitive and therefore more willing to pay the higher price. Off the high street (the marginal “land”) the customers are more likely to be regulars, and more price sensitive. Therefore your coffee will be cheaper.

What seems strange about Phillip’s experience is that culturally the Parisians seem to be passionate about “cafe culture”, that they’re willing to forgo the additional profit that customers like Phillip would bring. I guess the loss of prestige (and therefore regular custom) is just not acceptable at the moment, but I would have thought it’ll happen one day, driven by the two extremities.

There are other revelations and illustrations (if you’re not involved in marketing or economics) that make the book great fun. See also Freakonomics and the Freakonomics blog.

(this is also my first go at a trackback, hope it works!)

Beowulf: The reason why my favourite books are never going to see the screen

Beowulf one of those pieces of literature like The Aeneid or the Epic of Gilgamesh that, unless you studied classics (which isn’t generally considered a subject outside public schools), just sits on bookshelves to fill the space between Umberto Eco and James Joyce. I know it only from “Tolkien wanted to write an English version of Beowulf”. The Lord of The Rings series and Troy (probably others too) were a wakeup call to movie execs. The success of these meant that new trove of material was available without huge franchise fees like Harry Potter, no hordes of obsessive nitpicking fans like LotR. The story and characters are sufficiently unknown so that they can be manipulated to suit the audience and desired running time.

But I don’t feel that there’s been a huge call for this text to be made into a movie, or that your average moviegoer will see this because it’s a CGI movie. This is an awkward time of the year: half term over, running up to christmas – there is an additional risk of this underperforming at the box office, purely because of timing. Contrast this with the interest in The Golden Compass, which has a much better released date in December.

On a side note, I hate that the term “CGI Movie” is still being used – It’s been 12 years since Toy Story, for goodness sake! I thought with The Incredibles we’d seen the end of animation being seen as second-class or purely for kids. I thought we’d got out of that “ooh look at the pretty pictures” attitude – CGI has been part of the scenery for a long time. In the last year, I’ve had my expectations raised by Superman Returns and Transformers where the effects were used appropriately, a tool for illustrating the story.

I was expecting a movie made entirely using Motion Capture / CGI techniques to have come a long way from Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy. The image below is a quick & nasty comparison of how far we’ve come in 6 years. Certainly Zemeckis seems to have learnt from the mistakes in Polar Express in terms of making the characters look more emotive. Obviously these are just static images, but it still looks a little wooden. I expected more from 6 years development in CGI hardware and software.

The film looks to have fairly mature violence and sexual content, yet they have somehow squeezed a 12A certificate. King Arthur tried to do this a few years ago and it showed on screen – the Director’s Cut was quickly released on DVD. So already I get the nagging feeling that the story’s been compromised.

I’m not too keen on Ray Winstone in roles where he needs to talk. I loved him in Final Cut and Love, Honour and Obey, but in Henry VIII and Sweeney Todd (both TV dramas), it sometimes felt like he was reading phonetically from a card, much like the main bad guy in El Mariachi. So when the trailer ends with “I – wiw – kiw- yowah – monstah!”, and the CGI character looks more like Sean Bean, I wonder if he wouldn’t have been more convincing.

So with all that, I’m slightly disappointed, even though I wasn’t particularly looking forwards to it. And whilst there’s no loss to me from this film not doing well, I feel that if it doesn’t do well, it’ll be blamed on the story or the CGI.

And that’s a bad thing, because there are dozens of books out there that are screaming to be made into movie, but need CGI because of the scenery or characters. Some are in development hell, like The Sparrow, others like the Saga of the Exiles aren’t well known enough, but would make a fantastic series. I’ve got a list as long as my arm of books that I’d love to see on screen, I’ll share them with you one day.

Postscript:
I’ve finished writing this after the opening weekend, and signs are good.
But I’ll still wait for the DVD.

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