Will Guidara built Eleven Madison Park, the World’s Best Restaurant in 2017, by challenging the traditional notion of fine dining. For instance, removing the policy that waiters couldn’t put their hands on the table, and serving soufflés ‘incorrectly’ – in a way that enabled the server to maintain eye contact and a conversation with the person they were serving. “I found if I hired people who had worked in fine dining, they already had too many bad habits.”
All Threads
At the restaurant crowned world’s best in 2017, the waiters finetuned their service by turning to the world of baseball. Like pitchers, waiters developed a hand system to signal customers’ water choice while they were still chatting through the menu. The water would then appear at the table before the waiter had finished their interaction.
You don’t have to look at survey data to find social desriability bias. The Emperor’s New Clothes, a 1837 folktale written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, tells the story of a vain emperor who believes his magical clothes are visible only to the worthy. Everyone, including the emperor, pretends to see the clothes to avoid appearing unfit, until a child innocently points out the emperor is naked.
The government only knows how many people are working because of the ONS Labour Force study, a monthly survey that asks thousands of individuals about their employment status. But declining survey response rates means there are now serious questions about data accuracy. In 2024, several dodgy data points actually forced the ONS to delay the publication of its monthly figures. And we now face a remarkable situation where Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, says he wishes he “knew more exactly what our unemployment number was in the UK.”
You wouldn’t pay much for empty space, unless of course it’s a groundbreaking work of art. A European collector recently paid $1.2 million for Yves Klein’s ‘Zone of Empty Space’ – not bad for something invisible.
Clive woodward
During World War II, Britain wouldn’t have cracked the German code without the Enigma machine – but they wouldn’t have done it without human creativity either. To narrow down the 159 quintillion possible combinations, the Bletchley Park team made educated guesses at certain words the message would contain; they knew that the German forces sent out a daily ‘weather report’, and they knew that most messages would contain the phrase ‘heil Hitler’. Looking for these patterns in the coded messages helped the team to calculate the daily settings on the Enigma machine.
Most people say they care about the environment, but that doesn’t mean they act on it. According to Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary, just 1% of his airline’s passengers pay to offset their emissions. As he says, “people want low fare air travel, and people want somebody else to pay the environmental taxation.”
When asked about the symbolism in his novella ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, Ernest Hemingway simply said this: “Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit.”
The foam that forms on top of espresso was originally called ‘scum’, and was thought to be a bad byproduct of making coffee. So manafacturer Gaggia marketed it as ‘crema’ to make it sound more desirable.
Demographics are useful when used correctly, but they’re often too vague to be meaningful. A simple ethnic minority grouping misses key nuances in the political sphere, like the fact Chinese voters are significantly more likely than Bangladeshi voters to value low taxes.
3% deficit limit for EU was pretty arbitrary (a bit like in market research). Guy Abeille came up with it after he was asked for a rule that was ‘easy, sounded like it came from an economist, and can be opposed to the ministers that walk into my office asking for money.’ Took less than an hour to come up with. “It was a good number that had stood the test of time, somewhat reminiscent of the Trinity.”
Half the planet is on Facebook (pretty much, with 3 billion users). But it’s original target audience was very niche: it exclusively targeted Harvard students, before slowly expanding to other colleges across the US
According to the head of policy at human rights organisation Liberty, facial recognition is a “deeply invasive breach of our privacy rights” when it’s used by the police. But billions of people use it to unlock their smartphones every day.
Political disinformation is frequently blamed for election results, but its impact is highly concentrated. Researchers examined Twitter behaviour during the 2016 US election and concluded that “only 1% of individuals accounted for 80% of fake news source exposures… who were conservative leaning, older, and highly engaged with political news.” In fake news reached a tiny minority of users, most of whom probably had their minds made up before going on Twitter.