Our daughter has been attending a new school while we are in Milan. They asked the children to bring their own sets of coloured pencils to be used in art classes.
Here is the state of our daughter’s set after one month of use. I thought that the remaining length of the pencils is a nice visual representations of which colours she favours and by how much.
Not to over-analyze our daughter, but I think the picture shows that she prefer bright colours overall. The exceptions are the white, which is not a very practical colour for drawing on white paper anyway, and the dark yellow, which is a bit redundant, given the that there are two other yellow pencils in this set, both of them well-used. And of course, pink is still the strong favourite.
Incidentally, I once heard in popular science television show in Japan that there was a correlation between the preference for pink colour and health of middle-aged and elderly women. The hypothesis was that liking the pink colour, which is traditionally associated with youth, encourages women to maintain a youthful state of mind, which in turn leads to better health.
Even if there no causation here, I am glad that our daughter sees the world mostly in bright colours. I hope this trend continues as she grows up, and her brightly-coloured pencils and crayons will always be stubby.
Since Connell’s discovery in the 1950’s, people have drawn parallels between the intermediate disturbance hypothesis applied to biology and its apparent validity in other areas. In fact, I learned about it in Charles Duhigg’s book “
No matter how far in advance we wanted to start packing, we finished the night before our flight. Actually, my wife and I didn’t get much sleep at all that night, because we also had to prepare our house, which was being rented during our leave. Fortunately, our daughter is a good sleeper, so she had a good rest before the trip. She also likes travel – all aspects of it from packing to going to the airport to the flight itself to getting settled in the new place. This is her sixth major overseas trip, so she is a seasoned traveller by now.
Nothing helps the child’s mood as well as a new stuffy toy! We picked up a toy kitten at the Frankfurt airport, and our daughter didn’t let it go until the following day. We also brought another toy with us, one that was new to our daughter. It was a construction set, where you can build various shapes out of small plastic balls with hooks that attach to each other. I remember playing in a similar way with dried burs. Probably, the designers of the toy used burdock as the inspiration. Anyway, it’s a great toy for travel – lightweight and can be used in many configurations. Our daughter received it as a present for the New Year, but we asked her to keep it specifically for the trip.
Incidentally, sometimes we can formulate opinions and understanding by “talking them out” instead. I heard that Hemingway used to do this with his books. Here lies a bit of danger: unless you are as good as Hemingway, talking about your creative ideas might actually prevent you from writing about them (or painting them or doing the photo shoot). It can happen because talking does serve the purpose of fleshing out the ideas, but it is much easier than creating something persistent and tangible, like a pice of writing or an object of visual art. I believe this is why Seth Godin’s advice to writes is to keep their mouths shut about their book ideas until they actually have the books published and thus ready to be discussed.
Recently, there has been some discussion in North America on whether it is feasible (indeed, appropriate) to eliminate tipping at restaurants and other service-type businesses. This custom is much less common in the rest of the world. In Japan, for example, it borders on offensive to offer a tip or to negotiate the price of a service or a product. It is assumed that the providers of services are already doing their best, so offering additional pay for better quality is inappropriate.
Consciously 
” lately, and he has an important point on using only a limited set of tools. There is a cost associated with adopting and using a new tool in your typical workflow. There are tangible resources, that are required to learn the new tool or technique, to keep it sharp (figuratively speaking), and to make decisions regarding whether using this tool would add to or detract from the process and the product. In other words, adopting and using a particular piece of gear or a technique has both advantages and disadvantages. A conventional craftsman would not adopt a new tool, unless it offers a net improvement of the process.