I read this. If you are a big cat nerd like me, it is a must read! 

 

Cats have been popular household pets for thousands of years, and their numbers only continue to rise. Today there are three cats for every dog on the planet, and yet cats remain more mysterious, even to their most adoring owners. Unlike dogs, cats evolved as solitary hunters, and, while many have learned to live alongside humans and even feel affection for us, they still don’t quite “get us” the way dogs do, and perhaps they never will. But cats have rich emotional lives that we need to respect and understand if they are to thrive in our company.

In Cat Sense, renowned anthrozoologist John Bradshaw takes us further into the mind of the domestic cat than ever before, using cutting-edge scientific research to dispel the myths and explain the true nature of our feline friends. Tracing the cat’s evolution from lone predator to domesticated companion, Bradshaw shows that although cats and humans have been living together for at least eight thousand years, cats remain independent, predatory, and wary of contact with their own kind, qualities that often clash with our modern lifestyles. Cats still have three out of four paws firmly planted in the wild, and within only a few generations can easily revert back to the independent way of life that was the exclusive preserve of their predecessors some 10,000 years ago. Cats are astonishingly flexible, and given the right environment they can adapt to a life of domesticity with their owners—but to continue do so, they will increasingly need our help. If we’re to live in harmony with our cats, Bradshaw explains, we first need to understand their inherited quirks: understanding their body language, keeping their environments—however small—sufficiently interesting, and becoming more proactive in managing both their natural hunting instincts and their relationships with other cats.

~ Iain M. Banks

A nice overview of basic usability principles for building user interfaces. The call for do-it-yourself user testing is extremely important, though ignored or unknown to many companies. The sense of humor is great and the advice is fairly actionable and easy to follow.

The only downside (and hence a 4 star rating) is that the book could use more real world examples. Seeing many more screenshots of websites that do something well, side by side with those that do it poorly--or better yet, examples of incrementally improving a single design based on user testing--would make the lessons much more sticky.


Fun quotes from the book:

It's not rocket surgery.

The actual Average User is kept in a hermetically sealed vault at the International Bureau of Standards in Geneva.

What they actually do most of the time (if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are almost always large parts of the page that they don’t even look at. We’re thinking “great literature” (or at least “product brochure”), while the user’s reality is much closer to “billboard going by at 60 miles an hour.”

FACT OF LIFE #1: We don’t read pages. We scan them.

If your audience is going to act like you’re designing billboards, then design great billboards.

It doesn’t matter how many times I have to click, as long as each click is a mindless, unambiguous choice. —KRUG’S SECOND LAW OF USABILITY

The main thing you need to know about instructions is that no one is going to read them.

I think every Web development team should spend one morning a month doing usability testing. In a morning, you can test three users, then debrief over lunch. That’s it. When you leave the debriefing, the team will have decided what you’re going to fix before the next round of testing, and you’ll be done with testing for the month.

Experts are rarely insulted by something that is clear enough for beginners.

People are just as likely to be using their mobile devices while sitting on the couch at home, and they want (and expect) to be able to do everything. Or at least, everybody wants to do some things, and if you add them all up it amounts to everything.

As anyone who has spent exactly 3 second on my page knows, I looovvee a good mystery.  What may not be as screamingly obvious is my love of almost all things science (I admit, space bores me - I know it's important; but I also think it's boring.)

 

I'm a big fan of NewScientist magazine, and was a faithful subscriber before moving to AU.  So when I read about this book, 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time, and that it's author was a NewScientist contributor, I quickly ordered it.  I mean, Science?  and Mysteries?  I am sooo there.

 

Almost all (if not all) of these mysteries are Weighty Stuff.  5 of the mysteries are space-related, the rest are more of a terrestrial nature.  The author does a pretty decent job of writing about them without overwhelming the everyday reader with too much terminology, but it leans a bit towards the dry in tone.  

 

Brooks does a very, very good job of talking about these issues, their historical origins, the direction research is going with each; but he's not Bill Bryson - this isn't a chatty book about the coolness of science and it's mysteries.  These chapters read like a very well researched article.  Each is, in it's own way, controversial and some of them are hot button topics:  cold fusion, free will, homeopathy.   I personally found myself all het up about the free will chapter; I think he oversimplifies the idea of free will.

 

I'd suggest this book to anyone who bridges the gap between "I don't know anything about science, but it's cool!" and "I did my thesis work at MIT".  It's chapters are intriguing, informative and thought provoking.

 

However, I'm now off to read something much less weighty - perhaps something with a bad pun in the title...

 

 

As a full fledged on her way to be certifiable crazy cat person, I was really excited to learn more about cats. Reading this book definitely opened my eyes to things I didn't know about before and changed the way I look/think about my cat's behaviors. I think my favorite part was learning more about black cats and how they came to be as they have a special place in my heart. All in all, I really learned a lot from this book and have been spouting facts at anyone who will listen (and even some people who don't want to).