Quartz: The secret taxonomy behind IKEA’s product names, from Billy to Poäng

Reading strange-sounding Swedish words is part of the joy of shopping at IKEA. Within the labyrinth of stylish flat pack furniture is a pänoply of ödd, åccented pröduct nämes, printed on hang tags, walls and banners. What most shoppers don’t know is that the names of those 12,000 products conform to a strict internal logic that offers a peek into Scandinavian culture.

At a Jan. 25 product showcase in New York City, IKEA designer Jon Karlsson explained that IKEA has a crack team of product namers, who assign names from a database of Swedish words. Bookcases are named after professional occupations (Expedit means shop keeper) or boys’ names (The bestselling Billy bookcase is named after IKEA employee Billy Likjedhal). Outdoor furniture is named after Scandinavian islands (Äpplarö an island in the Stockholm archipelago and Västerön is in Aaland). Rugs are named after cities and towns in Denmark or Sweden (Ådum, Stockholm, Silkeborg), while bed sheets, comforters and pillowcases are named after flowers and plants. (Häxört or circaea lutetian is an herb in the primrose family).

The rules for naming were devised by IKEA’s founder Ingvar Kamprad, who struggled with dyslexia and had trouble remembering the order of numbers in item codes. The name IKEA itself is acronym for Ingvar, Kamprad, Elmtaryd (his family’s farm) and Agunnaryd (the village in Småland where he grew up in).

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Nerdwriter1: In The Mood For Love: Frames Within Frames (Jul 15, 2015)

The RSA: A Field Guide to Lies | Daniel Levitin

We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process. It’s raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies in amongst the facts. But how can we know if we are being sold mistruths? Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin visits the RSA to help us sort the wheat from the digital chaff. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren’t. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. 

FiveThirtyEight: Trump Is Doing What He Said He’d Do

Almost all of the actions that Trump has undertaken, however, are consistent with statements and policy positions he issued repeatedly on the campaign trail and during the presidential transition. It was more than a year ago that Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” for instance. (Friday’s executive order stops short of that, but Trump allies such as Rudy Giuliani have spoken of the order as a legal workaround that seeks to accomplish the same objectives as a Muslim immigration ban.) Another executive order called for building a border wall with Mexico, which was perhaps the signature policy position of Trump’s campaign. And Trump might even try to “make Mexico pay for it” by imposing a tariff on Mexican imports — although most economists argue such a tariff would really make American consumers pay for the wall, via higher prices. [...]

Why, then, does Trump’s first week and a half in office seem so surprising, even to those of us who weren’t expecting a kindler, gentler Trump? One could wryly remark that it’s a surprise whenever presidents actually keep their promises. But a longstanding body of research from political scientists suggests that this shouldn’t be a surprise. Presidents actually do make a good-faith effort to keep most of their promises. [...]

I don’t have a good answer to this question yet, but it could be the one that Trump’s presidency turns upon. If his supporters took him literally, they’ll presumably see a lot to like so far. But many of these policies have tenuous public support beyond Trump’s base. If this is the framework, then Trump is just continuing with the strategy he’s bet upon all along — doubling down on support from his base — and his approval ratings will probably oscillate within a relatively narrow band of 40 percent to 45 percent support. With Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress and having a geographic advantage in the way their votes are distributed, that mediocre rating wouldn’t necessarily do much to constrain Trump in the near term, although ratings toward the lower end of that range might be enough to make the House of Representatives competitive in 2018.

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Salon: This is your brain on knockoffs: The science of how we trick ourselves into not believing our eyes

In that case, Berenson’s gut reaction was right. The “American Leonardo” was sold in 2010 as by a “follower of Leonardo da Vinci, probably before 1750,” not by the master himself. But in other cases, the gut reaction may prove right, but your brain can toy with you, and convince you otherwise. Readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” will know the phenomenon: He opens the book with the story of experts initially thinking that the Getty Kouros (a theoretically archaic Greek life-sized statue of an athletic male nude) was “wrong,” identifying it as a fake “in the blink of an eye.” But these renowned specialists convinced themselves that it was authentic, after much debate and careful consideration, and the museum bought it. It turned out not to be. Gladwell kicks off his book with this story because it demonstrates his main point: that our initial instinct tends to be correct, but overthinking things can get in the way. That “there can be as much value in the blink of an eye, as in months of rational analysis.” We run into “analysis paralysis” when we have too much information and we complicate the thinking process. A “thin-slicing” decision, made quickly and based on a reduced amount of data, is often the most accurate, he argues. [...]

This pleasure principle may be why experts seek a manifestation of their expertise, to say “yes, this is by Velazquez.” It is far less satisfying to say, “It’s not by Velazquez, I don’t know who it’s by.” While there might be reward in catching something as a copy or a forgery by spotting the anachronism, this is associated with negativity, and it is rarely as targeted as “Yes, this is by Velazquez.” It is usually a double negative, “No it’s not by Velazquez, I’m afraid, and I don’t know who it’s by.” Thus the brain seems wired for experts to find clues that feed its reward in recognition, essentially feeding its ego (what Gladwell describes as “psychological priming” and “implicit association”), which plays into the hands of the forger. [...]

In 2011, Martin Kemp, an Oxford art history professor, ran an experiment referenced in Ragai’s book, in which 14 non-specialists were shown genuine and fake “Rembrandt” paintings while undergoing brain scans. A painting was shown to them and they were told it was by Rembrandt. Another painting was shown to them and they were told it was a fake. By measuring the pleasure centers of the brain, Kemp concluded that “the way we view art is not rational.” Being told a work was authentic (whether or not it actually was) activated pleasure centers when it was shown, which was not the case when the viewer was told it was inauthentic (even if it was actually the real deal). It’s all about anticipation. If you’re poured a glass of wine and told it’s a 1955 Chateau Lafite Rothschild, you’ll enjoy it much more than if you’re told it’s a 2015 Trader Joe’s wine-in-a-box, whichever it truly happens to be. (For more on this, see my eBook single on wine forgery).

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