Welcome to Kat’s Kable #108. I was reflecting this morning and honestly, it feels surreal that in under two years, I started a newsletter I wanted to, put out over a hundred issues, and am now so comfortable doing this that it’s become a firm part of my weekly routine. Thank you for sticking around!
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### 1. Lessons from History on how to Spot a Bubble
I enjoy reading Tim Harford’s blog, and here he talks about historical precedents for economics bubbles and meltdowns. What I liked most was that he also referred to the tulip craze, which was a few centuries ago. Humans will remain, humans.
It seems all so much easier with hindsight: looking back, we can all enjoy a laugh at the Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, to borrow the title of Charles Mackay’s famous 1841 book, which chuckles at the South Sea bubble and tulip mania. Yet even with hindsight things are not always clear. For example, I first became aware of the incipient dotcom bubble in the late 1990s, when a senior colleague told me that the upstart online bookseller Amazon.com was valued at more than every bookseller on the planet. A clearer instance of mania could scarcely be imagined.
2. Scientists are Designing Artisanal Proteins for your Body
Yes, just pictures. This is very fascinating.
3. Want to be Happy? Think Like an Old Person
Continuing from last week’s piece on growing old with intention, here’s something interesting. An interesting thing I read about a few months ago was that as we grow older, we relive our memories again and again. And each time we relive them, we cherry-pick the best parts of each event, and so our feelings about the past get better and better. This story is intimate and cute.
4. A New Zealand City the Size of Berkeley CA Has Been Studying Aging for 45 Years. Heres What They Discovered.
This is about the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Survey, which has been studying roughly a thousand people in great detail for over 40 years. It’s one of the grandest studies ever done, and most of its original members are still part of it.
The end result offers one of the clearest pictures of what makes us who we are, and why. It’s proof that we can learn from a single study over an incredibly long period of time. And in some ways, 45 years in, the study has only just begun.
5. In Search of the Lost Empire of the Maya
This was a fantastic read about Maya history from National Geographic. It’s about a dynasty of the Snake rulers. Great pictures, great reporting all about a fascinating story of ruling, warring, and politics.
6. Fred Turner on Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers
_Engineering culture is about making the product. If you make the product work, that’s all you’ve got to do to fulfill the ethical warrant of your profession. The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object. It’s like the famous line from the Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
So I think that engineers, at Facebook and other firms, have been a bit baffled when they’ve been told that the systems they’ve built—systems that are clearly working very well and whose effectiveness is measured by the profits they generate, so everything looks ethical and “good” in the Google sense—are corrupting the public sphere. And that they’re not just engineers building new infrastructures—they’re media people._
7. Unused Audio Commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky for The Fellowship of the Ring
I love The Lord of the Rings , and have read some about the seemingly callous treatment of orcs as universally bad in the series. This is interesting audio commentary about some of the issues in the series, which I enjoyed. It made me think, though.. It’s not all roses.
Chomsky : Naturally, it’s in Rohan/Gondor’s interest to keep the Orcs obscured, to make everything as restricted and dehumanizing as possible. It’s always the first step toward genocide. And is this — is there anything less than genocide being advocated in this film?
_Zinn : I don’t think so.
Chomsky : Is there any kind of idea that men should live in peace with the Orcs?
Zinn : Think of the scenes in the prologue with all the arrows hitting these thousands of Orcs. We’re supposed to think that this is a good thing.
Chomsky : I think this is a tragedy, this story. Because it’s about two cultures. And poor leadership. It’s a human tragedy, and an Orcish tragedy. _
8. The Invasion of the German Board Games
In North America, the complex board games created during the latter half of the 20th century typically took the form of simulated warfare. […] But for obvious reasons, this wasn’t a model that resonated positively with the generation of Germans who grew up in the shadow of the Third Reich. Which helps explain why all of the most popular Eurogames are based around building things—communities (Catan), civilizations (Terra Mystica), farms (Agricola)—rather than annihilating opponents. The result is a vastly more pacifist style of a game that can appeal to women as much as men, and to older adults as much as high-testosterone adolescents.
9. In Science, There Should Be a Prize for Second Place
A nice piece about scientific research. The flagship biology journal PLOS Biology announced recently that it would also publish “complementary” papers - about research projects that verify the results of other recently published work. Many groups around the world work hard and fast to be the first to publish results, at great cost to the individuals and also to the way science is done. I’ve earlier talked about my irritation that negative results are not published either, and that’s another issue.
This initiative comes at an important moment. In recent years, many scientists have worried about a so-called reproducibility crisis, where the pressure to produce new, eye-catching results has culminated in a lot of research that may not actually be true. These concerns have spawned a growing reform movement, whose members are pushing for practices that will make science more reliable—such as investing time in replicating the work of other teams.
10. Feast your Eyes on This Glorious Crocheted Food
Winding down with these lovely pictures.
That’s it for the week. I hope you have a good one ahead, see you soon. Thoughts, comments, feedback always welcome - just reply to this email.