Hello! In case you’re wondering what the subject means, 107 and 109 are twin prime numbers - prime numbers that differ by 2. We won’t hit another twin prime pair till 137 and 139, phew. I hope you stick by, for what is life if not for a celebration of random occasions?
By the way, some of the pieces I share (and have been sharing) have ‘soft’ paywalls - if you can’t read something, it will most likely work when you open the link in an incognito tab. You’re welcome.
I put this together hastily - it’s been a busy and topsy-turvy week. If you like it, forward to a friend (or ten). Here’s the web link and here’s the link to subscribe.
### 1. What If Men And Women Skied Against Each Other In The Olympics?
What if? Five Thirty Eight has done an excellent analysis. They have not been on the same footing thus far, since women have always raced on tracks that have been shorter than those of the men. Women are slower during pure descents, which may make sense, but they are just as good (or better) than men when it comes to courses with many turns in them.
2. The Lonely Mission of India’s Sole Luger
Some more stuff themed on the Winter Olympics. Shiva Kesavan has twice been the entirety of India’s contingent to the Winter Olympics. How does it feel like to be this way, alone as other countries celebrate as a contingent? He’s actually a great athlete, consistently qualifying for major events using “jugaad” (hastily and unprofessionally put together) tools.
Loved this, about the sport of luging.
He explained that when you’re lying on your back while hurtling down a tunnel of ice, you can see more than you’d think. But luge is based more on feeling than seeing. You learn how to respond to the G-forces, and vision just acts as confirmation. Luge is the fastest sport on ice, the only Winter Olympic game timed to thousandths of a second. But the beauty of the experience is in the relativity of the speed: When you’re doing it, it feels slow. When he’s off the track, he performs “mind runs” in his imagination, thinking through the track even faster than it goes in real time, which has the effect of slowing time down even more when he races. And if the sled looks as if it’s floating as it goes, that’s because it is: He estimates that 70 percent of the time, he’s airborne.
3. The Human Operating System gets an Overhaul
How do you write a human genome? It seems fantastic, but this may just be the status quo of the future. Genome sequencing has never been this passé.
4. Pushing the Limits of Extreme Breath-Holding
More sports! (That’s it for this week, I promise).
Humans test their limits in an endless variety of ways, but none is simpler or more elemental than breath-holding. There’s no pacing, no tactics, no bonus points; you simply deprive your body of its most urgent need until you can’t anymore. As a result, it offers a convenient laboratory for exploring the nature of human limits, for parsing the gradations of meaning between “won’t” and “can’t.”
5. A Statistical Analysis of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time
Wheel of Time is my favourite fantasy series, and probably will not be usurped from this position. This is a fascinating analysis of the 4 million words spread over 14 books. Since the first piece was about gender comparisons, I’ll leave this graph here, but you’ll have to take it with multiple grains of salt - Jordan was not very kind to his woman characters.
6. I’m Just More Afraid of Climate Change Than I Am of Prison
Sigh. This is about a bunch of people who (broke the law and) broke some important pipelines carrying oil in North America. I was sad when I finished reading this. Not galvanized or inspired, just sad.
7. Why Paper Jams Persist
We have put a Tesla Roadster in space! However, we still encounter jams in printing and copying machines. This was a lovely exploration of the world of Xerox, xerography, and paper jams.
In the nineteen-sixties, the British government asked an engineer named H. Peter Jost to investigate this subject; the 1966 “Jost Report” found that poorly lubricated surfaces—sticky ball bearings, rusty train rails, and the like—cost Britain 1.4 per cent of its G.D.P. (The term “tribology,” coined by Jost, comes from the Greek verb “to rub.”) The smooth functioning of the world depends on invisible tribological improvements.
8. The Secret on the Ocean Floor
The ocean mining boom that we are currently in (which I learnt about only when reading this piece) is indirectly sparked by a CIA plot in the 70s to recover a sunk Russian submarine. Wow.
We really misled a lot of people and it’s surprising that the story held together for so long.
9. A Kingdom from Dust
Fantastic piece (that’s quite long, but worth it) about Stewart Resnick, a farmer in California whose pistachio crop alone is worth over $1billion a year. How do you do that, when the rest of the state is either facing a drought or burning? Well, you do it with politics, cleverness and some sleight of hand. Not all is sunny in California too, it turns out.
10. The Lost Art of Staying Put
Air travel causes massive greenhouse gas emissions. I enjoyed reading this piece that said a lot of the right things, ridiculed Americans and their anguish at not finding WiFi, and was tongue-in-cheek.
What we need is an intervention. Either put these wander-losers on a low-mileage diet, or make them go cold turkey. If they need support, they can join Carboniferous Anonymous, a 12-step program for fossil fuel addiction.
See you next week. Do write back with what you think, what you’re thinking about, or if you have something you think I should read and know about. I’m always hungry/thirsty (what’s the right word?) for new ideas.