Welcome to another issue of Kat’s Kable. It has been a while since I put out a special edition, so I probably will this coming week.

This week I’ve been reading: The Rabbi’s Cat (parts one and two), a graphic novel by Joann Sfar, which I am loving. Also thinking about starting Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker because it is an optimistic book about our future, and that’s something I’m interested to know more about.

1. How And Why To Keep A Commonplace Book

A commonplace book is a small notebook to keep with you at all times, to note ideas down, write down streams of consciousness, and to make note of the things that you might forget otherwise. I am enjoying keeping one lately - it contains ideas for limericks, things to do, things to think and write about, shopping lists, and just everything that I think needs to be written down. I’m a fan of writing, saving, cataloguing and archiving for later, and this list of things to do from Ryan Holiday felt good to read.

2. The Trees That Sail to Sea

Lovely piece from one of my favourite publications, Hakai Magazine. This piece is about driftwood that sails down rivers into the seas and oceans of the world. Of course, unfortunately, we’re changing this too. Dead trees are not really dead - they harbour so much niche life in and on them once they are in the water. The picture I’m including isn’t of driftwood, but it’s beautiful.

3. Meet the Pirate Queen making Academic Papers Free Online

If you haven’t heard of Sci-Hub, you should look it up. If you are in the field of science, you will know how expensive journal subscriptions are, and some universities and research groups can plain not afford them. Sci-Hub is an online hub that makes these paywalled papers available for free online, which clearly has not gone well with journal publishers. It’s a nasty game that’s being played, but I, for one, hope that all science becomes open access. Political theory provided new growth to her evolving Open Access philosophy. Communism, a model of government-less society in which resources and opportunity are metered out with equality and impartiality, has never been successfully implemented. Nevertheless, it was a particularly seductive concept to Elbakyan. The collective ideals of communism entwined for her with the ideals of the scientific method. After all, science depends on shared data. History’s greatest scientific discoveries have all been made and shared, as scientists often say, from atop the shoulders of giants: their scientific predecessors who shared their research. To Elbakyan, science thrives only when scientists shout their discoveries to everyone. * * *

4. Is Human Morality a Product of Evolution?

I didn’t realise that this was an old article (from 2015) but I was fascinated by it. One theory talking about why humans are ultra-social says that it’s because unlike other primates, humans foraged for food in teams.

Specifically, people came to think of themselves as part of a larger unit whose members worked together for mutual gain. They began, in other words, to have what Tomasello calls “shared intentionality.” This, he says, is the subtle cognitive capacity—that difference of degree Darwin wrote about—that sets humans apart from the great apes, the reason why we have developed cultural institutions and engage in large-scale collaborative activities.

This shared intentionality, Tomasello believes, is the basis of morality. Some psychologists and philosophers break morality into two components: sympathy, or concern for another individual; and fairness, the idea that everyone should get what they deserve. Many animals are capable of the former—a chimpanzee, for example, will behave in altruistic ways, like retrieving an out-of-reach object for another chimp—but only humans, it appears, have a sophisticated understanding of fairness.

5. How to Make Pizza, the Highest Form of Cooking

Fun! to read. I’m growing to like pizza more and more, and I enjoyed this piece that was part how-to make pizza, and part how-to appreciate it. Favourite line:

Once the pizza is close to the shape and size of your pan or peel, it’s time to transfer it over. There are multiple ways to do this, but Jon’s method is pretty beginner friendly. Place one forearm next to one end of the dough, then with your other hand grab the opposite edge of the dough and then, like you’re turning the page in a book, drape it over your forearm. Cradle it like it’s your baby, because it is.

6. Is the ‘Digital Nomad’ Life as Good as It Sounds?

This is such a first-world piece. Companies with names like “Wi-Fi Tribe” allow you to work out of an exotic shared Airbnb house in an exotic country with other exotic (or should I say quixotic) people around you. And the reason this is possible is the internet - you can work anywhere as long as you send in your work on time.

Over the past five years, Canggu has become Southeast Asia’s hottest place for this new breed of worker to eat acai bowls, flaunt their yoga-toned obliques, and sip charcoal-infused cocktails while half-submerged in a hotel pool. It’s also where they go if their bosses don’t care where the hell they are, so long as they get their work done on time.

For every Instagram photo a digital nomad posts from a beach club on a Saturday afternoon, there are dozens of undocumented hours spent doing exactly what everyone else is doing in corporate offices around the world.

7. Why the PDF Is Secretly the World’s Most Important File Format

How did the PDF format become as ubiquituous as it is now? Fun read, again.

8. The Tragedy of Fritz Haber: The Monster Who Fed The World

Fritz Haber is most famous for inventing the Haber Process to efficiently produce large quantities of ammonia for use in agriculture as a fertilizer. What I did not know before reading this piece was the actual man behind the sotry - a fanatical German nationalist at the worst time possible. He pioneered poisoning by direct release of chlorine gas and also volunteered to make explosives by reversing his famous ammonia-making procedure. I was shocked.

9. This Company May Have Solved one of the Hardest Problems in Clean Energy

A hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell is a holy grail of sorts - it is the ultimate clean energy that is also reliable. You can produce it anytime you want. Additionally, you can store energy very well as hydrogen. Hydrogen burns to produce just water, so there are no pollutants. However, it’s difficult to do either of these things, and this article is about a company called HyTech Power that believes it has it sorted out. For now, they are aiming to upgrade engines in cars that are already on the road, adding a fuel cell to work in conjunction with the regular engine, thereby cutting emissions down to less than half of current levels. Here a HyTech employee “retrofits” the HyTech apparatus onto an old truck.

10. Is AI the Future of Good Taste?

Pertinent: we believe that humans alone are capable of “taste”, artistic sensibility and creativity. As AIs get better and better, will or can they get to a point where they will take over these seemingly human characteristics? This piece nicely complements what I shared last week about the fallibilty of Google Translate by Douglas Hofstadter.

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Hope you enjoyed this. As always, if you have anything to say, write back! I enjoy hearing from you and would love to talk. See you soon.