I have been on holiday, which has been great. I will still put out Kat’s Kable, but I haven’t read much this week. Here goes. I’ve really appreciated the emails I have been getting from you lately, and the feedback and support are more valuable than I can mention in this sentence.

1. SkyKnit: How an AI Took Over an Adult Knitting Community

“The knitting project has been a particularly fun one so far just because it ended up being a dialogue between this computer program and these knitters that went over my head in a lot of ways,” Shane told me. “The computer would spit out a whole bunch of instructions that I couldn’t read and the knitters would say, this is the funniest thing I’ve ever read.”
2. Life Can Survive in the Most Mars-Like Place on Earth
Life in the Atacama desert? The hyperarid regions of the Atacama? Yes! This reminds me of a book I read two weeks ago called Planet Factory by Elizabeth Tasker. It was a good, thorough and accessible introduction to the search for Earth-like planets and extrasolar life.

3. The Story Behind the Chicago Newspaper That Bought a Bar
“Journalists will go far for a story and they’ll go far for a drink—but would they buy a bar? In Chicago, that’s exactly what a newspaper did. An oral history of an incredible experiment.”

Amazing story - a newspaper bought a bar and conducted a massive sting operation.

4. The secret life of a physicist: moments of transcendence offset by months of confusion

At its best, the job allows us to experience moments of sublime joy: every now and then, you feel like you are uncovering nuggets of universal, objective truth about the cosmos. These moments of transcendence are predicated by months and years of confusion, obsession, mistakes and incremental work. Even if a particular discovery or insight isn’t your own, being able to understand it and grasp its significance inspires awe. Almost all of us are atheists, but we worship at the altar of nature.
5. The most important connection in any network is the local
An excellent essay, as is the norm, from Aeon. This is about the working of networks in the real world, like those of ant colonies and also ..cancer cells.

6. Say It with Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food
Best thing you’ll see and read all week.

7. Science PhDs lead to enjoyable jobs
Yayyyy.

Although many people with PhDs end up changing course from their original career plan, that hasn’t drastically eroded career satisfaction: more than 95% of respondents across all sectors in Hancock’s analysis said that they were at least somewhat satisfied with their careers, including 48% who said they were very satisfied. “Satisfaction doesn’t vary much by sector,” Hancock says. “Even if it’s not what they expected, the outcomes are OK.”
8. The Munger Operating System: A Life That Really Works

What I noted since the really big ideas carry 95% of the freight, it wasn’t at all hard for me to pick up all the big ideas from all the big disciplines and make them a standard part of my mental routines. Once you have the ideas, of course, they are no good if you don’t practice — if you don’t practice you lose it.

So I went through life constantly practicing this model of the multidisciplinary approach. Well, I can’t tell you what that’s done for me. It’s made life more fun, it’s made me more constructive, it’s made me more helpful to others, it’s made me enormously rich, you name it, that attitude really helps.

That’s it! See you later, alligator.