Good day to you, and welcome to yet another issue of Kat’s Kable. Sometimes the regularity of this surprises me; it must be over a hundred weekend issues now. Lots of interesting things this week. What about you? If you’ve come across or learnt something new or fascinating, I’d love to hear about it. Just reply to this email. Anyway, here’s the list.
1. Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm
Piotr Wozniak wanted to learn English. He devised a system where he noted down everything he learned, and then revisited them at regular intervals to see if he’d forgotten them yet. He was studying his own “forgetting curve”, whose guiding principle is that unless repeated, facts once remembered are forgotten with time. The system helped him, so he developed a software called SuperMemo which if used enhances one’s memory via spaced repetition. It’s not only a very interesting product he’s created; Wozniak’s journey has been fascinating. I was intrigued by his desire for anonymity, long breaks from work, and zeal.
Also related to spaced repetition and enhancing memory, Augmenting Long-term Memory by a theoretical physicist I admire very much, Michael Nielsen. He talks about another spaced repetition software that works for him; it’s called Anki.
2. Thought as a Technology
Another essay from Michael Nielsen; this one is his latest. Here he talks about thought, or way of thinking, as a technology by itself. Of course, if not for thinking mechanisms and structures, we would not be able to support the abstract thoughts that we think of on a regular basis. Here’s a Twitter thread by him explaining his thoughts.
In extreme cases, to use such an interface is to enter a new world, containing objects and actions unlike any you’ve previously seen. At first these elements seem strange. But as they become familiar, you internalize the elements of this world. Eventually, you become fluent, discovering powerful and surprising idioms, emergent patterns hidden within the interface. You begin to think with the interface, learning patterns of thought that would formerly have seemed strange, but which become second nature. The interface begins to disappear, becoming part of your consciousness. You have been, in some measure, transformed.
3. The Bread that makes Mumbai Rise
If you read any of the food special that I put out a few days ago, you know that I’m thoroughly engrossed by bread. Here’s something lovely I read a few days ago about the varieties of bread in Mumbai.
“From a Parsi chutney bread to a century-old ‘puriwala’ to the city’s best sourdough, a walk around South Mumbai’s old bakeries and restaurants reveals many stories”
4. Leaving Karachi
“On the anniversary of the brutal partition of India, the author reflects on her uncle’s coming-of-age in wartime Karachi: a child’s-eye view of power, identity, and a nation being ripped apart.”
Narayan, too, wrestled with these rumors. His native fluency in English made him a certain type of Indian, and the power of language created a wall around him that was permeable only from the inside. The British wielded an authority that was invisible but ever-present. Yet he could not articulate the elements of this power, so he was unable to imagine an India without it. In addition, the soldiers had enlivened their cricket game. And then there were the movies.
[…]
Narayan’s pride over the interaction was tinged with shame. The men did not have the authority to refuse him their water. In the village, without the direct authorial presence of the British, his family and the agraharam’s other Brahmin residents stood in their place, exercising the same full authority the British did when they confined him to the front row of the theater and sent his family away from their home
5. Can Playwriting Be Taught?
This was beautiful. I’ve never written a play nor do I know the mechanics behind writing one, yet this was a true description of the creative process.
Put in still another mechanical way, a play is like a ski lift. What you want from a ski lift is to get in, ride to the top of the mountain, get out, look at the view, say Wow, and go home. What you don’t want, in a ski lift or a play, is to stop, half way up the mountain and just hang there. Nor do you want somebody to pull the shades, come on the loud speaker and lecture you about the politics of Kansas, or tell you about their Aunt June, to whom nothing really happened and show you pictures of their very pleasant children. Finally and worst of all, you don’t want to ride a ski lift where there is no mountain. But it isn’t enough to be told there is a mountain out there. No. If you have paid your money, you want to see the mountain for yourself. You want the ride. You want to go someplace you’ve never been and feel how things are there. And the playwright owes that to you.
6. It Was Raining in the Data Center
Data centers, which power the servers that are bringing you this email, require a lot of computing power in a cramped space. There has to constant air conditioning to take away the heat generated by the computers within them. If the air conditioning doesn’t work… it can rain. Indoors. This was a truly incredible read, starting off with rain in a Facebook data center, and meandering all over the intricacies of data centers and server farms.
In Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Marc Augé describes non-places as hypermodern, predicated on the quality of excess. Non-places do not have history, but are instead built to be passed through (for example: malls, highways, and airports). They are abstracted places of capital and transit, as well as contract. Although data centers are generally closed to human traffic, if we consider the information that moves through them as truly transitory, a data center may be the ultimate non-place; even the colloquial term ‘information super-highway’ points at such a system.
7. How far would you go to be able to smile?
“Smiling is one of the fundamental ways people communicate, so what happens if your face can’t do it?”
8. The Tour de France and Cycling’s Uncertainty Principle
I’m a little upset with the title here, but it makes sense! If a cyclist clocks a great race, people are always suspicious of her or him doping. If a cyclist has a bad race, there are allegations of the cyclist not doping anymore. What is one to do? In a sport rife with unfair practices to the point of it being normalized, I’m not even sure.
Now, all the arguments and uncertainty have been amplified by social media. A sport that for decades had evasion and conspiracy knitted into its DNA is perfectly attuned to all the batshit elements of Twitter and Facebook. To arouse suspicion, a rider need do no more than win something significant, or show a notable improvement in form. Equally, losing a race or showing a decline in form will be taken as evidence that a rider used to dope but has now stopped. Not only can you not win, you’d be well advised not to, even if you could.
9. Why Should Physicists Study History?
And a more human physics is a good thing. For starters, it makes physics more accessible, particularly for students. Many promising students drop out of the sciences because the material seems disembodied and disconnected from their lives. Science education researchers have found that those lost students “hungered—all of them—for information about how the various methods they were learning had come to be, why physicists and chemists understand nature the way they do, and what were the connections between what they were learning and the larger world.”
Students can potentially lose the wonder and curiosity that drew them to science in the first place. Historical narratives naturally raise conceptual, philosophical, political, ethical, or social questions that show the importance of physics for the students’ own lives. A field in which people are acknowledged as people is much more appealing than one in which they are just calculating machines.
10. Did your Holiday make you more Creative?
Another great post from Tim Harford.
There are several reasons why this might be so. Different fields cross-fertilise each other. We process ideas unconsciously, once we’ve stopped thinking about them. And sometimes we simply need a rest. In the modern world, this may manifest in twitchy task-switching to another browser window. That is unhelpful. But taking a walk, visiting a gallery, picking up a book or planning a different project — this is often the kind of change we need.
I’m going to now take a walk.
See you soon! - Kat