Ahoy there. Good day to you, and welcome to another weekend issue of Kat’s Kable. Lots of nice things this week to read and think about. I would love to know what you think of any of what’s shared. Feel free to write back. :)
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1. One Wikipedia Page Is a Metaphor for the Nobel Prizes Record With Women
Donna Strickland was one of the awardees of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. It’s heartening and also saddening to know that she’s only the third woman to be a winner, in over a hundred years of the history of the award. Until the day of the announcement, she didn’t even have a Wikipedia page.
The construction of the Wikipedia page feels like a metaphor for a historic award process that has long been criticized for neglecting women in its selection, and for the shortage of women’s stories in the sciences at large. To scroll through the “history” tab of Strickland’s page, where all edits are recorded and tracked, is to witness in real time the recognition of a scientist whose story likely deserved attention long before the Nobel Prize committee called.
P.S. I’ve seen many people online say that it’s a shame she’s just an associate professor instead of a full professor at her university in Waterloo, Canada. The reason for that is that she felt too lazy to apply for it and complete the associated paperwork. That’s all. It was not sexist policy.
2. The Dark Side of Greener Kutch
Residents of the dry region of Kutch, in India, could only farm in the rainy season each year, and their land would yield only enough for their family. Things have changed drastically now, with Kutch producing a number of plants worthy of export. It need not import as much. Food grown in other parts of the country is available in stores.
Technology may have enabled the greening of Kutch, but imposing a land use that the region is unsuited to, is inherently unsustainable in the long run. What will happen when the land is too wasted to support the lush farms producing this array of foreign food? What becomes of the region’s new diet, and the forgotten indigenous knowledge of the land? Are new food choices, created by greater availability of resource, necessarily a step in the right direction? Especially when they come at the cost of a traditional food culture that has sustained people for centuries in a harsh geographical context.
3. San Francisco’s Dream of ‘Zero Waste’ Lands in the Dumpster
“In 2003, SAN Francisco set the lofty objective of getting to zero waste by 2020. By that timeline, the city should soon be performing a ceremonial burial for the last pair of broken headphones and closing down its moldering landfills. But with the deadline approaching, the city has sent that goal itself to the garbage heap.”
Waste and waste disposal is something I care about deeply. For a few months earlier this year, I refused to purchase anything that came in plastic packaging. Now I agree to use plastic if it is recyclable. Impressively, San Fransisco in 2012 was able to reuse, recycle or compost 80% of its waste. However, “zero waste” is hard. It gets harder the closer to zero you get. But this is something we need to do.
4. Stop Sending Us Your Trash
Related to the previous one, but from an Indian perspective. I’ve written about this earlier: China, which used to be the recycling hub of the world, has now gotten stricter with what it will and will not accept. India, too, has to be careful now. It has relatively low plastic consumption per capita, but that is burgeoning now with more people getting to the cities. It’s important to recycle as much as we can, but my personal opinion is that we have to stop using plastic if we can.
5. Meet the Unschoolers
This was another fascinating piece from India. I learnt about a growing cult of parents who choose to “unschool” their children, which means that they don’t send them to school, instead letting them find their own loves and ideal pace of learning at home. It’s a romantic idea if you can afford it, but in practice it must be quite scary.
While it is considered a subset of homeschooling, there is a vital difference between the two. Unschoolers receive no formal lessons, not even in reading, writing or basic arithmetic. Instead, unschooling parents believe that we underestimate, and at times suppress, a child’s natural ability to learn by supplying them with regimented doses of information. When instruction is supplanted by natural curiosity, learning can be impassioned and significantly more enjoyable. Unschooling parents take on the role of learning facilitators, supplying information and resources—books, DVDs, even private tutors and formal classes—based on their child’s interests and choices. This can include normal schooling, if the child demands it.
6. Why Big Companies Squander Brilliant Ideas
This is another post from Tim Harford. Bless his soul for publishing his articles on his blog as well as on the paywalled Financial Times. Here, he writes about why companies don’t capitalize on great ideas generated by their own employees. This is because many good ideas are interdisciplinary, and if acted upon by a single “team”, they don’t get the traction or visibility they deserve.
Perhaps the two most obvious places to put the tank were as a standalone unit (since it offered quite new capabilities) or in cavalry regiments (since it was highly mobile and the horse was becoming obsolete). There were traps along either route: the established regiments would resist a standalone structure for tanks, which would compete for resources while the postwar army was shrinking. A new tank regiment would lack both allies and the heft of historical tradition.
After various twists and turns, it was the cavalry that ended up as the organisational home of the tank. And cavalry officers certainly understand a highly mobile strike capability. But they were never really organised around the concept of “mobility”. They were organised around horses. The cavalry officer loved his horse and rode it with skill. His regiment was devoted to feeding and caring for the horses. Would he not resist the usurper tank with every fibre of his being?
7. Why Do Computers Use So Much Energy?
We know and accept that compared to our brains, the computers we use are vastly inefficient. We can definitely do better, and how well we can do is constrained only by the laws of thermodynamics. Can we reach that level? Because right now, we have many, many computers and they consume huge amounts of power. Even this email that’s being sent to you had to routed through a number of servers to get to you…
8. Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer.
It’s known that teenagers need more sleep than 7:30am school start times allow for. The city of Boston attempted to put this into practice, but it was going to be a mammoth affair. There are hundreds of schools and hundreds of school buses, and an algorithm would have to sort through the possibilities and change the times of schools around the city in such a way as to make traffic manageable and ensure that the city didn’t need to buy new buses. It did not go well.
If anything, the algorithm fueled the conflict and made the choices stark. Before the district commissioned the formula, few parents had thought about the interplay between high school start times and teenage sleep deprivation. And even fewer understood that starting high school later would mean sending younger kids to school earlier.
But even if the algorithm flopped, says Goldsmith, the former Indianapolis mayor who now runs Data-Smart City Solutions at Harvard, it was worth pursuing. “We live in an inherently political world,” he says, “and sometimes, politics are going to trump science. But if the science can illuminate the disparities, that’s better than continuing in ignorance.”
9. Fields Medalist Akshay Venkatesh Bridges Math and Time
I really loved this profile. Quanta magazine published profiles of all the Fields medalists this year, and all are good. What really stuck with me is this, something I do as well:
“When he felt discouraged, Venkatesh would dive into some mathematics textbook, often on a topic far removed from his research. “I think that’s what has always kept me going, even when my own research hasn’t gone anywhere — I’ll read something and I’ll think, ‘Well, this is really wonderful,’” he said.”
10. GMOs are better for the environment than you’d think
I read a book last week called The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan (highly recommend) and it talked about GMOs. The most important point it brought out was that injecting genes into a plant may not be externally harmful, but it is in one fell swoop erasing the boundaries between plant and animal species. It is completely unnatural. It may be the way forward to feed the billions of people who now live, and it may be successful, but it is the most drastic thing we have done in the history of agriculture. What’s better? Spraying herbicides and pesticides on non-GMO crops, or avoiding that by genetic modification? Preserve genes or preserve “biodiversity”?
See you next week. - Kat