Hello, friend. I took last week off on account of multiple reasons but here I am, happy to be back. The best breaks are the ones where you are happy to be off, and glad to be back when you return. Every single break I take from Kat’s Kable goes like that. Just before writing this, as I was boiling water to make the tea that fuels me, I thought to myself, “wow, this newsletter is now an actual corporeal part of me. I can’t not write it.”

Before I forget (I actually did forget but not before sending the email out); a question. I’ve mulled about other online presences for Kat’s Kable (Twitter account/Facebook page/group, and the likes), but have never taken them seriously because it would be one-more-thing-to-oversee-and-take-care-of. But a Twitter account with shared links would be useful, no? And super easy for me. Would it be useful?

I had some travel to a conference, which I dislike as a rule, but now it is over and there are no more conferences left in 2019, which is obviously good news. I traveled, on a single day, between two places both at 20 degrees, one in Celsius and the other in Fahrenheit. As Billy Joel would say, I go to extremes.

At the moment, the most consuming thing in my life is an ongoing tussle with the two squirrels who live in my apartment complex and absolutely maul the soil in the pots of my tiny house-garden because they’re burying nuts in them. The worst part is that they forget that they buried stuff, so they keep needing to verify the nuts’ presence. Last semester it was peanuts, now it’s pecans. It’s me vs. the squirrels, and I’ve lost a battle or two, but the war goes on. I’m definitely going to write a blog post (with pictures!) about this saga soon, and will link to it when done.

Here’s another limerick I wrote that I’m rather proud of because it’s scientifically accurate.

“oh electron, where have you been?”

quantum mech’s easy to get lost in
the hilbert space
is a very big place
and twice as large when you consider spin.

How are you? What are you reading? I hope you get to have a decent week ahead, and if that doesn’t work out, well, some other week will.

If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link. Also, if any of the links are paywalled and if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, try opening the link in incognito mode in your browser; it usually works. It does for me.

0. Other Newsletters

By the way, what newsletters do you subscribe to? What do you like in a good email newsletter?

1. A Journey Into the Animal Mind

I’d been meaning to read this piece for a long time. It focuses on how Jains (members of the religion of Jainism) accord respect not only to all human life, but to all life. It starts off with the Atlantic reporter visiting a hospital for injured birds in Delhi, and ends up with him climbing the mountain of Girnar, where one of the most important Jain temples resides. Using these as props, in some sense, it talks about various aspects of animal cognition and emotion. As someone born as a Jain and even now a moderate follower of it, I found this piece nice. Despite a couple of facts I would disagree with, it is respectful to all topics it considers.

2. An Honest Living

An honest living, indeed. This is a 30+ minute read but here’s the gist: academic gets tenured position, does not like academia, ruffles some feathers, refuses to participate in some university politics, leaves, wonders what to do, decides to drive school buses and live a life easier on his mind, albeit harder on his body (arguably).

I wanted good work, honest work, the kind in mythologies of industriousness and humility, where humans with denim overalls deposit saline piety into the earth and die for rustic ideals of personal valor. I dreamed of coffee and tea and cassava raining down on the countryside. But I settled for health insurance. Like any person disavowed of reverence, I finally recognized the need to disappear into the system that destroyed me.

3. Love letter: To my cats

Cats are fun to be around. My dream is to become best friends or flatmates with someone with a lovely cat, so I can hang out (Kat with cat) but not have to actually be a pet “owner”. This is a lovely piece.

I showed it to the older of the two boys. “Meo!” he said, which is the delightful Vietnamese word for cat, and one that I knew as well. “Meo,” I agreed, and we spent a happy half hour, looking at the three cats, far away in Delhi. Park Cats once, then Road Cats, and now Helping Me Navigate A Different Language Cats. Like the Little Prince and his rose, I only know my three cats, and to me that makes them the best cats in the whole world.

4. ‘This Land Is Meant Only for Saffron. Without It, It Means Nothing.’

Another piece from/about India. Much of the world’s best saffron grows in Kashmir, second in quantity only to Iran. It is a painstaking process to grow and harvest saffron, I learnt as reading this piece. Each beautiful purple flour yields only three strands of saffron, and 300+ strands are needed for each gram. A humbling story to read, and of course we’re not helping it, changing our climate and enforcing a tense atmosphere via the presence of armed forces. Growing up, I was used to seeing saffron packed in plastic boxes akin to small gram-sized pieces of gold. That was how revered it was/is, and it would be a pity to have it disappear.

5. For the pangolin

Speaking of disappearing, this is as impassioned a plea for the pangolin as you’ll ever read. Some idiots are killing pangolins because apparently you can make medicines with them. But if you’re not of those people, pangolins would be mostly ignored and unappreciated.

If the pangolins were wiped out tomorrow, we wouldn’t even notice, and this is why they must be saved. I would love to see a pangolin in the wild, but even more than that, I would love to simply exist in a world that can contain them, a world where the pangolins are safe, happy, distant, and unseen. Today is World Pangolin Day. It doesn’t mean much to the pangolins, who are far beyond all such things, but it means a lot to me.

6. ‘If it gets me, it gets me’: the town where residents live alongside polar bears

More animals! Polar bears in and around the town of Churchill in the province of Manitoba in Canada. It’s a small town but sees a huge influx of tourists to view the Northern Lights. Somehow this whole piece reminded me of the His Dark Materials books by Philip Pullman where there are armored polar bears and northern lights and all sorts of other things. Well, here you only have polar bears and humans, with the humans having made up all sorts of techniques to keep the bears away when they get inquisitive. There’s even something that’s informally called the “polar bear jail”. Reminds me of Life on the water’s edge, something I’d shared a while ago about crocodile-human coexistence in an Indian village.

7. “How to Live Unhappily Ever After”

Something I revisit every few months is this comic from the Oatmeal called How to be perfectly unhappy. It’s not about how to be “unhappy” per se, but about how life’s goal isn’t happiness (whatever that is) but is fulfilment, doing good work and finding meaning. At the end of the comic, Matthew Inman says that this essay was his inspiration, and while not as evocative (to me) as the Oatmeal comic, it is nice. It was originally in the Wall Street Journal but I couldn’t find it, thus this cross-posted link.

But “I just want to be happy” is a hole cut out of the floor and covered with a rug. Because once you say it, the implication is that you’re not. The “I just want to be happy” bear trap is that until you define precisely, just exactly what “happy” is, you will never feel it. Whatever being happy means to you, it needs to be specific and also possible. When you have a blueprint for what happiness is, lay it over your life and see what you need to change so the images are more aligned.

8. Meaningful

Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex may well be the best blog on the internet. Here he writes satirically about “meaning” and AI. Two children analyzing text written by an AI contemplate on what the AI understands. Two chemists looking at the children contemplate what they understand. Angels up above mock the chemists. And so on. Sometimes these points are best made with humor.

9. AI is reinventing the way we invent

This is really interesting. A lot of current research involves hunting for and finding new materials that have desirable properties: superconductors, biodegradable packaging, electrolytes for improved batteries, and so on. There is an infinity of materials out there to search in, and we have some idea of where to look, but not precise ideas. Machine learning and AI algorithms could help us by telling us where to look, and how to find better things, faster.

10. How to Grant Your Child an Inner Life

As my children get older, I’m realizing how profoundly my instincts have been shaped by this culture of constant supervision, which wants to believe that it’s the same thing as intimacy. I still prefer it, over all, to the enormous distance that I sometimes felt as a teen-ager toward my parents. But I want to ask: Who is speaking up, today, for a young person’s right to a private life, to secrets, unshared thoughts, unmonitored conversations and relationships? Phrasing it this way sounds dangerous, and also counterintuitive: Don’t teen-agers and young adults today accept that technology is embedded in every aspect of their lives, that just being alive means being present (at least to some degree) online?

That is all. Thanks for reading! -Kat.