Hello world. How’s your week been? I’m finally on summer “break”, which is not really a break, but it is a time when I have much more time to myself and to relax. I can also focus almost single-mindedly on my research projects, which is what I signed up for when I joined a PhD program. It’s nice. This issue is therefore much more relaxed and breathy than the previous ones, which I felt were a little antsy and harried/hurried. With no further ado, here goes.
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1. The Information Diet
Michael Pollan, in his book In Defense of Food writes, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In this article, Angus Hervey talks about applying this to an “information diet”. News and updates on social media is akin to a junk food diet, so why not incorporate more books (whole grains), email newsletters (vegetables), and podcasts (leafy greens)? I love the analogy, and honestly, this comparison is much more accurate than it will seem on first read.
I still believe that the internet is the greatest thing humans have ever invented. It’s a case of going slow though, of being intentional and sticking to a plan. You can make your own diet. Start with a philosophy. Identify your food groups. Figure out what works best for you. Stay away from junk. Evolve it over time.
2. Hilary Hahn: Entering the Sublime
My official new celebrity crush is Hilary Hahn, violinist par excellence. She is truly the embodiment of every ideal you can want in a violinist. Perfect phrasing, intonation, economy of movement, everything. This is a delightful interview which I’m very grateful for. ALSO, check out this video where she does incredible things like play difficult pieces while hula-hooping, or using the bottom one-third of the bow. She’s amazing.
3. A second life for digital debris
Scary situation of recycling of electronic parts and circuits in India. People are doing it in a haphazard and patently unsafe manner; things ought to be better than this, I feel. However, I feel a little more optimistic about digital waste as compared to plastic waste; this is because rare metals are getting rarer and rarer, and thus there’s increasing value in mining old phones, laptops and other things for them.
4. Can the world quench China’s bottomless thirst for milk?
The answer to this question is probably no, and I find it scary that China can dictate its citizens to consume milk to adhere to the artifically created national maxim that milk is needed to compete with the west. If you read the article, you’ll see that a lot of it seems to be coming from plain social insecurity and inferiority complex… which to me is mind-boggling.
5. The Third Phase of Clean Energy Will Be the Most Disruptive Yet
I enjoy Ramez Naam’s writing, and I earlier shared a Twitter thread by him. Here he says that the coming age of clean energy will be amazingly disruptive, and that’s because for the first time in modern history will clean energy be cheaper to produce en masse than traditional energy. It’s cheaper now to build new solar farms than to build coal power plants. It’s not about altruism anymore; it’s plain economics.
If those policies – and the fact that renewables are now competitive for new power even without subsidies in the sunny and windy parts of the world – continue for long enough for renewables to drop another factor of 2 or 3 in price – on top of the factor of 10 or more that they’ve fallen already, then we’ll enter a new domain where renewable growth rates aren’t determined by fickle policy. Instead, they’ll be limited only by the pace at which renewables can be deployed – the pace at which factories for solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries can be built; the pace at which labor forces can be trained to deploy them; the pace at which capital can be deployed to pay for their installation.
6. What It’s Like to Grow Up With More Money Than You’ll Ever Spend
Umm. Definitely a very niche thing, but I’m happy to read about Abigail Disney and how she’s grown up with a lot of money. Most interesting part: her not donating all of it at once and now realizing that having invested it smartly over many years, she can now do even more impactful work with a larger working capital. One thing I’ve realized about philanthrophy is that money is never the sole answer: there has to be scientific and human thought behind every action that’s aimed to be “helpful”.
7. The Problem With Happiness
Nice follow-up to the previous piece. It raises nice points, but clearly my favorite part is this:
Is it really true that everybody’s goal in life is to be as happy as possible? To this assumption, Nietzsche replied, “Man does not strive for happiness. Only the Englishman does.”
8. Designing for Mental Health
“The stakes are high for the digital delivery of mental-health services, and yet the services aren’t regulated for quality or consistency. Enter Design Patterns for Mental Health, a pattern library for evidence-based best practices.”
At a glance, these patterns appear to have little to do with uniquely supporting mental health. If anything, offering users “a way to access support from a human … at any point of interaction” or “creat[ing] options that make it easy for users to leave a product or service for any reason” sound like best practices for designing any digital service that isn’t exploitative or user-hostile.
9. The Metrics of Backpacks
This is a piece that did the rounds on many newsletters I subscribe to. It exposes so many of the ironies of Silicon Valley, as well as the attitude towards women. It’s sad to read, but also enlightening, because there might be some things here that you didn’t know about. I’m curious about the extreme polarization regarding “tech bros”, as the parlance goes. There are so many 20- and 30-something white men who idolize the likes of Elon Musk, and then there’s a large group of people who also have just reasons to resent them. Is it OK for these people to “reinvent” things? If they take old dietary practices from other cultures and brand it as “intermittent fasting”, for example, is that cockiness or it just a freedom of their expression? One thing is for sure, and that’s that these tech bros have too much of a say in the world.
10. “Magic: The Gathering” is officially the world’s most complex game
Haha! This takes me right back to the days of my extreme youth, when I was between 8 and 10 years old. My friends and I would play Magic: The Gathering, and now scientists have shown that the game is “Turing-complete”, which means that any computational problem can be mapped to the elements of Magic: The Gathering and solved within it. Science is great.
Bye! -Kat.