Hello, and welcome back. I’ve enjoyed my time off the newsletter, and at the same time feel energized and happy to be back. It was a bit strange to not curate and write it for three weeks, since it formed part of my routine for years. Hopefully I’ve unlearned repetitiveness, and some shortcuts I was taking. With no further ado, here goes.
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1. The Hiding Place: Inside the World’s First Long-Term Storage Facility for Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste
I really enjoyed reading this piece about a Finnish storage facility for radioactive waste. Once consumed, nuclear fuel has to be strictly contained for a few hundred years before it becomes relatively harmless. How do you create such a storage facility, considering that it is possible that an altogether different culture/species may come across it? Our regular danger warnings may not be understood by them at all. The piece ends on an optimistic note: we may not be doing this perfectly, but a team of us is working as well as they can to implement this facility, and ultimately it’s about trying to be good ancestors.
2. We Need a New Science of Progress
This was a pretty interesting read. Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collision say that we need to have a new academic field of “progress studies”. This was met on Twitter with an expected, “Oh, these Silicon Valley bros just rediscovered history”. That’s fair criticism, but there are some points in this essay that I like. The idea is to be more proactive and engineering with history: try to shape progress in a particular way.
3. The Case for Leaving Fare Beaters Alone and Making Public Transit Free
Who actually pays for public transit? If you look up the annual reports of most cities’ systems (I have looked at a few), you’ll see that the highest contribution to its upkeep is from taxpayers directly, and not from fares. This begets the question, is it worth the cost to penalize fare evaders? And if it isn’t, should there even be a fare? No, this article says, and I agree.
4. Is fair trade finished? and [The banana is one step closer to disappearing](https:
//www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/banana-fungus-latin-america-threatening-future/)
I’ve lived in the USA for two years now (yay I guess), and I’ve seen my fair share of fair trade products. The more affluent a country gets, the more it tends to import fancy and exotic foods from other countries. Goods such as chocolate, coffee, bananas, etc. are mostly farmed in large plantations in South America and Africa. Large corporations have minimal interest in the wellbeing of the actual farmers, and Fair Trade tried to change that. As long as you paid prices for the good that Fair Trade approved of, then it would certify your product and therefore customers could buy a “Fair Trade” product knowing that the farmers were compensated decently. However, fair trade as a concept seems to be diluted these days by a number of competing certifications, ironically run by the large food corporations themselves. They’re out for as much money as they can make, but they’re saying they can certify themselves on the sustainability and ethical fronts.
5. How to Help Someone With Depression
I like this list and go back to it every once in a while. As someone who has depression, I find it agonizing most of the time to talk about it with people. Part of it is because conventional social etiquette gets thrown out the window is someone is depressed. If you know someone with depression, try to use this list as a rubric for how to structure your conversations and interactions.
6. The weird magic of eiderdown
Eider ducks in Iceland are prized for their down. This article from the Guardian says, “In Iceland, the harvesting of these precious feathers has created a peculiar bond between human and duck. What can this unique relationship teach us?” The wild eider ducks are behaving as if they are domesticated.
7. Fast Software, the Best Software
This is a nice essay from Craig Mod, a writer who I admire and whose work I’ve shared earlier on this newsletter. He talks about the value of having fast software. Software that is fast enough to become almost unnoticeable is the gold standard.
But why is slow bad? Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness. Fast software gives the user a chance to “meld” with its toolset. That is, not break flow.
A typewriter is an excellent tool because, even though it’s slow in a relative sense, every aspect of the machine itself operates as quickly as the user can move. It is focused. There are no delays when making a new line or slamming a key into the paper. Yes, you have to put a new sheet of paper into the machine at the end of a page, but that action becomes part of the flow of using the machine, and the accumulation of paper a visual indication of work completed. It is not wasted work. There are no fundamental mechanical delays in using the machine. The best software inches ever closer to the physical directness of something like a typewriter.
8. Our August Cover Star, Caster Semenya: The Athlete in the Fight of Her Life
Sadly, I hadn’t heard of Caster Semenya before reading this profile of hers in Out magazine. She’s truly a phenom, and she hasn’t lost an 800m race since 2015, I think? Or any race. Whatever. She’s amazing. However, the IAAF has made purpose-built rules to stop her because she has too much testosterone in her blood. It’s ridiculous, because, as this profile states, do men ever get subjected to such censure?
9. The Perils of Being Paul Ehrenfest, a Forgotten Physicist and Peerless Mentor
Excellent piece on Paul Ehrenfest, a famous 19th- and 20th-century theoretical physicist. Held in high esteem by nearly all of his peers, he never quite found his place or the regard that he deserved, it would seem. He was an excellent teacher, effective advisor of students, and also a good man. Many of his colleagues called him “the conscience of phyiscs”, but that wasn’t enough for him. Sadly, like his doctoral advisor Ludwig Boltzmann, he too took his own life.
10. Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
Fun! A detailed unpacking of the technologies involved in inventing a bicycle, and why we only have had mainstream bicycles for the last two centuries or so.
See you next week. -Kat.