Hello there. It’s been a productive week for me, and this issue is another of those that has a few mini-themes inside it. I particularly enjoy when this happens serendipitously. I’ve read three books this past week, and while I didn’t plan it to be so, they’ve been so intricately connected that it seems that they’re all part of the same series. It’s a nice feeling to have. How has your week been?
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1. The Weather
(paywalled, Medium)
Beautiful.
Sometimes when he walks, I swear I can hear it, the depression. It’s a liquid sound. I can hear the cortisol sloshing around in his veins. I can hear the adrenaline drip-drip-dripping down the twisted cord of his spine.
D’s depression is the weather in our house, except there’s no forecast. Some days we wake to sunny skies, gentle breezes. We talk and laugh. We eat and nap. We watch the baby the way one watches a campfire, not for any particular reason, but because it is there and strangely fascinating in its combination of predictability and surprise.
2. What Indigenous Stories Can Teach a New Generation of Farmers
Every few months, I develop a new all-consuming passion for some topic. Right now, that topic is farming, agriculture and how to treat land with respect while drawing our food from it. Humans are drawn to stories; I remember reading in Sapiens about how the first stories came to be told when cooking meat around fires. Indigenous farming practices are as personalized to the local land as your Amazon or YouTube recommendations are to you. What works, works. And since we love stories so much, why not embed our fundamental ecological tenets in them? (If you want to nerd out about studying and growing plants and tending to land and soil, hit me up. Always happy to learn more.)
3. Opinion: Who the f*** are these guys?
Rohit Brijnath writing wonderfully, as usual, about tennis. This time, it’s about the Laver Cup and how Federer and Nadal were so pumped. They kept egging on their teammates, and if you look videos up, you’ll have some fun.
This Laver Cup is a competition but it’s also a champion-studying exercise. In a normal event, Nadal plays and disappears into the belly of a stadium, but here he lingers, cheers, fist-pumps, advises, like a one-man energy summit.
And what they did with Zverev, challenging him on his way to the change room, was a bit more than manufactured drama. Modern sport loves to talk about psychological advantage and yet, here, two ageing champions are trying to resuscitate the flailing season of Zverev. Trying to inject some confidence into a young man whose very ambition is to one day unseat these pensioners. It tells you about generosity but also about how secure these older men are, of their place in the tennis universe and in their understanding of their own talent.
4. Vaclav Smil: ‘Growth must end. Our economist friends don’t seem to realise that’
I haven’t read anything by Vaclav Smil, but he’s gotten high praise from a number of people who hold in high regard. This is a fascinating interview, with some gems. Instead of quoting from his answers, I’ll quote some of the questions he was asked.
You are the nerd’s nerd. There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like you. […] Before we get into those deeper issues, can I ask if you see yourself as a nerd?
Your one-man statistical analysis is like the entire output of the World Bank. Did this research make you feel we are closer to the end of growth than you previously realised?
5. Landscape with Beavers
I just read this book by Courtney White called Grass, Soil, Hope and one of the focuses of the book was the positive impact that beavers can have in restoring our wetlands and riparian (relating to rivers) systems. In North America, beaver populations are at about 10% of what they were a few hundred years ago. Beavers, however, influence their environment actively, and facilitate the existence of a variety of ecosystems. We know that in ecological systems, variety usually translates to resilience, and therefore beaver-managed wetlands are probably going to handle stress much better than human-managed ones.
6. Ann Nelson Took On the Biggest Problems in Physics
I didn’t know about Ann Nelson until I heard about her passing away a few months ago. She is, by any measure, an amazing scientist and a role model.
As her former student Paddy Fox told Rob Fardon, who was deciding whether to become her student, “When you realize how big her brain is, you’ll be amazed there’s no room in there for an ego.”
Characteristically, in our final email exchanges in June, her email signature didn’t indicate her various titles like elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, J.J. Sakurai Prize winner, Guggenheim fellow, and Kenneth J. Young Chair of Physics at the University of Washington. Instead it offered a vision of a better world for physicists of all kinds: “Pronouns: she/her. Some people identify with or use pronouns that may not be obvious based on their appearance. By stating mine clearly I hope to encourage others to share theirs. Please help make our culture more inclusive, safe, and comfortable for everyone.”
7. The Hidden Heroines of Chaos
Another piece from Quanta , and it’s also about women in physics/math. A few of us may have heard of Margaret Hamilton, who was in charge of writing the code for the Apollo space project. The other woman in this story is Ellen Fetter, who was Hamilton’s successor at MIT and in charge of running numerical simulations for Edward Lorenz, the man credited with discovering chaos theory. Lorenz thanked Fetter and Hamilton in his papers, but they were not co-authors (this is partly because of the culture back then. today, they would be co-authors by default). Sadly, Fetter has been almost completely forgotten, which seems to be a story that repeats itself infinitely in the sciences.
8. In Ghana, a Bumper Crop of Opinions on Genetically Modified Cowpea
Cowpea is a legume that is grown widely in Ghana. The crop, though, is susceptible to pests and between 20 and 80% of all crops are lost. That is shocking. What happens when genetically-modified seeds are introduced that promise to solve this problem? I think the issue is not with the genetic modification itself, but the fact that international seed and biotech companies might use this to gain undue power and leverage in the African country. As always, this is a complex issue, and has to be viewed from many angles before one can make a decision, a decision that will be subjective in the end anyway.
9. Crafting Sustainable Cities with Permaculture
There seems to be a number of mini-themes in today’s issue, which is pretty satisfying for me. This piece is from Paper Planes , where they talk about urban land management using the principles of permaculture in Indian cities. From the piece: “Permaculture is an approach that addresses situations with a set of design principles and ethics, whose aim is to create systems that are regenerative, resilient, and self-sustaining, which care for human needs, as well as the Earth and all its living beings. Contrary to popular belief, it is not, in fact, “just gardening”.”
It’s heartening to me to see that slowly but surely, these principles are being picked up in India.
10. Indigenous California Chefs are Reviving and Preserving Native Cuisines
Yay.
Eating Indigenous food opens people up to hearing about the culture, Trevino says. “The foods are just inherently delicious—it’s completely inarguable—and as they’re eating these delicious things, and we talk about our truths, they’re extremely receptive,” he said. “They’re walking away with a really strong memory.”
“It’s true,” Medina added. “How could people who create such delicious foods be lying about anything?”
That’s all - cya.