Hello. I’m sitting at home, wearing an apron as I write this email. There’s bread to be made, and a kitchen to be cleaned. I don’t know why people buy chemical cleaning solutions when vinegar is literally the best cleaning agent for your kitchen. Anyway, that may be a rant for another day.
Here is an accurate depiction of me typing this out.
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1. My own private Iceland
This was an interesting piece. It talks about overtourism, and defends it, in some sense. The author posits that the problem overtourism generates is the desire for visitors to get “authentic” experiences. According to him, it’s okay to be a tourist, but one must be a touristy tourist, and not interfere in the locals’ activities much. I feel like I would not want to go to Iceland, but this piece did make me think.
Where we go and how we get there are increasingly influenced by a series of digital platforms — not just big OTAs, but Airbnb, Yelp, and Instagram — that prioritize engagement over originality. Overtourism is a consequence, not a cause. The more often a particular destination or package proves successful, the more users a site’s algorithm will drive to it, intensifying the problem by pushing travelers to have the same experiences as one another on a single beaten track around the globe, updated and optimized in real time. When one spot gets too crowded and its novelty used up, the next is slotted into its place.
2. Is Anyone Going to Get Rich off of Email Newsletters?
(paywall: Atlantic)
There’s been so much written about email newsletters lately (I’ll make an archive/list someday.). Can someone obtain their entire salary off of an email newsletter? Is that a viable strategy for most, or even some, people? What this piece, and me too, finds funny is that email, the most boring technology, is being remarketed by some newsletter startups that claim to have “rediscovered” the newsletter. If you’re interested in newsletters and possibly the future of publishing, this is a good read.
3. Counter Mapping
So, so good. The A:shiwi people, who live in present-day New Mexico, have all but been written off contemporary maps. Now they’re producing “counter maps”, which reclaim older traditions and knowledge associated with the land. This was so, so lovely. It made me happy. Happy, but also sad that it needs to be done.
The Zuni maps have a memory, a particular truth. They convey a relationship to place grounded in ancestral knowledge and sustained presence on the land.
The Zuni maps are an effort to orient the Zuni people, not just to their place within the landscape, but to their identity, history, and culture. The maps contain a powerful message: you have a place here, we have long traveled here, here is why this place is important. Through color, relationship, and story, the maps provide directions on how to return home.
4. A New Digital Manifesto
This is a manifesto for our new age: we should have rights to anonymity, modify (hardware, software), hide, remember (data), filter, and communicate. It’s not a longform article per se, but the various rights were communicated very well and so I thought it was worth sharing.
5. How a scammer stole 500$ from me and in the end begged me not to tell his parents
Good lord. The author of this blog post was scammed of hie due payment for some gift cards sold online, and he got his money back by… stalking the scammer on Facebook, finding the account of his brother, and texting his brother who was very upset and told the scammer to return the money. I’m mindblown.
6. Why too much evidence can be a bad thing
There’s a practice in ancient Jewish law where if a suspect was found unanimously guilty, then the subject would be acquitted. The basic summary is: a unanimous outcome is so unlikely that it is more likely that the system itself is flawed, or rigged. And now some physicists have written a paper on it, which is great. If one applies Bayesian analysis to the probabilities, then one will see that there’s usually something fishy going on with unanimity.
7. Writing Your Disability or Chronic Illness
This is from The Open Notebook , which is a new outlet I’ve been following lately. They’ve got great pieces, which are usually about the nitty-gritties of science writing. This one is about various writers writing about their chronic illnesses, and how they’ve dealt with all sorts of responses, ranging from positive ones from some readers to others where people tell them their illnesses aren’t real.
8. Nokia’s collapse turned a sleepy town in Finland into an internet wonderland
Ha. The town of Oula was supported in large part because of the presence of Nokia. However, as Nokia’s fortunes reversed, it had to scale down its operations and lay off a number of employees. Oula, instead of becoming a ghost town, has bounced back to become an engineering hotspot, with all sorts of things going on. A fascinating story.
9. Can computers prove theorems?
I did not know too much about the use of computer-assisted interactive proof programs in mathematics. This is a wonderful primer. Basically, let’s say you want to prove something like 2 + 2 = 4. First, you have to teach the computer the axioms of numbers. How do you define 1, 2 and so on? How does one define addition? And then the computer has “learnt” these things, so can prove whatever you can using these axioms.
Lean is not a completely automatic theorem prover though—it often needs help from humans to prove theorems. Lean is an interactive theorem prover. Think about it like this. Lean is a framework which turns mathematical statements into levels of a computer game. Any maths theorem, from 2 + 2 = 4 to Fermat’s Last Theorem, when formalised in Lean, becomes a level of the game. If you manage to use Lean’s tactics to prove a theorem, you have solved the level. My favourite computer game used to be the Zelda series but now my favourite computer game is Lean.
10. Mike Posner Just Walked Across the Country. Here’s What He Learned
I didn’t know about Mike Posner, but this is a nice interview of him after he walked the entire length of the USA. Disclaimers: he had a friend in a car always a few miles ahead of him, and had readymade meals every day. So this shouldn’t necessarily be hailed as a great physical feat, but rather a social one. Posner says he learnt a lot, not only about America, but also about himself.
I’m not an expert, just a white guy who walked there for 10 days. But it seems to me in their tradition, they honor their elders in a way we do not in our culture. When Al speaks, everybody listens. And when you don’t interrupt, you learn a lot. It’s a small tweak that has huge manifestations, reverberations. We believe in private property; they don’t. If you ask, who owns this land? They’ll say, well, the deed says so-and-so. But nobody owns it. You can’t own land.
Cya.