Hello there. Before I forget, I want to share this bombshell: Indiana University Bloomington put out this statement on the First Amendment where they mention a faculty member with regressive and bigoted views. They don’t fire him, but they do something that’s possibly worse: none of his courses will be mandatory, and he’ll have to enforce double-blind grading in his courses (so he doesn’t know the name or race of the person whose homework he’s gotten). I’m shook.
Not much else here. It’s a quiet Saturday and I’m relaxing after getting some work done. I’m about to make hummus now, which is just about as close to perfection I’ll get to tonight. So with no further ado, here’s the list, and see you later.
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1. How America’s Elites Lost Their Grip
I enjoyed this piece by Anand Giridhardas. I’ve been vaguely following the politics in the USA, and it’s increasingly clear that rich people have an outsized say in almost everything that goes on. However, in 2019, we’re seeing cracks in their ivory castle: it’s not so easy for the plutocrats (or plutes, as Giridhardas calls them) to buy themselves out of, or into, any position of their choice. This is overall a good thing that should give hope. A fun test for you: try to imagine a hundred billion dollars. Consider that working a very good job, you could save a million dollars over your lifetime. How does one person accumulate a hundred thousand times that amount?
2. Hacking the physics seminar
I enjoyed this article from Symmetry Magazine. Productivity in academic research is significantly influenced by the wealth of one’s institute and nation. Traveling to and presenting at conferences is probably the best way to communicate one’s findings and gain new insights and collaborators, but is expensive. Frustrated by this, a group of Latin American researchers started a virtual seminar series using YouTube’s Live feature. It’s a wonderful idea, and hearteningly, is doing quite well. I generally dislike traveling to conferences myself, and benefit greatly from recorded videos of the talks. However, by streaming these seminars live, the audience can ask questions and receive answers, making it almost like a ‘real’ conference.
3. The Barbaric History of Sugar in America
(paywall: New York Times)
This is a sobering piece from the New York Times ’ Project 1619, which focuses on slavery and its effects in today’s world. I live in Louisiana, which in centuries past utilized plentiful slave labor to produce cane sugar. The sugar industry is still very much alive and dominant (try to find processed foods in a supermarket that don’t have any sweetener in them). Much of the current sugar landscape is shaped by its earlier reliance on slave labor. It’s …quite something.
4. Does philosophy still need mathematics and vice versa?
I read this earlier in the day, and it’s quite well written. The allure of mathematics is that everything in the world can be explained with statements made from some basic axioms. Further, the language of mathematics is simpler than regular human language: there is no tense, and the fact that one thing can be equal to another makes things quite simple. And the highest academic degree one can get is a doctor of Philosophy, no matter what subject it is in. One can definitely do mathematics without delving into philosophy. I don’t know much about philosophy, though; one point this essay makes is that philosophy of itself is not so useful, and one needs to be able to apply it to know/infer things about the world.
5. The Super-Optimized Dirt That Helps Keep Racehorses Safe
(paywall: Wired)
OK, wow. I am just amazed by this. Horses strain their bodies immensely as they race around their courses, and so it becomes very important to get the composition of the track just right. I think that a racehorse track get more attention in one day than my apartment has gotten over the past two years.
6. Weaving, coding, and the secret history of ‘women’s work’
“All these things are very ephemeral, they’re not tracked by society [because they’re] not a part of productivity,” Lee says. “Part of what I’m doing by documenting all this labor is making it tactile and visible and tracked . . . and part of my art output, and therefore valued.”
7. The biggest lie tech people tell themselves — and the rest of us
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“When have we ever been able to keep the genie in the bottle?” they ask. Besides, they argue, people buy this stuff so they must want it. Companies are simply responding to “natural selection” by consumers. There is nobody to blame for this, they say. It’s as natural as gravity.
Technologists’ desire to make a parallel to evolution is flawed at its very foundation. Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. (And while some inventions may indeed be the result of mishaps, the decision of a company to patent, produce, and market those inventions is not.) Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered.
8. India’s tigers seem to be a massive success story — many scientists aren’t sure
Nice article from Nature : the basic summary is that not all scientists get equal opportunities to study tigers in India, and the data and methodology behind obtaining the national tiger count is kept hidden. If this data were to be released, then external (non-government-affiliated) teams could verify the count. Tigers take up huge tracts of land (each male needs about 60-150 square kilometres), so it is very hard to obtain an accurate count of how many tigers there are.
9. Coldplay pause touring over environmental concerns
Yay. That’s all. Flying is bad for the environment, and nonessential flying can be cut down on until we figure out how to make planes have less of a carbon footprint. Good on Coldplay.
10. You Talk Real Good
Alison Stine, in this piece for Longreads , talks about all the ways in which being hard of hearing has impaired her efforts in finding a job. It’s very fascinating, because she isn’t deaf deaf, but she is hard of hearing. Whether she fills out yes or no in the disability status on any form, it’s still hard for her.
I was born with less than 50% hearing due to a congenital issue. “A fluke,” my mother told me her doctor said. I suspect, like most people as they age, I am losing more hearing, but have not been tested in years. I’m afraid to be. The last time I saw an Ear, Nose, and Throat Specialist, he wanted to “play a trick” on his medical student, to see how long it would take her to discover my hearing loss and what her reaction would be. He thought it was great fun, and was surprised when I didn’t laugh. Pro tip: You can’t be in on the joke if the joke is about your own body.