Hi hi. I was away from the newsletter for the past two weeks, and honestly, writing this week’s issue was a bit of a chore. I’m not sure why so, because I usually enjoy it so much. However, I did enjoy not having to do it for a while, and breaks are good. Maybe I’m getting a bit of imposter syndrome as I approach my 200th issue. How are you? I am looking forward to the end of the year.
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1. An Illustrated History of Fermenting
This is a lovely illustrated piece from Matters Journal. Fermentation is so amazing, and you can consider it as a kind of alchemy. Yesterday in a book I read that pollen is not eaten raw by bees, but is rather fermented by wild yeasts present in their saliva. Magic.
2. How Hong Kong’s Youth Plan Their Fight for Democracy
This piece is about LIHKG, an online, anonymous messaging board that Hong Kongers are using to communicate, and specifically, plan their protests. More than a piece, it’s a bunch of excerpts of the lovely communication that happens there.
_What you should do right now is drink a cup of milk or water with honey, then go to sleep. Go for a run and have breakfast after you wake up. Please do not look at the news or LIHKG posts anymore. Make sure you can fully relax.
Take a deep breath and relax. Imagine you are by the seaside, on the grass, in the forest, or wherever you want to go. Relax from your eyebrow to your toes, relax.
You’ll never walk alone._
3. In London, Natural History Museums Confront Their Colonial Histories
Western art museums have begun to confront this history with what is called “decolonization,” or the process of removing or contextualizing racist depictions and, where possible and practical, repatriating artifacts. These issues become trickier when one swaps the Parthenon Marbles (acquired in Greece and on display in London) for, say, the skeleton of an extinct thylacine, collected in Tasmania. “When you talk about decolonization, you think of questions of repatriation and restitution, giving an artifact back to a former country and focusing on ethnographic and archaeological collections,” says Alistair Brown, policy manager at the Museum Association. “What Miranda and Subhadra are doing is taking some of the ideas developed around that work and turning that lens on natural history collections.”
4. Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
I haven’t read Matthew Walker’s book yet, but I have shared an excerpt from it in a previous issue of the Kable. Alexey Guzey, in this excellent blog post, compiles a list of errors that pervade through the book. This just makes me sad more than anything. I know I can’t trust news and social media on face value, but now I can’t even trust an acclaimed non-fiction book? This was/is a serious error by Walker + publisher.
5. Is Net Zero Emissions an Impossible Goal?
John Carlos Baez, a mathematician who I admire, writes in Nautilus about attaining net zero emissions. He summarizes the options that we have right now, and what we’ll have to do. It’s well explained, however, we know what we have to do, and we’re just not doing it.
6. The Woman Who Can Smell Parkinson’s
Joy Milne has a very rare and interesting superpower, which is that she can smell Parkinson’s disease on someone. Her husband had it, and Joy says that as her husband aged, his “smell” changed over the years. It’s one of the most amazing versions of synesthesia that I’ve come across. Can she now help find a cure for Parkinson’s? Her nose holds perhaps our best chance to finding a cure.
7. Here’s How 2 Schools Have Made Free College Work — For Decades
This is about two colleges in Kentucky that don’t charge their students anything at all for tuition; how? One of them has a 100+ year-old endowment with the express purpose of reducing tuition, and the other doesn’t incur any debt when expanding or building new buildings: it ensures it fully finances them beforehand.
8. The True Price of Transportation Anarchy
This is a wonderful piece from Citylab about navigation apps and how they are changing the fabric of the cities in which they are popular. The short summary is: everyone is taking the route most optimal to them, and these “selfish” drivers cause the entire system to operate at less-than-optimal efficiency.
9. Mind of a Mathematician
A good profile of child and adult prodigy Terence Tao. He is a phenomenal mathematician. He’s 44 years old now and has published 17 books. But he’s also just a nice person, as I’ve noticed online.
A non-mathematician may ask if any of these problems have real-world applications, but is that fair? No one asks a poet what a new poem “does.” The poem’s simplicity, elegance, and beauty are sufficient reasons for its existence. Aren’t the same things true for a mathematical proof?
Tao ponders this question for a moment. “I do think we have a bit more of an obligation than poets because we receive more federal funding,” he says finally, with a slight smile. “So we can’t say we pursue something solely for its artistic value. What we do is basic research.”
10. Urban living makes us miserable. This city is trying to change that
“Glasgow has become notorious for the kind of mental and physical ills that plague city dwellers everywhere. Is urban life itself harmful to humans – or can we rethink cities so that they can help us to thrive?”
