Well, hello there! I’m writing this from Chennai, where I’m at home and enjoying a short break. I always send out Kat’s Kable at 8am Indian Standard Time on Sunday mornings, and for the first time in 2019, I’m writing an issue on a Sunday morning rather than a Saturday evening (in the USA). It feels nice, and makes me feel more at home.
It’s the end of the year etc., and I understand that this can be a time with some additional pressure for some. To you, I say this: a year is not a social construct, but the idea of the 1st of January is one, and so it needn’t be the pivot around which your year turns into the next year. Your new year can be whenever you want. I like to think of things seasonally. I’ve been slower this winter, and it makes sense, because winter is a time of slowing.
Anyway, here is this week’s list. I hope you enjoy it.
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1. Escaping in Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, and Shanghai
A lovely feature from California Sunday Magazine. People on three continents share the ways in which they obtain time for themselves and escape from the bustle of their crowded cities. Two of my favorites:
I go to a traditional Korean spa. You can even spend the night there — it’s open 24 hours, and it’s happened to me and my husband a couple of times. You get a massage, you go upstairs for dinner, and after you’ve eaten, you lie on this mat on these warm marble floors. Once, my husband and I just fell asleep. When we woke up, it was 7 in the morning. I was like, “Oh my God, you want to get coffee?”
and
When I close the bathroom door, it feels like there is just myself. I mash avocado with olive oil and leave it on my head for 30 minutes. I comb my hair lock by lock, then take a shower. It’s like meditating, a ritual of patience.
2. Open Source Technology Could Be a Boon to Farmers
(paywalled: Civil Eats)
Somehow, in the last hundred years, farming has gone from a communal and “open-source” activity to a walled garden. From seeds to fertilizers to equipment, things are increasingly expensive and also protected by intellectual property rights. However, there is a heartening new movement to make things open source again. I’ve shared a piece earlier on open source seeds (The Open Source Seed Initiative). This article talks more about freely available specs for farming equipment.
3. Never mind the 1 percent. Let’s talk about the 0.01 percent.
I’ll just leave you with this chart.
4. The Man Who Reads 1,000 Articles a Day
Robert Cottrell runs the email newsletter The Browser (which I recommend) and as part of that job scans through a humungous number of articles per day.
I put quite a lot of trust in headlines, oddly enough, because I figure that headlines are written by loyal allies of the writers who are paid to find and express what is best in the piece. So if the headline writer cannot produce a compelling headline then that is a very strong indicator that there’s not much good in the piece.
-–
_Once I’ve read the headline, and I’m intrigued, I’ll start to read the piece.
At that point the article has to start well. If a piece does not start well then the chances are vanishingly small that it’s going to improve.
Now, this sounds like an absurdly reductivist way to approach reading. Who knows what hidden treasures I’m missing? And I’m sorry about that.
But the reality is that I have to allocate my time efficiently, and the greatest efficiency seems to be in assuming that someone who writes something is going to start off with the strongest point._
5. ‘It’s pretty staggering’: Returned online purchases often sent to landfill
This is just sad. It’s usually cheaper for companies to trash what they receive as returns rather than process them for their next owner. I don’t know what we as individuals can do about it, apart from being more conscious of what we return.
6. Cool Beans
Thanks to friend B for sending me this absolute delight of article. This is an American-centric take on the increasing popularity of beans as a food in the past year or so. Avocado toast can take a seat, and the humble yet awesome bean will now have its time. It also links to this lovely 2018 piece from the (paywalled) New Yorker : The Hunt for Mexico’s Heirloom Beans, from which I’ll leave you this evocative excerpt.
The best staples make a virtue of blandness. They quiet the mind. The nuttiness in rice, the mineral in a potato, the hint of chocolate in a Rio Zape bean are all the better for being barely there. They make your senses reach out to them. (That’s why turnips, sweet and faintly bitter, don’t quite cut it; they have too much going on.) The conundrum, for a seller of heirloom beans, is that those qualities are the opposite of what he’s advertising. To get people to pay three times the cost of store-bought beans, Sando needs to convince them that his are dramatically different. That canned beans are a travesty by comparison. Yet to expect a burst of flavor from a Moro is to miss the point.
7. Collections: The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics
This is just …incredible? A military strategist examines in detail the Lord of the Rings movies and compares the movies to the books. He looks at how plausible the various events in the movies are, and honestly, even though I’ve thought about LOTR a lot, I’ve not thought about it close to as much as this man, Bret Devereaux, has. It’s stunning. It’s a six-part series, and honestly, one of the best things I’ve read this year.
8. The Economist Who Wants to Ditch Math
“Nobel laureate Robert Shiller argues that gossip, half-baked philosophy, and fake news drive economics — not only numbers. His peers aren’t exactly thrilled.”
I enjoyed this article.
In short, after four decades of a religious-like fixation with mathematics, mainstream economists may learn that the gossip, whispers, half-baked philosophy and “news tips” passed human to human since cave days drive economics. True, fake, it hasn’t mattered — such talk has spread and commanded surprising influence over economies. Shiller regards this as no small matter. In a new book, he argues for a profession-wide, decades-long study of viral stories as a path to much-needed improvement in utterly flawed economic forecasting.
9. Why the Laws of Physics Are Inevitable
Since the 1960s, and increasingly in the past decade, physicists like Baumann have used a technique known as the “bootstrap” to infer what the laws of nature must be. This approach assumes that the laws essentially dictate one another through their mutual consistency — that nature “pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.” The idea turns out to explain a huge amount about the universe.
It’s “just aesthetically pleasing,” Baumann said, “that the laws are inevitable — that there is some inevitability of the laws of physics that can be summarized by a short handful of principles that then lead to building blocks that then build up the macroscopic world.”
10. The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons
This was an interesting blog post to read. It calls out the “tragedy” of the tragedy of the commons. It’s a game-theoretic model that’s used to explain the prevalence of exploitation in human societies. It bases on the fact that every person is a selfish “agent” and therefore common and shared resources are used in a suboptimal way. What this blog post brings up is the fact that the origins of this “theory” lie in ideas of racism and supremacy. Of course, one wishes to separate the science from the scientist, but in this case, the actual paper that promulgated the tragedy of the commons is racist, containing phrases like “freedom to breed is intolerable” and “If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”. Oh well.