Hello, reader. I’ve been in a funk lately, and it has been weird. Anyhow, here is another issue of Kat’s Kable, and I must say that not being beholden to a particular weekly schedule is quite freeing for me. I’m going to skip issues whenever it feels like a chore, and the perhaps sad part about that is that those weeks are occurring more and more frequently now. Well, that’s enough from me. Enjoy the list.
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1. Why Sleep Deprivation Kills - Quanta Magazine
This was an interesting piece about why exactly sleep deprivation can lead to death, and in some cases faster than food deprivation. What it seems like is that sleep is not only something that regenerates and rests the brain, but is also a process by which the body regulates its overall biochemistry. In experiments on fruit flies that were deprived of sleep, the lethal changes occur not in the brain, but in the …gut.
2. Sridhar Vembu’s Vision From The Village - Forbes India
Zoho Corp, a large software company, is trying out a migration of folk from cities to villages in India. Out of its 9300 employees globally, about 500 now work from two offices, each in rural Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. It’s an interesting idea, especially made more so with the rise in remote working in 2020. I think that their final goal is to have a number of small offices, each with 10-20 people, in small villages.
3. On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant - Strike Magazine
This is a piece from 2013 by David Graeber, anthropologist and anarchist who recently passed away. I hadn’t heard about him, but am recently reading through his work, both online and hopefully soon in book form. This is an article about bullshit jobs, jobs that people do that are mostly full of vacuous tasks that aren’t enjoyable and which aren’t really changing people’s lives much.
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.
4. The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms - New York Review of Books (paywalled)
I really enjoyed this 2015 piece by William Dalrymple. It’s about the export of Indian culture and politics, and other influences, to various nation-states in Southeast Asia.
But for at least seven hundred years before then, from about 400 AD to 1200 AD, India was a large-scale and confident exporter of its own diverse civilization in all its forms, and the rest of Asia was the willing and eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian culture, religion, art, music, technology, astronomy, mythology, language, and literature. Out of India came not just artists, sculptors, traders, scientists, astronomers, and the occasional fleets of warships, but also missionaries of three Indic forms of religion […] If the scale and breadth of this extraordinary cultural diffusion is not as well known as it should be, that is perhaps partly because of a tendency to perceive and study this process as two separate disciplines, each the preserve of a different group of scholars.
5. Allow Fiona Apple to Reintroduce Herself - Vulture Magazine
I haven’t listened to Fiona Apple’s music, but after reading this interview of hers, I really want to. It’s such a fascinating interview, and Apple seems like a fascinating person. Her latest album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, was entirely recorded… in her home.
Certainly for the past few years. I made the album, and it helped me. I’m over the hump of a lot of the things I was dealing with on the album. Which means it was successful, you know? Because really, the first reason to do any of this is to help myself to live. I don’t mean with money, although that’s necessary. But to help myself get through things, and to help myself express myself so that I don’t get so confused inside.
You’ve got these stories you’re not telling anybody. Each one of those stories is like this little ball of yarn. If you don’t [express them], they end up getting tangled together inside. Then it’s really hard to sort through them. I got some balls of yarn out in this album and wove them into something I can actually work with, including [my] relationship to women.
6. The silence of the owls - Knowable Magazine
Just wow. Among flighted birds, owls are probably the quietest when they fly. How do they do it? Birds differ from airplanes in one aspect, which is that they flap their wings. As they do it, there is frictional noise created as the feathers rub against each other.
Clark says that we may be asking the question backward. Instead of asking why owls are so quiet, we should ask why other birds are so loud. The answer is feathers. “Feathers are amazing structures, and probably the reason birds are so successful,” Clark says. But they come with an evolutionary cost: “If you’re going to build a wing out of feathers, they are going to produce frictional sound.” To become silent hunters, owls evolved special adaptations that reduce this disadvantage.
Another paragraph I enjoyed:
At present, there are two ways to understand owl flight: an engineering view informed by the equations of fluid motion and wind-tunnel experiments, and a biological view based on anatomy, behavior and genomics. A truly integrated story will probably require both. Even engineers realize that idealized studies based on rigid, unfeathered wings are not enough. It’s quite possible that the owl uses its feathers and small shape adjustments of the wing actively, rather than passively, to manipulate airflow. Engineers aren’t even close to understanding this process, which spans several size scales, from the barbs of the feathers to the individual feathers, to the entire wing.
7. Peer Review - Rodney Brooks’ blog
This is a nice article/blog post about peer review, which I am clearly obsessed with.
In my opinion peer review is far from perfect. But with determination new and revolutionary ideas can get through the peer review process, though it may take some years. The problem is, of course, that most revolutionary ideas are wrong, so peer review tends to stomp hard on all of them. The alternative is to have everyone self publish and that is what is happening with the arXiv distribution service. Papers are getting posted there with no intent of ever undergoing peer review, and so they are effectively getting published with no review. This can be seen as part of the problem of populism where all self proclaimed experts are listened to with equal authority, and so there is no longer any expertise.
8. Why bad ideas refuse to die - The Guardian
I enjoyed this article about why “zombie” ideas, bad ideas that should have been forgotten by history, keep resurrecting themselves. A prime example of this is the flat earth theory.
There is certainly some truth in the thought that competition between ideas is necessary for the advancement of our understanding. But the belief that the best ideas will always succeed is rather like the faith that unregulated financial markets will always produce the best economic outcomes.
Even so, an idea will have a good chance of hanging around as a zombie if it benefits some influential group of people. The efficient markets hypothesis is financially beneficial for bankers who want to make deals unencumbered by regulation. A similar point can be made about the privatisation of state-owned industry: it is seldom good for citizens, but is always a cash bonanza for those directly involved.
9. Sight and Insight - Longreads
This is a riveting and beautiful piece of writing. Liane Carter talks about growing up with, and also living with, strabismus, which is an imbalance in the muscles that position the eyes. In other words, she’s squint-eyed.
I’d weathered years of childhood taunts. Comments from strangers. Feeling demeaned by men who saw my eyes only as sexual accessories, until I finally met the man who saw me as so much more than my eyes. Decades of feeling ashamed of how I looked to others, so desperate to look normal, to be pretty, that actually I had lost sight. Not in the literal sense of seeing, but of the critical fact that my parents and doctors had saved my vision. […] But the surgeon’s gift to me was twofold: sight, and insight.
10. Boredom is a pit stop - Austin Kleon’s blog
When Austin Kleon writes long-ish blog posts about topics that he’s deeply interested in, they’re usually good. And this one is very, very good. I remember thinking, even a year or two ago, that being bored is a bad thing. Now my thinking has changed, and it’s more aligned to what Kleon says: Boredom is just a pit stop, a place to recharge and be bored and have ideas.