Hello there. Here I am, with an issue I was about to write the previous Sunday, yet here we are. Hope you enjoy it!
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1. Cracking the Case of South India’s Missing Vegetables - Atlas Obscura
This is a really heartwarming story of Akash Muralidharan, who returned to his (and my) home city of Chennai this year. After finding an old vegetarian Brahmin cookbook called Samaithu Par , he realized that many of the vegetables mentioned in it are not so common now. He then embarked on a project to document and find some of these vegetables. It’s very pleasing to me.
2. Why is this interesting? - The Goodhart’s Law Edition - Why Is This Interesting
Goodhart’s law is typically stated as, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” This is an interesting newsletter issue (par for the course, considering that the word “interesting” is in its name) about it. Bear in mind that this issue is back from July of this year, so it focuses on Goodhart’s law applied to efficacy of policing in the US.
When we talk about systems that involve motivating people at some level (which almost all do), we can’t ignore the effects of Goodhart’s Law on the output. If you’ve worked in a product organization that focuses on features instead of impact, or ever taken a class where your paper was measured on page count instead of depth of understanding, you can attest to the ways people will game the system. That is, they’ll build more features and extend the margins to ensure they deliver on the measured goal.
3. The Erasure of Mesut Özil - New York Times (soft paywall)
“A year ago, he was one of the Premier League’s highest-paid players. Now, after angering China and refusing a pay cut, he has simply vanished.”
I don’t follow football much, but I have seen Özil’s name come up multiple times, mostly for non-football reasons. Basically, all of this happened:
Friends and advisers had warned Özil, the Arsenal midfielder, that there would be consequences. He would have to write off China as a market. His six million followers on Weibo, the country’s largest social network, would disappear. His fan club there — with as many as 50,000 signed-up members — would go, too. He would never play in China. He might become too toxic even for any club with Chinese owners, or sponsors eager to do business there.
4. What is the Value of Browser Diversity? - Dave Rupert’s Blog
This is a point of contention that makes the rounds every now and then, and I think people don’t talk about it enough. It’s important to have a number of different internet browsers, otherwise we will have a repeat of the Internet Explorer saga of the 2000s. Rupert says that the value of browser diversity, to him, amounts to two things: (a) “Browser diversity keeps the Web deliberately slow” (in a good way, in the sense that standards are not rushed), and (b) “Browser diversity fosters consensus and cooperation over corporate rule”.
5. Does Your Gut Hold the Secret to Performance? - Outside Online
The basic point this nice longform article makes is this: the gut microbiome plays a massive role in the functioning of our bodies, and hence also in athletic pursuits. Thus, it’s only natural that poop supplementing, or doping, becomes a mainstream performance-enhancement.. Wow.
But the idea of poop doping for athletic gain—even if Petersen wasn’t endorsing it—was too much. That’s because in addition to curing C. difficile, a transplant of someone else’s microbiome could result in a whole new set of problems. […] If a cyclist, seeking bacteria that could boost her body’s ability to, say, extract energy from carbohydrates, doped with the feces from a person suffering from severe depression, the doper could in theory become “infected.”
It’s a frightening prospect—but that doesn’t mean people won’t try. “Professional athletes will do anything to get a tiny margin of gain over competitors,” says Shanahan, the Irish researcher.
6. When our bodies become data, where does that leave us? - Deep Dives
At the heart of the vulnerability that Poornima draws attention to lies an aspect of the right to privacy that receives little attention but is becoming increasingly important in the digital age: privacy as boundary management.
All of us engage in boundary management in our everyday lives: it happens every time we make a decision about what to reveal — or what not to reveal — about ourselves. Whether we decide to hand over our phone number to department stores. Whether we decide to tell a cute stranger in a bar our name. Whether we decide to share our sexual orientations with our families. Some of these decisions may seem trivial, but collectively, our ability to control them affects our capacity for self-determination.
7. An Engineering Argument for Basic Income - Scott Santens’ Blog
This is a pretty good way of explaining and arguing for universal basic income, done properly. At its core, it’s just another stream of income that gives people a sense of security if they happen to lose their other income.
This is the engineering argument for UBI: We are all living, breathing, human beings, and we all need money to obtain the food and housing and everything else we need to stay alive. The best way to make sure we all stay alive then, is to make sure we always have a basic amount of money, and the best way to make sure we always have a basic amount of money is to provide it to everyone at all times, so it’s always there, no matter what.
8. Anthea Bell: ‘It’s all about finding the tone of voice in the original. You have to be quite free’ - The Guardian
I’ve been re-reading the Asterix and Obelix comics for the past month and stumbled on this interview by Anthea Bell. She is the French-to-English translator of all the comics, and she’s done an amazing job, so much so that to some of us, it seems unthinkable that the original comics weren’t written in English (that was me until I turned 15 or 16).
It was she who changed the name of Obelix’s small, evil-tempered dog from Idéfix to Dogmatix, and transformed Panoramix into Getafix, provoking decades of scholarly musing as to whether the druid was a dopehead. Bell has always protested her innocence. In her translation notes for the new book, she seized on one frame as belated evidence in her defence, writing: “Aha! At last we have a place in the text, and in the mouth of the druid himself, to justify his English name over all these years! Nothing to do with drugs … I mean, would I dream of such a thing? Never – I am as innocent as the driven snow. No, he was getting a fix on the stars…”
9. Why Deep Learning Works Even Though It Shouldn’t - Ryan Moulton’s Blog
A common trope (which is kinda true) is that nobody really knows how neural networks work and yet they use them in all sorts of applications. This is a nice blog post about why large (yes, really large) learning models will do well as a general rule. We don’t even need to know how they work, but by being large and by searching over a high-dimensional space, they will explore more of the available terrain and end up giving a good result. The post does a much better job of explaining it than I just did.