Hello there! It’s Tuesday morning where I am, and I’m quickly writing this issue of Kat’s Kable before I have to go start my work for the day. I’ll be on vacation for a few days, so I’ll see you again in two weeks’ time.
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1. Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist - Do The Math
This was a pretty interesting read, for me at least. Tom Murphy, the author of this blog, is a physicist and he is recalling a conversation he had with an economist on the physical limits to growth. The essential argument from a physics perspective is that the world (and hence resources) is finite and hence economic growth cannot continue indefinitely as it has in the past few centuries. It’s pretty interesting reading. I came into it thinking it would be merely academic, and that we wouldn’t ever hit these fundamental physical limits, but thanks to compounding growth, we actually will hit it in a few hundred or thousand years.
2. How Rentier Capitalism Is Destroying Dublin - Tribune Magazine
This was a pretty touching account of the way life in Dublin is changing as the real estate scene does too.
Capital has no morality; it merely follows its own algorithm into oblivion. But you can’t help but feel there is something intentional about the constant eviction, the enforced transience. Moving every year, you can’t connect to the place you live. You can’t make real communities on thin soil. These forces destroy solidarity, tear apart the tiny strings of community and organisation. They atomise you, make you think of yourself as an individual out for your own survival, an economic unit of one. Intangible bonds are meaningless to the world of profit.
3. The origin of mud - Knowable Magazine
A friend sent me this article from 2020 and it’s great! Mud/soil/earth is all around us today, and without the top six inches of topsoil that exists in many areas, we would not be alive right now. We have, first mosses, and then plants to thank for this. As they sunk roots down, they prevented erosion and hence led to mud depositing on the surface of the land. I also learnt something very cool–that the meandering “S” shape of rivers is not a happenstance; it is a direct effect of the stabilizing effect that plants along the riverbank have.
4. Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities - Low Tech Magazine
Another thought-provoking post from Low Tech Magazine. In a number of cities around the world (including Hanoi, Berlin and Kolkata), semi-urban ponds have been used to both detoxify sewage as well as raise fish for food. The idea is that with a 1:4 ratio of sewage to fresh water, certain fish species can survive in the high-oxygen environment, and also bring the biological oxygen demand (BOD) down to safe levels. These systems are on the wane now, but may be a viable option to sustainably treat sewage while simultaneously performing a significant (perhaps small) level of aquaculture.
5. Building the Mathematical Library of the Future - Quanta Magazine
The field of mathematics has slowly been augmented by computer-assistance. Right now, there are “proof assistants” like Coq which can do a lot of the heavy lifting of a complicated mathematical proof, allowing researchers to focus on the crux of the problem at hand. This piece from Quanta, however, is about “Lean”. Lean is also a proof assistant. However, the ambition in this case is quite grand, because to give Lean its full powers, mathematicians are “digitizing” math to the extent that Lean should be able to look at any undergrad-level math exam and know what’s being talked about (with no human input). To give a scale of the effort involved: 171 mathematicians started contributing to the math library project in 2017, and with 57,000+ theorems the library is only halfway there to the goal of a final-year undergrad math exam.
6. ‘Made You Look: A True Story of Fake Art’ Review: The Most Spectacular Art Forgery Ever? - Variety
This is a review of a documentary called Made You Look: A True Story of Fake Art , which is about arguably the most successful forgery scam in the art world. I usually never find myself reading film or documentary reviews, but this one is really nicely done.
In a sly way, “Made You Look” shows you that to be enthralled by a fake painting is to exist in an innocent state of foolish grace. It’s to believe nothing but your eyes. Many of the people interviewed in the film keep saying of Freedman, She should have known better. She should have researched it more. In a sense, you can’t argue with them. Yet what Freedman was seduced by wasn’t just profit — it was the incandescent thrill of discovering new works, of bringing them into the world.
7. The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News - The New Yorker
I lurk on the Hacker News forum/platform once in a while. I used to be a lot more regular on it–checking it once or more a day, until I started to shrink back because I didn’t like the discussion sections as much anymore. This piece by Anna Wiener does a really nice and nuanced job of bringing out why people love Hacker News (well moderated, no ads, text-only) but also why people don’t love it (people in tech can be …toxic). More specifically, it explores these pros and cons through the minds and experiences of Daniel Gackle and Scott Bell, who are full-time moderators of the forum. Their job as moderators is pretty unique: they actively participate, their identities are known to all who want to know, and they even email privately with members of the forum to sort things out.
I thought about the relentless patience and good faith that this style of moderation work required. I pictured Bell and Gackle as swimmers in a resistance pool, doing slow crawls against the currents of online discourse. I hoped the project of Hacker News was worth the effort. I wondered if their work might show that tech really does need humanism—that better online communities can be built one relationship at a time.
8. Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap - The Conversation
Well, this is something I’ve been reading a lot about these days. And the more and more I read about it, the more this particular viewpoint makes sense to me. That is, the idea, or target, of “net zero carbon emissions” is a dangerous and tantalizing one, because it essentially offers a way out right now when we (the Western world especially) should be doing much more to reduce carbon emissions. The article says it better than I could:
This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.
and
Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
9. Rain is sizzling bacon, cars are lions roaring: the art of sound in movies - The Guardian
Just …wow. I did not know that sound effects in movies were taken so seriously. My mind was getting progressively blown as I read paragraph after paragraph of this 2015 piece, which is mostly about Skip Lievsay–one of the best sound engineers today.
Despite Lievsay’s influence, you have probably never heard of him, and this is no surprise: Lievsay and his team are only a few members of the legions of people involved in film production, who go about their painstaking, essential work far from the public eye. Lievsay is not a household name, but he is famous among people who are. His expertise, fittingly, is what can’t be seen – sound, yes, but also everything else that sound is to the human mind: the way we orient ourselves in relation to spaces, to time, to each other; the way we communicate when language fails; the way our ears know, precognitively, when the dark room has someone lurking in it or when a stranger will be kind. He orchestrates the levels of human perception that most people either fail to examine or lack the ability to notice at all. His job is to make you feel things without ever knowing he was there.