Kat’s Kable #265

Hello there! This is Vishal, and after my break, I’m back with another issue of Kat’s Kable. I was away for a couple of weeks doing a permaculture course, which was quite fun and immersive but also tiring. I’ve taken a few days to rest and think I’m back to my usual self, albeit still a bit tired. More than anything, I am surprised at my social life these days. I expected my break to continue with a minimum of fuss and socializing, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the quality interactions I’ve been having with new people I’ve met and also with old friends.

As (almost) always, this issue has ten good things to read, so do enjoy.

If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link. Also, if any of the links are paywalled and if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, try opening the link in incognito mode in your browser. This works if the website has a “soft” paywall. If that doesn’t work, you can access the website using a different browser on the same device, or use a different device altogether. Another, slightly involved, method is to try to disable JavaScript and reload the page. This works on some websites for me.

1. The Godmother of the Digital Image - New York Times (soft paywalled)

I really liked this profile of Ingrid Daubechies, who I hadn’t heard of until now. She’s the inventor of the “ Daubechies wavelet”, a mathematical tool which has been very useful in digital image compression. I’m not an expert, but I think the use of wavelets in this context is that they compress the image while maintaining the specific information that one might be interested in. She also has dealt with depression for much of her life, and I liked the way she talks about it.

“But it’s always a bad idea to skip,” Daubechies says of her medication, because within a day, she starts sliding. She doesn’t mind talking about depression, in part because she believes it’s good for people to know that success doesn’t inoculate against mental-health vulnerabilities and that it’s a chronic problem requiring chronic solving. “It’s never really solved,” she says. “That is the case with many, many things. There is no static equilibrium.” She likens it to bicycling: “You have to compensate, all the time.”

2. How Indian lawyers, scientists gave Sci-Hub its first legal defence team - Careers 360

In December 2020, Elsevier, American Chemical Society and Wiley moved the Delhi High Court against Sci-Hub and asked for internet access it be blocked. Nilesh Jain asked to take on the case and put together a legal team to defend Sci-Hub. It’s pretty cool! And the first time it’s happened in the world.

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein: a mind on fire - The New Statesman

2022 is the hundred-year publication anniversary of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and thus there’s a bunch of nice recent longform pieces about him and his work. Wittgenstein’s life was very interesting and so was his work. In 1913, he moved to a remote part of Norway to work on his ideas. I thought it was pretty cool that he considered it more important to figure himself out than to figure out his ideas.

From Norway, Wittgenstein wrote to Russell: “Deep inside me, there’s a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep hoping that things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person.” “Perhaps,” he added, “you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!”

4. What Miles Davis tells us about AI - World Economic Forum

This piece talks about the prospect of artificial intelligence composing or improvising music. AI has made big strides in mimicking human activity, and so it’s natural to ask if the same thing can be done in creative and subjective fields like music. However, improvisation in music is chaotic, almost, in the sense that there are few rules and patterns. Miles Davis, jazz artist par excellence, was known for his improvisational prowess and dislike of strict rules. He complained that classical musicians were like “robots”. Thus, it remains to be seen if AI-based music systems can outperform human improvisation.

5. I Can’t Go Home, So I Go to the Indian Grocery - Catapult

This essay is from late 2021, and it’s written by Purnima Mani, an Indian living in the USA. She talks about her relationship with Namaste Plaza, an Indian grocery store near her home. I found it quite interesting and also a bit sad, because the Indian store becomes a conduit through which a lot of Indians abroad channel their homesickness.

Each time we have to contend with the reality of another month, another season, another year apart from our extended families, I drive my ennui to Namaste Plaza. […] In the absence of a plane ticket to Chennai, the food of my heritage helps tether me to the land and people I miss most.

6. Ada Palmer and the Weird Hand of Progress - WIRED (soft paywalled, this link via 12ft.io)

I really enjoy Ada Palmer’s work and outlook towards life and history. I recently shared another piece about her work (Hopepunk, Optimism, Purity, and Futures of Hard Work) in issue #261. This one now is an interview, and it was great to get a more in-depth view of why Palmer thinks the way she does. A few parts of her life and relatable to me too. I found this description of her voice quite cool:

Palmer speaks in complete paragraphs and occasionally what feel like complete lectures. (She was happy that I was recording, she said at one point, because it would save her the trouble of writing everything down.) Her voice is like the sound of an English horn, nasal and resonant, a breathy “h” forming when she says “while” or “where.” When she grows excited, pantomiming this or that haughty misreading by an old fogy of some ancient text, it rises in pitch, culminating in an incredulous laugh.
and also this clever punnery made me chuckle

Historically speaking, the nuclear family is a very recent invention, which makes it, in Palmer’s view, an unstable isotope. The family of the future, she thinks, will include a far more diverse set of molecular arrangements.

7. The digital death of collecting - Kyle Chaka’s Substack

This is pretty cool, and mostly because I’m very interested in the way collecting and curating work on the internet today. To make this newsletter, I try to use a mix of organized, deliberate curation and a trust in the serendipity of online social media algorithms. The former is more robust, since I have more control, but the latter is… tempting. Chaka talks about the dangers and realities of letting algorithms do your curating for you. Firstly, you’re at their mercy in terms of what you’re shown. Secondly and perhaps more seriously, you’re in their walled garden and don’t have a say when the platform makes changes you’re not happy with.

8. How Reading John McPhee’s Book on Tennis Helped Me Write About Skateboarding - Lithub

Lovely. Long-time readers will know I’m a big fan of McPhee. I enjoyed this piece by Jonathan Russell Clark. He analyzes the writing in McPhee’s Levels of the Game and demonstrates how it starts without much jargon and slowly moves into more and more detail. It’s quite instructive.

The best aspect of this kind of description is that it gives it a sense of narrative, almost like a slow-motion shot in a movie. Imagine that paragraph as a series of close-up shots with McPhee’s writing as voice-over. He conjures the images so effectively that a filmic visualization is involuntary; his images are that palpable.

9. Kolam: Ritual Art that Feeds a Thousand Souls Every Day - The Daily Good

This is a fun exploration of kolam , which is an art form practiced in Tamil Nadu. It consists of intricate geometric patterns made using rice flour. Not only does it have cultural significance to humans, but it also provides food for a wide variety of other creatures. This essay is both the author’s personal exploration of her relationship with kolam, and also a bit of a review of Vijaya Nagarajan’s book Feeding a Thousand Souls. It also reminded me of this interesting paper I found some time ago but never read: Entropy trade-offs in artistic design: A case study of Tamil kolam.

The more I drew the kolam every morning, the more they became an integral meditative practice. Funnily, they provided me with an anchor, to embrace both constancy and change, at the same time. Unless I was feeling unwell and needed rest, day in and day out, through light and mature summers, copious monsoons, dreary drought-like weather, or chilly winter dew, I made a kolam everyday. And every day, whether I felt pride and joy at a particularly aesthetic rendition or a tiny internal grimace at some flaws in execution, the kolam was half-smudged by the next day – nibbled at by ants, termites, squirrels, birds and bandicoots (depending on the season) and trampled over by the feet of visitors to the home, or even our own. More than a Vipassana practice on the cushion, the kolam was my visceral meditation on impermanence and gratefulness – a reminder of the transient nature of life, and an act of gratitude for one more day of constancy and a somewhat stable routine.

A piece by Cory Doctorow about interoperability between social media and messaging platforms. (Can you tell I got quite tired towards the end? Hehe)

See you next this weekend! - Kat.

Kat's Kable #265