Hi hi, this is Vishal with yet another issue of Kat’s Kable. My personal obsession for the past week is juggling! I have been teaching myself to juggle three golf balls and it’s been great. I decided to not use or follow any YouTube videos or tutorials and see how far (and fast) I could progress on my own. Reader, the answer is that I can do it quite fast and quite well (I think). It’s been a fun meta-learning experiment in observing how I observe what’s wrong and how I fix it. The only thing I knew before starting was that it’s best to throw the balls so they peak at your eye level. I might write a blog post about this later.
Well, juggling aside, this is technically last week’s newsletter being sent a few days late, but who cares. It’s here, so do enjoy. I made some tweaks to the template which makes the whole thing more readable (on mobile, especially I hope).
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 Seven Double Standards - George Monbiot’s blog
This is a piece from 2011, reposted from The Guardian. It’s a follow-up to Monbiot’s controversial article where he claimed that the Fukushima disaster made him change his mind and start to believe in nuclear energy as a viable and (relatively) safe source of energy. That earlier article is worth reading too, and this is one points out seven double standards that are applied to nuclear energy when comparing it to both renewable and non-renewable sources of energy.
2. Raising Baby Sharks from the Dead - Hakai Magazine
Wow. Biologists off the coast of Malta are finding sharks caught in fishing nets, and incubating (for lack of a better word) the eggs they find in females. It’s really quite crazy, but it reminds me of something I’ve been thinking lately.. sure, the biologists are improving chances of the sharks’ overall survival, but are they also abetting or encouraging the practice of sharks being caught as by-catch in fishermen’s nets? I don’t know.
3. The Caregivers - Atavist Magazine
This piece made me tear up. It’s about a couple, Buzz and Janie, who worked as academics, artists and activists in Michigan. In particular, they organized an annual show of art made my incarcerated people. They met Danny Valentine through this, and in a way they saved his life. Many years later, when Buzz had a form of dementia with no cure, Janie asked Danny to come be his primary caregiver. The story is quite something, and very pleasingly comes full circle, so to speak.
4. Of Thin Ice - Alpinist Magazine
Wow, everything I’ve been pointed to from Alpinist magazine has been so great. This is a sort of meandering musing on “thin ice”–how it’s like to walk on, how it’s like to look at, and so on. The prose alone is worth it.
To roam the Northeast hills between late autumn and early winter is to be entranced by metamorphosis: a bead of newly formed ice, a clatter of wet stones, a trickle of water behind icicles. Here, seasons unspool from any predictable trajectory. You might climb up shimmers of ice that spread like frost on a morning garden, only to descend, mere hours later, into a murk of misting rain, muddy earth and orange leaves. At sunset, alpenglow turns summit rime to iridescent violet, rose and gold. Even the valleys light up, and the drab hues of barren oaks, maples and birches give way to glowing burgundy and orange, as if the peak foliage, vanished weeks prior, has come back as colored light.
5. Out of the valley - Nadia Asparouhova’s Substack
Nadia Asparouhova (formerly Nadia Eghbal) writes pretty nicely about philanthropy and charity (and how they are vastly different). This was kinda clarifying and also kinda mind-opening? Her premise in this regard is, “If venture capital is risk capital for private goods, philanthropy is risk capital for public goods.”. Which is ..interesting mostly because I never thought about it that way. I don’t know how much I agree with what she writes, as I have some strong (but evolving) views on the place that philanthropy has in the world. In particular, this is something I feel a bit conflicted about:
Philanthropy, then, can be understood as a form of self-expression. It is complementary, not competitive, to government: citizens have the right to use their private assets to experiment with new ideas, and government has the size and longevity to scale and maintain them. Everything from tiny libraries and Patreon backers to much grander experiments is a participation in, and upholding of, that great American tradition.
Like freedom of expression, philanthropy is inherently pluralistic. A difference in ideologies, goals, and strategies simply means more ideas that can thrive in an open marketplace. (This is why effective altruism, despite its popularity, cannot singlehandedly meet the civil purpose of philanthropy.)
6. The Coming Ethics of the Internet of Things - Emily Gorcenski
This is a 2019 essay but I think it makes for good reading. Gorcenski starts with talking about how Robert Moses’ planning of New York (in the 1930s) has prevented, even now, buses from New York City to ply to Long Island, cutting off poorer people from the affluent Hamptons. She then says that we have to be careful about the outsized impact of early decisions in the field of the Internet of Things, particularly about ethics.
The current era of technology has already seen connectivity and big data become the next layer of public infrastructure. Governments and corporations are increasingly reliant on insights extracted algorithmically from large data sets. The scope and scale of the data that affects day-to-day life continues to expand as more and more devices are connected to the internet. The ethical questions of how and when it is appropriate to use that data, and to what ends, are growing ever more complex. Just as Robert Moses weaponized his bridges to leverage public infrastructure against those he found undesirable, so too can IoT data become a weapon of power and privilege. Technologists in the IoT space must weigh innovation against questions of safety, privacy, security, legality, liability, and morality.
7. Art3: A Crypto Exploration - Crypto, Culture, & Society Journal
Ha, I hope a bunch of you don’t immediately unsubscribe after seeing me share this. I thought it was interesting. Artist and designer Bhoka is interviewed about her views on the role that crypto/web3 can play in modern and digital art. I learnt about a few new perspectives from the interview.
8. How to Build a Low-tech Solar Panel? - Low Tech Magazine
Low Tech Magazine is one of those online outlets whose every article/essay I share. I don’t know about the veracity of what they’ve posted about now, and I’ll have to do some online sleuthing to find out, but the topic is interesting. It’s about an alternative solar panel invented by George Cove in 1930 that is less energy- and resource-intensive to manufacture than the ones we use today. This other panel will also be less efficient, but perhaps more sustainable.
9. On the Insanity of Being a Scrabble Enthusiast - Lithub
This was fun to read! Scrabble is a strange game, but in some sense, all games are strange and if you embrace the artificial strangeness of scrabble, it can be fun and rewarding.
The first time you realize that your opponent is stuck with the Q and you make a crucial play to deny her the legal two-word layup QI, securing yourself the victory, well—-that’s magic. It was this sequence of unfolding skills that eventually endeared me to the game–I realized what this game is, that it is the creation of something from nothing. It felt valuable to learn and exercise a craft, even if it was “just a game.”
10. The race to reconnect Tonga - Reuters
This did the rounds on the internet some time ago so I think some of you might have seen it, but I only got around to it this week. And it’s so cool! How do you reconnect the island of Tonga to the internet after a volcanic eruption when it only has one undersea cable servicing it? The graphics in this piece are magical.
Cya next week (or sooner!)-Kat.