Kat’s Kable #276

Hello there, this is Vishal with another issue of Kat’s Kable. I am currently in a good mood because I’m starting to learn how to use Q-GIS to make cool maps, and it’s reminding me of how much I enjoy maps. I think that one reason I rarely get bored is because I will look at a map before boredom strikes. I still remember one day last year when I channeled my procrastination into following the Mississippi river (which I lived very close to) all the way up to its headwaters in Minnesota. It was a fun exercise. What else have I been up to? Not a whole lot. I baked a few trays of cookies for friends I visited over this past weekend. Very typical of me. I’ve also realized I have limited mobility in my hips, so my to-do list now has the ominous-reading “work on hip mobility exercises” in it. I will tend to that now. As always, enjoy this list, and feel free to write back if you have anything to say.

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 secret life of solitary bees - Citizen Matters

I learnt quite a few things about bees (who I absolutely adore and love) in India from this piece by Arati Kumar Rao. She talks about solitary bees, which are bees that don’t live together in groups or hives. Social bees, which live in groups, are definitely more popular to most people, but there are actually very few social bee species and far more solitary bee species. This piece goes into more detail about bees found in India, and it also has a bunch of close-up photographs taken by the author too. Fun all around! It also reminded me of a beautiful and large bee I saw and photographed a few weeks ago. I have a feeling it’s Xylocopa latipes, the tropical carpenter bee.

2. Battered by climate change, Central India’s forest products are disappearing - Scroll

I learnt from this article that there’s a lot of forest items that get foraged and harvested every year. These items are then either eaten, or else sold and processed into medicines, cosmetics or other processed foods. This is a large business spread across a vast area, and what’s worrying is that the yields from these products are fluctuating as well as reducing quite a bit.

3. The pop stars tackling the climate cost of live music - New Statesman

Interesting. Music concerts and artist tours obviously have a large carbon footprint. A few bands and performers (like Massive Attack, Billie Eilish, Brian Eno and Coldplay) are taking some steps to reduce their footprint. I find it amusing that Coldplay is going to use a stage that generates electricity from people dancing. This article also briefly touches upon the most important factor of all: the carbon footprint of traveling concert-goers far outweighs the footprint of the concert and the artists. I wish this article went more into detail about that, but of course that is something out of the artists’ control.

4. ‘There are no words for the horror’: the story of my madness - The Guardian

This article by Emmanuel Carrère was doing the rounds on the internet some time ago, and for good reason. He talks about his experience with bipolar disorder, and it is difficult to read in parts.

5. The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)

Well, wow. I had known of Alexander Groethendick, but I did not know that he.. disappeared. He was a celebrated mathematician in the mid-20th century, and his reframing of many aspects of modern mathematics has led to many advances in the field. When he was 42 years old, he left mathematics and over the next few decades, it came to the point that nobody knew where he was. This article also has a little introduction to what Groethendick’s work was like, and that is pretty cool. It was a very novel approach to understanding and solving things. I don’t think I can do a good job of summarizing it here. Groethendick was also a strange person, for example this is his reaction when another mathematician, Pierre Deligne, solved the final Weil conjecture, something Groethendick himself wanted to solve:

Ravi Vakil told me that mathematicians sometimes describe this moment with an analogy: “It was as if, in order to get from one peak to another, Deligne shot an arrow across the valley and made a high wire and then crossed on it.” Grothendieck wanted the problem to be solved by filling in the entire valley with stones. He wrote about a dream in which he was “cut deeply in many places.” When he awoke, he said, he realized that this image of “massacre” had made clear the “reality of intentions and dispositions of others that I had strongly perceived.”

6. The Man Who Controls Computers With His Mind - The New York Times (soft paywalled)

It was fun to notice that this article about brain-computer interfaces also mentions the article Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported that I shared in Kat’s Kable #270. These things satisfy me. This article itself has lots of cool things about controlling your body and other computers with your mind. It’s something that is mostly used by disabled survivors of accidents now, but there are obviously lots of companies now that are betting on this being used by a majority of people.. soon.

7. Letting the Sea Have Its Way - Hakai Magazine

Big fan of Hakai magazine and I’ve been sharing many essays from them in the past few issues I think. This one is also really nice. It’s about “coastal realignment” projects in the UK, where coastal communities are moving inland and letting the water move in and reclaim marshland as it moves. I like the approach. Initial well-funded projects have done well, and it remains to be seen if there will be enough motivation and money to do this throughout sensitive places in the UK, and perhaps even the whole world.

Interesting point of view, much of which I agree with. Brandon Sanderson, world-famous fantasy writer, recently raised $41 million via Kickstarter. That is a crazy amount of money, and this blog post is a reflection on the fact that the internet lets people like Sanderson raise this amount of money, but it really doesn’t afford that to lesser known writers. There was a hope that the internet would serve as a platform to level the playing field, so to speak, and let “midlist” authors do well. But it seems to have made things more power law-y than before the internet, where the big winners win big. This article also mentions an article from 2004 by Chris Anderson called The Long Tail where Anderson argues that the internet will push demand down towards the tail ends and hence bolster lesser-known creators and authors. It doesn’t seem to have done that.

9. Computing Expert Says Programmers Need More Math - Quanta Magazine

I liked this profile of Leslie Lamport. He’s obviously been a really influential person in computer science and it’s worth listening to what he has to say. What’s interesting here is he talks about the difference between programming and coding, and how programming is a thing that needs more care and some mathematical thinking. Coding, on the other hand, is simply writing code, and Lamport thinks that people jump into writing code before designing their systems properly beforehand. I have not worked in this field, so I’m not sure how people operate, but I do think that it’ll be better if programmers use more math.

Kat's Kable #276