Kat’s Kable #286

Well, hello there! This is Vishal with another issue of Kat’s Kable. I have been busy! But I have also been moving around and learning new things and figuring things out so I cannot complain. As always, I’ve been reading things whenever I get the time, and so here we are with another list of ten things to read. I have a feeling that this week’s list is slightly more.. random than usual, and I say this is in a totally neutral not-good not-bad way. After all, I did my PhD in quantum information where “random” is not a word to be lightly thrown around. That’s all I have time for now, because I have to run, so see you next time!

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. How we adapted to milk, and how we adapted it to us - Saloni Dattani’s Substack

I’ve been enjoying Saloni’s Substack since it launched a couple of months ago. This is the seventh instalment of it, and she talks about humans’ ability to digest lactose. The capability to digest lactose kicked in genetically much after humans started to drink milk, which means that in the intervening period, humans either drank small quantities or it or consumed milk in a fermented form. In the end, Saloni concludes with the statement that, “the ability to digest milk isn’t a binary. It hasn’t been a binary for a long time – because of cultural techniques to ferment milk – but it is even less so today, with the ability to mass produce the lactase enzyme.” Cool!

2. Chasing Ghosts: Unlocking the Mysteries of Human Hibernation - CNET

Whelp. A Japanese man in 2006 lost his footing and fell while hiking up a mountain. He broke his pelvis and passed out once the nighttime chill kicked in. Quite amazingly, he went into a state that can only be called as hibernation. He stayed that way for 24 days until he was found and taken to a hospital, where he recovered completely (his pelvis had begun to heal by itself while he was hibernating!). It seems as though cooling people down and putting them in a state of hibernation, or “synthetic torpor”, can be very useful. Of course, it would be useful in interplanetary space travel, but it could also help in treating people in the immediate aftermath of traumatic incidents.

3. Agile and the Long Crisis of Software - Logic Magazine

Agile is a framework that helps programmers and developers work faster and with less micromanaging from their managers. However, it seems to have its own set of issues. One of the funny things, in my understanding, is that Agile’s rules are quite vague, so every time it doesn’t work, it seems legitimate to say, “well, you just didn’t implement it right!”. Another interesting thing in this article is how one of the people quoted talks about why software developers shouldn’t call themselves engineers:

The digital theorist Ian Bogost argues that this move-fast-and-break-things approach is precisely why software developers should stop calling themselves “engineers”: engineering, he points out, is a set of disciplines with codes of ethics and recognized commitments to civil society. Agile promises no such loyalty, except to the product under construction.

4. The Perils of Audience Capture - Gurwinder Bhogal’s Substack

I quite enjoy Gurwinder’s Substack, and here he talks about audience capture–i.e., what happens when someone gains a large following, and then has their behaviour dictated by the nature of the audience they quickly gained. The other aspect of this which makes it quite scary is that this feedback loop generally involves your more outlandish behaviour, which receives more attention from your audience. This puts you into a hamster wheel of behaving more and more outlandishly, until, well.. you’re captured by your audience.

I’d shared an article about Mexico City’s Aztec-era floating gardens, the chinampas, in issue #232: In Mexico City, the Coronavirus Is Bringing Back Aztec-Era ‘Floating Gardens’. Here’s another article focusing on the chinampas, and just like the previous one from a few years ago, it too makes me very happy.

6. We Should Fix Climate Change, But We Should Not Regret It - The Philosopher’s Beard (Thomas Wells’ blog)

I’d shared a post by Thomas Wells in issue #269 (There Is No Such Thing As Countries) and I found this one interesting too. One of the points Wells makes is that industrialization should not be something we regret, even though it has accelerated climate change drastically.

It is true that fossil fuel powered industrialisation caused climate change and that climate change is a terrible problem. But I disagree that it follows that industrialisation was a mistake that we should regret and wish that humanity had never made. Industrialisation was an objectively good thing overall, because, although it created a terrible problem, it also helped humanity out of a worse one. The price was worth paying even though it turned out to be higher than expected.

7. The Industrial Revolution That Almost Was - Étienne Fortier-Dubios’ Substack

This post is about Bengal’s industrial revolution that “almost was”. Bengal in the 16 and 1700s was “proto-industrialized”, which meant that the society was halfway between an agrarian and a craft economy. That’s a really good stage from which to industrialize, but what we saw is that Bengal ended up _de_industrializing, due to a number of factors, not the least of which was the British colonization. This is more like an introductory blog post, so I’m sure it misses on some details, but it does a good job of painting the broad picture.

8. Care Tactics - The Baffler

I found this quite cool! It’s about how people with disabilities are “hacking” (in a physical rather than software way) everyday objects to make it easier for them to do their tasks. I think it’s pretty neat that they are figuring out what they want and then figuring out how to make it happen. Of course, it’s sad that they’re forced to do it this way, and that many solutions designed for them don’t work all that well.

9. My Week With America’s Smartest People - NY Mag

I still remember being a kid and wanting to be a part of Mensa, which is an organization you can join if your IQ is above some arbitrarily defined cutoff. I no longer want to be part of it now, yet this article about an annual Mensa member convention is still quite funny and fascinating. I found this part to be quite funny and relatable:

But high bar aside, Mensa’s members seemed to be, on average, as dumb as the general populace. As most people understand, intelligence is not only about how good you are at the skills that the Mensa admissions exam and the IQ test measure, but also self-awareness, intellectual curiosity, empathy and emotional cognizance.

10. Jesus is a Fungal God - Sophie Strand’s Substack

I came across this from Longreads’ An Unseen World: A Reading List about Fermentation (which I recommend!). I’m not entirely sure what to make of this short essay, but it was still fun to read.

I want to offer that they have a very big pantheon indeed. A kingdom, in fact. We must remember that fungi, although they weren’t perceived under a microscope, were intimately sensed, cultivated, and worshipped. What if I told you every god and goddess of fermentation - of beer making and bread baking – was fungal? What if Jesus wasn’t a god of monotheism, but a multiplicity of yeast cells, sipping on sugar, breathing carbon dioxide into a skin of barley dough? What if he was the magical metamorphosis of pulverized grapes into wine?

Kat's Kable #286