Hi there reader! This is Vishal with another issue of Kat’s Kable and I am in a great mood right now and I think it reflects in the issue today. I have had one of those expansive evenings where the world stretches out before you in a way that makes you feel in touch with your feelings and you are laughing just because, why not. So! Yeah. I have had three dinner guests over three consecutive days and I feel like parts of me I abandoned during my PhD are coming back now. It is nice. I made miso soup tonight with miso that I made myself (and started all the way back in May). Life is good. I hope this issue of the Kable is too.
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. Geometric Analysis Reveals How Birds Mastered Flight - Quanta Magazine
Very cool! So there are two kinds of aerial stability: “inherent stability, or innate resistance to perturbations, and control, an active ability to alter responses to perturbations.” Manmade flying objects usually have one or the other, but birds can alter their geometry to choose between a stable cruising shape and a more unstable shape that they lean into when they want to be more maneuverable. I think this is co cool. And it’s one of those things where the scientific explanation and visuals make you appreciate the thing much better. There are a lot of kites that fly outside my new apartment window, and I’m going to watch them for this now.
2. How the Yurok Tribe Is Bringing Back the California Condor - Undark
More bird content. The California Condor is a great bird. I have really fond memories of them because of a strange connection. When I was younger, my dad and I used to go to a used book store and buy old issues of National Geographic. And the first NatGeo magazine I actually read had an article about the California Condor as the one featured on the cover. Also wow, condors live to be 50 years old? This is a really cool effort, primarily because it is difficult to raise condors because of the tight social circle that teaches young condors how to survive.
3. 10 Reasons Why I’m Publishing My Next Book on Substack - Ted Gioia’s Substack
Ted Gioia runs of my favourite newsletters, even though I’m only on the free tier. The title of the post is self-explanatory and there’s lots of cool things to learn from his thought process.
4. Two Fathers - Esquire
This made me tear up. It’s also such a well-done piece of writing. Here’s the subtitle of the piece, it’s about a tragic road accident that happened in Canada in 2018:
“Their sons were among the sixteen people who were killed in a bus accident in Saskatchewan. Chris Joseph and Scott Thomas lost their sons in the same way, but in grief, their roads diverged.”
5. The science of a wandering mind - Knowable Magazine
Nice interview with psychologist Jonathan Smallwood about mind-wandering (and daydreaming) helps us prepare for the future. A lot of this is obvious, I feel, but I enjoyed reading it nonetheless.
The past and future seem to really dominate people’s thinking. I think things like mind-wandering are attempts by the brain to make sense of what has happened, so that we can behave better in the future. I think this type of thinking is a really ingrained part of how our species has conquered the world. Almost nothing we’re doing at any moment in time can be pinpointed as only mattering then.
That’s a defining difference. By that, I don’t mean that other animals can’t imagine the future, but that our world is built upon our ability to do so, and to learn from the past to build a better future. I think animals that focused only on the present were outcompeted by others that remembered things from the past and could focus on future goals, for millions of years — until you got humans, a species that’s obsessed with taking things that happened and using them to gain added value for future behavior.
6. Inside the Growing Movement to Do the Most Good Possible - Time Magazine (soft paywalled)
For some reason, there’s been a lot of articles about effective altruism lately and it’s kinda forced me to get to know it better. This is a decent primer but really, the thing to note is that there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the tenets of EA itself, but rather in the way the people and the groups behave and the power structures it operates from. Which is true of anything! Ha. People are gonna be people. I also recommend two other things if you want to learn a bit more: Michael Nielsen’s Notes on Effective Altruism and Erik Hoel’s Why I am not an effective altruist.
7. What does balance mean? - Nids’ Substack
This is quite unlike things I share usually. It’s an introspective/reflective personal post, but it quotes a paragraph from Jessica Doire’s book “Tarot for Change” that I like a lot and it’s been stuck in my head.
A lot of us have grown up in environments where limits are not well understood, acknowledged or respected. It is not necessarily that the adults in our lives didn’t care about our limits, they likely had trouble recognising their own and therefore weren’t the best teachers of when to say when or of identifying where they ended and another began.
8. You have a doppelganger and probably share DNA with them new study suggests - CNN
I really enjoy people watching because I like to look for people who look like my friends. And so I lapped up this article even though it centres on a study with a really small sample size. Also a random fascinating detail from it:
When scientists looked closer at what they call the epigenomes of the doppelgängers that looked most alike, there were bigger differences. Epigenetics is the study of how the environment and behavior can cause changes in the way a person’s genes work. When the scientists looked at the microbiome of the pairs that looked most alike, those were different, too. The microbiome are the microorganisms – the viruses, bacteria, and fungi too small to see with the human eye – that live in the human body.
9. About this site - Arcana.Computer (Justin Duke’s website)
I love personal websites. I love reading about how people design theirs and talk about why they’re making them and what does it serve etc. This is a great example. I think the internet would be a more wholesome, diverse and decentralized space if everyone created a nice cozy personal website for themselves.
10. How to Grieve for a Very Good Dog - Outside Online
I always look for good writing on grief. I also am trying to maintain a list of things on grief on my blog, here it is if you’d like to take a look. It is quite sparse at the moment: A collection of things on grief. This article is very good. The first line of this paragraph, also, very nice. I am a fan of good similes in prose:
Sunny was like a handrail along the edge of a thousand-foot cliff. Navigating life’s challenges seemed doable because I knew I could hold on to her if needed. Now the handrail was gone. Trying to understand why I was in such pain, I sought out a few experts, who explained to me what it is about these transitions that makes them so difficult.
I also collect similes, find them here: simile collection.