Hello there, reader! This is Vishal with another issue of the Kable, and as is becoming the norm of late, I come to your inbox on a Wednesday. I really don’t have all that much to say this time, apart from the interesting prospect that a ghost has entered my apartment and lives inside my bluetooth speaker. The speaker turns itself on every once in a while and even connects to my laptop to disrupt my work. Ha!
As always, if you want to say hi, please just do reply to this email. I’ll be off now, so enjoy this week’s list!
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1. Max Miechowski: Documenting Britain’s Land Loss (Atmos):
Beautiful pictures.
2. Emmy Murphy Is a Mathematician Who Finds Beauty in Flexibility (Quanta Magazine):
Pretty wholesome feature of Murphy, a geometer (I love this word!) who has uncovered “a startling degree of flexibility in a branch of geometry that is ordinarily distinguished by rigidity”.
The “space between us,” for Murphy, is not just a domain of abstract beauty, but also a meeting place of human minds. It’s no accident that she found her way into the dynamic and multidisciplinary field of symplectic geometry. “A big part of why I love the type of math I do is the opportunity to discuss it and share that beauty with others,” she said.
3. China’s Silicon Future (Asterisk Magazine):
Really interesting piece about China’s trajectory in establishing itself as a major player in the semiconductor space globally.
4. Trial By Fire (Enthu Cutlet Magazine):
Meera Ganapathi, in this personal essay, talks about her interactions with kitchens and cooking as she’s grown up, and how she’s grown from staying away from the idea of cooking to slowly leaning into and embracing it. It’s really quite nice. I especially loved this sentence about her grandmother:
I loved how Paati made cooking seem effortless and inclusive, like your presence was just as important to the food as a jar of salt.
5. Rooting for Nature (Coonoor & Co):
Vasanth Bosco (whose book Voice of a Sentient Highland I really want to read!) writes about the value and magic of tree roots, and the role they play in maintaining soils by treating “soil as the most precious material on the earth’s crust”.
6. Beyond Staple Grains (Asterisk Magazine):
Another one from Asterisk! This is an interview with Prabhu Pingali, a professor at Cornell University and expert on food policy. He talks about the Green Revolution’s valorizing of rice and wheat, which led to a relative diminishing of other grains and a broad loss in diversity in our diets.
7. I Know a Place (Pioneer Works):
Everest Pipkin writes about Roblox, one of the biggest games in the world but more accurately seen as a platform for a wide variety of games to exist within it. It’s really a love letter to the game and platform, and I found it very nice.
Alone, I can be interested in the material of the ground, the paucity of construction, how little is needed to make a place that is yours, and by how quickly these worlds are built, explored, and then forgotten. How even the most hastily made place still waits there, sleeping. These worlds say so much about the default capacities and tools of the Roblox editor—the assets that get reused over and over again; the kinds of spaces that are valuable or loved; what is needed, and what meets that need.
8. The impossible job: inside the world of Premier League referees (The Guardian):
It’s been quite some time since I shared anything by The Guardian. Well, this one was quite enjoyable, and I think football fans will enjoy it far more than I did. The most interesting thing for me was this part:
_If we wanted to have consistency across football officiating, we could, in theory, draft the laws in a way that eradicates subjectivity. We could decide that if player A touches player B and doesn’t touch the ball then it’s always a foul. That is a question of fact. But once we are talking about whether a tackle is “reckless”, as the laws currently do, then we are in the realm of subjectivity. And once there is subjectivity, there will never be perfect consistency. One tackle that referee A sees as reckless, and therefore warranting a yellow card, referee B might not.
So, do we want to protect the spirit of the game or do we want consistency at all costs?_