Hello there, reader. This is Vishal, and I’m here with another issue of Kat’s Kable - a newsletter full of fun, long and insightful things to read. This is going to be the last issue of 2023, and also indefinitely. I need to go on break. I’ve realized in the last two months that I simply do not have the bandwidth nor the enthusiasm for all the things I want and need to do, and I’ve been losing my “center”, or my sense of who I really am. I tried to keep the newsletter going as a way of at least keeping up with that part of me, but I’m out of touch there too. So it makes sense for me now to pare down some of my activities, and to take the time to feel more comfortable in my skin. I hope it’s going to be a short break, but to be honest with you, I don’t know.
As always, there’s a fun list of things to read, so do enjoy. And I’ll see you when I see you next.
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. Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief (Wired, soft paywalled):
“Gerald Blanchard could hack any bank, swipe any jewel. There was no security system he couldn’t beat—until one slip-up brought it all crashing down.”
2. Where be your jibes now? (London Review of Books):
Phew, an 8000 word meditation on David Foster Wallance. I liked this excerpt.
As he writes in one of his most typically tall-tale essays, ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley’, he was, as a ‘near-great’ junior tennis player, at his very best in bad conditions. In fiction, he creates them; he serves himself sleet, hail, sun in the eye, all for the chance to play through them. Weather, from the beginning, was his best and most beautiful dimension; he trusted in The Pale King’s tornadic structure to finally lift him up.
3. My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things (Nautilus):
Aphantasia refers to the absence of “voluntary imagination of the senses”, which is an interesting but also scary thing for me to comprehend. This is a peek into someone’s brain with aphantasia and also a review of what the scientific community is doing to understand it better.
4. Tiny Language Models Thrive With GPT-4 as a Teacher (Quanta Magazine):
Interesting piece about making small and contextual AI models so that they can be faster, more efficient and useful for specific tasks, and how larger models like GPT can kinda be like their parents.
5. Dig No Further: Renewing the Soil and the Self (Coonoor & Co):
Gayatri Ganesh writes about her move to the Nilgiri hills of South India, her no-dig approach to gardening and how it’s been inspired by YouTube-famous gardeners like Charles Dowding (who I also admire).
6. The Protagonist Is Never in Control (Guernica Mag):
Phew - a hard-hitting essay by Emily Fox Kaplan about her abusive childhood and how she’s reclaimed control of the narrative and not let her affect it as much as she’s grown older.
7. Life is Short (Paul Graham’s blog):
I enjoy Paul Graham’s writing and I stumbled upon this 2016 essay of his about how having kids really drilled into him the fact that life was short, and how that pushed him to minimize the bullshit in his life.
8. How wind turbines could coexist peacefully with bats and birds (Knowable Magazine):
Turns out there’s a host of solutions to prevent bat and bird collisions with wind turbines, ranging from increasing their “cut-in speed” (the speed of wind at which the turbine starts to spin) to painting one blade black.
9. Why Mathematical Proof Is a Social Compact (Quanta Magazine):
Felt a bit skeptical in parts of this interview with mathematician Andrew Granville since he talks about the “subjectivity” in mathematical proof, but I found it an illustrative read - and I will also say that I haven’t really done “advanced” mathematics at the frontier of the current body of work, so I don’t know how the large, modern proofs work - and so I’m inclined to believe Granville is right in that proof is a social compact.
10. The role of cat eye narrowing movements in cat–human communication (Scientific Reports):
Fun research paper on the slow-blinking of cats!
This study examines the communicatory significance of a widely reported cat behaviour that involves eye narrowing, referred to as the slow blink sequence. Slow blink sequences typically involve a series of half-blinks followed by either a prolonged eye narrow or an eye closure. Our first experiment revealed that cat half-blinks and eye narrowing occurred more frequently in response to owners’ slow blink stimuli towards their cats (compared to no owner–cat interaction). In a second experiment, this time where an experimenter provided the slow blink stimulus, cats had a higher propensity to approach the experimenter after a slow blink interaction than when they had adopted a neutral expression. Collectively, our results suggest that slow blink sequences may function as a form of positive emotional communication between cats and humans.