Hi! It’s been.. a while. Five months and a week since I last sent out Kat’s Kable. What started off as a “let’s take a few weeks off when life is going to be really busy” ended up becoming “life’s still busy, I don’t have the bandwidth”. For the past two months, it’s been, “ah, I have time to restart the Kable this weekend” mixed with, “ah, not this weekend, maybe the next”. What’s also happened in the intervening time is that I have, in a way, started to get distant from myself - I haven’t been reading as much, not been spending time with my hobbies, haven’t picked up anything new , and have basically not gotten the time to step out beyond work and domesticity. And, well, I’ve had enough of it - so the Kable is back! Writing this paragraph out is bringing me the joy akin to meeting my best friend after many months - reading and curating has been a muscle I haven’t flexed in some time, and I can’t wait to come back home to it.
The articles, funnily enough, are from way back - it’s a list I saved maybe some time in April or June (who even knows anymore), but I thought I’d share anyway. In a way, it marks a nice way of me coming back to the newsletter and back to myself. Anyhow, that’s all here - maybe I’ll go into more detail next week about what the break has been like and how nice it feels to be back here (on a new mechanical keyboard that my wife gifted me!) - but for now, I’m going to go eat some dosais.
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1. The quest to understand tornadoes - Knowable Magazine
An interesting learning from this article was that tornado observations really picked up post the completion of that amazing infrastructure project, the US interstate system. Even though we know at a high level what causes a tornado (a supercell thunderstorm with rotating air close to the ground), we really don’t know too much beyond that. So cool! It always strikes me as pretty incredible that we understand things like the storms on Jupiter, but we still don’t have an accurate model to predict which supercell will become tornadic.
2. Urban sprawl is a tragedy of the commons - Devon Zuegel’s blog
I always like reading about good (and bad) urban planning, and Devon Zuegel’s blog posts are always a treat. Here she talks about how urban density behaves like a classic Tragedy of the Commons, which is basically where everyone makes decisions centering themselves and influenced by their neighbours, but ends up leaving everyone worse off.
3. Will the Real Miyawaki Please Stand Up? - The Wire Science
I read this piece by Somil Daga and Fazal Rashid some time ago - and it’s about the recent trend (or rather, craze) to plant Miyawaki forests everywhere. A Miyawaki forest, basically a type of intensely planted artificial forest that’s supposed to reach maturity soon, sounds like a great idea to build up greenery, but it may not be the right thing everywhere - and that’s why it’s not great to shoehorn the concept into every single urban greening project.
4. Why aren’t smart people happier? - Adam Mastroianni’s Substack
This post raises an interesting point. “Smartness”, or “intelligence”, captures the ability to solve well-defined problems - however, being happy is about “solving” or optimizing the solution to a vaguely defined, make-your-own-rules type of problem - so that’s why they’re not really a one-to-one match.
5. The French Burglar Who Pulled Off His Generation’s Biggest Art Heist - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)
This is a 2019 piece which is just really fun reading! Even the article subtitle is “The skilled climber and thief Vjeran Tomic, whom the French press referred to as Spider-Man, has described robbery as an act of imagination.” - you know it’s going to be fun.
6. The Band of Jewel Thieves Who Robbed for Revenge - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)
Another one - also from the New Yorker. This article is from 2010, and it’s about the Pink Panthers - a group of jewel thieves who have achieved worldwide fame (or infamy). Apparently the hang has about 800 members around the world! This one is actually even more fun to read than the previous one.
7. The Inner Lives of Fruit Flies - Atmos Earth
This is a cute post about fruit flies - organisms that we have used for so much of our scientific discoveries, but which we don’t value as much on their own.
For over a century, the fruit fly has been held up as a mirror to ourselves. There is some humility in acknowledging our similarities; we share so much with our animal kin, down to the tiniest of insects. Still, in that framing, there remains an implied hierarchy, a subtle exploitation where value is defined by human gain.
8. TV on Mute… AB de Villiers on Strike - Prashant DP’s blog
I’ve shared blog posts by Prashant before, and this one about the cricketer AB de Villiers is quite touching. He talks about the 2015 World Cup and how he watched de Villiers bat while enjoying becoming a new dad.
As ABD raged on, my son gurgled happily in his sleep, and shifted his head to find a slightly less bony spot on my shoulder. It felt like bliss. Heaven. Whatever you want to call it. It felt like we had all the time in the world. His whole life was ahead of him. He could be anything he wanted to be.
9. How Disney Packed Big Emotion Into a Little Robot - Spectrum (IEEE)
The Disney Research team unveiled a brand new robotic character in 2023 - and they’ve crammed a lot of personality into it! In a couple of conversations mentioned in the article with Disney scientists, you get the sense that they’re taking robotics beyond the necessary (the robot should walk and be stable) to the expressive (how can the robot’s walk be used to convey its mood?).
