Hi there, reader. Good morning, and welcome to another tardy issue of your favourite internet newsletter, Kat’s Kable. Last issue, about twenty days ago, I talked about ups and downs and finally feeling on even keel.. well, life happened yet again and I fell sick. I’m back now, after a whirlwind couple of weeks, with ten great things to read per usual. I’ve also started reading the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, and I’m loving it! Already on book three, and I am making rapid progress.
As always, enjoy the newsletter, and feel free to reply any time - I’d love to hear from you.
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1. Monty Don: Dirty dressing (The Guardian):
I stumbled upon this twenty year-old article about dressing, and it’s very fun. Monty Don is the lead presenter of BBC series Gardeners’s World, and he talks about his dressing style.
2. Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s suicide (Yashvardhan Jain’s Substack):
I really enjoyed this essay connecting Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah ‘s long path to fame and John Kennedy Toole’s book A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s touching - and more importantly, it’s reminded me I need to re-read the book asap!
3. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (Andrej Karpathy’s blog):
Another old post (from 2015 this time) about recurrent neural networks. The blog post title is a nod to Wigner’s article, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts (as an amateur) of ML and AI, this is a fun one.
4. Royal Navy Once Created A ‘Franken-Ship’ From Two Destroyers (The War Zone):
Well, it’s like the title says - the British Royal Navy literally put two severely damaged ships together into one ship, right in the middle of WW2. The HMS Zulu and HMS Nubian became the HMS… Zubian.
5. Resurfacing the past (ArcGIS):
“More than 20,000 ships sank during World War II. One man is on a mission to map them all — and is uncovering untold stories along the way.”
- Your phone is why you don’t feel sexy (Catherine Shannon’s Substack): Very interesting take, and I agree with large parts of it.
“Feeling sexy is not frivolous. Getting in touch with our true desires is critical if we want to feel connected, happy, driven, and alive. But, like an old iPhone battery, the vital charge that used to fuel our lives is trending precipitously downwards. Our phones aren’t solely to blame for the lack of sexy vibes in the world, but they play a central role. Nothing about our phones is sexy—from the things they allow us to do, to how they feel to use, to what they ultimately symbolize.”
7. The White Darkness: A Journey Across Antarctica (The New Yorker):
Long, and harrowing read, to be honest. Henry Worsley, massively inspired by Ernest Shackleton, attempted to walk across Antarctica, alone. This is the story of his Antarctic obsession, his previous journeys, and finally this heroic journey.
8. The IHOP Kingpin vs. the American Revolutionaries (Curbed):
OK, this is actually quite hilarious. Super entertaining essay from about two years ago. “When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war.”
9. The magic of software; or, what makes a good engineer also makes a good engineering organization (Moxie Marlinspike’s blog):
Good take.
The people who create software generally refer to themselves as software engineers , and yet if they graduate from university, it is typically with a degree in computer science . That has always felt a little strange to me, because science and engineering are two pretty different disciplines – yet we for the most part seem to take such an obvious contradiction for granted. However, I think there is something uniquely magical about software, and part of that magic might stem from this tension in how we define it.
10. The Colour of Remembering (Coonoor & Co):
I’m a fan of Pankaj Singh’s writing, and this meditation on photography.
Photographs are this very place we all seem to be making brief pit stops at. A point we arrive at before we all depart toward our own inscapes, whatever they might be.
