Hello there, reader, and welcome to another Sunday issue of the Kable! I’ve had a whirlwind of a weekend, honestly - I decided that the apartment needed some organizing, and organizing is what it got. Anyhow, it’s just 3pm now on Sunday, and the rest of the weekend stretches tantalizingly ahead of me.. once I hit send on this email. Ha. So I’ll do that soon. It’s been a good reading week, and therefore a good Kable week.
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1. The queen of crime-solving - The Guardian
Fun article from 2022 profiling Angela Gallop, a forensic scientist who’s helped crack some of the UK’s most notorious murder cases. Gallop’s work is characterized by imagination, where she’s often recreated potential scenes as experiments to see what would actually happen. What’s also interesting is the parallel of her career with the dramatic change in the way detective work happened in the UK - the government-run FSS was dismantled in a movement led by her as her and others established private forensic companies. Her story is interesting, and she’s a fascinating person.
2. Co-Becoming: The Human-Dog Kinship - Coonoor and Co.
Fun read about the history of the human-dog relationship. What I found pretty interesting here is that the domestication of dogs allowed humans to “outsource” our sense of scent to them and that’s how we adapted to our snouts becoming shorter in our quest for more complex speech. That’s pretty cool, and overall this is a short but instructive read.
There are plenty more questions about where they come from. So, to me, dogs are the ambassadors from the animal realm. They come to us with wet snouts, wagging tails and that precious polished mirror. They give us the opportunity to not only experience profound interspecies kinship but also to develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and, thus experience a better relationship with ourselves and our natural world. Given the juncture we are at, how we utilize these opportunities may just define our future itself.
3. Chefs say a dishwasher can make or break a restaurant. So I signed up for a shift. - Washington Post
Pretty cool story by Tom Sietsema about working as a dishwasher for a spell to understand the physicality and criticality of the job.
4. Overcoming India’s technological cowardice - Soham Sankaran’s Substack
Soham Sankaran runs a biotech startup in India called PopVax where he’s working on mRNA vaccines powered by computational design. This long essay is about the difficulties of running such a “deep tech” startup in India - starting from governmental inflexibility and lack of public funding and going to difficulties in simply doing business and paucity of private risk capital. It’s a good article that posits that Indian R&D is already pretty good (I kinda agree, relatively speaking) but there are just too many roadblocks on the way.
5. India’s missing wolves - The Hindu
2022 article about India’s wolves. At the time of writing, India only had 3100 wolves! That’s such a small number, even smaller than the tiger population in that year. How has this happened, and why is it so important to recognize the importance of the savanna grassland ecosystems that are unsexy but so critical to the survival of wolves?
6. Design for 3D-Printing - Rahix’ Blog
I don’t 3D print, but as you know, I’m a studious consumer of 3D printing content on YouTube. I really enjoyed this deep dive into how to design parts for 3D printing, how to make them portable (so that they’ll work on different printers), etc. etc. Very fun and quite technical but I nerded out on it.
7. With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits - Quanta Magazine
There’s a nonchalantly named fundamental computer science problem called the “busy beaver”. It comes in varieties - the first, second, and so on. The first busy beaver is basically the longest-running and halting Turing machine with a single rule. The first beaver is easy - it goes on for only one step. However, as you go up the beavers, so to speak, it gets dizzyingly complex. The fifth busy beaver has taken the computational complexity theory decades to solve, and it’s finally been done. And in fact - the sixth may not be solvable at all with the current scale of computational resources we have. Crazy, and honestly such a well written story too!
8. The Philosophy of Liberty: On Liberalism - Bret Devereaux’s Blog
Really nice long essay (that I read twice!) on the origins of “liberalism” and how revolutionary it was that the USA was founded on this fundamental tenet. I think it’s worth a read, especially because words and their meanings change and it’s cool to know what liberalism originally meant - championing individual freedoms and deciding that the government’s role was to protect those freedoms from communal claims.
9. The Ghost Crop of Goa - Orion Magazine
Really nice article by Sharanya Deepak about Goa’s heritage rice varieties. In this essay, I learnt that Goa has three primary types of cultivated land - morod (uplands), kherlands (midlands) and khazans (low-lying wetlands). Khazans, like any other similar ecosystem, are complex and rich and have their own specific rice varieties that are being kept alive only by a small group of people now.
10. Letter to a friend who may start a new investment platform - Graham Duncan’s blog
I had earlier shared another piece from Graham Duncan’s blog (What’s going on here, with this human? in #343) and this one is quite nice too. I’d saved it immediately after reading that one but have just gotten around to reading it. This is a kind of checklist to his friend who’s about to embark on an entrepreneurial venture, and while it’s for a new investment platform, I think the wisdom here is widely applicable.