Hello reader, and welcome to another issue of your favourite internet newsletter, Kat’s Kable. I missed last weekend, but I’m back now and I must say, the quality of essays and articles over the past few months has been quite good, if I may say so myself. I spent the last couple of days finding lots and lots of interesting things to read. You know, doing the “explore” part of explore and exploit. It’s always nice when you know the next issue and the one after that and actually the next ten issues are going to be great.
1. air traffic control - JB Crawford’s website
Really cool read about the history of air traffic control in the US, and how it started off as a necessity for the postal service’s mail planes, how it worked with and interfered with military operations, and finally what incidents and regulation had to be passed to get to the system we have today.
2. The vocal effects of Daft Punk - Bjango
I know a little bit about Daft Punk but am not super familiar with their music. I do know that their experiments with technology, particularly voice encoders or vocoders, have made them iconic. This piece goes into the vocal effects that the band used, and not just that, but it also goes into the history of these devices, when they were made, and how they started to affect the music industry as a whole (of course with Daft Punk leading some of the way). Nerdy but fun.
3. Why Bell Labs Worked. - 1517 Fund
Bell Labs is famous for leveraging its monopoly status to support and fund the era’s leading science and technology. This is another post about it, and what I found interesting is the way the scientists were “managed”. Or rather, the way they weren’t managed:
Kelly seems to have believed that the desire to impress your boss was a corrosive force, and so new discoveries and inventions were steadily percolated up to him and other leadership layer-by-layer one to two weeks at a time. From his perspective, it wasn’t Kelly’s job to micromanage people. Yes, they worked for him, but in his model, he wasn’t their employer — he was their patron.
Reportedly, Kelly and others would hand people problems and then check in a few years later. Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, “what’s stopping someone from just slacking off?” Kelly would contend that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”
4. If we already understood the brain would we even know it? - [citation needed] blog
I’ve spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out how to summarize this post, and I can’t. The basic premise is: (a) what does understanding the brain mean? At what level of abstraction is it considered complete and/or useful? and (b) if this is the case, can we reduce the operation of the human brain to a set of core principles and then agree that we’ve understood it? Pretty thought-provoking and generally a useful framework of thinking of how we understand something - also related a bit to The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov (shared in issue #352).
5. Guilty Laughter - Eashan Ghosh on Medium
I’ve often shared Eashan Ghosh’s sports writing on this newsletter (It’s What You See about Roger Federer in issues #287 and #326, e.g.) and I somehow chanced upon this from 2023 just now. It’s about Glenn Maxwell’s improbable 201 * against Bangladesh in the World Cup, an amazing and unbelievable innings. Worth a read even if you aren’t much of a cricket fan.
6. How Brazil built a world-beating aircraft manufacturer - Pedro Franco on the Noahpinion Substack
OK, first up, I didn’t know that Embraer was a Brazilian company! Secondly, I will also confess I’ve never really paid attention to technology and industry built out of South America. Put these two together, and what you get is a satisfied me after reading this deep dive into the ecosystem required to incubate and support Embraer being built out from Brazil. Fascinating!
7. Chinese towers and American blocks - Works in Progress
“China builds towers in a park, while America, and nearly everyone else, builds squat mid-rise blocks. The difference comes down to regulation, not culture.”
Superb! Well worth your time.
8. Long live the nub: ThinkPad designer David Hill spills secrets, designs that never made it - The Register
Everyone agrees that the IBM (and now Lenovo) ThinkPad’s TrackPoint navigation is iconic. I really enjoyed this profile and interview of David Hill, the designer who is currently heading ThinkPad design and I also learnt about some other major innovations he proposed but which never took off - butterfly keyboards (very cool!) and LED lamps on top of laptop screens being two of them.
9. How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers - APM Reports
Phew! I knew that most sensible countries teach kids to learn via phonetics, but American discourse has been hijacked by a technique called cueing, where you don’t learn to read by vocalizing, subvocalizing and then internalizing words, but rather by responding to visual and contextual clues in the text. Despite so much evidence showing that phoneme-based learning works better than cueing, Americans still use cueing. It’s sad.
10. He was in mystic delirium: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI‚ or a lonely madman? - The Guardian
In issue #276, I shared The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician about Alexander Grothendick, and Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture in #335. Grothendick’s life post his “disappearance” was pretty sad - where he retired to rural France, shunned all society and spent all his time working on theories bridging science and spirituality. A lot of this was because of childhood and young adult trauma he suffered at the hands of his parents’ abandonment.