Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to another issue of your favourite internet newsletter - Kat’s Kable. As always, there are ten great things to read, and a curator who’s had a rough week but a really good and relaxing weekend. I’m an active relaxer - I need to do relaxed things to relax rather than do nothing to relax. Weird but true.
I just finished reading book #8 of the Culture series by Iain M. Banks and enjoyed it - the plot was pretty random but the action was fun! I’m currently waiting for my Claude limits to reset (half an hour to go) to continue working on a few fun personal things, and I’m about to go watch a play my friend is acting in! Fun weekend. Enjoy the Kable, as always, and write to me always by just replying to this email.
1 Raspberry Pi: Interview with Eben Upton - Colossus
I loved this! I’ve been thinking about mini electronics/hardware projects at home, especially now that LLMs are pretty good at writing code for small hobby projects. I recently hooked up an old Kindle to check on a web server every hour and update its screensaver based on whatever message (or picture!) Samira or I want to put on it, and it was totally the most satisfying vibe-coded project ever.
This interview with Eben Upton, co-founder of Raspberry Pi, was so fun and inspiring to me. I’m going to buy a couple of Pi Zeros very soon.
2 The world’s most complex machine - Works in Progress
Uff. I knew that ASML is one of the most amazing companies in the world because of their leadership in lithography, the technology that etches patterns into silicon and gives us the complex semiconductor chips we have today. I didn’t know how they got to this point though - couple of near-death situations (saved by a Philips board member), partnership and investment from their customers, and willingness to work with all partners across continents. Each extreme UV (EUV) lithography machine has over one hundred thousand components. “To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks.”.
3 The Aluminum Tech Stack - Breakthrough Journal
Great deep dive into China’s industrial capabilities, and how a lot of their current strength comes from aluminum processing. Granted, aluminum is important, but is it that important? Like, you know, as important as semiconductors? Steel? The point this essay makes is that in creating a great aluminum processing value chain, you can do a lot more things (including semiconductors, EV batteries, and so on).
As goods like aluminum and graphite electrodes illustrate, strategic industries are interconnected and linked to “non-strategic” industries in surprising and unpredictable ways. The broader aim of industrial policy is to cultivate an energy-industrial ecosystem that can effectively procure upstream capabilities on its own to adapt to the evolving technological cutting edge. The operative test of such an ecosystem may well be whether it can build and commission a new metallurgical or chemical plant as necessary. The challenge for Japan, India, the United States, or the European Union will be developing a non-Chinese formula for bringing that plant into operation.
4 Does “Kingmaking” actually work? - Vector
Interesting exploration into the way venture capital works today. This piece has unfortunately been paywalled since I first read it, so here’s the first paragraph:
The term “kingmaking” has a medieval ring to it, which is fitting: venture capitalists have begun behaving less like investors and more like feudal lords, anointing monarchs and then daring the market to disagree. The strategy — flooding a single startup with enough capital to make it appear dominant before it has proved much of anything — is not new. What has changed is the audacity of its timing, and the institutional machinery that now exists to make the prophecy self-fulfilling.
5 Inside the movement that’s rewriting how we do science - Big Think
This essay is a deep dive into the new field (or movement) called metascience - the study and redesign of how science operates. As an aspiring scientist myself who dropped off that track recently, I like this a lot. I think the way we’ve done science is awesome - but of late (relatively speaking, given modern science is a few hundred years old) we’ve stagnated. I’m glad to learn more about new ways to fund, conduct and distribute science. To me, the most interesting thing is the way we now are incentivized to publish and share “negative” results, basically when we try something and it doesn’t work. Earlier, you’d have no positive incentive to do so. Now, if you want AI systems to accelerate science, they can’t do so without the negative result data.
6 Our Very Strange Search for “Sea Level” - The New Yorker
Ha, very fun. A 2024 piece about how we’ve collectively struggled to define and measure “mean sea level”. Why is it hard? Because mean sea level depends on many things! Tides! Where in the world you are. Things change over time. And so on. That hasn’t stopped us, though.
7 Darwin the Fun-Loving Young Fellow - Aether Mug
I’d shared Darwin the Witness in issue #380, and this is actually the first essay in the same series. You’ll see both in this piece and the next how Darwin was just really an adorable person traveling the world, doing what he loved, and having a lot of fun doing it. Some examples of his shenanigans: sitting on and hitching rides from Galapagos tortoises and having staring conversations with iguanas. I can’t believe I never thought to read his writing before, but now it’s on priority.
8 Developing creative identity - Michael Nielsen
I’m a big, big fan of Michael Nielsen’s work - I recently shared Which Future? in issue #379 about artificial superintelligence. This particular essay, though, is quite different. It’s not about a particular topic, but rather a personal essay contemplating the nature of Nielsen’s work. The fundamental point he’s grappling with is, “am I a writer?”. He uses many examples, including Darwin, Einstein and Maxwell, to conclude that his “am I a writer?” question is far more subtle than he initially thought, and it’s better to ignore the question and reframe himself differently: as a thinker who is chasing a question, for which words are often a good way to convey the thinking and the output. The primary identity is “creative explorer and researcher”, and temporary roles are “scientist, a physicist, an interface designer, a writer, and many more identities.”
9 passive obsession - bookbear express
Ava, from bookbear express, talks about passive obsession. I’m sharing a quote from the piece below that I really liked, and the other thing I’ll mention is that this ties in somewhat with a book I’m rereading, The Inner Game of Tennis. In that book, Timothy Gallwey talks about the key to athletic (and general) performance being getting into a zone of “effortless concentration”.
Creativity is not something you can force. That’s why the term “passive obsession” feels fitting to me: my ideas tend to bubble up from fixations that I bat away more than I encourage. I’ve never been someone who enjoys brainstorming on command or making top-down decisions about what to work on. I prefer letting my attention wander, believing that it’ll lead me to the right place if I just watch and wait.
10 Tour de Force - Victory Journal
Whoa. What a great piece to end today’s issue with - this is a profile of Misty Copeland, who I hadn’t heard of earlier. She’s one of the few ballerinas who has achieved widespread celebrity status in America of late. And she’s Black.
The group milled around for a moment, and when nobody was really paying attention, Copeland sprung to life and leapt across the floor in a flash. It was like watching a pterodactyl wake from rest and take flight in a split second. Without the inhibiting force of a partner—a second body, with all of its quirks and unfamiliarities—Copeland’s sheer explosiveness came to light. Her wingspan and the height of her vertical jump took my breath away. Ballet is a sport in which athleticism and grace are often at odds with one another, even when they are both necessary. Here, leaping through the air in an unrehearsed moment, Copeland was able to channel her own athleticism and use it to power her grace.