5 Intriguing Things
1. Robots in everything: beet farm edition.
"The Ladybird recently moved out of the lab and into a test field, spending three days monitoring the vegetative robustness of a Cowra-area onion, beet, and spinach farm. 'The robot was able to drive fully autonomously up and down rows and from one row to the next, while gathering sensor data. Sensors include lasers, cameras and hyper spectral cameras,' Professor Sukkarieh said. 'Part of our research program is to find new ways to provide valuable information to growers about the state of their paddocks.'"
"About 10 guys showed up at a meeting somewhere near VDNKh [the All-Russian Exhibition Center in northern Moscow]. We spoke in the entrance arch of a residential building there. A Slavic man in civilian clothes who didn't give his name met with us. First, he asked us whether we knew how to handle weapons. He warned us that we would be going to [the eastern Ukrainian city of] Slovyansk, that we were heading to certain death, that the punishment for looting was execution on the spot—which, by the way, I saw was true several times while I was in Ukraine. Two men immediately walked away."
3. On the philosopher Tim Morton's concept of the 'hyperobject.'
"What we don’t have, Morton argues, are ways of thinking about very large finitude – the terrifying yet mundane fact that a plastic bag will last for roughly twenty-thousand years, or that radioactive materials buried under Yucca Mountain in Nevada will still be there '21.4 thousand years from now,' when the mountain itself may not. In this view, ecological awareness is a coming to terms with our existence in multiple temporal scales."
4. This sunflower time-lapse reminds me that movement is central to of my idea of being alive.
"Plant biologists Hagop Atamian and Stacey Harmer of the University of California in Davis grew sunflowers in a field and then transferred them to growth chambers with a fixed overhead light that was always on. The plants continued their daily journey from east to west and back for several days after the transfer, suggesting that they were not responding only to the direction of the light, but their own timekeeper. 'It brings into question whether there's some sort of memory that's found within the plant that allows this regulation,' says Mark Belmonte, a plant biologist at the University of Mannitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, who was not involved with the study."
5. The placenta: so fascinating, so underrated.
"The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development calls the placenta 'the least understood human organ and arguably one of the more important, not only for the health of a woman and her fetus during pregnancy but also for the lifelong health of both.' In May, the institute gathered about 70 scientists at its first conference devoted to the placenta, in hopes of starting a Human Placenta Project, with the ultimate goal of finding ways to detect abnormalities in the organ earlier, and treat or prevent them."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
cardinal virtues. In scholastic philosophy the four natural virtues, justice, prudence, temperance, & fortitude, to which are added the 'theological' virtues, faith, hope, & charity.
My friend Bob Killingsworth points out that I left out an important thing from yesterday's edition of the newsletter: Valeria Luiselli's essay was translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. "Literary translators don’t get no respect," he noted.
So, yes: shoutout to MacSweeney and all the literary translators. Thank you.
Some Sort of Memory That's Found