A Self-Taught Roller Coaster Maker
Hey Everyone,
So, it's been a while since you received one of my newsletters. A few weeks ago, I became the editor in chief of Fusion. Since then, I've been preposterously busy meeting with our awesome staff and coming up with new plans. Luckily, that's beginning to calm down, and I will return to newslettering.
In my new role, I will have less time than I did before, so I'm only going to commit to sending out a newsletter most days. I know that's not as good as every day, but it's better than rarely. I really miss doing this newsletter and I miss the community it brings together, and I can't want to get going again.
Best,
Alexis
1. An argument that education and genetic enhancement are more similar than most would think.
"There is a structural analogy between educational and genetic enhancement such that the moral evaluation of these two procedures should be seen as analogous, too. I will show that an affirmation of educational enhancement suggests an affirmation of genetic enhancement."
2. Interesting Kickstarter-funded time-travel magazine.
"The first issue tells the history of 21st century’s most disruptive technology: the internet.Traveling through twenty articles from 1962 to 2096, you’ll experience the incredible transformation from a technophobe to a virtual society. Machines become more intelligent than humanity, privacy ends in a free flow of information and centres of power dissolve in the emergence of decentralized structures. Technology is shrinking, until it vanishes in the human body. Mankind overcomes natural selection by evolving into machines, until our whole world finally gets replaced by virtual reality."
3. Guy built a homemade rollercoaster.
"If your child asked you to build a roller coaster in your backyard, would you? In 2013, after riding roller coasters all day, Will Pemble’s son, Lyle, asked him that very question and he said, “Yes– that would be cool.” Together, they started The CoasterDad Project and this year’s Maker Faire showcased the roller coaster they built in their front yard (plus an additional 14 meters of track). Pemble is a management consultant and founder of ProtoPalette, an Arduino learning kit that teaches kids about electronics and coding. Pemble studied aeronautics in college, but he is a self-taught roller coaster maker."
4. The levees that are and the levees that might have been.
"The ubiquity and scale of American levee systems makes it difficult to imagine a world without them. Pierre Bélanger’s essay 'Landscape as Infrastructure' clearly argues this point: 'the histories and complexities of land transformation and infrastructure deployed in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries present important evidence of a large system of biophysical resources, agents, and services that support urban economies in North America.'"
5. Why aren't there more poetry audiobooks?
"Poetry books, even Pulitzer winners, generally don’t sell much in print, which makes them a risky bet in audio. Moreover, a nontrivial portion of audiobook listeners buy books for long drives or flights. Audible’s current subscription model allows listeners to pick one or two books a month for a set price, with additional titles costing extra — a disadvantage for poetry collections, which tend to be quite short. (To equal the 32 hours of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” you might need to buy as many as 15 collections of poems.)"
On Fusion: How to take a vacation when you're addicted to technology, by the newly returned from vacation, Kashmir Hill.
The Credits 1. kickstarter.com 2. jetpress.org 3. spectrum.ieee.org 4. placesjournal.org 5. nytimes.com
A Self-Taught Roller Coaster Maker