Fractal Wonder (Across the Sundering Seas #29)
Hello there, fellow travelers! I come to you this week with three articles, ranging from fractal wonder to depression to remix culture. A smorgasbord, as is my wont. Enjoy!
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Why Paper Jams Persist: A trivial problem reveals the limits of technology. (Joshua Rothman, February 5, 2018) – one of those delightful forays into a corner of the world I’d never actually thought about, but which is fascinating and intricate. The world, it seems to me, is profoundly fractal in nature. Everywhere you look, there are more details than you can imagine at first blush. Paper jams! They’re this fabulous little corner of physics and engineering and they’re incredibly complicated, incredibly important if they’re in your corner of the world, and incredibly interesting. At least, they are to me. This article somehow captures the magic of something which likely never occurred to you as interesting before (as it did for me):
“Stupid idea No. 7!” Ruiz said, grinning triumphantly. The whiteboard now contained an elaborate diagram of rollers, conveyors, vacuum pumps, air knives, air jets, stub points, and fingers. “Jets on corners to lift with Bernoulli,” Ruiz wrote. Outside, the wind howled. Lake-effect snow had begun to dust the parking lot. The engineers were aglow: conspirators who’d just planned the perfect crime.
Seriously, just read it and delight in the fractal wonder of the world we live in. Because as much as I push on our culture for its technocratic approach to everything—there is still something wonderful and beautiful about humans solving hard problems, even when those problems were made by humans solving other hard problems. There is a limit to that beauty; it is not the sole good. But it is certainly a good!
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On Living (Alan Noble, September 17) – one of the better pieces I’ve read on the challenge of living with mental illness, especially depression. Everyone in our lives, and no few people on the internet, are aware that my wife has dealt with clinical depression for over a decade. We know the struggles Alan points at here incredibly well—and the tensions of dealing with depression in an appropriately full-orbed way. The ditches are easy to fall into: medicalize everything, or spiritualize everything. Both are ditches!
My concern is that sometimes medical and scientific language obscures or replaces the very thing it is supposed to be treating. Sometimes getting a diagnosis puts your despair in a discrete category. Or we wish a diagnosis could provide concrete and discrete answers. The unknown is so much more frightening than the known, so it can be a great relief to receive a diagnosis. If there is a diagnosis there must be a treatment. And with a diagnosis we can objectify our suffering. We can set it on a table, examine it, and communicate it to others. I am not depressed. I have depression. It is over there and I am over here. Your experience has a listing in DSM-5. You can name it. So, maybe it’s manageable after all?
If you have ever been to counseling long term or been medically treated for a disorder, you know that such concrete answers are few and far between. The best mental health professionals are not scientists who offer precise, scientifically objective diagnoses, but students of the human heart and soul.
This kind of careful walking the line between those two ditches is very much needed. Alan does not for a moment pretend that there is no physiological component to depression, nor criticize psychology or psychiatry. But he also refuses to stop with the answers they tend to offer (as, equally, he refuses to stop with the answers that “nouthetic counseling” and similar approaches tend to offer). This was a bracing and challenging piece—and all the better for it.
(Full disclosure: Alan is an acquaintance, albeit it a very distant one.)
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10,000 Original Copies (Klim Sowersby, August 2018) – I’ve become a huge fan of Klim’s typography work over the past couple years. We’re using his utterly delightful Tiempos family for every part of the current Winning Slowly design, from the logotype to the body text. This essay does something fabulous: it pokes a little hole in the great balloon that is our cultural obsession with novelty.
These days, particularly in American and European cultures, to say something is a copy is to use the pejorative. It’s not an original. And if it’s not original, it’s no good. To call something a mere copy is to imply that its a lesser creation. In fact, suggest that it’s not even a creative act.
But as he notes later of a wildly different kind of creative work than type design:
…these products do not set out deceive, their attraction lies in how they draw attention to the fact they are not original, but that they play with the original. They transform the original by embedding it in a new context. Their creativity is based on active transformation and variation.
This is remix culture. But “remix culture” is just culture. Our no-prizes-for-unoriginality culture has lost sight of a fundamental truth: there is nothing new under the sun. Not because humans never manage anything novel, but because everything novel inevitably draws on what has come before—and more than that, what is most gloriously novel is often produced by those who know the past best, not least, who can work with the materials that have been handed down by the generations before and from them make something new. You don’t become a great composer in any musical tradition without understanding that tradition. The same for typography. The same (though, sad to say it, few of my peers out there in the world understand it) for crafts like software development.
Klim covers all this ground and more; the talk-cum-essay is worth the many minutes it will take you to read its many thousands of words.