It can be important 

To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

- Kenneth Koch, "One Train May Hide Another"

As we stretch into the heat of summer up in the Northern Hemisphere, my question is, what could we gain by slowing down? If we’re constantly being urged to do more faster maybe that’s exactly the right time to take a step back, observe, reflect, pick a direction, and then act. Watch the ropes spin before you jump into double dutch, come in on the and instead of the downbeat, or wait for a set to roll through to spot a perfect wave.🏄‍♀️

What if you intentionally put friction into an experience and that made it better?

You could use AI to transcribe a meeting and generate the follow-up actions and tasks, but still take notes by hand because that’s how you capture what really happened among the people in the room.

Julio Ottino and Brian Uzi describe the importance of independent, divergent exploration to knowledge production in their recent Science editorial Progression without progress:

“The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery. By contrast, optimization pressures drive convergence—faster iteration within a constrained search space. The result may be more output but less exploration of the unexpected.”

Sometimes faster is just faster, not better.

Other serpentine paths to follow while you’re digging out your copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Preserving ocean samples for 30+ years can help you discover why the seagulls in The Birds were so agitated (spoiler: toxic algae)

• Global Fishing Watch continues to reveal previously invisible ocean activities, like this pileup of squid fishing vessels just off the 200nm ocean border of Peru.

• Have you been waiting to teach yourself about data mesh architecture until there was an example with fish? Josh Lee has you covered.

• Beyond cables and servers: what would it take to build the human infrastructure for a data commons, collectively stewarding knowledge beyond any single institution or point of failure?

Our team will be taking some time off between now and the next newsletter. We’ll see you in August with more ocean-climate data ideas, including the release of our ocean data stewardship training materials.

-Kate