Kickoff For 1 September, 2025
A subscriber or three has pointed out that, on occasion, an article I share in this letter is behind some kind of wall — be it pay, registration, or otherwise.That’s never intentional — I aim to share writing that’s freely accessible on the open web. I apologize for that happening and will try (though I'm not sure I'll always succeed) to avoid sharing walled articles in the future.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Noise Is All around Us—and It’s Affecting You More than You Think — The world sometimes seems as if it's become louder, hasn't it? Learn about the impact of all that sound (much of it made by humans) has on us and our environment, and why we should push back against it.
From the article:
There is an environmental justice component to noise in our cities. Wealthy neighbourhoods tend to be quieter, while low-income neighbourhoods are often much louder, further eroding the quality of life and health outcomes for people who are already at a disadvantage because of their socio-economic status. People in those neighbourhoods can generally expect to endure more noise produced by planes or traffic, for example. The big difference is that we now know there are social and physical costs to living in noisy environments.
Original Pirate Material — An overview of the history of pirate radio in the UK: why it started, the competing players, and what happened to the early pirate stations in the end.
From the article:
Everybody involved in the creation of Caroline admits that had a navy gun boat pulled up alongside their vessel in the first weeks of broadcasting the entire dream would have been scuppered. Instead, with radical objectives the pop pirates thrived for three and a half years, broadcasting 24 hours a day from the coastal waters of England. Sixty years later, Radio Caroline lives on as a licensed UK broadcaster.
Optimize What? — Jimmy Wu explores the dangers that not just Big Tech but also technical education poses when they ignore supposed softer questions and ideas.
From the article:
[I]n positioning itself as tech’s moral compass, academic computer science belies the fact that its own intellectual tools are the source of the technology industry’s dangerous power. A significant part of the problem is the kind of ideology it instills in students, researchers, and society at large. It’s not just that engineering education teaches students to think that all problems deserve technical solutions (which it certainly does); rather, the curriculum is built around an entire value system that knows only utility functions, symbolic manipulations, and objective maximization.
The Uncertain Origins of Aspirin — Sean Harrison dives into the history of the titular over-the-counter medicine, and highlights the difficulties in trying to separate fact from folklore about that history and in doing scientific research in general.
From the article:
So ultimately, while we have a smattering of evidence that some version of a poplar bark potion may have been used for sciatica and that poplar and willow leaves may have been used for gout, we arrive at our second problem with the claim that willow bark and similar plants are the ancient equivalent of aspirin — that of effectiveness.