Kickoff For August 12, 2024
I spent a few days thinking about the poll around the number of links to include in each edition of The Monday Kickoff. Then, stuff happened. Nothing bad, but the kind of stuff that whittles away at the time I have to do various things. So, I'm going to stick with six links per week. There might be more or less, depending which mountain of work I'm tunnelling through, but expect six links in your inbox each week.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The quest to type Chinese on a QWERTY keyboard created autocomplete — Wherein we're introduced to the forgotten story about how a computing function we take for granted (and regularly curse) came into being as part of an effort to make inputting hanzi faster.
From the article:
IMEs are restless creatures. From the moment a key is depressed, or a stroke swiped, they set off on a dynamic, iterative process, snatching up user-inputted data and searching computer memory for potential Chinese character matches
Your Career Doesn't Need to Have a Purpose — Wherein Stephen Friedman argues that trying to imbue what you do for a living with a more grandiose aim can be a zero-sum exercise, and that perhaps you should look for other ways to give your career meaning.
From the article:
[T]he roles you take on early in your career are typically not grandiose or imbued with deep, worldly significance — and there’s nothing wrong with that. The trick is to make work meaningful by making it a part of your exploration, as opposed to expecting a job to fulfill your entire reason for being.
Why technology has not transformed building — Wherein we learn some of the reasons why the fundamental techniques and materials involved in constructing buildings haven't changed all that much in the last century, even with advances in technologies that can help put up ostensibly better structures.
From the article:
Developers need a certain amount of confidence that they'll be able to sell their houses quickly once complete, and often need to alter plans as a project continues as the market changes.
The Great Pretenders — Wherein we learn how a mother perpetrated a huge fraud, supposedly for the benefit of her daughters (and perhaps with their collusion), how they got away with it (at least for a time), and how the scheme came crashing down.
From the article:
By late 2021, a number of Indigenous sleuths were growing suspicious of the Gill sisters. Canada’s Inuit population is small—just 70,000. If these sisters who seemed to be taking on the world were, in fact, Inuit, how was it possible that no one else in Inuit circles had any connection to them, or had even heard of them before now?
When RAND Made Magic in Santa Monica — Wherein we learn about the fabled think tank, the truly cutting-edge ideas and concepts that it came up with in its first couple of decades, and how that all changed.
From the article:
Within two years, RAND had assembled 200 of America’s leading academics. The top end of RAND talent was (and would become) full of past (and future) Nobel winners, and [mathematician John Davis] Williams worked around many constraints — and eccentricities — to bring them on.
Philosophy was once alive — Wherein Pranay Sanklecha looks at how analytic philosophy is far more than the academic (and often pedantic) discipline it has become in the last century or so, and how it can and should be taken out into the wider world.
From the article:
Philosophy was alive for the ancients because it was the form – which they needed to invent – that authentically expressed some very deep and constant human needs. The way to reanimate philosophy, to fill it again with life and vitality and urgency, is not to copy an old form. For philosophy to become a living thing, for a form to be invented that speaks to human beings today, it needs to go back to the needs that the form once contained and satisfyingly expressed.