Kickoff for July 15, 2024
Welcome back! We're already half way through July and the month is still interestingly weird. And, in some ways, giving us a scary view of what might to come. But this week's set of links should get your mind off all of that.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Biology is not as hierarchical as most textbooks paint it — Wherein we learn that what we've been taught about cells, that they have a centralized control mechanism, isn't correct and that said control mechanism is actually spread throughout a cell.
From the article:
While the ‘factory’ metaphor attributes control and information to the nucleus, the ‘nucleus as a collaborative notebook’ shows agency on the part of the cell. While the factory metaphor makes the cell seem obsessed with ‘production’, alternative metaphors can highlight the mutual aid among the cellular components and the labour of maintaining the cell.
Is It Even Possible to Become More Productive? — Wherein Kelly Stout recounts their descent into the world of extreme productivity and productivity hacking, and tries to answer the questions How much work is enough?
From the article:
How many of these things we produce is not productivity. How you spend your life is. To flow steadily from one bucket of wax to another and lose count of the wax hands was the only way to live. I stood watching her peel back the plastic that surrounded the wax.
In Praise of Old Bookstores — Wherein David Masci shares his love for, and delight with, antiquarian bookshops and the many wonders (not just printed volumes) that reside within them.
From the article:
Beyond the great pleasure offered to those of us who love to look for and buy used books, all these stores also have an important civilizational mission: They are preserving not only great books, but great books as books.
From WhatsApp to Greggs - why is tech going down more? — Where we take a look at the outages of major apps, services, and websites (which seem to be happening more frequently) and the many, varied reasons for those outages. Some of which might surprise you.
From the article:
Underpinning all of this is another fundamental truth of the online world: while the services and products on offer grow ever more sophisticated, its basic architecture is, often, quite antiquated.
A Political Ecology of the Repair Manual — Wherein Shannon Mattern walks us through the long history of the repair manual, and how these form and purpose of those guides (and the organizations that have sprung up to replace or bolster them) has shifted in the face of planned obsolescence and and manufacturers locking down their wares.
From the article:
Ours is a time of privatization and obfuscation, polarization and degradation. Increasingly, technology is sold as a solution to these myriad problems, and so it’s ever more critical that we understand the operating logics governing our technologized terrains — as well as our power to fix and transform them.
The Ultra-Pure, Super-Secret Sand That Makes Your Phone Possible — Wherein we learn about a naturally-occurring substance — an impossibly pure form of quartz — that lies at the heart of our digital world, and about the secretive companies that control the commodity.
From the article:
High‑purity silicon dioxide particles are the essential raw materials from which we make computer chips, fiber‑optic cables, and other high‑tech hardware—the physical components on which the virtual world runs. The quantity of quartz used for these products is minuscule compared to the mountains of it used for concrete or land reclamation. But its impact is immeasurable.