Kickoff For June 17, 2024
Welcome back my friends to the letter that never seems to end. Hope things are going well for you. If not, I hope there's some light on the horizon.
Just a reminder about the poll around the number of links that I put into each edition of the Kickoff. If you haven't yet, please take a moment to vote. The poll is anonymous and is open until 18 June, 2024. Thanks!.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The Only Reason to Explore Space — Wherein Marko Jukic ponders space exploration as a way to transform humanity by forcing us to confront, and answer, our most pressing existential and philosophical questions.
From the article:
There is no reason to omit the potential of space to transform humanity for the better, which is ultimately the core and only durable reason to aim for interstellar civilization. Whatever may be out there, however it may change us—there is a golden path to a destiny among the stars. Isn’t it worth following?
Machiavelli on the problem of our impure beginnings — Wherein David Polansky explores the notorious Renaissance Italian's obsessions with political origins, and how that thinking has applications today.
From the article:
It is not that the liberal political tradition (which is the tradition of most of the world’s developed countries) is simply unaware of political origins; but it deals with them in a deliberate and abstract way that is removed from the messy historical realities behind the formation of states and nations.
The man who won the lottery 14 times — Wherein we learn how Stefan Mandel, a Romanian economist, used his knowledge and skills with numbers to (legally) game several lotteries around the globe.
From the article:
Mandel wasn’t just any guy — he was a natural with numbers who spent every spare minute analyzing theoretical probability papers written by the 13th-century mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci. And, after years of research, he wrote a “number-picking algorithm” based on a method he dubbed “combinatorial condensation.”
Urban Countrysides — Wherein Matthieu Calame examines the good, and the not so good, of establishing gardens in urban areas (often, poorer areas), which can lead to gentrification, whether intended or not.
From the article:
Both private landlords and municipal authorities have well understood this phenomenon, and frequently use urban agriculture projects as a temporary means of avoiding the degradation of a space before improving it. This improvement often leads to the “skedaddling” of the players involved, not just from the urban agriculture lots that are destined to be built on, but sometimes from the whole neighbourhood.
The Early History of Counting — Wherein Keith Houston walks us through the history (and prehistory) of how humans not only began to tally things with numbers but also how counting grew in complexity and how we started recording numbers and figures.
From the article:
[W]hen the Lebombo bone was determined to be some 42,000 years old, it instantly became one of the most intriguing archaeological artifacts ever found. Not only does it put a date on when Homo sapiens started counting, it also marks the point at which we began to delegate our memories to external devices, thereby unburdening our minds so that they might be used for something else instead.
In Defence of the EU — wherein James Graham walks us through the history of the European Union and argues that, despite the EU's many failings and missteps, it actually has done more than just a bit of good.
From the article:
The European Union has been overwhelmingly successful in achieving its primary mission: guaranteeing peace.Indian The Russian invasion of Ukraine is just one of a number of profound shocks—the 2008 recession, Brexit, the COVID pandemic—that have stress-tested this mission in recent years. It has held up amid the chaos. There has not been another world war. War between two EU member states is now unthinkable. And that, at least, is something to be profoundly grateful for.
On Letting Go of the Idea of “Keeping Up” — Wherein Molly Templeton explores the idea of social reading and the idea that it promulgates: having to read the same books and at the same pace as your peers, and sharing that (loudly) online.
From the article:
Reading itself should be productive, in the sense that it produces ideas and feelings and thoughts and empathy and a lot of other things, too, across the whole range of human experience. The kind of productivity I mean is the quantifying kind, the kind that wants to get to a certain number of books read, or tick all the bingo boxes, or simply read more books than someone else did.
Why batteries come in so many sizes and shapes — Wherein Wesley Chang looks at the history of portable power storage, and how and why they evolved into the variety that we know (and sometimes curse) today.
From the article:
What shapes and sizes batteries will take in the future depends not only on how much energy they store, but also on market economics – how easy it is to make each type of cell, how much it costs to make them and what they’re used for. And those factors are a mix of innovation and history.
Why has the ‘15-minute city’ taken off in Paris but become a controversial idea in the UK? — Wherein we learn more about why attitudes towards a strangely controversial concept that can make cities more liveable vary so greatly across the English Channel, which also demonstrates a difference in thinking around urban sustainability and personal freedom.
From the article:
[W]hile fake news spreads about officials enacting “climate lockdowns” to “imprison” people in their neighbourhoods, across the Channel, Parisians are enjoying their new 15-minute neighbourhoods. The French are stereotyped for their love of protest, so the lack of uproar around the redesign of their capital is in stark contrast to the frenzied response in Oxford.