Kickoff for June 3, 2024
Welcome to June. Down here at the bottom of the world, it's a public holiday (the birthday of some member of a royal family, in case you're wondering). And yet I still fired off an edition of this letter. See how much I care?
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Things Used to Work in This Country — Wherein Clare Coffey laments how, for the supposed sake of convenience, common devices and gadgets which were once simple now require apps and internet connections and more to perform their tasks.
From the article:
But when I say “things used to work,” the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you.
Empire of the ants: what insect supercolonies can teach us — Wherein we discover how little we know about one of the most populous species on the planet, just how invasive and destructive that species can be, and learn about the parallels between ant supercolonies and human society and development.
From the article:
It is remarkable how irresistible the language of human warfare and empire can be when trying to describe the global history of ant expansion. Most observers – scientists, journalists, others – seem not to have tried. Human efforts to control ants are regularly described as a war, as is competition between invaders and native ants, and it is easy to see why comparisons are made between the spread of unicolonial ant societies and human colonialism.
Rediscovering Ikigai: What We Got Wrong and How to Find Meaning in Life — wherein Anne-Laure Le Cunff looks at how have misinterpreted the popular Japanese concept, and offers some thoughts about how to view and apply that concept.
From the article:
“Japanese people don’t view ikigai as a lofty goal, a destination, or something to achieve,” explains Nicholas Kemp, author of the book Ikigai-Kan. Similarly, in The Little Book of Ikigai, Ken Mogi wrote: “Japanese do not need grandiose motivational frameworks to keep going, but rely more on the little rituals in their daily routines.”
Silent Running: A 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All Too Relevant — Wherein Kali Wallace looks back at the (flawed but entertaining) 1972 SF movie, a movie which strikes a chord of truth about capitalism and its relationship to the environment over 50 years later.
From the article:
The fact that he’s right about what a terrible decision it is to destroy the forests has nothing to do with how he comes across; there is no effort here to artificially link righteousness or morality with likeability. Lowell’s crewmates are good-natured and affable—they’re also the ones who laugh while blowing up cute little bunnies with nuclear bombs.
Babies Smell Sweet, but Teenagers Stink. Is Evolution the Explanation? — wherein we learn about olfactory that attempts to explain why the, for lack of a better word, fragrance of young people changes as they hit the early double digits of age.
From the article:
... [baby odor] facilitates bonding between parents and children,” says Ilona Croy, a psychologist at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany and a co-author of the new research. But that doesn’t last forever. Once children become teens and are no longer as reliant on their parents, becoming smellier to mom and dad can help them foster a degree of independence as they begin to strike out on their own.
How Did the Ancient Greeks and Romans Conduct Banking? — Wherein Jared Krebsbach walks us through some of the history of banking systems in the ancient European world, how the structure of those systems developed, and how the systems spread.
From the article:
Romans generally considered banking a lowly profession that was on par with acting. This was likely due to the fact that making money from interest on loans was seen as an unworthy profession. Not all Roman banks and bankers profited from interest, but it appears several did and many utilized relatively modern monetary policies such as fractional reserve banking. This simply means that banks that practiced this policy would lend a portion of their reserves at interest. Roman records show that loans were referred to as a nomen or nomina (name), as they referred to the names of the debtors.
Nuclear’s role in a net-zero world — Wherein we're treated to compendium of opinions, both for and against, around adding nuclear power to the mix to help us reach our non-polluting energy goals.
From the article:
But the surge in interest is not without controversy. As with everything in the nuclear landscape, debate rages about whether society actually needs nuclear to tackle climate change, and whether the new systems are as shiny as they seem — with reasonable arguments for and against every promise and risk.
Inkjets are for More than Just Printing — Wherein we learn a bit more about the history of a technology that many of us have in our home, but which has more flexibility than most of us know or give it credit for.
From the article:
Each of these applications is like a colored dot on the vast canvas of human technology and activity. And while the dots from inkjets, powered by MEMS, may be only a single color among many others on that metaphorical page, the picture would be very different without them.
‘He was always voraciously watching’: Scorsese’s secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist — Where we discover one of the celebrated director's long-time passions: recording and cataloging anything and everything from television to both preserve it and to use as reference material.
From the article:
The collection is also a physical manifestation of his famously omnivorous appetite for visual media. Scorsese has frequently spoken about growing up asthmatic in a New York City household that lacked books but was one of the first on the block to get a television set in 1948, when he was six years old. For young Marty, who wasn’t able to play in the streets as frequently or vigorously as other kids, the 16-inch screen of the black-and-white RCA Victor in the living room became his window to the world – and, critically, his first exposure to great cinema.