Kickoff For June 9, 2025
Another weird and wonderful mix of articles for the second week of June. I hope you're enjoying these selections!
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The future of silk — Wherein Hiawatha Bray looks at the history of the titular fabric and at some of the more novel, unexpected, and innovative uses that modern researchers are putting it to.
From the article:
A cheap, clean, and safe food preservative could make quite an impact, in a world where about a third of all food – as much as 2.1 billion tons – presently goes to waste, according to Boston Consulting Group. It could also spare millions from the ill effects of eating spoiled food.
'Conventions were exploded to make something with the remains': Jean-Luc Godard on the film that changed cinema — Wherein we get a peek into how the famed French director made the groundbreaking file Breathless, and learn about its influence on cinema.
From the article:
This jittery editing style lent Breathless a feeling of unpredictability, grabbing the audience's attention and forcing them to be aware of the film-making process. Godard also did this by referencing other films, while at the same time subverting the very conventions that make those films work.
How Commodore Invented the Mass Market Computer Wherein we take a trip back to the early days of personal computing, learn about businessman Jack Tramiel, his mission to build and seel computers for the masses, not the classes, and how that helped open the door to bringing the devices into every home.
From the article:
Most families didn’t have the kind of money—often $500 or more—required to buy a computer that was specialized around one of those goals. It made buying a computer a luxury purchase. The genius of the VIC-20 was that it could do all of these tasks. It was a machine you could tinker with, use for basic business productivity tasks, or play games on—all for less than $300. You could even hook it up to your television as a monitor if you couldn’t afford to buy one to go with the computer.
The New Old Way of Learning Languages — Wherein Ernest Blum looks at interlinear translations, time-honoured way of learning foreign tongues via learning the literal meanings of the words, phrases, and sentences in texts, a method which he believes could revitalize reading in foreign languages (especially in the academic sphere).
From the article:
Only extensive reading of texts with interlinear translations, as advocated by Hamilton, can offer a comprehensive solution to the problems involved. Most student readers of long foreign-language texts must have broad vocabulary assistance. We are talking here about reading several million words of running text, since thousands of unfamiliar and infrequent words must be encountered multiple times to be retained in the mental lexicon.
Greening the Solar System — Wherein Edwin Kite and Robin Wordsworth look at old ideas around propagating Earth's biodiversity off planet, but also introduce us to some modern twists on the idea.
From the article:
[W]e need to keep learning about the solar system. Mars and the asteroid belt still have much to teach us about habitability and the origin of life on Earth, and we must be careful not to erase this archive until we have deciphered it.
Remembering Juicero, The Ultimate Silicon Valley Flop — Wherein Jerard Fagerberg looks back at a classic solution looking for a problem, and how applying tech solutionism to something that was a simple process at its core came up with a device that no one wanted or really needed.
From the article:
In the video, Huet stands in the Bloomberg staff kitchen with a Juicero packet in her hands. She squeezes it over a cup, and the juice dispenses—no multimillion-dollar technological revolution needed. Huet found that it was, in fact, quicker to get 7.5 oz. of juice out of the packet with her bare hands; the Juicero Press took 30 seconds longer to dispense the full 8 oz.