Kickoff For November 18, 2024
Over the last several months, I've had some short opportunities to shift into what English writer Warren Ellis calls lab mode. That's been helpful to both focus some ideas and clear out some others. One of those ideas is for a paid, twice-monthly email letter. That letter might happen. Nothing may come of the idea. But watch this space for news or an announcement.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
What’s the Point of Epigraphs Anyway? — Wherein we dive into the quotations that appear on the opening pages of some books and learn why their use is controversial (both among readers and legally).
From the article:
Epigraphs aren’t self-indulgent, unhelpful, and expensive because of any inherent failures of the device itself or even due to ambiguities in the law. It’s because we’ve been letting authors get away with too much. Both the legal and aesthetic issues would be easily resolved if we held usage to a higher standard.
The Coming Second Copernican Revolution — Wherein Adam Frank argues that discoveries and developments in the field of astrobiology will turn our notions of life in the universe, and on this planet, on their heads, and explains why.
From the article:
The planetary is a radically new worldview and paradigm grounded in revolutionary scientific advances about biospheres and the planets that support them. It also yields insights into the fate of world-spanning “technospheres” like the one we’ve already assembled that’s driving the Anthropocene. Using this science as a frame, the planetary promises a new design for our future in a climate-changing world.
Bookselling Out — Wherein Dan Sinykin explores the changes to the bookselling trade over the last hundred years or so, changes (for better or for worse) that led to the number of bookshops, large and small, being decimated with some doggedly holding on.
From the article:
Rather than dark, stuffy spaces where a bookseller might offer an unsolicited suggestion, shoppers could enter bright, clean, spacious stores that felt like any other retail outlet in the mall. A democratizing ethos prevailed: consumers should choose what to read for themselves.
How the Famous Lucy Fossil Revolutionized the Study of Human Origins — Wherein we learn how a chance discovery turned the paleoanthropological world upside down and forced researchers to reconsider how early humans evolved.
From the article:
With the discovery of Lucy, scientists were forced to reconsider key details of the human story, from when and where humanity got its start to how the various extinct members of the human family were related to one another—and to us. Her combination of apelike and humanlike traits suggested her species occupied a key place in the family tree: ancestral to all later human species, including members of our genus, Homo.
How to Think About Relativity — Wherein Sean Carroll shares a different way to get our heads around the famed and feared theory, one which literally turns how we're taught to think about relativity upside down.
From the article:
Once you have the idea of thinking of space-time as a unified four-dimensional continuum, you can start asking questions about its shape. Is space-time flat or curved, static or dynamic, finite or infinite?
Why a Minnesota Man Walked Around the World, Traversing 13 Countries and 14,450 Miles in Four Years — Wherein we learn about David Kunst who, armed with only a series of mules and what they could carry (and, at stretches, the companionship of his brothers), circumnavigated the globe on foot, about the adventures and tragedy that he encountered, and about the legacy of that trip.
From the article:
The ambitious endeavor started in the projection room of a movie theater, in the enduring tradition of colleagues wishing they were elsewhere. David (nicknamed Dave) told Rick Ebensteiner, the theater’s manager, that he dreamed of driving a Jeep across South America. Ebensteiner shared his vision of something bigger: walking around the world.