Kickoff For October 14, 2024
It's good to be back. OK, the letter really didn't go anywhere in the last few weeks, nor did it take the short hiatus I expected it to. But with a broadband connection firmly in place in my new place, prepping The Monday Kickoff is a heck of a lot easier.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
What Does It Really Mean to Learn? — Wherein Joshua Rothman explores how we absorb and process information, how that information transmutes into knowledge over time, and what can make someone an effective learner (it's not always higher intelligence).
From the article:
This sounds chancy and vague, until you reflect on the fact that knowledge almost never arrives at the moment of its application. You take a class in law school today only to argue a complicated case years later; you learn C.P.R. years before saving a drowning man; you read online about how to deter a charging bear, because you never know. In the mid-twentieth century, Toyota pioneered a methodology called just-in-time manufacturing, according to which car parts were constructed and delivered as close as possible to the hour of assembly. This was maximally efficient because it reduced waste and the cost of storage. But the human mind doesn’t work that way. Knowledge must often molder in our mental warehouses for decades until we figure out what to do with it.
The Imperial Origins of Big Data — Wherein we once again dip into the what's new is old again files and learn that efforts to collect and to try to store, organize, secure, and make sense of huge amounts of information date back centuries.
From the article:
The history of the early modern information state offers no simple or straightforward answers to the questions that data raises for us today. But it does remind us of a crucial truth, all too readily obscured by the deluge of popular narratives glorifying technological innovation: that questions of data are inherently questions about politics.
A Boat Ride to the Confluence of the Two Niles — Wherein Charif Majdalani recounts an early-morning trip down the famed river while in Khartoum, and at key points on the river recounts some key moments in Sudan's history.
From the article:
This boat was painted in the tri-horizontal colors of Sudan’s independence flag: blue, yellow and green, representing the Nile, the desert and the fertile land. In my mind, it offered an emblematic image of freedom and possibilities while floating over the mixed waters of the confluence.
Computation Is All Around Us, and You Can See It if You Try — Wherein Lance Fortnow explores the idea that when you start to seriously things about the concept of computation you can visualize how the process applies to all aspects of lie, even the most mundane ones
From the article:
This innate sense of a machine at work can lend a computational perspective to almost any phenomenon, even one as seemingly inscrutable as the concept of randomness. Something seemingly random, like a coin flip, can be fully described by some complex computational process that yields an unpredictable outcome of heads or tails.
I Cannot — Wherein Lucy Schiller ponders the (forced) gravity, formality, and seriousness that seems to have taking hold, especially online, over the last decade or so.
From the article:
Of course, “essay means ‘to try’ ” has become its own aphorism, so accepted among contemporary essayists that it’s easy to assume that all the lightly elevated language, the slight stiltedness to certain phrasings, are simply an extension of this idea—of trying to be heard, of trying to eke meaning from experiences we carry inside. Yet I can’t help but imagine, too, a different kind of trying: mundane, unsure, suggested, loose.
Liquid Bewitchment: Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850](https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/liquid-bewitchment/) — Wherein James Brows examines the hysteria and the reality around the introduction and popularity of the titular spirit in the England of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the attitudes that accompanied it.
From the article:
As well as being vended and enjoyed within these specialised settings, gin was a promiscuous and ubiquitous substance that insinuated itself into a variety of preexisting sites and spaces.