Kickoff For October 28, 2024
It's Labour Day here in my antipodean home. Yet here I am, when I should be having a lie in or something, sending you another edition of The Monday Kickoff for you. See how much I care?
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Against humility — Wherein Rachel Fraser explores the idea of intellectual humility, why it's made a resurgence in the last decade or so, and why that humility might just be a pose.
From the article:
But what if it turns out that our intellectual icons – our exemplars of the intellectual good life – tend not to be humble? What if it turns out that the growth of knowledge proceeds not via humility, but rather via stubborn pig-headedness? These are not hypothetical questions. A look at the history of science suggests that intellectual humility, far from being a crucial ingredient in intellectual flourishing, might serve to corrode it.
When Earth Had Rings — Wherein, via some new research, we take a trip far into our planet's past to a time when it might have been encircled by rocky debris which might have crashed into the Earth over time.
From the article:
“It seems plausible that the planets have seen multiple cycles of ring formation and loss,” Tomkins wrote in an email. These cycles would be triggered by the rare, very close passage of a comet or asteroid. Some planets are more likely to have ring phases than others, based on the frequency of asteroid flybys and the planets’ properties.
Enough, already: why humanity must get on board with the concept of ‘sufficiency’ — Wherein David Angus Ness examines the titular idea, looks at what it is and means, and why we need to embrace it.
From the article:
Sufficiency is a whole-of-government approach that aims to create the structural change needed for societies to consume less overall. It also seeks to ensure wellbeing for all people, not just the affluent.
It requires reassessing our needs and the ways they can be met. It requires policies with firm targets and supporting infrastructure, to foster change in individuals and businesses.
Why Is Everything So Ugly? — Wherein we dive into observations and thoughts around why visual disciplines have been embracing a drab, brutalist, homogeneous, and passionless aesthetic.
From the article:
In Prisoners of the American Dream, Mike Davis describes how, in the 1970s, “the adoption of new building technologies involving extensive use of prefabricated structures, like precast concrete, eroded the boundaries of traditional skills and introduced a larger semi-skilled component into the labor force.” If it’s cheaper to assemble concrete panels than to hire bricklayers, cityscapes will eventually contain fewer bricks.
Why I Write — Wherein, in one of his classic essays, George Orwell explains what set him on the path to becoming an author and the reasons why he stayed on that path until his final days.
From the essay:
The problem of language is subtler and would take too long to discuss. I will only say that of late years I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. In any case I find that by the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.
How to build a nuclear tomb to last millennia — Wherein we learn about the challenges inherent in designing, building, and running facilities in which to store some of the most dangerous waste humanity produces, and why finding the right site is both important and difficult.
From the article:
The designers' biggest headaches may result from a simple equation: the speed of technological change versus the length of the project. "This timescale means it's impossible to know if we will be using this technology [to contain the waste] in 20 to 200 years' time," says Delay. "But we have to demonstrate today that we have a solution to these problems in the future."