SCALES #10
Hello!
After a long time in the wilderness of struggling to get an experiment working (not completely finished even now), I'm starting on some preliminary kinetics measurements. This involves generating a tiny droplet, leaving it suspended for a while in an electric field while its composition changes, and then destroying the particle to measure its chemical makeup. Each data point, produced by waiting for a different length of time, provides a snapshot. Put together the snapshots track the transformation in time of the particles.
We're interested in letting these droplets levitate from minutes to hours and days. Tied to the rhythm of generate–wait–measure–repeat on this very human time scale, I'm impressed with a strong sense of being-in-time. I've had the same feeling when doing kinetic measurements in the past, meditating on the isolation of time as a variable. Time itself is the force transforming the particles, and every, say, three hours of time applied to identical particles has the same effect. I'm not causing the particles to change; the particles and myself are equally passive in riding along in time. It's a strange meditative awareness of how deeply everything is embedded in time, especially any performance, whether it be a kinetics experiment or a piano recital.
Speaking of time...
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I've reached the end of S-Town, with its novelistic treatment of horology. ("The measure of time has something to do with me.")
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Time is a major theme (the major theme?) of Joanna Newsom's Divers: "Time is taller than Space is wide", "‘round every bend I long to see temporal infidelity", &c. I revisited the album this week and it's a masterwork in the classical sense, showcasing the artist's ability to perform everything to perfection: the skillfully deployed orchestral arrangements, the impossibly clever lyrics that somehow still flow naturally (how can I resist an album that name-drops both fluorescence and phosphorescence in ways poetically sensitive to the scientific details of each?), the absolute control of voice (those anticipatory and delayed entrances!), the technical shredding on harp, the thematic unity and essayistic grappling with themes of time, identity, place. Genius.
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
S-Town post mortem with host Brian Reed. Was especially interested to hear more about Starlee Kine's role as story consultant, since some of the beats felt very Mystery Show to me.
I loved hearing about the activism and science involved in cleaning up the air of West Oakland, polluted in large part from Port of Oakland cargo ship-related activities.
New Gastropod on vitamins, including a great history of science tale of how a Dutch scientist first puzzled out the existence of vitamin deficiency.
Links
A lot this week!
RIP Lucky Peach and its influential illustration-based design.
"Today, and especially today, as the threat of desensitization—and the accompanying seductions of detachment, outrage, revulsion, indignation, piety, and narcissism—looms over all our lives, we might need to ask ourselves the question that Chekhov asked himself in the spring of 1890: What will move me beyond this state of anesthesia? How will I counteract the lassitude that creeps over my soul?" (h/t The Paris Review Daily)
Teasing apart the chemical composition of old book "heritage smells". (h/t The Paris Review Daily)
Hiking the Appalachian Trail as a black woman.
Choice cuts from a new Lorde profile: (1) "While making “Melodrama,” Lorde took lots of subway rides, auditioning rough mixes of songs on cheap earbuds, which helped give her a sense of how the music would sound in daily life," and (2) "[Max] Martin described “Green Light” as a case of “incorrect songwriting,” Lorde said, clarifying that this “wasn’t an insult, just a statement of fact,” and one, furthermore, that she agreed with: “It’s a strange piece of music.”" (More on this in a Switched On Pop episode.)
"The island continent has not been mere background. Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family. Like many Australians, I feel this tectonic grind — call it a familial ache — most keenly when abroad."
Nonunion factory jobs at the Tesla plant: "Instead of offering workers better wages and input on production, Musk promised “a really amazing party” for the launch of the Model 3, “free frozen yogurt stands” at the factory and “a Tesla electric pod roller coaster” connecting the parking lots. “It’s going to get crazy good,” Musk concluded."
Slightly more abstract, but still deeply harmful, consequences of having an oligopoly of an airline industry: "Despite a wave of mergers that is fast concentrating control in the hands of three giant carriers, the industry remains essentially insolvent. Absent any coherent outcry, the directors of these private corporations remain free to respond to the crisis in the manner of an electrical utility company that, when it runs short of money, simply cuts off power to the neighborhoods of its own choosing." (h/t David Dayen)
"For me, the stakes of thinking about what it means to be a stepmother don’t live in statistical relevance — slightly more than 10 percent of American women might relate! — but in the way stepparenting asks us to question our assumptions about the nature of love and the boundaries of family."
"Like many of its Midwestern brethren, Buena Vista County’s residents do not abide by the pronunciation of the original name, instead saying “BYOON-a Vista.”"
Hospital closures in poor rural America is bad news: "Haywood County’s budget has become a twisted mess as demand for the services of its ambulance authority has ballooned. “The emergency room now is the back of an ambulance,” said Bill Rawls, who grew up in Brownsville and was sworn in as its first black mayor the month the hospital closed."
"They estimated penguin population by the percentage of guano in a sediment sample, figuring three ounces of guano per day per penguin, and calculating how much of the colony’s output would flow into the lake. Using a sample to determine the amount of penguin guano flowing into the lake in a given period of time, they could calculate how big the colony was."
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I have a soft spot for MIT's brutalism.
Made it to double digits!
—Adam