SCALES #11
Hello!
Some code-wrangling this week in lab. For a while I've needed a way to automate extracting my data from the mass spectrometer. The commercial software that comes with the mass spec requires a whole bunch of clicking around that's fine for a one-off analysis, but at this point I think I'm well over the extremely scientific efficiency threshold.
Being an autodidact when it comes to all things programming (shout-out to ExilE-hints!), my process is not so terribly efficient. A lot of testing out each step in Jupyter (née IPython) notebooks and a billion browser tabs.
Ultimately, though, the surprising thing might be how much my coding process really isn't all that different from my writing process: starting with a draft that explodes in all directions, and then a gradual paring-down until something functional emerges.
It makes me curious about the origin of the mental model of computer program as quasi-linear set of written instructions (so I guess, a little further along into the history than the Jacquard loom-based punch card model). Sure, this method is compatible with How Computers Work, but it's certainly not the only possible mode of interaction. Machine learning, as a layer of abstraction on top of declarative code, seems to be emerging as one alternative model. The "wiring up a circuit" dataflow programming madness of something like Labview also has some fundamental differences. (Teaching a lab this week involving the latter definitely revealed to me that I did not think deeply enough how to communicate the assumptions embedded into interacting with Labview "code".)
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
Conversation about rewilding Siberia in the Anthropocene and long timescales, on Warm Regards. (Autoplay warning.)
I found 11 minutes' discussion of the British snap election on the Guardian's Brexit Means… pretty helpful.
Just can't quit those S-Town (I know, but this is a squeaky-clean family-friendly newsletter) takes: a convincing case on Still Processing that a novelistic study of the US South + white people + time and the past demands a more thorough examination of whiteness and race.
Links
Toponyms as records of once and future climates: "as winter storms get stronger and more frequent, often swelling rivers and tributaries beyond their capacity, Chertsey and other waterlogged places are reclaiming their medieval identities. “These names are once again accurately describing the behavior of water in England,” Jones says." (h/t @rebekkahrubin, @wcronon)
I think the big geoengineering story in the New York Times Magazine pretty successfully captures in broad strokes the state of the field, and how someone like David Keith takes very seriously the knot of tangled ethical, political, scientific and technological questions. (Full disclosure/humblebrag: I'm not doing climate engineering research, but my advisor was quoted, and it's very possible I was one of the students "cluttering" the described lab, "fiddling with pipettes and arcane scientific instruments".)
Ducked out of lab yesterday to see a conversation between @jonnysun, @dog_rates, and @susanbenesch at MIT Media Lab (full series of events), and feeling more Twitter goodwill right now. In that spirit, I enjoyed @tcarmody's guest Kottke posts as reminders of how joyous Twitter can be as a lab for experimentation with language: I am four eels! @horse_ebooks! the climax of @MayorEmanuel! Only quibble is that I would choose a different iconic @dril tweet.
Reminder from the Boston Globe about the persistence of housing segregation: "The average white family earning $78,000 a year in metro Boston lives in a neighborhood where the median household income is $72,400 a year, while the average black household earning $78,000 a year lives in an area where the median is $51,100 a year."
Choice profiles: Kara Walker. Mike Judge.
"Solresol, an artificial universal language designed at a time when individual nation-states were consolidating in Europe. Sudre envisioned "speaking" through the seven pitches of the diatonic scale, or the syllables assigned to those pitches in the solfège singing system, or really any system with seven units." (h/t The Paris Review Daily)
Email newsletters of note
Two recent dispatches from Zeynep Tufecki: (1) "Can We Make Bad Jokes in a World of Surveillance?", on digital personas and the stifling effect of "vague surveillance"; (2) "How Does One Despair Productively?", including this: "Electoralism, or reducing all political power to getting 1% more than the other side, has been warned against for so long, and yet here we are.. Possibly the worst way to make huge structural transformations in a country is the simple majority, a narrow win. Brexit and Turkey's recent referendum are potential cases in point. Electoralism is not necessarily a healthy democracy." (Not archived—subscribe.)
Science!
Climate change-induced glacier retreat and resulting "river piracy", over just a few months of 2016. (From the paper itself, I loved this mash-up of different eras' science and technology: "The 2016 terminus position [of the glacier] was determined from a Landsat 8 image acquired on 8 October 2016. The position of the terminus in 1899 was recorded by a series of oblique photos taken by A.H. Brooks during a surveying expedition, which we acquired from the National Archives, Ottawa, Canada.")
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Signs of spring in the neighborhood.
As always, replies welcome!
—Adam