SCALES #13
Hello!
I'm back from two weeks off due to a variety of reasons (going to a wedding! going to a graduation! thesis committee meeting!).
Latest update from lab is that after struggling with a mysterious flaky experiment, I made some small tweaks this week and… I'm starting to produce interpretable data!? Assuming I don't jinx myself, this is a big relief. In addition to taking off some stress about, you know, being able to finish grad school, I also just find it a lot more enjoyable to run experiments when they're working. I prefer my fiddling to be with data and words, not with the lab setup.
For these experiments where I periodically splat a levitating droplet and measure its contents, it's deeply satisfying to see that every time I look at the composition of an hour-old droplet, I see the same thing. There's this sense that a trajectory traced itself out as predicted, like a fly ball you've tracked to your glove, or a cake you've pulled out of the oven at just the right time. (Or on a more ambiguous note, a curve that's more Gravity's Rainbow, "screaming comes across the sky", &c.?)
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
I have been waiting for Switched On Pop to talk PC Music for so long. (And their coverage of the "pop drop" reaches a fitting conclusion with their analysis of none other than Fall Out Boy smirklingly blowing it up.)
The delightfully nerdy home solar panel/electrical grid "net metering" explainer you've all been waiting for.
Haitians in Greater Boston (one of the largest communities in the US) worried about their residency status, a short WBUR report.
Still Processing is just so good: Moonlight director Barry Jenkins. Whitney Houston.
Henry Threadgill on Meet the Composer. Particularly liked the description of his iterative rehearsal/composition process.
Links
The S-Town takes will not die! As a similarly credulous, going-out-of-my-way-to-assume-the-best-of-people person, the unpacking here of the limitations of host Brian Reed's empathy, non-judgment, and blind spots spoke to me.
Emily Nussbaum is always worth reading, no matter whether I've watched the show in question.
Biomass burning event in Cambridge.
Critical perspective on Pixar plots: "Pixar conceptualizes death not as the end of existence per se, but as the state of becoming waste. Waste does not work. Waste does not have a function. Waste is obsolete. Waste is undifferentiated."
Example-rich analysis of English rhyme technology between the Elizabethans and Romantics, and what is a "permissible" rhyme. Definite resonances with rap lyrics!
Rosa Parks's Detroit house, now in Berlin, is a crazy historical preservation story. So is this look into contest ballot box-stuffing and rival historic preservation factions in Newport, R.I..
Cormac McCarthy's provocative (and apostrophe-free) thoughts on the origins of language.
Illuminating interview with Zachary Woolfe about the direction of the New York Times' classical music coverage. Flashbacks to my musicology seminar and discussions of The Role of Music Criticism.
Looooong but good read on the move of a Cadbury chocolate factory from England to Poland and all it signifies.
Music
Bad and Boujee (ad libs only) (h/t nytimes popcast).
Email newsletters of note
Not sure why you aren't reading Mallory Ortberg's newsletter right now, to be honest.
Science!
Using the wrong kitty litter in nuclear waste containers led to a half-billion dollar cleanup operation. (Guilty of a similar nitric acid + organics in a closed container mistake as an undergrad! But on a much smaller scale and without the whole nuclear waste bit.)
Refreshingly precise use of chemistry in this Washington Post investigation into the varying degrees of "organic" milk.
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Hot evening yesterday in Cambridge!
Tried hard not to overdo the links too much with the multiweek backlog. Feels good to be back!
—Adam