SCALES #16: "at least 127 colossal underground pillars"
Hello!
Stayed up way too late last night finishing The North Water by Ian McGuire: nasty, brutish, short tale of a late-period whaling expedition that (of course) goes wrong. The characterization, and to a lesser extent, the plotting, felt a little wobbly at times (though I think the terrifyingly devilish Drax will stay with me), but I don't think those were McGuire's primary concerns. Instead he seemed much more interested in atmosphere and language: a sense of dread, a suffocating atmosphere dense with smells and the language of sailing, the juxtaposition of fleshy, flawed characters against the forbidding, unknowable titular environment.
I'm really in the thick of it in lab, trying to hoover up as much data before parts of the experiment ship back to Switzerland next week. Constrained by a limited timescale, it's hard to troubleshoot why long-running experiments haven't been working as well recently. Instead now I'm shifting tack to learning about the short-term behavior of a range of different particle types. I can still be struck by basic chemical and physical truths: by eye the mixtures all look the same, but the mass spectrometer reveals the presence of different molecules, whose different minuscule masses cause them to accelerate through space at different rates.
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
Anna Sale, of Death, Sex & Money, interviewed by Ezra Klein. Love when her interviewing superpowers somehow pivot the conversation to a DSM-style discussion of Klein's childhood fear of death. (Also interesting to note how both Sale and Krista Tippett, whose On Being shares some DNA with DSM, started out as "hard-nosed" political reporters.)
Chef Marcus Samuelsson interviewed on Another Round.
With the podcast 74 Seconds, Minnesota Public Radio is providing updates on the trial of the police officer who shot Philando Castile. You might start with the first day of the trial proper, earlier this week.
Video
Struck by how well the first episode of John Berger's Ways of Seeing, from 1972, holds up: the refrain of "on your screen"; "The images come to you. You do not go to them. The days of pilgrimage are over"; "You cannot respond to me. For that to happen, access to television must be extended beyond its present narrow limits."
Links
Always worth reading Maciej Cegłowski on surveillance and our new technology overlords. The latest takes the EU perspective and has concrete suggestions of what might be done there. "Decisions about how this software works are not under any kind of democratic control. In the best case, they are being made by idealistic young people in California with imperfect knowledge of life in a faraway place like Germany. In the worst case, they are simply being read out of a black-box algorithm trained on God knows what data." (Also, hilariously and amazingly to followers of the Delicious/Pinboard saga: "Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.")
"A few ships were sunk intentionally. Then as now, real estate was a hot commodity in San Francisco, but the laws at the time had a few more loopholes. “You could sink a ship and claim the land under it,” Everett says. You could even pay someone to tow your ship into position and sink it for you. Then, as landfill covered the cove, you’d eventually end up with a piece of prime real estate. All this maneuvering and the competition for space led to a few skirmishes and gunfights." Some underground streetcar lines now pass through the hull of one of these ships! (Have had this topic on my mind since hearing from @urbnallen about his work on private land reclamation projects in Malaysia.)
Remembering civil unrest in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, 1967.
Also from the Globe: I had been so incredibly confused by the dual existence of WGBH/WBUR as Boston public radio stations. (I don't think it helped that my existing mental model was Minnesota's KSJN/KNOW/KCMP empire.)
Vertiginous just scrolling through the illustration of the rope-free climbing route up El Capitan.
Teaching climate science to high school students in communities where skepticism reigns: southern Ohio, northern Idaho.
Evergreen Rebecca Onion content from my Instapaper backlog: "An existing set of 19th-century juvenilia produced by children like the Nelsons—farmers’ kids, who lived in a rural setting and didn’t go on to become famous authors—is rare. Reading the Nelsons’ books, we get a unique perspective on late-19th-century American childhood, learning how farm kids felt about farm work; how young, rural readers processed and remixed the books and magazines they read; and how boys absorbed the era’s ideas about manhood."
Infuriating story, also in the backlog: investigative journalist goes undercover in North Korea; her resulting book is miscategorized as memoir.
Just one more reason we should all be more statistically literate (myself included): "“Because of the big El Niño event in 2016, I suspect that temperatures five to 10 years from now will be statistically comparable to 2016, even though 2016 to 2025 will be a warmer decade than the previous one,” he added. “If climate science is still very polarized, I have little doubt people will be talking about ‘how global warming ended in 2017,’” Colose told me. “It will be just as silly then, and hopefully all the hiatus talk this time around will serve as a compelling reason to ignore them.”"
Two 19th-century painters, Peder Balke and William Chappel.
"“How are we to be taken seriously as an institution of higher learning and research if our professors can be called before a ‘Council on Free Expression’ to defend their teaching of geology?” Vanness wondered."
In happier UW news: "Aldo Leopold’s field notes score a lost “soundscape”." (h/t Rob Macfarlane)
Mostly proud, I think, of how the Walker and the artist are addressing what seems like a big mistake in not consulting with the Dakota people about "Scaffold". (Also: "Van Bruggen contributed the cherry as a playful reference to the Garden’s formal geometry, which reminded her of Versailles and the exaggerated dining etiquette Louis XIV imposed there. She also conceived the pond’s shape in the form of linden seed. (Linden trees are planted along the allées that stretch before the fountain.)")
Science!
"Much of Louisiana sits atop an ancient ocean whose salty remains, extruded upward by the merciless pressure of countless tons of rock, have formed at least 127 colossal underground pillars. Seven hundred feet beneath Bayou Corne, the Napoleonville salt dome stretches three miles long and a mile wide — and plunges perhaps 30,000 feet to the old ocean floor." 2013 sinkhole news, via BLDGBLOG.
Here in 2017, "The story of modern human origins just got more complicated."
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Seeking information on this bread headwear spotted in Union Square.
Here's hoping the Cavs get at least one win in,
—Adam