SCALES #19: "local bananas"
Hello!
It's a short ("short") links-only week.
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Jill Lepore, interviewed: "Wouldn’t it be interesting to write the history of the editor, as a figure not in the history of literature but in the history of knowledge? One of the really staggering things to me about the great “newspaper death watch” of 2009 was the jeering jubilance of disruptors, their astounding confidence in the genius and efficiency of a new system of communication that, at the end of the day, did one thing above all: it killed the editor." (h/t A Working Letter)
Really charmed by Sam Sanders' interview of Lena Waithe (Master of None's Denise) on his new NPR podcast.
Oral and audio history of Basque sheepherders in the western US.
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Farmers market season and I keep thinking about the complicated interplay of food and class and race and ~authenticity~ depicted here: "My instructions were to claim that all the produce was local, although nothing was or could be local: It was early June in northwestern New Jersey’s Kittatinny Mountains, and the produce had been shipped from warmer parts of the world to the distributor who’d sold it to my boss. But “local” was the magic word hand-painted on our signs; it was what made our customers, most of them New Yorkers driving to country vacation cottages, slam on their brakes and pull over."
Via the New York Times' photo archive Tumblr (yes, it exists) I learned about the former United States Board of Tea. (The linked 1947 Times story reveals that during World War II the Board of Tea didn't meet because tea was allocated and pre-graded by the British Ministry of Food—fair enough!) Turns out Congress only voted to disband the Board in 1996.
Best piece I read this week in the Times of today: the Craig Taborn profile.
Matthew Guerreri on African-American composer, musician and bon vivant Nora Holt and lost history: "And none of it was preserved. No recordings of Nora Holt were ever made. Not the naughty French songs, not the light classics, not the blues, not her old, salacious signature number, “My Daddy Rocks Me (with a Long, Steady Roll).” That voice, the solemn gong, described as having a range from bass to soprano – the description is all we have. She spent a decade in Los Angeles, was the toast of Hollywood royalty, but never herself made it onto film. Nora Holt was an experience. Once it was gone, it was gone."
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Christina Xu on technology, culture and WeChat in China, and contrasting Chinese and American conceptions of "convenience". (Talk itself is only the first ~20 minutes.)
Despite having extremely limited technical knowledge, I'm fascinated by machine learning/deep learning/neural network system-building write-ups, and this one on "Not Hotdog" provides an interesting snapshot of the field in 2017: so much kind-of-alchemical "well, we're not exactly sure why it works better to do it this way than that way, but that's what people tell us", and having to puzzle out how a computer sees.
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Bill McKibben's New Yorker piece on electrification and distributed solar in rural sub-Saharan Africa stays pretty clear-eyed and focused on reporting the facts he sees on the ground.
Frustrated that this is probably paywalled for a lot of you, but a very clear Bjorn Stevens explainer on measuring cloud-aerosol interactions. (Also another example of the importance of volcanic eruptions as unplanned climate experiments.)
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Base-4 fractions in Telugu, feat. alternating characters for even/odd powers!: "This is all fanciful in English, but Telugu actually did this. Instead of 0-=Z they had ౦౼౽౾ as I mentioned before. And instead of Q|HN they had ౸౹౺౻. So if the Telugu were trying to write 7.4805195, where we had 7|ZHZQ they might have written ౭౹౾౺౾౸. Like us, they then appended an abbreviation for the unit of measurement. Instead of “gal.” for gallon they might have put ఘ (letter “gha”), so ౭౹౾౺౾౸ఘ. It's all reasonably straightforward, and also quite sensible. If you have ౭౹౾౺ tūmu, you can read off instantly that there are ౺ (two) sōlalu left over, just as you can see that $7.43 has three pennies left over." (h/t trivium)
Fun data-visualization-heavy story on science magazine dot com accompanying a new paper on egg shape across bird species: "The shape of an egg—how asymmetrical or elliptical it is—relates to flying habits. And the stronger a bird's flight, the more asymmetrical or elliptical its eggs will be." (h/t ERB)
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The Times archive photo in question—wish these dudes were having a little more fun!
Quick administrative note: I think it's possible last week's note (#18) got stuck in some of your spam filters. If that was the case, you can help me out by marking it "Not Spam". Adding me to your address book might help prevent filtering issues in the future.
—Adam