SCALES #28: drinking deep
Hello, and happy 2018!
SCALES is back, after a conference/holiday travel hiatus.
As I'm writing this, the first flakes of the hyped East Coast cyclone bomb/blizzard are just starting to fall. Maybe it's my Minnesota upbringing but a foot, at most, of snow when I don't need to drive anywhere seems… welcome? I should be fine as long as I stay out of the wind—the temperature right now is warmer than what I've experienced for weeks.
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I spent the last week of 2017 studiously avoiding the catch-up work I intended to do. Instead, I read some books I received as gifts. The haul:
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, Valeria Luiselli: Novella-length essay describing the Central American child refugee crisis and the work Luiselli has done: first as triaging immigration law volunteer interviewing child refugees in Manhattan, and second as professor inspiring a group of student activists at Hofstra University on Long Island. Compared to Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, which was collaboratively written with a group of juice factory workers, the structure was more straight-ahead than I might have expected based on the subtitle. Still, a model of writing directly engaged with the world, full of specificity, willing to listen and observe.
Sourdough, Robin Sloan: When I got to the minor character who has developed a way to roast coffee beans with an unprecedented level of precision using lasers, that sealed it: I was squarely in the book's target demographic. An overabundance of play with ideas about technology, work, storytelling, culture. A comfort read that made me want to get back to making sourdough. (And there have been recent Gastropod episodes both including Robin and about sourdough—coincidence?)
Void Star, Zachary Mason: I remembered Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey being a lot of combinatorial fun, short sketches heavily indebted to Invisible Cities. Here, the generally brief chapters, with a constant rotation through the trio of main characters, give a similar impressionistic feel. This time there's an overarching sci-fi thriller plot, but Mason seems perfectly willing to sacrifice its coherence in favor of flashing a series of striking images and ideas onto the page: AI whose inner workings are impenetrable except to those with augmented brains, drones constantly rebuilding maze-like favelas, a long-abandoned space elevator disappearing into the sky above a deserted island, autonomous cars outfitted with self-defense weapons.
And still to be read: The Idiot, by Elif Batuman (though I'm constantly surprised the cover doesn't credit the author as @bananakarenina).
In other reading news: Pome has quietly returned for the first few days of the new year, kicking things off with C.D. Wright. Some interesting year-end book lists from Suzanne Fischer's and Matt Webb's newsletters.
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I've started listening to the cubesat Planet Money miniseries (h/t Matthew Braga's recently started sensor readings newsletter): did you know the original cubesat dimensions were based on a container marketed to Beanie Baby collectors?
I had all kinds of plans to listen to New Orleans-centric podcasts in preparation for my trip there. I ended up managing to listen to some Gravy episodes: one on food, rebuilding, gentrification, and tourism in the post-Katrina city, and one on the history of Bourbon Street.
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Alex Ross reports on the latest re: Star Wars leitmotifs (spoilers ahoy!).
Read "The Virtuoso", a New Yorker tearjerker, on Tilly Minute's recommendation. Went in skeptical, left with the room a little dusty.
Almost missed "The Image of Time", a particularly good entry in Teju Cole's New York Times Magazine series on photography: "I can’t help sensing in these works, which photographically verify the passing hours or days or years, a quiet gratitude about the simple fact of return." Thankfully the piece was linked to in the Kottke 2017 recap. (Looking forward to Noticing, the new newsletter!)
Two pieces by Liz Pelly (h/t Slate's year-end Music Club) illuminated for me how Spotify's playlist-centrism isn't just a natural outgrowth of "the streaming era" but a conscious move by the company to be the gatekeeper for music discovery. The unsettling thing to me isn't so much the algorithmically-generated playlists as the data used to feed those algorithms: playlists controlled by Spotify and the major labels. I agree with the suggestion to use more human-curated playlists in the upcoming year, but I also continue to feel like the solution sounds a lot like… local and independent public and college radio.
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Science!
Beyond the buckyball: calculating the geometries and stabilities of all 1812 (!) isomers of C60. (Reminder of the Buckminster Fuller-obsessed, mathematically inclined, garlic-growing, Cambridge expat shuttle driver in Western Mass.)
Peregrine falcon attack trajectories are as sophisticated as guided missiles.
Fluid-driven origami-inspired artificial muscles.
The robot crawling baby carpet dust exposure study has been published. (If you'd like to be terrified, I made a GIF.)
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Nicolett Ave pandas are happy because they know it's time for phở on a freezing day.
Programming note: It looks like Mailchimp (kalelimp) is aiming to phase out Tinyletter in favor of unifying its service under the simian name. What does that mean for this newsletter? I don't know! But I don't expect it impacting you, loyal reader.
—Adam