SCALES #39: duck authorities
Hello!
Lab work has been crunching up serious time as of late. Right now we’ve been stuck on a problem that’s following the classic contours of what can be described in technical language as “a huge pain”: there’s a bigger, more important project in mind; what seems like a trivial check (here, detecting a particular molecule of interest using our paper spray setup) needs to be done; said check doesn’t work right away; none of the obvious fixes fix; consultation with the advisor doesn’t lead to a breakthrough; flailing in search of a solution commences.
One piece of grad school folk wisdom I heard early in my Ph.D. has stuck with me, and I try to keep it in mind at times like this. In research, the advice goes, the things that work well move forward really quickly; it’s the problems you get stuck on that take a lot of time. As a result it’s even the successful scientist’s lot that most of the time is going to be spent doing the slow, laborious troubleshooting.
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I just learned City of Boston staff refer to the big challenges of local government—the housing affordability, the schooling, the road maintenance, the emergency services—as, of course, “wicked problems”.
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Only took reading one essay about gardening to trigger Haley Heynderickx singing “I need to start a garden, I need to start a garden!” getting re-stuck in my head.
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So I was listening to this podcast…
On Distillations, the patent fight over the invention of the laser (as a “light maser”) reveals, as always, the fiction of “invention” as something a single person does.
Ear Hustle is back!
Chana Joffe-Walt interviewed by Longform about her “Five Women” story on This American Life.
Surprise thermodynamics in the Gastropod episode on military food R&D at the Army research center in Natick, Mass.: preventing soggy crusts in shelf-stable pizza MREs by using humectants to match the water activity in the sauce to that of the bread.
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Reading list
Helen Macdonald travels to the high Chilean desert and profiles Nathalie Cabrol, an astrobiologist with a strong mystical streak.
Kathryn Schulz on stinkbugs as the latest awful invasive bug to the US. A gleefully presented horror story.
A lot went over my head, but I appreciated reading Roger Penrose giving a technical description of Stephen Hawking’s scientific accomplishments.
“The U.S. Clean Air Act is widely regarded as having produced large reductions in air pollution. In the four years after its 1970 enactment, American air pollution declined by 20 percent on average. But it took about a dozen years and the 1981–1982 recession for the United States to achieve the 32 percent reduction China has achieved in just four years.” Consider this mind rightly boggled.
Enjoyed playing the “how long until Oberlin comes in?” game with this sweeping look at American evangelicalism and politics, from the 19th century to now.
Paul Ford proposing a “Digital Protection Agency”.
From the backlog: very much enjoyed reading a a mixed memoir and deep dive into comma usage by Mary Norris of the New Yorker: “One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. The popular image of the copy editor is of someone who favors rigid consistency. I don’t usually think of myself that way. But, when pressed, I do find I have strong views about commas.”
From Lady Science, “Women’s Work in Natural History Museums”, centered on the key, hidden role played at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology by Elizabeth Hodges Clark.
Controversies in the fossil record over what is evidence of primordial life, going back to the 19th century.
Zeynep Tufecki minces no words on Facebook: “If Facebook failed to understand that this data could be used in dangerous ways, that it shouldn’t have let anyone harvest data in this manner and that a third-party ticking a box on a form wouldn’t free the company from responsibility, it had no business collecting anyone’s data in the first place. But the vast infrastructure Facebook has built to obtain data, and its consequent half-a-trillion-dollar market capitalization, suggest that the company knows all too well the value of this kind of vast data surveillance.”
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Republic of newsletters
Matthew Braga does some infrastructure sleuthing in Toronto.
The Audit—I’ll pull back the curtain and reveal it as a key source of my podcast recommendations, particularly for paying attention to what’s going on outside the US—is switching over to less frequent but longer dispatches. (And latest in my history of extremely slow-blooming pun realizations—“audit”, “auditory”!)
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Science!
I’ve seen my share of scientific papers using holidays with fireworks as excuses to study air quality, but never before Bonfire Night.
“A turning point in Freeman Dyson’s life occurred during a meeting in the Spring of 1953 when Enrico Fermi criticized the complexity of Dyson’s model by quoting Johnny von Neumann: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” Since then it has become a well-known saying among physicists, but nobody has successfully implemented it.” Until now. (h/t trivium)
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Duckin' authorities. (Not pictured: tiny front yard filled with golden ducks.)
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—Adam