SCALES #50: other weaves
Hello!
Against all odds, I’ve made it to issue #50 (fifty!) of this here newsletter. I’ve found it to be a rewarding project throughout, so thank you, dear reader, for following along.
I was trying to think of some way to commemorate the milestone by summarizing the contents of the newsletter up to now. At this point I’ve learned there are, ahem, certain topics, stylistic tics, points of view that I return to time and time again, and I was thinking of ways to represent that for…posterity, I guess?
To do this in as nerdy of a way as possible, I discovered there’s a very easy-to-use implementation of a Markov chain generative text model that I could load the corpus of the first 49 newsletters into and see what it spits out. I was surprised how fun I found this to be! Because the best way to use this kind of thing is in tandem with human judgment (Robin Sloan, of course, being a master of really impressive, much more refined computer-assisted writing projects), I messed around with tuning a few different parameters, &c., kept spitting out sentences, and only saved the ones I liked.
So, in the following section, a curated sampling of my favorites:
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SCALES, remixed
I assume all scientists are equally passive in riding along in time.
Ferrante: “The metaphor of atmospheric circulation as the source files better-defined, which warms for my obsessive heart and gives a person opportunity of tasting the notable literature of the theory became widely accepted as a soft spot for MIT’s brutalism.
A more short-term field campaign can be a great history of the omniscient pseudo-scholarly narrator from well after the Ohio college by an early resident of the wind—the temperature right now for only $5.
▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ ▢ Science!
That voice, the solemn gong, described as a single knowable object, it has to start with a coal-related venture in Nova Scotia.
My brain is comforted by the machinists, asking the electrical technician to help out with the paper’s fibers.
▢ ▢ ▢ So I was reminded of how deeply everything is working—the problem is to try out other weaves.
Using the wrong move, the droplet on a sunny July day, and I try to predict these things, at a Vermont prep school.
If nothing else I want to focus on climate science is still running despite never having been here now and I’m ready to go.
It’s been busy in these kinds of different combinations of changes in the sky progresses than what I read, listen to, watch.
There are plenty of newsletters that I’ve been assembling on Etsy, but she looked as if through a climbing-raccoon lens.
Some albums were favorites, some sad and lame, some sad and lame, some were an attempt to live in the same humanity.
And, along the coast fades away as you descend into the cup that was also at a certain close-mindedness about scientific disciplines.
There are moments of sentiment and melodrama, but it’s time for other thinking.
▢ ▢ ▢ So I was turning around in my phone a typo-laden transcription of some notable event in the world—but this newsletter is back.
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Okay, back to purely human Adam now. I think that was plenty self-indulgent. (And very possibly guaranteed some other automated system will flag this dispatch and divert it from your inbox.)
OR—I don’t know, I’m tempted to declare that last section contains some of the best writing this newsletter has ever had. The technique and the corpus aren’t really sufficient to rebuild my entire newsletter-writing voice from the ground up—I guess a reassuring thought—so there are lots of fragments that are clearly directly lifted from a particular issue or other. The effect is a little crude and one-note—a sentence goes a certain way, then swerves somewhere else—but happily works out well for this retrospective project.
I like how by removing semantic meaning from the sentences, the reader’s focus shifts to other things: the nouns, the verbs, the go-to phrases. The effect isn’t entirely unlike cutting up text on paper and collaging them together, as I’ve experimented with before. The technique took my writing voice but reconfigured the language in more fanciful, metaphoric ways my usual stodgy literalism keeps closed off. Opens up possibilities! “The coast fades away as you descend into the cup”; “the solemn gong, described as a single knowable object.”
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Also...
WPA-hired pack horse librarian “bookwomen” of Eastern Kentucky! (And in the same episode, a moving story about the repercussions of digitizing a World War II oral history.)
The entirety of Articles of Interest.
“Computational composition in the United States got its start, quite literally, in the off-hour downtime of the military-industrial complex.”
“That first, formative decade of the Dartmouth network had created a masculine computing culture for users and experts alike that was hard to break. It was also a computing culture that spread throughout the 1960s, ‘70s, and beyond.”
A heartrending conclusion to Serial’s third season, and a concrete-solutions-focused SerialLand: “Show up, get involved, and I believe we can make a difference.” (Further wrapped up in Belt.)
Jenny Odell, “Designing for the in-between: hybrids, 1990s net art, and a giant floating worm”:
“What would it mean to design for the in-between? For shapeshifting selves, for emergent alliances, for ambiguity, for contradiction? What would a social network look like that isn’t extractive, that would not appropriate but rather accommodate individuals and the not-quite-one, not-quite-two nature of actual interaction and identity?”
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Sciencing!
A moving obituary for Ruth Gates, a coral reef biologist who seems to have been impressively mindful of how her position could contribute to scientific knowledge, the scientific community, and society.
Highly recommended: the TROPOMI satellite's Instagram.
A pellucid Bruno Latour profile.
A hemimastigote found in Canadian dirt serendipitously (“serendipitously”—not difficult to see the make-your-own-luck kind of moral) collected on a hike leads to a genetic analysis suggesting the tiny eukaryotic critters are a new supra-kingdom of life, more different than animals and fungi are similar. In the CBC story linked above I love the juxtaposition between novel science and utterly prosaic photographs: here is an laughably normal-looking stretch of woods that revealed a profound surprise about the tree of life; here is a standard-issue camping breakfast made by researchers who used their experience, technical skills, and a little luck to advance the scientific enterprise.
And also, here is the caption conveying the hairy thrills of microbiology: “Hemimastix kukwesjijk feeds on its prey in this microscope image. It attacks the prey with harpoon-like organs, then uses its flagella to bring the prey to its mouth, called a capitulum, and sucks out the juices or cytoplasm.” (If you were wondering, “[t]he researchers named [the newly discovered hemimastigote] Hemimastix kukwesjijk after Kukwes, a greedy, hairy ogre from the mythology of the local Mi’kmaq people. (The suffix ‘jijk’ means ‘little.’)”.) (Full paper)
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Snow: here and gone.
Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.
—Adam