SCALES #63: cue fake drums
Hello!
Just a short check-in this time around. I hope you’re all staying healthy, looking out for those around you, and keeping cabin fever at bay.
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You’re reading SCALES, a newsletter by me, Adam Birdsall, who lives on the very old American frontier, works in the Rubber City, and has thought a lot about particles in the atmosphere. The title is capacious on purpose. You can unsubscribe at any time (link at bottom), forward, subscribe, or reply!
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Reading
Two slightly older pieces in new contexts:
For obvious reasons I keep thinking about this Heidi Julavits piece from late last year about avalanche school: how hard of a time humans tend to have at knowing how to behave when surrounded by danger that is hard to see but can easily accelerate out of control.
With the wild changes in online fulfillment I hope the packaging preppers of Roundup, Montana, are coping.
Music
I hope you’ve been finding some livestream performances to fill the holes in your concert calendar! Last night Zachariah Hickman had a charming, over-the-top show to try to help make up for the loss of a Club Passim date, feat. a camera on rollers, multiple instrument set-ups, a heartfelt song about a mimic octopus, and a slightly unhinged on-screen chyron.
I went to town on the Bandcamp 100%-revenue-to-artist day. Some choice cuts so far: Dan Bejar cues up his band, a local group casually name-drops Mussorgsky, Soccer Mommy sings the Boss, a Riverdog favorite plays a tune.
So I was listening to a podcast…
The new Radiotopia podcast “Over the Road” is an empathetic look at truckers in the US, hosted by “Long Haul Paul” Marhoefer.
I just started beaming when I saw the first episode of the “Home Cooking” podcast, hosted by Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway, is not only available but looks to have a bean theme!
Science!
For the obvious current beat: The Atlantic continues to be setting the bar.
Considerably more off-the-wall: What if SETI should be thinking about evidence for (sub)-nanoscale complexity? “(Instead, of course, we’re stuck looking for evidence of a very particular technology that was big on Earth a few decades ago—radio waves.)”
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Some words of wisdom I’ve been trying to keep in mind, courtesy of Robin Sloan:
“There’s a world waiting on the other side of this crisis, and that world wants your strange, personal video game; your cleverly-designed fanny pack; your email newslet—
Scratch that. There’s a world right here, right now, and THIS world wants those things! Even more, it wants, it NEEDS, signs of their production: the light in the (browser) window, the (digital) curl of smoke from the chimney.”
—Adam