Hi friends!
I’ll be working today, but I hope you have a restful Saturday with these reads. Lots of great stuff to explore this week, if I do say so myself.
The Weekend Reccs
Just, wow: This may be the first time a technological advancement brought tears to my eyes. Truly remarkable; watch the video.
Shameless plug: I wrote up some thoughts coming out of my earlier discussion on different forms of data.
The point from last week about books is only tangentially related, but actually is much more closely aligned with this paper I found. More specifically the point I was raising was about information efficiency in terms of resources per bit. Each copy of a book is a redundancy that was needed for distribution in the world before the internet and eReaders. Now, even digital copies of books are wasteful, despite the minimal real estate they take up on our Kindles and computers. Ideally we could have one copy of each book hosted on a server, with each device pointing there when we wished to read it. Maybe some extra copies for backup. Some physical copies, too, for those areas without internet. But, of course, the world of publishing was not built upon such considerations.
Scrollytelling, redux: Back in June I had linked to a great scrollytelling piece by the Times. They continued to impress with this deep dive into Hokusai’s “Ejiri in Suruga Province”. The thing I love about scrollytelling in particular is that it is created for our digital world whereas normal news articles are just a digital representation of an analog medium.
Speaking of art: Lots of folks commented about the Roman statue video from a few weeks back. I couldn’t help but thinking about it while reading this piece on the history of the primary colors. It is a little long-winded and I do not know many of the artists mentioned, but I really enjoyed the linguistic and historical factoids sprinkled throughout.
Lego Lessons: I don’t know anything about design, and I have a hard time whenever I try to learn about it, but I always really appreciate when folks teach things in innovative ways, like this post on the UX of Lego interface panels.
Consistency, not Efficiency: In middle school biology we learn that green plants are green because of chlorophyll. But green light is the most intense part of the spectrum, so why do they throw it away by reflecting it? A recent paper in Science suggests it is to ensure consistent inputs of energy across the different levels of shade a plant can expect to get during the day. The plants prioritize pretty good energy absorption at nearly the same levels all day long over big swings that may maximize total energy absorption. Here’s a good summary.
Quick Links: Lots of old money. Larger student loans are better. The most accurate calendar (s/o Benedict Brady). Oysters. Jupiter made the solar system boring.
Lagniappe
While watching Biden and Harris’s first speech together as a ticket, I was reminded of this poem by Langston Hughes, which Caroline had sent me some time ago.
Graph(s) of the week
[The Economist] Interesting effects at play here. NE has the lowest rates and the most educated populace, if I’m not mistaken, so some overlap there. Also if you’re the holder of a postgraduate education you may feel very confident in schools in your neighborhood reopening safely since they likely possess proper funding. Of course, it is probably also true that postgraduate holders have a better sense of the importance of uninterrupted education. The vaccination graphs are pretty surprising and worrisome.
[WSJ] The typical terminology here is that if more than 30% of your income goes to housing you are “cost-burdened,” and if it is greater than 50%, you are “severely cost-burdened.” I would love to see the disaggregated statistics here for rent versus homeownership, as I imagine we might see more striking disparities. Interestingly, however, it seems overall spending on necessities remained pretty flat in each income quintile over time (slide 30 of this must-read deck from 2018 by Deutsche Bank) so I’d be curious to see the rent and homeownership graphs over time, too.
Your friend,
Harrison