September 6, 2020
Together Mode, the Moon Illusion, peanuts, storage, black holes, "score"
Welcome to the Weekend Reccs. Today’s world is curious and cacophonous. This newsletter delivers an eclectic sample of some of the best things to read, watch, and ponder over your weekend. There’s a lot of economics and politics, but there is also so much more.
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Hi friends,
Happy September. As a kid I always disliked this month—it was just there in the middle of school starting in August and the festivities of October. And now, with the pandemic lulled from a roaring terror into a terribly persistent companion and the election not yet all-consuming, we are faced with perhaps the most middling September of all. Yet even in the middling times there are memories to be made and the everlasting present to savor. In that spirit, I hope that you’re finding rest and enjoyment this Labor Day Weekend.
The Weekend Reccs
Indefatigabili-Teams: A few weeks ago I had dropped a note about the NBA’s use of Microsoft Teams. If you don’t watch the NBA, their stadium setup makes it look like fans are “sitting” in virtual stadium chairs. I found this curious but didn’t think much about it. This week I read this interesting piece from Microsoft on the feature they are using and an even more interesting background on one of the feature’s chief designers.
A mind-altering satellite: The Moon Illusion is a good reminder that there are lots of ways to be wrong but only one way to be right.
The Peanut Gallery: Note: I don’t know anything about biology or botany. Corrections to this section are highly encouraged.
Last week my coworker Noah mentioned peanuts in passing and got me thinking: why are peanuts shaped like an eight? It was surprisingly difficult to figure this out—all the Google searches I could muster came up with unclear or otherwise insufficient information. The following is the best I could cobble together.
First, some basics you may have forgotten since high school biology. Peanuts are legumes, like peas. Full-grown peanuts are pods that have seeds (nuts) inside them. We eat the seeds and discard the pod. Many plants have flowers with ovaries that contain ovules, and these must be fertilized for the seeds to develop.
Now to peanuts. Peanut flowers (which are quite beautiful) are fertilized above ground. These flowers then wither and the fertilized ovary forms a “peg” a type of ground-seeking stem that grows until it plunges itself underground and orients to horizontal (i.e. parallel to the soil) in preparation of the peanut developing. The peanut pod then grows from this now-underground peg, with both seeds growing at the same time. It seems the position of seeds as ovules determine their position in the peanut pod, and, while I could not confirm this, the “long” orientation (seeds growing one after the other, rather than side-by-side, the crux of the shape) appears to be evolutionarily advantageous for the whole pegging-part of things. I imagine you’d want the ovules one after the other to be able to make the peg as thin as possible so as to put all the energy into the major job of growing into the ground.
While researching, an unexpected (and similarly ungooglable) question came up: why does the peanut grow horizontally? I could not find even a whisper of an answer. My speculation is that peanuts need loose soil to grow, and that evolutionarily those that grew closer to the surface (while still under it) had the most success in finding loose soil, as topsoil is looser than deeper layers.
The Life-Changing Magic of Storage: This is a great piece giving a slice of the vibrant history of storage and hoarding. It is a little heavy on the analysis and light on the history for my taste, but still very worth a read. Something I love about reading such seemingly random articles like this is that they can connect to things that feel a world apart. This article reminded me of a paper that RISC came across when we were working with a social media company on algorithmic bias: Do Artifacts Have Politics?
The Universe is still a flash drive: A few weeks ago I wrote a short piece about the overwhelming data that we do not yet have the ability to read. I had a hard time coming up with great examples of this phenomenon in writing the piece. This week, however, a perfect one crossed my radar (err my interferometer?). Without the LIGO and Virgo detection systems described in the article, we would not have had the means to measure the 1/10th-of-a-second “sharp chirp” from which we could infer the presence of a black hole 17 billion light years away. The chirp would have been there, we just would not have had the means of receiving the chirp in a perceptible, much less meaningful, way.
Words have meanings: “Four score and seven years ago” is one of the most famous phrase in American history. Students learn, upon encountering this phrase, that score is a stand-in for 20 in a base-20 number system.
These students may, at a later date, be instructed to score their tests or score the pieces of clay they are about to join. In fact these all originate from the Norse skor, meaning an etched incision. This skor is most closely related to our pottery example, but learning that such etchings were used for counting by cultures with a base-20 system makes is easy to see how it made the jump over to 20 and finally to tallying up numbers (scoring a test, in effect, would be counting scores).
Quick Links: Bill Nye’s slide rule is in the Smithsonian. A gamer grandma. Early cat memes.
Lagniappe
Here is a website that aggregates methods to opt-out of data sharing with certain companies and organizations. For your own data hygiene I’d recommend combing through it and, for each entity that you interact with, considering whether you want your data shared with/by that entity.
Graph(s) of the week
[The Economist] Pretty striking numbers here.
[WSJ] Millennials and Gen Z are continuing to buy homes — which is a good thing.
Your friend,
Harrison