Dispatch

These photos from Planet Stories are just incredible. The oblique angles communicate the grace and scale of our planet in a new, profound way much like satellite photography did for the first time with Earthrise.

This series in particular is not to be missed:

And this interactive map of San Francisco:

I knew I’d seen this somewhere before: in 2015 they released an enormous low-angle shot that captures the state of Colorado in its entirety:

This:

China used a tiny chip in a huge hack that infiltrated Apple and Amazon
https://bloom.bg/2ycZ9TI

— Bloomberg (@business)

October 4, 2018

Followed by this:

This 6.5 MB Bloomberg article injects targeted code into your browser and pings back to a suite of mystery servers every few seconds while the page is open. Most of its components serve no obvious purpose.

— Dork money defeats dark money (@Pinboard)

October 4, 2018

Nabham again in Where Our Food Comes From:

Living through the famine of 1891 and 1892 had a profound effect on Vavilov just as the 1873 famine had on Tolstoy.

It was into this era of calamity and inequity that the worlds greatest agricultural scientist had been born and the seeds of the Russian revolution were sewn.

Nothing breeds change like hunger.

Gary Paul Nabhan describes one of Nikolay Vavilov’s early experiences in Where Our Food Comes From:

He was on assignment from the czarist government to determine why Russian troops at remote garrisons were getting sick on the wheat flour in their rations.

Soon Nikolay arrived at the first garrison near the Iranian border, where he quickly surmised that the soldiers were being fed flour that included not only the ground grains of wheat, but the ergot-infested seeds of a weedy grass named darnel, as well. Ergot is a fungus that attacks the grass seeds, producing toxic but typically sub-lethal levels of lysergic acid, the naturally occurring drug that later became famous as LSD.

Nikolay quickly completed his official assignment by making a simple suggestion to the garrison commander: The men would probably stop hallucinating soon after he bought them some better-quality flour.

This was in 1917, decades before the discovery of lysergic acid.

There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquility born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence.

Tara Westover in Educated

In this article from the Huffington Post, Michael Hobbes captures a lot of what it feels like to be a young person today: the profound uncertainty, desperation, and anger.

He describes in minute detail the ways our systems of economic safety are failing us, and points to fundamental changes in attitude that have caused them:

Over the last four decades, there has been a profound shift in the relationship between the government and its citizens. In The Age of Responsibility, Yascha Mounk, a political theorist, writes that before the 1980s, the idea of “responsibility” was understood as something each American owed to the people around them, a national project to keep the most vulnerable from falling below basic subsistence. Even Richard Nixon, not exactly known for lifting up the downtrodden, proposed a national welfare benefit and a version of a guaranteed income. But under Ronald Reagan and then Bill Clinton, the meaning of “responsibility” changed. It became individualized, a duty to earn the benefits your country offered you.

This is something I’ve felt acutely during my time in America, where benefits that ought to be universal are tied to employment.

Hobbes goes on to examine the housing affordability crisis:

Falling homeownership rates, on their own, aren’t necessarily a catastrophe. But our country has contrived an entire “Game of Life” sequence that hinges on being able to buy a home. You rent for a while to save up for a down payment, then you buy a starter home with your partner, then you move into a larger place and raise a family. Once you pay off the mortgage, your house is either an asset to sell or a cheap place to live in retirement. Fin.

This worked well when rents were low enough to save and homes were cheap enough to buy. In one of the most infuriating conversations I had for this article, my father breezily informed me that he bought his first house at 29. It was 1973, he had just moved to Seattle and his job as a university professor paid him (adjusted for inflation) around $76,000 a year. The house cost $124,000 — again, in today’s dollars. I am six years older now than my dad was then. I earn less than he did and the median home price in Seattle is around $730,000. My father’s first house cost him 20 months of his salary. My first house will cost more than 10 years of mine.

This part in particular resonated with me. As prices rise faster than we can save, buying that first home is increasingly impossible. My wife & I have had immense privilege and good fortune our whole lives and yet without some miracle windfall we, too, will struggle to become home owners in our hometown of Auckland. And there seems to be little will to fix the system, especially in New Zealand where home ownership is so inextricably linked to a secure retirement:

All the urgency to build comes from people who need somewhere to live. But all the political power is held by people who already own homes.

There is a deep unfairness to it all. And not one perpetuated by any one actor. It would be easy to point to our parents generation and place blame, but I expect many of them are as worried as we are.

— Roy Carlson

One of many gems from this 1985 article by Jim Bentley.

Tim Urban’s delightful description of a wood fire.

Another from The Idea Factory:

Unfettered research, as Odlyzko termed it, was no longer a logical or necessary investment for a company. For one thing, it took far too long for an actual breakthrough to pay off as a commercial innovation — if it ever did. For another, the base of science was now so broad, thanks to work in academia as well as old industrial labs such as Bell Labs, that a company could profit merely by pursuing an incremental strategy rather than a game-changing discovery or invention.

In sum, it had become difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, for a company to capture the value of a big breakthrough. So why do it? To put it darkly, the future was a matter of short-term thinking rather than long-term. In business, progress would not be won through a stupendous leap or advance; it would be won through a continuous series of short sprints, all run within a narrow track.

In American and European industry, Odlyzko concluded, the prospects for a return to unfettered research in the near-future are slim. The trend is towards concentration on narrow market segments.

Andrew Odlyzko in 1995, on the death of commercially-funded basic research in the states.

This incremental approach is typified, I think, by Apple right now: every year a new and slightly improved iPhone.

Jon Gertner in The Idea Factory, discussing early mobile phones:

The main shortcoming, however, was that the Federal Communications Commission had only made a narrow portion of the radio spectrum — a portion just above the frequency of FM radio — available for mobile telephone service. The narrow spectrum meant there were only a few channels available to make calls. In all of Manhattan, fewer than a dozen people could use their car phones at any one time.

I find this incredible to think about.