May has been a month of flowers and sun -- welcome, after a
long cold lonely winter spring.
We all looked at the northern lights and took grainy pictures of them on our smartphone
and put them on our little instagram accounts/sent them to our friends
& I thought it was great.
• I finished a draft of a paper based on
this talk.
(It's an intermediate step, but so is everything except the last thing,
so I had a negroni and an egg to celebrate, because, why not.)
• My friend wrote a cute paper on how many mammoths modern-day Northern Alaska could maybe support.
Click on the mammoth to find out more! (TL;DR: 0.0–0.38 woolly mammoth / km2 (mean 0.13))
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• My friend and collaborator Greig posted a
preprint
of his model paper, on which I helped with a small part. We model the Salish Sea quite accurately at a
1.5km resolution, for decades -- neat!
• I spent a few days waffling about asking a question about a dataset because
I assumed I was missing something first-order / it was trivial to ‘the community’.
When I finally did, it turns out the answer was, whilst understandable, not obvious,
and that moreover the number of people in the world who could answer it is definitely
less than 10. A wholesome reminder.
• A less wholesome {but >= the first in terms of importance} reminder in the form
of, among others, the self-satisfied retired engineer who sat next to me on a plane:
Don’t tell people who they are or what their problem is,
unless they’ve explicitly asked you (this goes even if you know them well — perhaps doubly so).
• Sasha Dolgopolov
wrote their first stand-up in English. For fans of sardonic sensitive
Russian punks (which I am). {Key words: feelings, faxes, fritz-kola, Alexei Navalny}
•I really liked the history of freedom podcast series with Lea Ypi (h/t J.J., ofc) --
(enough to figure out how to
transcribe
it so that I could reread the
bits I missed when zoning out doing the dishes):
»
David Runciman: We now live in a world where that kind of speed has been franchised out to machines.
It just has, and I don't think it's coming back. That kind of knowledge, the ability to access this space so
that you can move in time with the pace of the information is so reliant now on machines which are
themselves controlled by and dominated by the forces that you just talked about. And I don't think,
my feeling is that this has escaped the story that we've talked about, which through the 20th century
did make a lot of sense. We have escaped it and part of the reason that we've escaped it,
I totally also get what you're saying that it's tracking one version of human reason,
but that version of human reason that it is tracking has now acquired a life of its own.
Lea Ypi: Fine, it has escaped. Is the escape irreversible or not?
Because if you think it's irreversible, okay, fine, let's close down the podcast, go home,
get drunk and wait for everyone to die. If you say it's reversible, the next question is,
what are you doing to reverse it? And that's the question that people need to ask themselves.«
•I'm reading Ian Urbina's really nicely paced book
Outlaw Ocean about the lawlessness of the seas (I found it because my favourite Slovak publishing house informed
me on instagram that it had been translated into Czech, of all reasons).
The first chapter is rather optimistic stuff, about the time that activists
from Sea Shepherd chased down a pirate fishing vessel (that had been wanted for years by INTERPOL for catching endangered species
but apparently none of the world's governments felt like doing anything about it)
over the course of 110 days and 11000 nautical miles,
until the captain sunk it to get rid of the evidence, and eventually people were fined and went to jail.
A nice clear win for the scruffy idealist corner, for once.
»This pointed to a commonly held misconception about these advocates.
They were often dismissed as dreadlocked, pierced, and tattooed kids and portrayed as undisciplined and naïve
escapists fleeing personal responsibility, the “real world,” and nine-to-five jobs. Mostly, that was false,
especially the nine-to-five part because, in fact, they worked even longer days at sea. Both the crews on the Sea Shepherd
ships and those on the Greenpeace vessels I’d cover later were driven people, type A even, just that their goals were not traditional résumé fodder.
Aside from their ocean campaigns, many of them were on self-improvement missions. Complain less, focus better, actually listen, be more present.
“It’s a daily reminder to be thankful that I have this job,” one deckhand told me when I asked why he always signed up for bathroom-cleaning duty.
“If I’m going to have these politics, I need to think through the unintended consequences,” another told me when I asked her why she was reading what
looked like a deeply boring book about global food policy. «
• I've spent enough time in the Canadian backcountry that I know the song The Mary Ellen Carter, of course
{filed under "quasi-motivational songs feat fiddle and banjo that are about pulling a sunken ship from the
bottom of a harbour, which is both a metaphor and not; no notes"}. What I hadn't known was the story of the
guy who
kept himself alive when his boat sank in the north Atlantic in February 1983 by clinging to a lifeboat and yelling
the lyrics to make it through the night. He survived,
and some maritime regulations were amended to make aspects of seafaring safer.
Something something victory of spirit over circumstance.
Two relatively new tracks I've been really liking lately, for very different moods:
♮ stark, sparse, beautiful cello-atmospheric-ambient named for Vancouver Island's
Quatsino Sound (h/t D.T.)
♮ self-assured, slightly ominous Spanish over uncompromising industrial synths.
a kick in the teeth (in a good way).
Soy quién quiero ser, tu no me cambiarás! (h/t M.P.)