And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
Neither brave man nor coward, I tell you —
It’s born with us the day that we are born.
– Hector
From the Iliad, by Homer. Hector Returns to Troy.
Translated by Robert Fagles
Category: History
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Tim Hunkin is a professional tinkerer. His YouTube videos series The Secret Life of Components are excellent primers to the hidden lives of machines – their components.
A few notes on chains:
For us engineering noobs, the chain is associated with the bicycle. But oh it’s so much more. Tim Hunkin demonstrates the variety of their uses. Old fashioned arcades. Pulleys. And even a giant metal clock.
Belleville washers are “dished” spring washers. They look a bit like Satellite dishes. These help with torque.
The advent of the “Bush” chain was revolutionary. Bush chains are the modern chain. Their pins are able to slot all the way through the bush. This allows the chain handle greater loads.
They were invented by Hans Renold who founded the Renold Chain Company in 1880. The Renold Chain Company is still in operation.
H/T Kevin Kelly
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In an age when AI can write songs and poems for you, the human edge will come not in what we generate, but in what we save, what we collect, and how we arrange the data. We find this idea in Walter Benjamin, who praises the collector as one who redeems objects, by bringing them into constellation with one another. We find it in the work of Mallarmé, for whom chance is the great anthologist. We find it in Nietzsche’s revisionist philosophy of history, according to which the task of the historian is less to remember the past as it was than to use it, recontextualize it. We find it in the art of Joseph Cornell, for whom art is fundamentally arrangement.
Atkins, Zohar. Curation Over Creation: In Praise of the Anthologist. June 6, 2023, What is Called Thinking newsletterCuration has merit. With an AI abundant world on the horizon, curation could rise in value.
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“We can always become more human”
– Zena Hitz
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“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.“
From L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between“The past is never dead; it’s not even past.“
William FaulknerAnd from Breaking Bread with the Dead:
The decisions of our ancestors, however strange those people may be to us, touch us and our world; and our decisions will touch the lives of those who come after us. By understanding what moved them and what they hope for, we give ourselves a better chance of acting wisely-in some cases, as those ancestors did; in others, they didn’t. By understanding what moved them and what they hoped for, we give ourselves a better chance of acting wisely–in some cases, as those ancestors did; in others, as they didn’t. We judge them, as we should, as we must; but if we judge them fairly and proportionately, as we ourselves hope someday to be judged, then we may use them well with an eye toward the future.
Jacobs, Alan. Breaking bread with the dead: a reader’s guide to a more tranquil mind. New York: Penguin Press, 2020. (see page 143)You often hear “Forget it! The past is in the past.” sure, but the consequences of our decisions can reverberate longer into the future than we expect.
Social movements like Effective Altruism and organizations like The Long Now Foundation recognize this. The better choices we make today, paired with long-term preparation can give our decendants a chance to flourish.
Too deep for a Sunday morning?
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“Impossible only means that you haven’t found the solution yet.”
– someone
Morrison, Scott. 1972: The Series That Changed Hockey Forever. Toronto: Simon & Schuster Canada, 2022. (see page 243)This from what looks to be a fantastic book on the 1972 Summit Series.
Don’t fret. I didn’t know what the Summit Series was either. It was an eight game hockey series between Canada and the Soviet Union. This was the first time NHL players filled the Canadian national team roster.
On the surface 1972 looks like a hockey book, but as I read on I discovered it’s a Canadian history book. It’s packed with historical moments most non-Canadians would know nothing of.
See the FLQ crisis. Crisis of national identity is not something unique to the last five years.
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Found this one late. Will add to the original list of seven.
The decay of the body is irreversible. Death is non-negotiable. After that, what’s left? Stories. But not just the stories as the story tellers remember them and then recounted them to others. The stories that people adapt from other people’s stories which then are retold, remade, and handed down until only their essence remains.
Matt Zoller Seitz -
Ideas of India became one of my favorite podcasts in 2022.
In the 2022 in Review episode producer Dallas Floer’s posed the question to Shruti Rajagopalan.
Why should we talk about India more?
Three summaries from their conversation:
- Avoid cultural boo-boos. India is much more diverse than our immediate social circles. If you at the moment have young children, there’s a high likelihood they will marry someone Indian.
- India’s population is young, and getting younger. The global talent pool will continue disperse from there.
- As India’s infrastructure continues to develop, Indians will soon dominate the internet, YouTube, twitter, streaming apps, etc.
Read the full section of Shruti Rajagopalan and Dallas Floer‘s conversation below:
Why Learn About India?
FLOER: I have a general question—and I think this rounds out this first part of the discussion nicely—but why should we talk about India more? Why should more people be listening to, not just your expertise, but anyone who spends their time doing research and talking about India?
RAJAGOPALAN: The world demographics are changing, and I think we are not good at looking at the 30-, 40-year horizon, because of Twitter and all the other things we talked about. We’re so in the moment of what’s happening now. If you look at global demographics—and I recently started a Substack, it’s called “Get Down and Shruti,” and the first post was on this topic—the developed world is depopulating, or at least, the fertility rates are dropping quite rapidly. In fact, China will start depopulating next year, and it’s so far the largest country in terms of population.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: India will not depopulate until 2065. India’s population, which is right now 1.4 billion, will continue to grow and then start to go down only in 2065 when it peaks. Over the next 40 years, China will lose a quarter of a billion people and India will gain a quarter of a billion people. That’s like the size of Brazil and three-quarters the size of the United States, so that’s big numbers. What this means is India is very young; it’s only going to get younger as the world gets older.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: One in five young people in the world actually live in India, and half the Indian population is below 25. Even for very self-serving reasons, if people have nothing to do with India, the global talent pool, the workforce is going to come from India. And as India starts peaking, then it’s going to come from Africa. That’s where we need to pay more attention. The world just doesn’t pay enough attention to India or Africa, so that’s the big picture.
The other part of it is, India is also a subcontinent. It’s 1.4 billion people. It’s stitched together as a collection of people with different—it’s actually, religiously, the most diverse place in the world. It’s linguistically the most diverse place in the world. There’s, of course, caste heterogeneity. For these reasons, it’s difficult to understand India. Thinking that India is your buddy from accounting or IT in your office, that’s like one type of India and one type of Indian that you may meet in your social circle or in the neighborhood or in the office place.
India is actually very diverse and requires a lot of context to actually understand. If the future is India, and you’re going to have more people coming to universities, and there’s a good chance that some of the older listeners in this episode, their children end up marrying an Indian they met in college.
FLOER: Sure.
RAJAGOPALAN: Even if the base reason is you don’t want to make a cultural boo-boo in front of your future in-laws, you’ve got to know some cultural context. You’ve got to know a little bit more about India. I think, for various reasons, of course, if you’re a university or if you’re hiring, if you work in the AI or tech space, all the talent there is coming from India. So for different groups, India might be more or less relevant. If you work in the climate space, you should really focus on India. It’s going to be one of the largest-growing spaces, which means we need to worry about technology and how to control carbon emissions. It’s different for different people, but I think everyone should pay more attention to India.
FLOER: Yes.
RAJAGOPALAN: More generally, the baseline has to increase. And then, depending on what you do, you may want to zero in on certain kinds of books and podcasts and experts. Most Indians now have access to electricity. About 800 million-plus Indians have access to a smartphone, so now they’re on the internet. We are slowly getting to a point where the internet will also get dominated by Indians. In terms of natural language processing, more people sound like me than sound like you, Dallas. More people will spell like me than spell like you and so on.
I think, with an overwhelming number of Indians on the internet, people will also see that landscape change faster than immigration or them visiting India. Their Netflix front page will change quite dramatically and so on.
Floer, Dallas. (2022, December 22). Ideas of India Podcast, episode 69: 2022 in Review [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://ideasofindia.libsyn.com/eoy-2022Read the full transcript in full here
Listen to the podcast episode in full here:
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First appearing in his Essay “On Living in an Atomic Age“. Lewis answers the question – how to live in a time of uncertainty?
Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plagued visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat at night….The first action to take is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb come when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
Baxter M. Jason, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022. (see page 14)Whatever 2023 brings, let’s heed these words.
Do human things. Live.
Happy New Year!
Floodlights and Goalposts 