And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been. [Rainer Marie Rilke]
Hey friends,
Happy 2024! I hope you all had a relaxing, rejuvenating, connected, peaceful, and/or adventurous holiday season, depending on what you most sought. I found the past few weeks of more relaxed schedule helpful to catch up with some tasks, shift gears to a new phase of my work, review how the last year has gone at a macro scale, and set some intentions for the future. If you’re interested in the latter two, check out my updated values page.
I also had a great time visiting family in the Chicago area, spending a week full of dogs (Laguna, my brother’s pup Koji, and my cousin’s dog Scout), blowtorches (thanks to my brother’s current interest in re-tinning copper pots and lost wax casting), and puzzles (Readactle, Connections, crosswords, and jigsaw).
Anyway, here are some random things I learned about recently as I continue to learn how much I don’t know about the world:
- Spite houses and spite fences (I… would maybe build one of these if properly motivated)
- The phrase “sensu strictu,“ which is the incorrect spelling of the actual Latin sensu stricto and likely used by people who want to be impressive by using obscure words in random contexts instead of just saying something like “strictly speaking.” Not that I don’t do the same occasionally.
- There was once a pair of twins named Bigamy and Larceny. Obviously, I thus spent a few hours learning about tort law, the legal definitions of trespassing, easements, estoppel… (all by Wikipedia, of course).
So, my questions for y’all! How did you spend the holiday season— do you find it to be a unique or special time of the year in some way, or just another stretch of time among the days we live? What is something you learned or heard about recently that surprised you in some way? As always, excited to hear from you, and thanks for reading!
Cheers,
Maya
Links
- 200 years of history, told through tree rings
- Some insight into the tension between clean energy and fossil fuels in 2023
- “God wants us to discover truths about the universe, but our hearts are hard, so he begrudgingly allows us to use statistics.” Or, how our dependence on statistics can hinder the scientific pursuit of knowledge.
- On the invisible behemoth of our reverse logistics industry — how you returning an unwanted purchase culminates in “a guy named Michael [who] has to sniff the sweatpants.”
- Related: a deeper look at the global and ethical implications of returns, “take-back” schemes, and the culture of fast fashion.
- Also: how a Guatemalan company is tapping into the used clothing market with technical skill and surprising success
- The societal causes and consequences of more popular, more dangerous, and ever-growing SUVs and trucks
- 100 little ideas that explain the world, by Morgan Housel. Curious how many of these have actual evidence behind them? Some that caught my interest:
- Base-Rate Neglect: Assuming the success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try doesn’t apply to you, caused by overestimating the extent to which you do things differently than everyone else.
- Apophenia: A tendency to perceive correlations between unrelated things, because your mind can only deal with tiny sample sizes and assuming things are correlated creates easy/comforting explanations of how the world works.
- Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
- David Roberts interviews the CEO of KoBold, a startup using AI to optimize discovery of rare minerals
- Four key metals for electrification that are hard to find and hard to replace: lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper
- Cost of difference between [quantity of metals we need to electrify by 2050] and [quantity of metals we will have available if we continue to use current mines] = >$15 trillion!
- Concentrated deposits are getting harder to find, but we aren’t getting better at finding them → even though payout of a successful mine is still high, cost of exploration is increasing
- Mostly looking at surface level, though we know the minerals are formed deeper underground
- Not a problem of absolute quantity of the minerals on Earth, but rather finding where they are economically concentrated enough to extract
- One major value added of KoBold is compiling and standardizing massive amounts of public geoscience data
- Framing mining exploration as making decisions to maximally decrease uncertainty using the sparse information available
- These musings by Adam Mastroianni on the thought patterns that keep us stuck in the hard times resonated so much. For example… “Often, I’m waiting for the biggest jackpot of all: the spontaneous remission of all my problems without any effort required on my part. Someone suggests a way out of my predicament and I go, ‘Hmm, I dunno, do you have any solutions that involve me doing everything 100% exactly like I’m doing it right now, and getting better outcomes?’”
- Linked within, and also so relevant: when trying harder isn’t the best idea
- Somewhat unrelated, but relatable thoughts on the experience of depression
- An epic work of embroidery that ties together hundreds of artists, dozens of countries, and over a decade of time
Books
- Mobility — Lydia Kiesling
- Azerbaijan book. What did I learn? Azerbaijan used to be part of the USSR; Baku is its major city; it borders and has warred with Armenia; its strategically located for oil pipelines; the word describing people from here is “Azeri.”
- A Pablo Neruda poem on Standard Oil quoted by one character… the “subterranean estates”
- Cantoras — Carolina de Robertis
- Uruguay book. What did I learn? A glimpse of the sociopolitical unrest in the country during the 1970s, and the haunting effects of a dictatorship on its citizens
- Read by the author!
- A narrative told through the seamlessly-shifting perspectives of five young Uruguayan women, this story painted a picture of the dynamic interplay between class, race, and gender through the captivating thoughts and relationships between its deeply-characterized, flawed yet sympathetic cast. I was initially hesitant of having so many main characters to keep track of, but I quickly learned the voice and personality of each— and, surprisingly, cared about the fate of them all.
- A Passage North — Anuk Arudpragasam
- Sri Lanka book. What did I learn? I admit I knew very little about Sri Lanka before this aside from it being a teardrop-shaped island south of India. I learned that there was a long and traumatic civil war in the country, with reverberations to this day. I learned that the island is much bigger than I imagined, big enough for long train rides through the country. I got a glimpse of the climate, though that didn’t stay with me as much.
- Framed through the narrator’s relationships with a cast of complex and emotionally-rich characters, this book offers thought-provoking philosophical musings on romantic and familial love, forgetting (of the forced and natural kinds), aging and death and the burden of surviving
- In the Shadow of the Mountain — Silvia Vasquez-Lavado
- [A Memoir of Courage]
- Peru book, with a bit of Nepal
- This has been on my to-read list for awhile, so I was excited to find it on sale at a book store in Banff!
- How do you drawn the line between suicidality and undertaking life-threatening, adrenaline-inducing adventures like climbing Everest? Something I’ve been asking myself since 2016— as Vasquez-Lavado was making her way to the summit, I now know.
- bergschrund: “a gaping crevasse where the glacier has cracked and pulled away from the mountain.”
- “Everest has many names, but they all mean mother. Sagarmatha— Mother of the Sky; Chomolungma— Mother of the World.”
- “Nothing we do is small.”
- “Reaching the top isn’t about the accomplishment. It’s about walking in the shadows long enough to see the other side, about learning to roll with other women and men, and how to lean on and support others instead of white-knuckling life alone. It’s about letting people brush up against you, even if they are headed in a different direction. It’s about sharing the journey, the stories, and the pain. It’s about knowing that climbing with others is the safest way to climb and the surest way to heal.”