Assorted Links (Summer 2024)

This summer has been very busy with work and family life, so I haven't had much time for writing. The title of this post, set when I started putting it together, reflects this. This blog is not defunct, however, so I wanted to at least share a link round-up like I do semiannually (more-or-less). By the time you're reading this, I will have finished reading the books I'd picked out for this year on the theme of industry/technology; hopefully I'll have some time to do some writing on this theme throughout the fall.

I came across a great anecdote from the 20th century physicist Richard Feynman that I wanted to share. In my observation and experience (related to research in water & wastewater, primarily), some of the most productive research comes from very ad hoc and janky-looking pilot or bench-scale equipment. Chaotic tangles of tubing, copious usage of zip ties to reinforce connections, that sort of thing. In most facets of water & wastewater, we understandably shy away from the Silicon Valley aphorism to "move fast and break things"; full-scale treatment plants (and let's not forget related infrastructure like distribution systems) have a responsibility to provide clean water day after day. However, when it comes to R&D, you can learn more if there's flexibility to rapidly try a lot of different things, with a comfort level around some of them failing. Equipment and systems quickly lose their shine when you repeatedly reconfigure them, but having the freedom to iterate in this way outweighs a lot of bells and whistles. As Feynman explains, something "completely inelegant" that you can fiddle with can often outperform "an insulated box with knobs".

I also knew that at MIT they had a marvelous cyclotron. They were very proud of it. MIT was self-confident and proud, and everybody at MIT thinks it’s great, and I thought that it was great. It was essentially gold-plated, if you know what I mean — I don’t mean literally — and the control board was in another room, with special glass panels and knobs and everything. It was very nice. I’d seen the cyclotron. But I knew from the journals that not much was coming from the MIT cyclotron, relatively, and therefore the Princeton cyclotron must really be something — you know? Of course, the MIT one was big, in two rooms, and so on. So I got to Princeton, and the first thing, when I was there and I went to the physics building, I asked immediately, “I want to see the cyclotron” — because I was very excited. And they said to go down in the basement and the room down at the end of the basement — which seemed to me incredible, stuffed away…Anyway, I went down in the basement, and I walked into the room where the cyclotron was, at the end of the basement. And it wasn’t 15 seconds before I understood why the Princeton cyclotron had lots of results, ... The cyclotron was in the middle of the room. There were wires all over the place, hanging in the air, just strung up by somebody. There were water things — there had to be automatic water coolers, and little switches, so if the water stopped it would automatically go on, and there were some kind of pipes and you could see, you know, water dripping. There was wax all over the place, hanging, where they were fixing leaks. The room was full of cans of film at crazy angles on tables. You see, completely different than at MIT. A place where somebody was working! Where the guy who was working was close to the machine, could fix it with his own hands. It was not in an insulated box with knobs. I understood it immediately, because I’d had this experience in laboratory. ... I understood it very quickly, as soon as I saw the machine. I loved it. I knew I was in the right place. They were guys of the old — the way I had felt when I was a kid. Fiddling is the answer. Experimenting is fiddling around. It’s not an organized program, elegance — it’s impossible. I noticed it. I mean, I realized right away that Slater was right. I had thought that [MIT] was the best school in the world, and here [at Princeton] was a thing I’d imagined must be three times as great, ten times as large, and four times as elegant, in order to get that much more research. But as a matter of fact, it was smaller and completely inelegant, and that was the secret.

The reading and thinking I've been doing about industry/technology has made me aware that oil refineries and microchips are some of the most complex technological artifacts in existence. I've mentioned before (e.g. in the previous links post I did) the density of linear features and semi-fractal nature; but I figured a picture is worth a thousand words. Observe how there's some visual similarities despite the vast difference (a million times!) in scale:

top scale is 200 ft (~60 m), bottom scale is 60 microns

(Image sources: Refinery, Microchip)

On the subject of images of industrial stuff, I've been enjoying photos from a Facebook group called Industrial Fine Art. Although it's a bit poignant how many of them—especially entries from Great Britain and other parts of Europe—are taken at plants that are shutting down or about to be demolished.

I enjoyed watching whitewater events like Canoe Slalom and Kayak Cross at the Paris Olympics this year. The current satellite view on Google Maps (preserved below for after it gets updated) of the Olympic whitewater course shows it before it was full of water. I thought it was interesting to see how it was constructed.

Continuing on the map theme, I've tried making a unified map of Narnia before, so it was neat seeing someone else's attempt.

We watch some Chinese movies and TV shows from time to time, so I found this series about how to identify which era/dynasty something is set in quite interesting:

Did you know that there is a sort of periodic table of knots? Knots were also used for record-keeping by the Incans.

Sticking to mathematical topology, here's a video about practical applications of origami. And an article about how computation goes beyond computers.

And here are two really cool videos on math-y topics:

Earlier this year, I got a 3d printer again. It took quite a while to get it working due to issues similar to the ones described here, but now that it is up and running, I've been enjoying designing and printing various things. I plan to share about some of these in the next 6 months but for this post, I'll share some really impressive 3d printing (and related) projects/applications I've come across online—these are much more complex than anything I've been doing:

a 3d printing to metal-casting workflow
a DIY 2-stroke engine made from scratch (with a couple of 3d-printed components)
a lathe
perhaps 3d printing and CNC machining will bring features like bas reliefs back into style for interior decorating?

VR Museums are an idea that I feel has some potential. I can certainly think of a whole bunch of artifacts that I'd like to curate if doing so becomes more accessible. Unfortunately, IRL museums are facing political trends that constrain curation.

Young people are facing unprecedented levels of anxiety. They're also facing increasingly-adversarial gender relations. My own kids are quite a bit younger than the age groups that are most affected by these trends, but I'm already asking myself how I can help them steer around them.

Here's an update on an issue I've shared links about before: regulation and taxation of online content in Canada. Personally, I find it objectionable to make the things I want to watch more expensive in order to fund things the government thinks I should watch. "There has been an ongoing erasure of shared implicit understandings" and the way streaming services give everyone the ability to customize their own media consumption (compared to the days when there were three channels) is surely part of it. However, I feel that CanCon rules are a relic from those 3-channel days; there's no going back. Having more of a common culture again would be nice, but the CRTC isn't the right tool for the job.

Most of the remaining links in this edition are just going to be presented in rapid-fire point form. Some of them are bookmarks for myself to check out in more detail when time permits:

A documentary series on church history.
If you've ever had trouble keeping the Ammonites, Moabites, and Edomites distinct.
Some touristy coastal things to do near my hometown.

This was a good podcast episode about the geopolitics of semiconductor manufacturing.
Indian-Americans are becoming prominent in politics. This is a good background piece.
Let's give merit, excellence, and intelligence a try.
Ornamentation in architecture is still possible, if we want it
Does beauty have meaning?
An exploration of different verbs related to cutting
This article makes the case that you shouldn't necessarily delete social media, but you should probably think about it and then be deliberate in either abstaining or in the way you engage
A couple of takes on cities that are worth thinking about
The vital role translation of foreign technical works played in the industrialization of Japan

Are your goals in life such that "the best possible person to achieve them is a corpse"? These kinds of goals of negation like not wanting to be a burden or to make mistakes aren't as good as striving to accomplish something real even if you don't achieve it 100%.

If you are a living being, you will have needs. You will want things. You will take up space. You will have to eat, and sleep, and take time for recreation and relaxation. You will feel things, sometimes unpleasant things. Sometimes you will make mistakes. Sometimes people will have negative feelings about you. You will have an impact on the world, however small.
As an alive person, you have one major advantage over dead people: you can take actions.

I'll finish this post off with a motivating song:

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