Weekend Reads: Dark Matter, Corona Beer, Future Funk, Little Women
Recommended weekend reading material for March 7, 2020.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting, thought-provoking, and enjoyable articles, blog posts, and reviews. I hope you’ll find they make for good weekend reading material.
Physicists have proposed a new sub-atomic particle to explain the existence of the mysterious stuff known as “dark matter.”
Up to 80% of the Universe could be dark matter, but despite many decades of study, its physical origin has remained an enigma. While it cannot be seen directly, scientists know it exists because of its interaction via gravity with visible matter like stars and planets. Dark matter is composed of particles that do not absorb, reflect or emit light.
Via 1440.
If the previous article whetted your appetite for more cosmic discoveries, then you’ll enjoy this article on neutron star discoveries.
Astronomers know that much about how neutron stars are born. Yet exactly what happens afterwards, inside these ultra-dense cores, remains a mystery. Some researchers theorize that neutrons might dominate all the way down to the centre. Others hypothesize that the incredible pressure compacts the material into more exotic particles or states that squish and deform in unusual ways.
CNN recently reported that 38% of Americans were avoiding Corona Beer because of the coronavirus. Is that accurate?
So how can it be that 38 percent of Americans are afraid of a Mexican beer giving them coronavirus? Short answer: They aren’t. What we have is a flawed survey that generated a series of misleading hot takes.
Bandcamp profiles Neoncity Records, the Hong Kong-based label that’s become synonymous with future funk.
What started as a bedroom project manned by Law — and in once instance his mother, who helped him pack tapes to customers — has morphed into a proper business. The label is helping spread the speedy sounds of future funk, while also preserving a corner of internet music that could easily fade into the digital ether otherwise. Neoncity’s discography of originals and physical re-releases nearly encapsulates the entirety of future funk’s foundational creators and albums.
For a good introduction to future funk, I highly recommend the Neoncity Cruise compilation (read my review).
I really enjoyed Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and similarly, I really enjoyed Gina Dalfonzo’s thoughtful meditation on the movie’s treatment of loneliness, marriage, and singleness.
On a deeper level, though, I wonder if perhaps we just don’t like to contemplate the idea of loneliness, or rather aloneness, at all. It’s too scary, because it’s a possibility that could loom up in front of any one of us at any moment. It hits too close to home.
Not only is The Hunt For Red October an excellent action movie, it’s also a Cold War thriller with a remarkable sense of empathy and nuance.
As a young man of 14 when the movie originally came out, the Cold War was more of a distant idea to me than any sort of existential threat, but what I remember taking away was the idea that these people who are ostensibly our opponents are complex individuals just like we are, possessed of recognizable, sympathetic needs and wants, and deserving of our understanding, and possibly our compassion.
I love The Hunt For Red October. It’s one of those rare movies that I’m almost always in the mood for. I’ll often rewatch certain scenes on YouTube (like this one).
To celebrate turning a billion seconds old, Daniel de Bruin built a machine to visualize the number googol (which is a one followed by a hundred zeroes).
This machine has a gear reduction of 1 to 10 a hundred times. In order to get the last gear to turn once you'll need to spin the first one a [googol] amount around. Or better said you'll need more energy than the entire known universe has to do that.
Via Kottke.
Speaking of Kottke, he recently celebrated 15 years of running his site as a full-time job.
It seemed like madness at the time — I’d quit my web design job a few months earlier in preparation, pro blogs existed (Gawker was on its 3rd editor) but very few were personal, general, and non-topical like mine, and I was attempting to fund it via a then-largely-unproven method: crowdfunding. As I wrote on Twitter the other day, attempting this is “still the most bonkers I-don’t-know-if-this-is-going-to-work thing I’ve ever done”.
I won’t deny that Jason Kottke has been a big inspiration for what I’m trying to do with Opus. I don’t foresee Opus becoming a full-time job anytime soon but I do hope that it continues to grow thanks to subscribers like you.
If politics have left you feeling cynical, heartbroken, burned out, etc., then Alan Jacobs has a good word for you.
We are too prone, I believe, to think that voting is the definitive political act. That would be true only if politics simply belongs to the government. There is a far vaster sphere of politics — the life of the polis — that belongs to everyday acts of ordinary people.
That he quotes Gandalf is the icing on the cake.
To the consternation of privacy and civil rights advocates, governments around the world are turning to algorithms to help predict criminal activity.
[Advocates] are angered by a growing dependence on automated systems that are taking humans and transparency out of the process. It is often not clear how the systems are making their decisions. Is gender a factor? Age? ZIP code? It’s hard to say, since many states and countries have few rules requiring that algorithm-makers disclose their formulas.
Methinks that the folks developing these algorithms need to read and watch more science fiction like Minority Report and 1984.
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