The Overview - May 17, 2021

The Overview is a weekly roundup of eclectic content in-between essay newsletters & "Conversations" podcast episodes to scratch your brain's curiosity itch.

May 17, 2021

Hello Eclectic Spacewalkers,
I wish that you and your family are safe and healthy wherever you are in the world. :)
Check out the last The Overview - May 10, 2021: HERE
Get our E-Book for free by using ‘substack’: HERE
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Below are some eclectic links for the week of May 17th, 2021.
Enjoy, share, and subscribe!

Articles/Essays - Dr. Mullin; The Guardian; Boston Review; The Drift Mag; Palladium Magazine; Small Farm Future; New Republic; Aeon Magazine; and Balaji Srinivasan
Book - The Frailest Thing: Ten Years of Thinking About the Meaning of Technology via @LMSacasas
Documentary - First Japanese in Europe: Incredible Story of the Tensho Embassy (1582 - 1590); First Non-Muslim European Description of Mecca (1503) / Undercover Adventure of Ludovico di Varthema
Lecture - Black American History Preview via @ClintSmithIII in @TheCrashCourse
Paper - A Self-Replicating Radiation-Shield for Human Deep-Space Exploration: Radiotrophic Fungi can Attenuate Ionizing Radiation aboard the International Space Station
Podcasts - Modern Movie Theory (MMT): WandaVision via @Superstruc & @moneyontheleft (H/T: @tato_tweets)
TED Talk - How to change your behavior for the better | @danariely
Twittersphere - How globalization worked before globalization via @ThisIsSoliman
Videos - Utuqaq via @fieldofvision
Website - Philosopher’s Web: A comprehensive map of all influential relationships in philosophy according to Wikipedia.

To define “Indigenous,” start by erasing those lines on the map via @Dr_Mullin

“With a simple click of the mouse, my eyes widened, and my mouth dropped open. What I saw was not an exhaustive list or narrative, but a bright map of the United States. It looked like an impressionist painting, where boundaries and hard edges give way to complementary overlapping shapes, as if a dance were paused in time.
Gone were the labels and lines signaling ownership and exclusion. What replaced them was an illustration telling a story of cooperation and coexistence. At that moment, the long-held “tribe is to state” analogy fell apart.
Like any good data visualization, the site left me wanting to understand more. Professional questions arose such as, how do I cleanly capture the contributions of Indigenous peoples while honoring their story? And personal ones including, what can I do to start to understand the Timucua peoples who once lived where I do now?”

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Study links childhood air pollution exposure to poorer mental health via @denis_campbell in @guardian

“Research found that those who grow up amid heavy traffic pollution have higher rates of mental illness by age 18
“These results collectively suggest that youths persistently exposed to moderate levels of nitrogen oxide air pollution may experience greater overall liability to psychiatric illness by young adulthood”, the authors concluded.
The link between air pollution and risk of mental illness is “modest” but real, they added. The association was also “a liability independent of other individual, family and neighbourhood influences on mental health”, such as poverty and family history of mental disorder.”

Relevant US example: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/climate/air-pollution-minorities.html

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Portrait of the United States as a Developing Country via @jhv85 in@BostonReview

“Dispelling myths of entrepreneurial exceptionalism, a sweeping new history of U.S. capitalism finds that economic gains have always been driven by the state...
In keeping with the disciplinary orientation of the field academic historians call the “history of capitalism,” Levy upholds the centrality of political initiative to economic development. Through painstaking accumulation of evidence over several centuries, Ages of American Capitalism decisively demonstrates that capital does not work in the interest of the public without state mechanisms that both ramp up and set parameters for investment activity. At the same time, Levy shows that political initiative is also fallible, marked by biases or outright prejudices, difficult compromises, and sometimes a lack of foresight. In this regard, Levy’s account of the imbalances and inequities of late nineteenth-century industrialization is especially instructive, as it provides new resources for explaining how the Democratic Party transformed into the party of New Deal liberalism. In doing so, Levy significantly enriches our understanding of the rise of the early Republican Party as a world historical event.
What might this long history augur for Biden’s vision of the U.S. economy? His victory over Trump improved margins with affluent suburbanites but raised doubts over the ability of Democrats to mobilize working-class voters. If Biden truly intends to establish a more just and egalitarian economic order, he would do well to consult both the achievements and the tragedies of U.S. development documented in Levy’s book.”

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Other People’s Despair | Mending the Social Fabric Won't Fix the Suicide Crisis via @erikmbaker in @thedrift_mag

“This Sisyphean struggle with the destruction of the social fabric underscores the inadequacy of the underlying conception of class at work here. As the French philosopher Louis Althusser once joked, it often seems like conservative intellectuals imagine classes as competing soccer teams. They exist independently of each other, come into contact occasionally on the field, and share a primary interest in ensuring that the rules of the game are fair and everyone comports themselves in a sportsmanlike manner. Like other popular writers on the “white working class,” Case and Deaton thoroughly inhabit the soccer team understanding of class. For them, the “working class” is a kind of affinity group or cultural condition, the team that just so happens to value manual work, tradition, and NASCAR over education, avant-garde art, and NPR. The problem, in their view, is that developments in the economy, as a force somehow external to class, have made it hard for members of the working-class team to live their lives the way they were accustomed to for generations.
Following Marx, the left has historically viewed class very differently: the working class is a structural position in the capitalist economy, the segment of the population whose members have no choice but to work for a wage, or to depend on someone who does. Workers and employers are not preexisting types of people who bump into one another every so often. There are no rules that could make the game of labor markets fair. No amount of sportsmanship could obviate the imperative for employers to extract as much work as possible from their employees for as little money as possible. And the work that is extracted is not some abstract cultural signifier but real labor wrested from laborers, often brutally so. Durkheimian interventions might help people make their peace with class relations in the short term. But the persistence of exploitation ensures that no peace can last forever. It is the force of this everyday violence that grinds hope into despair.”

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A New Golden Age of Governance via @wolftivy in @palladiummag

“At its early stage, any new paradigm will be represented by a network of seed institutions. Like biological seeds, what matters with these seed institutions is not their initial scale. Rather, what matters is that they are operating on and developing a genuinely better paradigm, and that they can survive and grow as the society around them falters and even becomes hostile to growth.
This is how paradigm shifts actually happen in practice: the ideas and machinery of the new paradigm out-survive and out-compete the old by playing a bigger and longer game, and being more appropriate to the problems of the time. Independent institutions that are grasping towards something better in their own situations notice each other, trade ideas, and become self-conscious as a movement. Eventually, existing power centers notice this alternative movement and move to recuperate it. If this movement is willing, offers real solutions, and avoids the neutralization of its functional core, it can become the basis for a new paradigm. Otherwise, the movement is sidelined. The moment is ripe for this kind of disruption. All we have to do is build.”

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The single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth… via @csmaje

“…is a vegan diet. Well, at least it is according to Joseph Poore. But I have an alternative suggestion. The single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth is to stop thinking there’s a single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, or that bang for your buck metrics of this kind are helpful in formulating how best to live...
“So perhaps, after all, I’ve argued my way to the opposite of my opening gambit. There is one single biggest way to reduce your impact on the Earth – dispensing with fossil fuels. If we do that, livestock numbers will pretty much take care of themselves and will have minimal environmental impacts.
However, to make that happen isn’t a ‘single’ thing, and certainly not a thing that can be done by a simple choice in the shopping aisle. Instead, it’s a journey of many steps. And the journey will end for many people with a small farm where they live and work. For those with a taste for meat the good news is that when they get there they can raise a little livestock. In fact, they’d probably be unwise not to. The livestock they can feasibly raise won’t amount to a hill of beans as much meat as people in wealthy countries are used to eating at present. But if they’ve raised it themselves, with minimal off-farm inputs and maximal on-farm benefits, I think it’ll taste all the better gramme for gramme. Same goes for beans.”

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Forget Tech Bro Fantasies of Self-Driving Cars and Just Invest in Buses Already via @SilvermanJacob in @newrepublic

“Lyft and Uber’s autonomous vehicle hype has far outstripped progress. Let’s put our hopes, and our money, elsewhere.
In contrast to all the hype and expense of autonomous vehicles—along with the regulatory and technical and economic uncertainty—bicycles, sidewalks, and public transport work exceedingly well. They are known quantities that can be strengthened and made more accessible with a fraction of the resources that have been poured into A.V. research. They are safe and enhance the urban experience. They contribute few, if any, emissions and don’t enrich a handful of oligarchs at the expense of the common interest.
Perhaps we should see the autonomous vehicle dream for what it is: a Disneyland-style spectacle that can’t live up to its sci-fi imaginings, a series of very expensive and glitzy pilot projects that can’t cut it in the real world. Naturally, Elon Musk offers a useful example. Recently, the Boring Company, one of Musk’s many ventures, unveiled a “Convention Center Loop” in Las Vegas. Surrounded by colorful LED lighting, a Tesla eased through a narrow tunnel that seemed to leave little space for an emergency exit. The project was patently ridiculous—slower than advertised, low capacity, expensive, dependent on human supervision, and possibly dangerous—but it received all the usual hype of any Elon Musk production. Still, it doesn’t matter if it works as promised: The Boring Company already has contracts with the city of Las Vegas to build tunnels all over town—just don’t ask him when.”

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The miracle of the commons via @nijhuism in @aeonmag

“Far from being profoundly destructive, we humans have deep capacities for sharing resources with generosity and foresight
Ostrom’s principles of commons management now underlie not only the Namibian conservancy system but hundreds of similar efforts throughout the world. Many have revived and adapted conservation practices developed centuries ago, developing new rules suited to current circumstances. Their creators cooperate in the management of coral reefs in Fiji, highland forests in Cameroon, fisheries in Bangladesh, oyster farms in Brazil, community gardens in Germany, elephants in Cambodia, and wetlands in Madagascar. They operate in thinly populated deserts, crowded river valleys, and abandoned urban spaces...
Community-based conservation can’t solve everything, and it doesn’t always succeed in protecting the commons. In many cases, national governments don’t recognise the longstanding land claims of Indigenous and other rural communities, creating uncertainty that interferes with community efforts to manage for the long term. Even well-established systems are vulnerable to internal conflict, and to external pressures ranging from drought to war to global market forces. As Ostrom often reminded her audiences, any strategy can succeed or fail. Community-based conservation is distinctive because many societies have only begun to understand – or remember – its potential. ‘What we have ignored is what citizens can do,’ she said.”

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Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science via @guardian

“Fifty years ago, a book by Thomas Kuhn altered the way we look at the philosophy behind science, as well as introducing the much abused phrase 'paradigm shift'
As for his big idea – that of a "paradigm" as an intellectual framework that makes research possible –well, it quickly escaped into the wild and took on a life of its own. Hucksters, marketers and business school professors adopted it as a way of explaining the need for radical changes of world-view in their clients. And social scientists saw the adoption of a paradigm as a route to respectability and research funding, which in due course led to the emergence of pathological paradigms in fields such as economics, which came to esteem mastery of mathematics over an understanding of how banking actually works, with the consequences that we now have to endure.
The most intriguing idea, however, is to use Kuhn's thinking to interpret his own achievement. In his quiet way, he brought about a conceptual revolution by triggering a shift in our understanding of science from a Whiggish paradigm to a Kuhnian one, and much of what is now done in the history and philosophy of science might be regarded as "normal" science within the new paradigm. But already the anomalies are beginning to accumulate. Kuhn, like Popper, thought that science was mainly about theory, but an increasing amount of cutting-edge scientific research is data- rather than theory-driven. And while physics was undoubtedly the Queen of the Sciences when Structure… was being written, that role has now passed to molecular genetics and biotechnology. Does Kuhn's analysis hold good for these new areas of science? And if not, isn't it time for a paradigm shift?
In the meantime, if you're making a list of books to read before you die, Kuhn's masterwork is one.”

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Founding vs Inheriting via @balajis

“You can found an institution, or you can inherit it.
That older, institutional ideology is now failing. Over the course of 2020, public health failed, public schools failed, fire departments failed, and police departments failed. National, state, and local governments failed. Media corporations failed and even the US military failed. Just about every Western institution run by a political heir failed, because it was presented with the unanticipated shock of COVID-19. The widgets these heirs' factories were cranking out were no longer suited for the occasion. And their failure has caused a crisis of faith in American institutions specifically, and in the postwar order more broadly.
Where heirs failed, founders succeeded. The internet stayed up. The state couldn't deliver checks, but Amazon could deliver packages. The legacy universities were closed but the MOOC platforms were open. The restaurants were shuttered by the state but the delivery apps were shipping. The media corporations reported that the virus was at best a remote threat while the tech companies prepared for remote work. And the billions spent on military biodefense didn't do much, but the millions invested in Moderna did.”

Book

The Frailest Thing: Ten Years of Thinking About the Meaning of Technology via @LMSacasas

“What you have here are 100 dispatches spanning that decade of thinking and writing about how technology sustains, mediates, and conditions our experience. These are the essays that, in my view, have remained useful exercises in thinking about the meaning of technology. Prominent themes include the relationship of technology to politics, memory and time, ethics, and the experience of the self.”
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Excerpt from Essay 100: ‘The Wonder of What We Are’
“Ultimately, I don’t think I want to oppose these two realities. Part of the wonder of what we are is, indeed, that we are the sort of creatures who create technological marvels.
Perhaps there’s some sort of Aristotelian mean at which we ought to aim. It seems, at least, that if we marvel only at what we can make and not also at what we are, we set off on a path that leads ulti- mately toward misanthropic post-humanist fantasies.
Or, as Arendt warned, we would become “the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”
It is odd that there is an impulse of sorts to create some of these marvels in our own image as it were, or that we seek to replicate not only our own capacities but even our physiology.
Yet, it is precisely this that also makes us anxious, fearful that we will be displaced or uncertain about our status in the great chain of being, to borrow an old formulation.
But our anxieties tend to be misplaced. More often than not, the real danger is not that our machines will eclipse us but that we will conform ourselves to the pattern of our machines.
In this way we are entranced by the work of our hands. It is an odd spin on the myth of Narcissus. We are captivated not by our physical appearance but by our ingenuity, by how we are reflected in our tools.
But this reflection is unfaithful, or, better, it is incomplete. It veils the fullness of the human person. It reduces our complexity. And perhaps in this way it reinforces the tendency to marvel only at what we can make by obscuring the full reality of what we are.
This full reality ultimately escapes our own (self-)understanding, which may explain why it is so tempting to traffic in truncated visions of the self. This creative self that has come to know so much of the world, principally through the tools it has fashioned, remains a mystery to itself.
We could do worse, then, than to wonder again at what we are: the strangest phenomenon in the cosmos, as Walker Percy was fond of saying.”

Documentaries

First Japanese in Europe: Incredible Story of the Tensho Embassy (1582 - 1590)

“00:00 Introduction 3:14 Japan: The Idea 6:43 The Journey 10:04 Portugal 14:56 Spain 21:23 Italy and Rome 29:33 Home Again”

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First Non-Muslim European Description of Mecca (1503) / Undercover Adventure of Ludovico di Varthema

“Extracts taken from "The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema" translated by John Winter Jones.”

Lecture

Black American History Preview via @ClintSmithIII in @TheCrashCourse

“Over the course of 50 episodes, we're going to learn about Black American History. Clint Smith will to teach you about the experience of Black people in America, from the arrival of the first enslaved Black people who arrived at Jamestown all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement.”

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#1: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

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#2: Slavery in the American Colonies

Paper

A Self-Replicating Radiation-Shield for Human Deep-Space Exploration: Radiotrophic Fungi can Attenuate Ionizing Radiation aboard the International Space Station

The greatest hazard for humans on deep-space exploration missions is radiation. To protect astronauts venturing out beyond Earth’s protective magnetosphere and sustain a permanent presence on Moon and/or Mars, advanced passive radiation protection is highly sought after. Due to the complex nature of space radiation, there is likely no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem, which is further aggravated by up-mass restrictions. In search of innovative radiation-shields, biotechnology holds unique advantages such as suitability for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), self-regeneration, and adaptability. Certain fungi thrive in high-radiation environments on Earth, such as the contamination radius of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Analogous to photosynthesis, these organisms appear to perform radiosynthesis, using pigments known as melanin to convert gamma radiation into chemical energy. It is hypothesized that these organisms can be employed as a radiation shield to protect other lifeforms. Here, growth of Cladosporium sphaerospermum and its capability to attenuate ionizing radiation, was studied aboard the International Space Station (ISS) over a time of 30 days, as an analog to habitation on the surface of Mars. At full maturity, radiation beneath a ≈ 1.7 mm thick lawn of the melanized radiotrophic fungus (180° protection radius) was 2.17±0.35% lower as compared to the negative control. Estimations based on linear attenuation coefficients indicated that a ~ 21 cm thick layer of this fungus could largely negate the annual dose-equivalent of the radiation environment on the surface of Mars, whereas only ~ 9 cm would be required with an equimolar mixture of melanin and Martian regolith. Compatible with ISRU, such composites are promising as a means to increase radiation shielding while reducing overall up-mass, as is compulsory for future Mars-missions.”

— Relevant recent news from NASA’s Perseverence Mars rover: NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars has found some mysterious rocks (photos)

Podcast

Modern Movie Theory (MMT): WandaVision via @Superstruc & @moneyontheleft (H/T: @tato_tweets)

“In this episode, Scott Ferguson and Maxximilian Seijo discuss the politics and aesthetics of Marvel’s WandaVision (2021), which was released via the Disney Plus streaming service earlier this year. Picking up questions about blockbuster form and apophatic analysis they’ve pondered in previous episodes, Scott and Maxx affirm the show’s exceptional foray into past sitcom aesthetics and other similarly abstract forms in light of the present neoliberal paradigm crisis. They tease out WandaVision’s critical engagement with the white heteronormative patriarchy that sitcoms have complicatedly mediated. And they critique the program’s ultimate capitulation to conventional blockbuster aesthetics, which substitute a finite and fatalistic physics for what is in truth a capacious and transformable process of monetary mediation.”

TED Talk

How to change your behavior for the better | @danariely

“What's the best way to get people to change their behavior? In this funny, information-packed talk, psychologist Dan Ariely explores why we make bad decisions even when we know we shouldn't -- and discusses a couple tricks that could get us to do the right thing (even if it's for the wrong reason).”

Twittersphere

How globalization worked before globalization via @ThisIsSoliman

“How globalization worked before globalization. Cha, if by land. Tea, if by the sea. Interestingly, Portugal traded with China from the Macaw port instead of Fujian and thus uniquely adopted cha, in contrast with its neighboring countries in Europe.”

Mohammed Soliman @ThisIsSoliman

📷: How globalization worked before globalization. Cha, if by land. Tea, if by the sea. Interestingly, Portugal traded with China from the Macaw port instead of Fujian and thus uniquely adopted cha, in contrast with its neighboring countries in Europe.

BBC Radio 4 “Thinking Aloud” podcast about the history of tea

Video

Utuqaq via @fieldofvision

“In the Arctic, ice is both all around and constantly disappearing. “Utuqaq” explores climate change from the perspective of this beautiful and vital element, as four researchers embark on an expedition to drill ice cores in subzero temperatures. Narrated in Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) by Aviaja Lyberth.”