Digest, 7/23/2023: Eating Snowflakes with Plastic Forks
the ninety-sixth digest post
Come on, move this!
This Week’s Posts
Monday, July 17th - I’m Not Trying to be Dramatic, But I’m in Hell
A lament about (what else) the state of mental health culture in 2023.
Thursday, July 20th - Like All Economic Forces, NIMBYism is the Product of Structures, Not Personal Choice
NIMBYism is bad, but as with so much else in politics, moralizing about it does us little good without understanding the root causes.
Friday, July 21st - You Can't Understand Physics Without Understanding Its Math and I'm Certainly Too Dumb to Understand the Math (subscriber only)
On knowing my limits, when it comes to science, and also wondering about what the limits are for everybody.
And we finished up Beloved in our book club.
From the Archives
Everything I said about the revelations from the Panama Papers (which were, of course, swiftly forgotten with absolutely no meaningful consequences) is still true.
Song of the Week
I think this may genuinely be my favorite pop song of all time.
Non-Garbage Online Reading
Here’s my review of Terrence Malick’s Song to Song, to entice you to follow me on Letterboxd.
Book Recommendation
Bicycling Through Space and Time, Mike Sirota, 1991
This is the kind of book that fits perfectly in your back pocket, if you know what I mean. Exactly the kind of cheerful, trashy, cheerfully-trashy sci-fi book I like the most, Bicycling Through Space and Time sees the by-turns obnoxious and endearing narrator given access to a bike that allows him to travel interdimensionally. (In the habit of such protagonists, he accepts this unlikely development with easygoing acceptance.) Aside from an ill-advised encounter with Baby Hitler, the stakes here are always low, the otherworlds are well-drawn and interesting, and the story as fast-paced and unfussy as you’d hope for with this species of sci-fi. A favorite of my brother and me when we were young adolescents, this book perfectly channels my inner 13-year-old and his desire to go adventuring.
Comment of the Week
Many commenters are responding to the claim, which you didn’t make, that you can understand physics with *only* math. That’s even worse than the claim that you can understand physics without *any* math, but I think both are clearly incorrect. As a mathematician who doesn’t know much physics, I also don’t really know what the wave function is, but I know (I think) that it’s a solution to Schrodinger’s equation, and I know something about solving differential equations, which means I can narrow down the mental *space* the wave function lives in to something that’s probably dramatically narrower than it is for you. This kind of narrowing is critical to be able to check that two people, who very well might be primarily speaking in intuitive terms, are actually saying the same thing. I think that’s the key to the centrality of math in physics. - Jerome Powell
That’s it. Life goes on and on!
A song to illustrate the objectively better 90's!
Hooked me with the heading.