Mind Tavern Edition 10
Welcome to the 10th edition of Mind Tavern. Thank you for subscribing to this free newsletter, I don't intend to capture any data, but do consider sharing it on your social networks if you like it!
Back to Roe v Wade
For the uninitiated, this is one of the most historic rulings in the US jurisprudence, which gave the women of the country right to abort, thereby ensuring control of their own bodies. But with the conservative majority firmly established in the US SC by the appointment of 3 judges by Donald Trump, the tides are turning. A recent draft obtained by the Politico had some jarring details.
“The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” reads Alito’s draft, which goes on to note that the right to end one’s pregnancy is neither “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” nor “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty”—a benchmark the court has used for enshrining constitutional protections.
Read this Vox report on the draft here, and New Yorker’s article for the ramifications if the judgment is finalised in the future. The issue should concern everyone, not just the women in the US.
If the draft opinion, or one like it, becomes law, abortion would immediately or very quickly become inaccessible in at least 22 states that already have near-total bans or very early-term bans on the books.
Even the two blue states, Wisconsin and Michigan would go back to laws dating back to 1849 to ban abortion, as their overturning had become redundant post Roe v Wade.
When will this pandemic end?
Mckinsey has a very detailed update on how the dreadful Covid 19 can become an endemic by analysing three distinct scenarios, Milder cron, Delta Cron and Omicron’s twin. This depends a lot on the immunity status of the population, demographics and the general state of healthcare in the territory. Read the full report here.
Money’s steady walk towards the future
This MIT longread takes us through a timeline of how money took various shapes and forms from Copper coins to Paper notes in China, to the first Central Bank in Sweden in the 17th century to the decentralised currencies of today. The recent transformation towards the cashless mode of payments, partly fueled by the pandemic, even in countries like Kenya and India are increasingly making cash obsolete. Bitcoin, despite showing a lot of promise has a lot of inherent flaws as well which the new generation of cryptocurrencies is trying to fix. Read here.
The first paper currency appeared in China in the seventh century, in the form of certificates of deposit issued by reputable merchants, who backed the notes’ value with stores of commodities or precious metals. In the 13th century, Kublai Khan introduced the world’s first unbacked paper currency. His kingdom’s bills had value simply because Kublai decreed that everyone in his domain had to accept them for payment on pain of death.
Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies whose stable value comes from being backed by reserves of US dollars or other reputable fiat currencies, are proliferating. Stablecoins are billed as reliable, easily accessible digital payment systems that will make both domestic and international payments cheaper and quicker. However, unlike Bitcoin, which is fully decentralized, they require transactions to be validated by the issuing institution—which could be a bank, a corporation, or just an online entity.
You can now surgically increase your height
There is a doctor in California named Shahab Mahboubian, an orthopaedic surgeon who specializes in limb lengthening surgery, who claims that he can surgically increase heights to up to 8cm. This is not new, limb lengthening techniques have been there for over a century but only just recently, people have started to go for elective and cosmetic reasons. Disclaimer: I feel this is written as an advertorial but still quite a fascinating development in the field. Read here.
Mahboubian nonchalantly described the “minimally invasive” procedure like a man recounting his breakfast. “Through small little incisions, I cut the bone surgically,” he began. “Then I insert a rod — we call it a nail or a rod — that goes inside the bone. The rod is magnetic and it has gears. Then there’s an external device that communicates with the nail. And over time, little by little, it lengthens out the nail.” The lengthening happens gradually. “We usually say about a millimeter a day, until they get to their desired height.”
A Garment that changed the field of Athletics for Women
A historical account of the Sports Bra and its inventors, that made it easier for millions of girls and women across the globe to play sports and created a category of apparel which is today a multi-billion dollar industry. The Runner’s World magazine headlined its 2018 feature story: “The Greatest Invention in Running—EVER—Is the Sports Bra.” Read here.
Running was empowering, but the tradeoff was pain. Human breasts are made up of fat as well as glandular and connective tissue, blood vessels, and lymph nodes. Breasts have no muscle; the Cooper’s ligaments provide support and attach to the chest wall, but do little to reduce movement. During exercise, biomechanics clash with biology: Breasts move up and down, backward and forward, and also side to side, causing severe discomfort.
An early prototype of the Jogbra, in the collection of the National Museum of American History.The design was itself a radical statement of sorts: a co-opting of a venerable symbol of male jock-dom to craft an object of women’s liberation.
The bigotry of Dunning Kruger
A very famous idea, that basically finds an inverse relationship between the knowledge a person has in a field vs the confidence he has on the subject. This blog post tries to counter that theory by making a case that this tool is primarily used nowadays used in popular social media to condescendingly mock people with dissimilar resources or slower trajectory of learning. Read here.
In essence it’s become a socially acceptable way of calling someone an illiterate buffoon. It doesn’t matter if you’re clearly speaking to someone who couldn’t afford to go to an expensive university or spend hours on Reddit playing political compass quizzes to iron out their inconsistent bouquet of views into a respectable homogeneous monolith. It suddenly doesn’t matter that IQ is highly correlated with socioeconomic status, and education even more so. Just don’t call them brainless filthy casuals, say the Dunning-Kruger effect is in play here, then chuckle sensibly into your embroidered pocket square and collect the upvotes.
Ultimately if our goal is to maximize competence/knowledge and accelerate one’s journey along that curve, a variant of Dunning-Kruger I would like is to see how every unit of knowledge changes the rate of seeking/accrual of new knowledge.
Do you want to start a new country?
Ever wondered if no country actually is good enough for your expectations. Balaji Srinivasan has your back, he gives a step by step guide for creating your utopia. Read here. You might want to take out your notebook for this one.
Conceived by Patri Friedman and backed by Peter Thiel, seasteading essentially starts with the observation that cruise ships exist, and asks whether we could move from a few weeks on the water at a time to semi-permanent habitation on international waters (with frequent docking, of course). As the cost of cruise ships has fallen recently, this approach is becoming more feasible.
The main difference between the seventh method (cloud countries) and the previous six (election, revolution, war, micronations, seasteading, and space) is that it straddles the boundary of practicality and impracticality. No one can claim that it's infeasible to build million person online communities or billion dollar digital currencies, or that it's physically impossible to architect buildings in VR and then crowdfund them. The cloud country concept "just" requires stacking together many existing technologies, rather than inventing new ones like Mars-capable rockets or permanent-habitation seasteads
Something fascinating: Wordle and Twitter
This blog post on Twitter talks about Wordle conversations on the platform. An intriguing study in analytics goes through over 30 million mentions of Wordle on Twitter from Oct, 21 by 3.3 million people. A number of useful insights to draw from there with respect to geographies and timelines. For example, most of the people did their wordles in the half-hour window after midnight.
A podcast you should check out: Mission ISRO
Harsha Bhogle in his usual calm and comforting voice pulls you into the story of India’s space programme. This historical account is told in 12 episodes, based on numerous interviews and government archives. The history of India’s pursuit into space has romance and drama built into it, Rocket Man barely does any justice to this remarkable journey of being an unimaginably disadvantaged nation relegated to the fringes to being a dominant force in the field.
The Hindu writes, “A historian’s task is thus always an onerous one, as is that of the journalist or the archivist. The project of a critical science historian is to contextualise science within the social, cultural, economic and political messiness of a given moment. It’s to put people into the stories and take note of the many connections that make some things possible and render others less likely.” Harsha here does this job very well.
Thread(s) of the week:
Pared down listing of LIC: In the light of the upcoming check out this thread against the tide which talks about how the government is undervaluing the priced golden goose.
Story of a Hindu King from Cambodia from the early 9th century AD. See this remarkable thread by William Dalrymple talking about Jayavarman II.
If you want to read more about it and maybe visit the valley when you are in the country, check out this blog post here.
Internet is Beautiful
Fun stuff for you to discover
Quite a few of us might have seen the Divergent word test doing rounds on Twitter this week. This cool study on randomness by amazing people at Pudding takes it a step further. Take the test here.
An interesting chart on Reddit plots marathon records by age, time and gender.
An image taken from the streets of Kashmir has won the prestigious Pink Lady Food Photographer of the Year 2022 for an image titled Kebabiyana. Clicked by Debdatta Chakraborty, this smoke covered reminded me of the times I visited the food street behind Jama Masjid in Old Delhi. Check out the equally delicious nominations here.
Interesting read about a technique, which is called the Milk Carton rule by psychologists, to bridge the gap between expectations and reality.
For the fans of architecture and design, check out this lovely story, where a couple built side by side apartments when their aesthetic choices grew apart.
If Sisyphus rolled in the times of Instagram, makes for a hilarious timeline. Read this Newyorker graphic story here.
Snapchat has recently come out with a flying selfie companion called Pixy. It costs 230$ but still a very interesting idea. It has the potential to become what selfie sticks could have been. Check it out below
Trivia Corner: Kaiten
The story of Japanese Kamikaze fighter pilots from the second world war is quite popular now, wherein the firebrand pilots crashed their aircrafts into enemy targets, mostly ships. Kamikaze attacks sank 34 ships and damaged hundreds of others during the war. At Okinawa they inflicted the greatest losses ever suffered by the U.S. Navy in a single battle, killing almost 5,000 men.
But their less known cousins were also doing similar attacks but under the sea. Kaiten, literally called heaven shaker, were crewed torpedoes deployed by the Imperial army during the later periods of the war, which crashed into the ships to inflict massive damage. The Kaiten submarine torpedo proved successful – in fact, it ranks second to Kamikaze planes in the effectiveness of Japanese suicide craft.