Welcome to the 3rd 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! Let’s dive write in.
Food for thought: Making a case for Non-Vegetarians!
Let’s start with food this week. We see a lot of arguments and theories in favour of veganism and vegetarianism but not many on the other side. In this interesting article by Nathanael Johnson, he ventures into various planks and theories backing meat-eating. I don’t agree with all the theories, but one that talks about the lack of equivalent alternatives for the poorer households does have some merit. Read here.
Animal welfare expert Temple Grandin offered one potential plank for building a defense of meat eating. "We’ve gotta give animals a life worth living," she told me. Later in the interview, she reminded me that most farm animals wouldn’t have a life at all if no one ate meat. Combine these points and you could argue that it’s better to have a life worth living than no life at all — even if it ends with slaughter and consumption.
Under modestly improved circumstances, the extremely poor add a little meat, milk, or eggs into their diet. My claim is that there is something curious with a moral system that reclassifies legally and traditionally sanctioned conduct of people at the utter margins of society as something that needs to be excused.
Exampur: A fascinating story of a locality in Patna
Abhijit Banerjee has written at length on how at lower levels, too many waste youth years taking competitive exams for government jobs that most will never get. We all read about that newspaper headline of close to 3 cr applicants for Railways recruitment in 2019. But in that awe, we forget to look at the mess which has resulted from delayed notifications and results, scrupulous question papers, cases stuck in courts for frivolous reasons, mass-scale corruption and so on. The inability of the country’s policymakers to generate attractive jobs for people moving out of the agricultural sector is gradually eroding our Demographic Dividend.Read here.
In 2014, a study by the Indian Staffing Federation found that as much as 43% of the government sector employed contract labour to get its work done. In the years since then, the trend has only been on the rise.
According to economist Dipa Sinha, the movement of employment from agriculture to manufacturing has traditionally been an indicator of growth in advanced economies. “But in India, the manufacturing sector has not been able to absorb the labour coming out of agriculture, and has not generated as much employment as one would expect,” Sinha said.
“Because of Covid we understood the real value of a government job,” said Agarwal. “During the lockdown, people with sarkari jobs remained employed and got paid too, even if their salaries may have been cut a little. But people in private jobs lost everything.”
Collecting Metals: The Layers of Value
This fascinating blog post from a few years back talks about values different societies assign to the metals, like the fundamental layer which cherishes the inherent value of the item while the protocol layer or the outer layer for purposes of display and transfer of wealth. Read here.
So important is the “lower layer” of the traditional cultural understanding of gold and silver, the natural substance itself, evaluated by its weight rather than by any value added via the craftsmanship or its form, that Europeans of earlier generations evolved a word for it: bullion. Bullion is the metal itself, considered and valued only for its substance.
Form and style is the “protocol layer” of gold artifact most highly valued and distinguished in modern Western jewelry; but it is far less valued, compared to the natural substance itself, in the vast majority of Asian and pre-modern Western jewelry.
..we make a strong distinction between stocks and bonds on the one hand and decorative wealth objects such as jewelry and artwork on the other. So strong is our taboo that if a Western archaeologist finds a wearable (as in forager days they mostly were) collectible, it is automatically and dogmatically labeled “ornamental” or “symbolic”, with wealth-related uses seldom considered.
The world’s oldest gold artefact – a small bead from the lower Danube river basin
The Importance of Copying in Design
“Great artists steal.” This phrase has been attributed to many artists from Picasso to Stravinsky to TS Eliot. The author takes us through a historical journey of how the copying of various forms continues to foster innovations. He gives examples like Jobs with Apple, John Carmack who created iconic games like Doom and Quake to Richard Stallman’s Unix.Read here.
In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it.”
Unlike Steve Jobs, John Carmack never changed his mind about copying. When his boss at Softdisk suggested that they patent Carmack’s PC scrolling technique, Carmack reeled. “If you ever ask me to patent anything,” he said, “I’ll quit.”
In China, there are many concepts of a copy, each with distinct subtext. Fangzhipin (仿製品) are copies that are obviously different from the original — like small souvenir models of a statue. Fuzhipin (複製品) are exact, life-size reproductions of the original. Fuzhipin are just as valuable as originals, and have no negative stigma.
Winners and Losers of Covid Induced Virtualisation
I came across this essay a few weeks back during my research for a case competition on digitalisation. It talks at length about how the advent of new technology has a different impact, depending upon where you are financially. By giving a number of examples of changes forced by the pandemic, the author tries to categorise them into forklift, microphone and stethoscope tech. Read it here.
If someone asks you, “Is a computer more like a forklift or more like a microphone?”
It doesn’t matter much who drives the forklift, but it matters a lot who sings into the microphone. Think about the forklift first. You might be a lot stronger than I, but with a little bit of training, I can operate a forklift and lift just as much as you or any other forklift operator. Thus the forklift is a force for income equality, eliminating your strength advantage over me….
The effect of the microphone and mass media have been to allow a single talented entertainer to serve a huge customer base and accordingly to command enormous earnings. This creates an earnings distribution with a few extremely highly paid talented and trained individuals….
A computer is both a forklift and a microphone.
What makes writing more readable?
Another brilliant Pudding piece, where they try to figure out what makes reading more comprehensible, from using cool live-action tools to transform sample texts to taking a deep dive into algorithms that modify texts according to reading levels. For eg. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade level formula looks, in part, at syllable count, based on the idea that words with fewer syllables are easier to understand. Read here.
Ukrainian artist Tatyana specialises in creating tiny things. Using a range of materials, she recreates small versions of food, clothing and other objects that fit into the palm of a hand. Check her Instagram here.
A mesmerising NY Times audiovisual story on music that helped us traverse through the tumultuous times of the pandemic. Check it out here.
One of the most thought-provoking books I have ever read about the seemingly innocuous things that we tend to ignore, creating an extremely biased world against women. Carolina Criado Perez painstakingly collates numerous such examples with substantial data and citations backing her claims. I humbly urge more people to read this book, so as to remember what happens when we forget to account for half of humanity. It is an exposé of how the gender data gap harms women when life proceeds, more or less as normal. In urban planning, politics, the workplace. It is also about what happens to women living in a world built on male data when things go wrong. When they get sick. When they lose their home in a flood. When they have to flee that home because of war.
EU countries with comprehensive support for working parents have the highest rates of female employment. Numerous studies world wide have shown that maternity leave has a positive impact on women’s participation in the paid labour market.This impact is seen not only in the raw numbers of women employed, but also in the number of hours they work and the income they earn.
Brilliance bias is in no small part a result of a data gap: we have written so many female geniuses out of history, they just don’t come to mind as easily. The result is that when ‘brilliance’ is considered a requirement for a job, what is really meant is ‘a penis’.
Since the Australian Army reduced the required stride length for women from thirty inches to twenty-eight inches, pelvic stress fractures in women have fallen in number. And as an added bonus, not forcing women to march in time with men has not, as yet, led to the apocalypse.
When Apple launched its health-monitoring system with much fanfare in 2014, it boasted a ‘comprehensive’ health tracker. It could track blood pressure; steps taken; blood alcohol level; even molybdenum (nope, me neither) and copper intake. But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot one crucial detail: a period tracker.
Thread(s) of the week
An IR professor from Chicago University, Paul Poast has done a detailed thread drawing parallels of this mindless Russian endeavour with history’s greatest wars. It is going even worse than the Austro-Hungarian empire for Russia. He narrates the story with tonnes of quality corroborations and infographics to keep you intrigued. In one of those, he references another thread done by Kamil Galeev, who wrote about the fragility of the Russian Economy.
Bonus: Check out this cool thread done by Ramanand (@quatrainman), where he tries to cover all 700 odd districts of India, giving tidbits about every one of them.
WorldWideWeb – the first browser developed at CERN
Trivia Corner: Trial of the Pyx
Dating back to the 12th century, this is the annual process to ensure that the coins minted at the Royal Mint of Britain are up to standard. It is one of the oldest continuing judicial procedures in the world, taking place at Goldsmiths' Hall since 1871. The name Pyx refers to the chests in which the coins are transported and derives from the Latin word pyxis which means a small box.
Little has changed in the procedure since the reign of Edward I. Throughout the year, coins are randomly selected from every batch of each denomination struck, sealed in bags containing 50 coins each, and locked away in the Pyx boxes for testing at the Trial. These coins, normally more than 50,000 in total, represent one coin from every batch of each denomination minted.
The benchmark against which the coins are tested is called a Trial plate. These metal plates, made of gold, silver, platinum, nickel and zinc, are held at the National Measurement and Regulation Office along with the original coin Standard Weights against which the weight of the trial coins are compared. The oldest surviving Trial plate, from 1477, is one of the treasures of The Royal Mint Museum.
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Fascinating as well as informative, looking forward to at least 1 book suggestion in every edition.