#4. The Love of a Lousy Buck
You know that this newsletter isn’t supposed to be political—it’s supposed to be a breath of fresh air to get your mind off of hard things. And it is that.
But this has been another week, another bunch of hard news. I see protests happening all the time—which is great!—but it can often feel hard to stand up. I know that I have been intimidated out of going to protests more than once, which I regret.
I’m reminded of one of the best monologues to come out of Hollywood ever, from my favorite movie of all time: On The Waterfront. In the movie, Karl Malden plays a priest who is trying to help the dockworkers, who are being absolutely used and abused by the mob running their union, to stand up and talk to the Crime Commission.
The movie was made during the McCarthy Era, during the period when Hollywood was blackballing actors and directors for being communists. And this movie was made as director Elia Kazan’s way of saying “I’m standing up and talking. I won’t be silenced.”
One of the dockworkers, who didn’t trust the police anymore than they trusted the mob, finally agreed to testify, and the next day the mob caused an “accident” to happen on the waterfront and get him killed. The priest comes down to say last rites, and then preaches one of the best sermons you’ll ever hear about standing up for the little guy against the rich and corrupt. I’ll let you watch it
Fun and Fascinating Stuff Going On
Joy Milne, the disease sniffer
#1. There is a lady—and I know this sounds like some kind of crazy pseudoscience that the weird old neighbor with dementia tells you—who can smell Parkinson’s Disease. Not only can she smell Parkinson’s, but she can smell diabetes and tuberculosis.
Now, this is super weird, but doctors have been testing Joy Milne, former nurse, and she is astonishingly accurate in blind tests. So now the scientists are trying to figure out WHY she can smell it, and then use her sensory powers to develop their own scent-based tests to diagnose these illnesses. Super weird, right? Would it surprise you to learn that the organization she’s working with is the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research? It’s super legit!
#2. Now this one is just bananas. Scientists have successfully turned light into a solid. Well, a supersolid, which is a form of matter that has both the properties of a solid and a liquid. Light!? I know, super weird.
This is going to sound like Geordi Laforge talking to Data, and I certainly don’t understand it, but it works like this: as published in Nature, scientists working with the National Research Council in Italy fired a laser at a gallium arsenide structure that was precisely engineered with microscopic ridges. The interaction between the light and the material led to the formation of polaritons, which are hybrid light-matter particles. Their setup forced the polaritons into an “ordered lattice structure while simultaneously allowing them to flow without viscosity!” Make sense? Not to me! But neat!
The staff of the CCWF’s Paper Trail, inmate-run newsletter
#3. The world’s largest women’s prison is in California—the Central California Women’s Facility—and the inmates have started and are successfully running their own newspaper. It’s online and you can read it!
Their mission statement says that the newspaper “engages with community, promotes hope, creates positive solutions, and amplifies voices rarely heard.”
Other newspapers have been tried at other prisons and have been seen to have a good and lasting effect on inmates, helping rehabilitate them and improve morale and transparency in the prison.
#4. The scientists are at it again! They have developed a technology that makes it so that, if you’re standing in a crowd, they can send sound waves that only reach you and no one else can hear them—no headphones required! The sound can even bend around obstacles to reach someone behind it. They call these little sound bubbles “audio enclaves.”
Why are they doing it? I don’t know! It sounds like something spies would use in Mission Impossible, though, right?
Delights and Distractions
I love me some Tolkien. I love all the shows—even The Hobbit, EVEN The Rings of Power—and any chance I can get immersed in Middle Earth is a chance I’ll take. There is a Youtube channel I really enjoy called Nerd of the Rings, which gets into ALL things Middle Earth, in the kind of detail reserved for the people who can read elvish and recite Tolkein’s letters. And I’d recommend any of their videos, but who can’t resist indulging in one of the biggest mysteries: Who the heck is Tom Bombadil?
One of my favorite channels to just relax and enjoy is Samy - Model Maker, who builds incredible scale models, usually of buildings and castles. There is no narration, just background music and thirty to forty minutes of some of the most meticulous scratch building you’ve ever seen. In this video, he’s recreating Havanna from one of the Assassin’s Creed games.
Howard Ho’s channel is a fascinating look into music, and he came to fame with his analysis of the Broadway hit Hamilton. I’m a theater kid, growing up watching musicals and then working at a theater, on stage and off stage and in the box office and in the concessions stand and everywhere else. This video does a deep dive into all of the references in Hamilton to other musicals (think “I’m the model of a modern Major General” from Pirates of Penzance or “You’ve got to be carefully taught” from South Pacific.) Anyway, this video has a billion of them.
Just For Reference
Sidenote: Normally, I’d end the newsletter here, but something has been on my mind. In the last week, one of the greatest references to the American Revolution—the government’s website on the topic—has been taken offline, due to… you know, all the stuff. And now there’s word that the Smithsonian is next?
Here are some great independent resources of knowledge, just for reference:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
