Scope Creep, 2025-06-23

School's almost out in NYC, but I would say that it's officially summer. Let's get at it!

SCOPE CREEP.

• Muntz metal is a brass alloy, patented in 1832, that was used to clad the hulls of wooden ships. With its relatively high copper content, Muntz metal retains good anti-fouling properties (animals and plants won’t grow on it) while being significantly less expensive than pure copper.
• Here’s the US’ schedule for agricultural import tariffs, which runs ninety-six pages long. It is, in my humble opinion, totally and utterly wild, and you can skip to basically any page and find complexity of great proportions.
  
  On page twenty-seven, you’ll learn that non-celeriac celery imports are assessed a 14.9% ad valorem tariff if they’ve been “reduced in size” (which I assume corresponds with celery “hearts”). Un-reduced celery (presumably the full bunch?), if imported between April 15th and the end of July, is taxed at $0.0025 per kilogram, and the rest of the year it’s taxed at $0.019 per kilogram. Want to import celeriac, the root of the celery plant? That’s a flat 10% tariff, regardless of timing.
  
  Tobacco products are divided into fifty-six categories and span from page eighty-three to eighty-seven. Some are taxed based on their value (like tobacco “refuse” intended for use in cigarettes; 350%), some by mass (like cut, ground or pulverized tobacco stems from “other” tobacco; $0.97 per kilogram), and some by both (like clove cigarettes; $0.417 per kilogram plus 0.9%). Some, like whole tobacco stems, are free to import.
  
  Livestock are also taxed when imported. Live mules and hinnies are subject to a 4.5% tariff if not intended for immediate slaughter, but free if they’re destined to be killed once they land on US soil. Live sheep are free, but live goats cost $0.68 per head. Live whales, dolphins, porpoises, and manatees are free, but live foxes are assessed at 4.8%. Frozen, boneless cuts of lamb are taxed at $0.007 per kilogram, but if the lambs are allowed to mature into sheep then the rate jumps to $0.028 per kilogram.
• A balikbayan box is a remittance, sent to the Philippines by an overseas Filipino. Balikbayan box services are sold by specialized freight forwarders in Filipino communities in the US: Walk into a store, get a free, standard-sized cardboard carton, and pack it up with whatever your family back in Manila wants. Then drop it back off at the shipper, and they’ll charge you a flat fee (typically under $100) to send and deliver it. Balikbayan boxes are typically containerized and shipped by sea, so delivery times are around six to eight weeks — but they’re exempt from Filipino import duties and have become immensely popular, with a reported four hundred thousand balikbayan boxes arriving in the Philippines every month.
  
  See also: Our 2022 feature article on remittance barrels, which are one of the more popular ways to send goods to the Caribbean from the US.
• It's currently illegal (but very common) for cats to live in NYC bodegas; this might be changing.

• Here’s Edmund Gettier’s two-and-a-half-page argument, published in 1963, that “justified true belief” is an insufficient definition for “knowledge.” I find it unconvincing, as the beliefs in Gettier’s examples feel unjustified; also, the disjunctions in Case II are “entailed” only in a very obscure sense.
• I’ve been listening to V.G. Jog, an Indian violinist who died in 2004, more or less nonstop for the past week and a half. I’m listening mostly to this album (which you can see a video excerpt from here), though I also have a rip of an album called Waves of Ecstasy which you can hear part of here. I made the rip in about 2001, at the McHenry Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I was a student at the time, and my course load was extremely flexible, and for no particular reason I would reserve a listening room and then borrow a couple of obscure CDs from their catalog, bringing them into the listening room and (maybe?) doing homework while they played. I’m not sure how I found V.G. Jog in particular, but it’s probably through his association with Zakir Hussain, who was at the time (and is to this day) the only tabla player who I could name. Here’s a 2019 video of Zakir Hussain playing tabla solo at the Berklee College of Music. Here he is in 2023 at NPR’s Tiny Desk with a band called Shakti, which features, among others, Mahavishnu John McLaughlin on guitar.
  
  Mahavishnu John McLaughlin — or just John McLaughlin, I suppose — is a British musician who played with Miles Davis during his fusion period, including on Bitches Brew and (my favorite, and generally more suitable for semi-background listening) In a Silent Way. A few years later he released My Goal's Beyond, whose first side sounds broadly like In a Silent Way but which then shifts completely on the solo second side, becoming quieter, and more dynamic, and entering a different kind of conversation with pre-fusion jazz.
  
  After My Goal's Beyond — which I really do recommend — McLaughlin founded The Mahavishnu Orchestra and Shakti, which is the context in which the Tiny Desk video, above, occurred. For Shakti, McLaughlin had a guitar built by Abraham Wechter, a luthier at Gibson. The guitar was based on the Gibson J-200, a flat-top acoustic that Gibson claims "is the world's most famous acoustic guitar," and which McLaughlin wanted a second set of strings added to — sympathetic strings, which would be allowed to resonate with and thereby enhance whatever McLaughlin played on the primary strings. In this respect the guitar was similar to a sitar, an effect that you can hear in this video of a later Shakti guitar, made by Mirko Borghino (you can also see McLaughlin playing what looks like the Wechter guitar, with Shakti, in this 1976 Montreaux concert). McLaughlin seems to have owned multiple Shakti guitars, but the first one — the Wechter — is described in detail in this 1978 piece from Guitar Player. If you've read this far and are curious, then I'd encourage you to put on this 1978 Shakti track and read the whole article; here's a pullquote for a sense of the technical detail:

The drone strings presented various challenges, since they had to be positioned so as to maintain access to the regular strings; furthermore, Wechter had to develop internal braces strong enough to support the extra tension of 13 strings but flexible enough to avoid interfering with the top's vibration and sound conduction. (Abraham notes that the six standard strings exert about 90 pounds of tension, while the heavy-gauge drone strings add well over 200 additional pounds.)...

The area between each pair of consecutive frets is scalloped, so that from a side view the fingerboard resembles a succession of waves with a fret on each crest...The minimum thickness of the fretboard at the troughs of the waves is about 1/16". The scalloped construction, specified by McLaughlin, allows him to bend a string by pushing it toward the fingerboard - as well as up and down, parallel to the fret. "The design is extremely effective," explains Wechter, "however, the guitar is exceptionally difficult to play - it requires incredibly good technique. The slightest finger pressure will change the pitch of the strings, so if you're coming into a big chord, you've got to keep the pressure just right - there's no fingerboard to stop you."

• Last week I enjoyed listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Representative Sarah McBride (D, Delaware) about “the trans rights movement’s shortcomings and how to win hearts and minds through a politics of grace.” I also enjoyed Andrew Huberman’s interview with Michael Easter about “how to grow by doing hard things,” which mentions the idea of Misogi — which in this context refers to a personal challenge that you have only a 50% chance of succeeding at (but does not carry the risk of death).
  
  In addition to reading Prototype Nation with the SOW Members’ Reading Group (the book is written in fine detail, and it intersects with many of my interests), I’m also listening to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and James Fadiman’s The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide (which is unfortunately not great on audio). Over the past month or two I’ve listened to Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside (which I think has been helpful, as parents, for both me and Ada to read), Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity (which provides a useful backdrop for mid-forties married life), Miranda July’s All Fours (which I was fairly captivated by), Ross Douthat’s Believe (which I found interesting and thought provoking, if not behavior-changing), Becca Rothfield’s All Things are Too Small (which was funny, extremely smart, and incisive), Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals (both very resonant; reading these felt genuinely useful), Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation (interesting 🤷), John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead (unexpected, intense, impressive), Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson’s Abundance (relevant to my political beliefs), and Rich Cohen’s The Fish That Ate The Whale (a pretty wild story).
  
  In sporting news, I enjoyed watching the Critérium du Dauphiné, which more than anything else felt like a display of complete physical grace on the part of Tadej Pogačar. I also highly recommend 100 Foot Wave, and enjoyed EF's moody cut of Lachlan Morton's second-place finish at Unbound XL. In sporting maintenance news, recently I've spent equal time trying to recover from pull-up-induced tennis elbow on the one hand, and bleeding my new bike's hydraulic disc brakes on the other 🙃

Tony, a reader, emailed me to tell me about the Society for Industrial Archeology (SIA), which he’s involved with. From their website:

The Society for Industrial Archeology was formed in 1971 to promote the study, appreciation, and preservation of the physical survivals of our industrial and technological past. The word “archeology” underscores the society’s principal concern with the physical evidence of industry and technology-the study, interpretation, and preservation of historically significant sites, structures, buildings, artifacts, industrial processes, bridges, railroads, canals, landscapes, and communities.

Tony tells me that SIA is really interested in industrial heritage, and that his particular interest is in iron and steel production — a topic which he’s currently spinning up a SIA special interest group on. SIA also has active research inquiries into coal gas houses, historic bookbinding equipment, and the Venus Mill in Carcross, Yukon. SIA hosts an annual conference, an annual fall tour of an industrial heritage site, and various local events through its chapter groups.

Browsing the SIA website, I came across the Industrial Archaeology Image Archive (which is extensive) and a website called “Quarries and Beyond” (which has galleries of quarry tours, as well as a very comprehensive page on stone cutting and carving tools). Lastly, I stumbled across the website of the National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum in Coatesville, PA. Coatesville is where World Trade Center’s “tridents” (the buildings’ most notable architectural features) were fabricated, and a few salvaged tridents were relocated to the National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum in 2018.