One of the joys of reading history is the sense of perfect clarity that it sometimes offers. You might begin with a question about why such-and-such technology developed as it did. Perhaps you’ve got hunches about the answer, but perhaps they feel just a little too neat. Like any thoughtful person you know not to trust your hunches too much, and as you begin your research you find that yes, your hunches are notionally correct, but also no, they don’t capture the full picture. With each new historical source you piece the full picture together in the same way that the proverbial blind men piece together their collective understanding of the proverbial elephant. One historical detail might align with one of your hunches, while another historical detail might align with another. There may come a moment, then, when your sense of the history is disjointed, multifaceted, complex. But if you push through, and keep reading the history, then sometimes you reach what feels like a moment of perfect clarity.
It’s a good idea, at least — that it is possible to truly understand history. That the past makes sense, and that you can make sense of it too.
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I did not read much history over the end-of-year holidays, focusing instead on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Of these I found Kitchen Confidential to be the most entertaining and informative, but I appreciated The Creative Act for its meditative, liberating, and honestly fluffy characteristics. I listened to each of these books as I meticulously cleaned, sanded, cleaned again, primed, and re-painted about nine hundred square feet of flooring in my home, a project that itself was meditative and liberating too. I cut all my edges sans masking tape, staged the work in zones so that I could still use the house while the project was active, and quickly touched up scores of wall scuffs with a lightly-loaded roller. I also learned about and used sugar soap, which is often used to clean painted surfaces before repainting and which usually does not contain sugar. It was, in all, a highly satisfying experience, and one that I’m surprised to say I’ll look forward to doing again in the future.
Returning to my “normal” routine in January, I picked up my copy of Hasok Chang’s Inventing Temperature, which the SOW Reading Group is working its way through now. The book goes into incredible historical detail, explaining at length scientific ideas that have been out of vogue for centuries or more. It’s a little strange to learn so much about long-dead theories, but nevertheless I’m enjoying the book, and learning a surprising amount about how mushy and imprecise even the most basic physical benchmarks are. For instance, it turns out that water can, without too much effort, be heated to 110°C or even 120°C without boiling. This is weird; the systems we use to measure temperature are based on physical phenomena that are not firmly fixed. It’s weird too that temperature itself has a bounded quality: Absolute zero is a theoretical state which cannot be reached or surpassed, and Planck Temperature (the hottest possible temperature, at which point the wavelength of emitted light reaches Planck length) is a firm limit on how hot things can get. Thermal energy is not something you can have infinitely much of, and nor is it possible to have none of it at all.
Scope Creep.
- Recently I wrote about the evolution of single-use plastic bottles on the Lumafield blog; I also discussed the topic with Jon Bruner on their podcast. Since these events I’ve taken to carrying around the same single-use PET Evian bottle, which I’ve filled and refilled with NYC tap, pulling it out of the fridge on my way to the climbing gym. Somewhat predictably, I then found myself talking about the bottle (and single-use plastics in general) with another forty-something dad attempting a black V6 on the 45° bouldering wall. I expressed some ambivalence about the topic, equivocating over whether it was justifiable to rely on disposable bottles, or invest in a reusable container (with dramatically higher embodied energy), or simply slurp from the water fountain. He pushed me to take a firm stand; I demurred; the topic remains comfortably unresolved in my mind today.
- Christopher Payne, the industrial photographer who I wrote a profile of last year, has an exhibition up through September at Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC.
- Margaret Crane is the inventor of the at-home pregnancy test. “Although her name was on the patents for the device, [her employer] Organon licensed the product to three over-the-counter pharmaceutical companies and Crane never received a penny for her design.”
- Joe Montgomery, who founded Cannondale Bikes and pioneered a number of changes in the bike industry, died.
- Here’s a good, short video explainer on how permanent magnets create eddy currents when they pass nearby a conductor. This is the fundamental principle behind basically all electricity generation, and it’s also how the auto belay systems at my climbing gym work.
- Here’s a good blog post on thermostat wiring, which lacks “well standardized nomenclature” and is one of the next things I really need to work on in my own house.
- In the hundred-and-twenty-five years since Michael Joseph Owens invented the automatic glass bottle blowing machine, staggering quantities of glass bottles have been produced. They are blown inside of molds, which the machines open and close automatically, but the mold surfaces need to be lubricated with “swabbing compound” so that the glass can flow across the mold surfaces and not stick to them when the blowing is complete. The swabbing process itself has resisted automation, though, and even in the 21st century it is often done by hand.
- In addition to Inventing Temperature, I’m currently working my way through Nona Willis Aronowitz’s Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution; so far it’s both challenging and compelling. Starting in February I’m looking forward to reading Little Perfections: Eating in Singapore, by my friend and colleague TW Lim, with the SOW Reading Group. In the meantime, I’m listening to a lot of Fred again.., keeping up to date with The Pitt and Shoresy, and trying to figure out whether I enjoyed Marty Supreme or not.
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Spencer
