Reads, Listens

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled

🎧 “Dwarf wheat: On the shoulders of a giant” | Our Daily Bread | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Dwarf wheat: On the shoulders of a giant | Our Daily Bread 10 by Jeremy CherfasJeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

Norman Borlaug created the wheats that created the Green Revolution. They had short stems that could carry heavy ears of wheat, engorged by loads of fertiliser. They were resistant to devastating rust diseases. And they were insensitive to daylength, meaning they could be grown almost anywhere.

All three traits had been bred into wheat 40 years before Borlaug got going, by the Italian pioneer Nazareno Strampelli.

Photo is a 1933 medal to honour Nazareno Strampelli.

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I’d never heard the quote from the episode, but it is a painful, but wonderful, concept to contemplate. Here’s an alternate, but somewhat more flowery translation:

History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of king’s bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.

—Jean Henri Fabre in Les Merveilles de l’Instinct Chez les Insectes: Morceaux Choisis (The Wonders of Instinct in Insects: Selected Pieces) (1913), page 242.

🎧 Lecture 13 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lecture 13: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 13: The Case For the World’s First Language
Despite the hostility of most linguists to the Proto-World hypothesis, there is increasing evidence that many of the world's language families do trace to "mega-ancestors," even if evidence for a Proto-World remains lacking.

🎧 Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? | Crazy/Genius | The Atlantic

Listened to Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? by Derek ThompsonDerek Thompson from The Atlantic
In a special bonus episode of the podcast Crazy/Genius, the computer scientist and data journalist Meredith Broussard explains how “technochauvinism” derailed the dream of the digital revolution.

I was excited to hear Dr. Meredith Broussard, a brilliant colleague I’ve met via the Dodging the Memory Hole series of conferences, on this podcast from The Atlantic. I would recommend this special episode (one of their very best) to just about anyone. In particular there’s something to be gained in the people side of what the IndieWeb movement is doing as well as for their efforts towards inclusion.

From a broader perspective, I think there’s certainly something to be learned from not over-sensationalizing artificial intelligence. Looking at the history of the automobile as a new technology over a century ago is a pretty good parallel example. While it’s generally done a lot of good, the automobile has also brought along a lot of additional  societal problems, ills, and costs with it as well.

I hadn’t yet heard about her new book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World which I’m ordering a copy of today. I suspect that it’s in the realm of great books like Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Distraction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy  which was also relevant to some of the topics within this podcast.

🎧 Lectures 10-12 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 10-12: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 10: Language Families—Diversity of Structures
Semitic languages assign basic meanings to three-consonant sequences and create words by altering the vowels around them. In Sino-Tibetan languages, a sentence tends to leave more to context than we often imagine possible.

Lecture 11: Language Families—Clues to the Past
The distribution of language families shows how humans have spread through migration. We trace the Austronesian language family to its origins on Formosa. Similar work sheds light on the history of Africa and North America.

Lecture 12: The Case Against the World’s First Language
A few linguists have claimed to reconstruct words from the world's first language, but this work is extremely controversial. Professor McWhorter presents the case against this theory, called the "Proto-World" hypothesis.

🎧 Lecture 9 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lecture 9: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 9: Language Families—Tracing Indo-European
Linguists have reconstructed the proto-language of the Indo-Europeans by comparing the modern languages. Applying this process, we learn the Proto-Indo-European word for sister-in-law that was spoken 6,000 years ago.

👓 The Cybersec World Is Debating Who to Believe in This Story About a Massive Hack | Motherboard | Vice

Read The Cybersec World Is Debating Who to Believe in This Story About a Massive Hack (Motherboard)
No one is really sure who to believe after Businessweek's bombshell story on an alleged Chinese supply chain attack against Apple, Amazon, and others.

🎧 Lectures 6-8 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to Lectures 6-8: The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 6: How Language Changes—Many Directions
The first language has evolved into 6,000 because language change takes place in many directions. Latin split in this way into the Romance languages as changes proceeded differently in each area where the Romans brought Latin.

Lecture 7: How Language Changes—Modern English
As recently as Shakespeare, English words had meanings different enough to interfere with our understanding of his language today. Even by the 1800s, Jane Austen's work is full of sentences that would now be considered errors.

Lecture 8: Language Families—Indo-European
The first of four lectures on language families introduces Indo-European, which probably began in the southern steppes of Russia around 4000 B.C. and then spread westward to most of Europe and eastward to Iran and India.

 

 

👓 The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all | The Verge

Read The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all by Russell Brandom (The Verge)
A bug in the rarely used Google+ network has exposed private information for as many as 500,000 users. Should Google have shared more sooner?

👓 The Times Trump investigation and the power of the long game | Columbia Journalism Review

Read The Times Trump investigation and the power of the long game by Kyle Pope (Columbia Journalism Review)
WE LIVE AT A TIME WHEN JOURNALISM can land with great force. The epic investigation published Tuesday by The New York Times, on the fraud that is the Trump family business, is such a story. The piece, which took three reporters—David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Russ Buettner—18 months, 15,000 words, and eight pages in the print edition, has been roundly, and rightly, praised. One of its great benefits, to my mind, is that it transcends the headlines of the day, focusing on an elemental, fundamental aspect of this man and this presidency that, it turns out, is even more divorced from our common understanding than we might have previously thought. It is an example of journalism as long game, a sport that more of us need to be playing.

👓 China Used a Tiny Chip in a Hack That Infiltrated U.S. Companies | Bloomberg

Read The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies by Jordan Robinson, Michael Riley (Bloomberg)
The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources. In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

👓 Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+ | Google

Read Project Strobe: Protecting your data, improving our third-party APIs, and sunsetting consumer Google+ (Google)
Findings and actions from Project Strobe—a root-and-branch review of third-party developer access to Google account and Android device data and of our philosophy around apps’ data access.

👓 Google+ to shut down after coverup of data-exposing bug | Tech Crunch

Read Google+ to shut down after coverup of data-exposing bug (TechCrunch)
Google is about to have its Cambridge Analytica moment. A security bug allowed third-party developers to access Google+ user profile data since 2015 until Google discovered and patched it in March, but decided not to inform the world. When a user gave permission to an app to access their public pro…

🎧 The Daily: The Other Russian Interference | New York Times

Listened to The Daily: The Other Russian Interference from nytimes.com
Hours after the presidential summit meeting in Helsinki, news broke of the arrest of Maria Butina, a Russian woman charged with conspiring to influence American politics.

🎧 Lectures 4 and 5 of The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter

Listened to The Story of Human Language by John McWhorterJohn McWhorter from The Great Courses: Linguistics

Lecture 4: How Language Changes—Building New Material
Language change is not just sound erosion and morphing, but the building of new words and constructions. This lecture shows how such developments lead to novel grammatical features.

Lecture 5: How Language Changes—Meaning and Order
The meaning of a word changes over time. Silly first meant "blessed" and acquired its current sense through a series of gradual steps. Word order also changes: In Old English, the verb usually came at the end of a sentence.

Some great examples of words changing over time:
eke name – nick name
(my) mine Ellie – Nellie and (my) mine Edward – Ned
brid (bird) / fowl
silly (blessed)
verb endings and conjugations
n’est verb pas in French in which pas means literally “step”

🎧 The Daily: A Supreme Court With Justice Kavanaugh | New York Times

Listened to The Daily: A Supreme Court With Justice Kavanaugh from nytimes.com
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh takes his place on a Supreme Court whose reputation has suffered significant damage from the battle over his confirmation.