Kickoff For May 10, 2021
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Monday Kickoff, a collection of what I’ve found interesting, informative, and insightful on the web over the last seven days.
Let’s get this Monday started with these links:
Science
How English became the language of physics, wherein we learn how in the middle and late 20th century, English supplanted German, French, and even Russian as the major language for physics research.
Blueprints Of Intelligence, wherein Philipp Schmitt ponders how AI diagrams prompt[s] us to consider how their creators think about cognition.
Not all early human societies were small-scale egalitarian bands, wherein we learn that the image of small, mobile, egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers is only a small part of the picture and that those bands may actually be an outlier.
Technology
The Case Against ‘STEM’, wherein M. Anthony Mills argues that we shouldn’t lump science and technology together as educational pursuits since the aims and goals of the two are different.
The pandemic and a boom in digital services have revolutionized how we die, wherein Marianne Bray looks at how startups are working overtime to digitize practices around death.
How and why I stopped buying new laptops, wherein Kris De Decker explains why he tries, wherever possible, to bring new life to older laptop computers — and it’s not all about saving money.
Odds and Ends
How some people can end up living at airports for months – even years – at a time, wherein Janet Bednarek looks at the ways and the whys some people take up residence in terminals for weeks, months and sometimes years.
The new use for abandoned oil rigs, wherein we learn about efforts to turn disused oil rigs as the framework for growing coral reefs.
When the Cholera Came, wherein Lindsey Hilsum contrasts living in the time of coronavirus and its requisite lockdowns and the cholera outbreak in Rwanda in the early 1990s.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.