Sitting here in the Gomecile with the first cuppa Toltec War Party Juice of 2022. No particularly deep thoughts about the year ahead, to be honest. 2021 started with the aggressive surreality of Jan. 6 and ended with the passing of human rights activist Desmond Tutu, the world’s most garrulous aerophobe John Madden, and she-was-actually-very-good-at-Password Betty White. All the while, we had a mutating virus to keep us good and scared.
2021 was a bad sequel to the blockbuster of 2020: No real advancement of the plot, themes or characters, and no real sense of closure either. We were hoping for The Empire Strikes Back. We got Attack of the Clones. Here’s hoping that 2022 starts everything anew and stands on its own.
Back to more substantive editions next week. Until then, get yourself some coffee, set your phone to Do Not Disturb, and enjoy the reads.
Happy New Year, Pennyheads.
Recommendations
SCIENCE: “The Webb Space Telescope Will Rewrite Cosmic History. If It Works.” Quanta (2021) — This article is perfect for those of us who experienced the crushing youthful disappointment of the initial Hubble images and hold out great hope for the James Webb telescope. While you’re at it, keep tabs on the Webb via the… umm… Web via this handy dashboard.
SCIENCE: “Creating a Better Leaf,” The New Yorker (2021) — This is an article for Malthusians with a brain. “The more that was discovered about the intricacies of photosynthesis, the more was revealed about its inefficiency. The comparison is often made to photovoltaic cells. Those on the market today convert about twenty per cent of the sunlight that strikes them into electricity, and, in labs, researchers have achieved rates of almost fifty per cent. Plants convert only about one per cent of the sunlight that hits them into growth.”
BUSINESS: “Family Feud: Adidas vs. Puma,” Uncle John’s 24-karat Bathroom Reader by way of Neatorama (2012) — One of my favorite cautionary tales about family businesses. “The brothers really had very little in common: Adi loved nothing more than to sit at his workbench and tinker with his shoes. Rudi, on the other hand, was a people person, but also short-tempered and loudmouthed. Their personalities complemented each other during the early years of the business. But as Germany moved closer to war in the late 1930s, their relationship became strained, made worse by the fact that they, their wives, their children, their parents, and all their siblings all lived together under the same roof in a villa in Herzogenaurach.”
CRYPTO: “The Coder and the Dictator,” The New York Times (2020) — Crypto skeptic? Worse yet, a Chavez/Maduro apologist? I had the honor of sitting down for coffee with Venezuelan software engineer Gabriel Jiménez in late 2019 or so. This article, as good as it is, only tells a smidgen of his fascinating story. “But whatever Mr. Jiménez felt about the regime, he felt just as strongly about the potential of cryptocurrency. When the Maduro administration approached him about creating a digital coin, Mr. Jiménez saw an opportunity to change his country from within. If a national cryptocurrency was done right, Mr. Jiménez believed, he could give the government what it wanted — a way to fight hyperinflation — while also stealthily introducing technology that would give Venezuelans a measure of freedom from a government that dictated every detail of daily life.”