What I'm Reading (Mar. 20)

Insects like bees and spiders use static electricity for various tasks, including traveling, avoiding predators, and collecting pollen.

“Parasites, such as ticks and roundworms, hitch rides on electric fields generated by larger animal hosts. In a behavior known as ballooning, spiders take flight by extending a silk thread to catch charges in the sky, sometimes traveling hundreds of kilometers with the wind. And this year, studies from Robert’s lab revealed how static attracts pollen to butterflies and moths, and may help caterpillars to evade predators.

This new research goes beyond documenting the ecological effects of static: It also aims to uncover whether and how evolution has fine-tuned this electric sense. Electrostatics may turn out to be an evolutionary force in small creatures’ survival that helps them find food, migrate and infest other living things.”

From Quanta, The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology

When my youngest child was much younger, my wife insisted that I accompany him on any venture she considered dangerous. That is how I found myself bolted into a rollercoaster at Universal Studios and found myself speaking fluent Hebrew somewhere in the middle of the first drop.

“Some of the very first rollercoaster trains expended their energy on tracks shaped like figure eights. When technology and imaginative daring allowed, these tracks were given dip elements, dive elements, loop elements. The loops were pioneered by Schwarzkopf, a 20th-century impresario working out of Münsterhausen, Germany. It was his apprentice, Stengel, who led the way towards the more extreme elements we see today: the bow tie, the bat wing, the pretzel, the horseshoe, the cobra, the scorpion tail and the sea serpent, all named for their shape. Other elements have names borrowed from aerobatic aviation: the Immelmann turn, the hammerhead turn and the Top Gun stall. A rollercoaster element called the heart-line roll – a lovely example of industrial poetry – got its name from a romantic notion that passengers sent through these tight corkscrews are spun around and around their own beating hearts.”

A deeper look at the love and design of rollercoasters. From the Guardian, The rollercoaster king: the man behind the UK’s fastest thrill-ride

The Robinson-Patman Act was implemented in the federal law books nearly 90 years ago and banned price discrimination – suppliers can’t offer it, and retailers cannot demand it. While it remains on the books, it has not been seriously enforced since the 80s – through multiple administrations. However, laws can have unintended consequences, whether enforced or not. Could the concern over food “desserts,” which should be a mantra for MAHA, result from government non-enforcement?

“Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.”

From The Atlantic, The Great Grocery Squeeze

One of my concerns about automation is that taking over the tasks we find onerous often leaves us “de-skilled.” AI will accelerate that possibility.

"Airmen in World War I, justifiably proud of their skill in maneuvering their planes during dogfights, wanted nothing to do with the fancy, gyroscopic Sperry autopilots that had recently been introduced. In 1959, the original Mercury astronauts famously rebelled against NASA’s plan to remove manual flight controls from spacecraft. But aviators’ concerns are more acute now. Even as they praise the enormous gains being made in flight technology, and acknowledge the safety and efficiency benefits, they worry about the erosion of their talents. As part of his research, Ebbatson surveyed commercial pilots, asking them whether “they felt their manual flying ability had been influenced by the experience of operating a highly automated aircraft.” More than three-quarters said “their skills had deteriorated.” Fewer than one in ten felt their skills had improved.”

From Nicholas Carr’s substack New Cartographies, On Autopilot