Links, quotes & articles (Week 19, 2024)

Tiffany B. Brown does this weekly post on her blog capturing some podcast/audio highlights that interested her over the past week. I've started using Snipd to capture little bits from the podcast I listen to on the regular, however I've never really done anything with them. This feels like a good habit to start, getting me to review the bits I capture from podcasts through the week & put them out into the world at the very least.

This item includes a few items from previous weeks which I only got around to reviewing today in preparing this post.

I really enjoyed this episode of Green IO, which Gael Duez chatting to Sara Bergman. I've followed Sara's work since I first started getting into digital sustainability, and hearing her own ideas and thinking about some of the complexity that surrounds building green software was really insightful. In the episode, she touched on the concepts of carbon-aware, grid-aware, and even temperature-aware computing, as well as the topic of measurement, estimation, and metrics.

It's fine to use the amount of hardware that you use as a proxy. You don't have to measure every, every single detail just to do something is what I really firmly believe ... you can always find more things to measure, more complex ways to think about things. There's always more data, more things to consider. What about a vocation of the soil? What about eco diversity? What about the water use?

I know of the work of Daniel (Danny) Kahneman through hearing it references so often on the various podcasts in the Freakonomics Radio Network. This episode was a replay on an interview Kahneman did for the People I Mostly Admire podcast during COVID. Among the topics covered included the flaws in human problem solving methodologies, something which I feel can be related back to what Sara Bergman spoke about when it comes to measuring with imprecise proxies.

The intuitive way of going about it is to assimilate a lot of information and then to trust your intuitive system to come up with a solution. And this is clearly not optimal. We know that people do better than that. If they have a plan, if they break up the problem, if they evaluate each part of the problem separately and independently from the other parts. If they postpone their intuition until they have enough information.

It was fascinating listening to Senator Scott Wiener speak about getting California Senate Bill 253 (Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act) passed. In the episode, the Senator gives a easy to follow walkthrough of the Bill and what it will require in terms of emissions reporting for companies operating in California.

Another one from the People I Mostly Admire podcast. I loved hearing host Steve Levitt recall the awe his late grandfather had for everyday life. It's something that I really try to build into my own daily existence. To not take things for granted, or as being "understood", but rather to wonder at how they could possibly even work, almost as though they're magical. I experience this every morning when I brew coffee in my small 2 person Moka pot. Sure, I understand the science behind it, but every time the coffee starts to trickle out I get this little buzz of "wow, that's magic!".

So my role model for aging has always been my grandfather. And physically, he was a mess. He had cataracts and he couldn't see very well. And he had broken his hips so he limped around. But I would go over to his house for dinner once a week. And he walked. And with a childlike fascination, he would report the things he had seen and what he'd experienced. And something about that, this is now 50 years ago, is still completely alive in me today. I'm not good at awe myself, but I understand the power of it. And as I get older, more and more, I think about my grandfather and how amazing it was that he had awe for the everyday. And I think that's one of the greatest gifts you could possibly have.