It’s Friday, and I’m back here slinging words. And links!
SCOPE CREEP.
- Yesterday the SOW Members’ Reading Group had a lively chat about the first few chapters of Not the End of the World; I enjoyed it a ton. While reading the book I’ve been thinking about how the ideas of “climate change” and “sustainability” have evolved in the public consciousness, and how my age has affected how I understand them. So, I plotted the terms in Google’s Ngram viewer. When I was born in 1983 these two terms were basically not in the lexicon; by the time that Hannah Ritchie was born, ten years later, they had adopted the slope that has then continued to 2019. Add “global warming” to the mix and it gets even more interesting: that term’s usage rises and falls with “climate change,” but but since about 1990 it has had a much lower slope.
- In the next month I need to drill a few holes in a concrete slab that contains radiant hydronic heating. I was dreading it, but once I learned of the practice of detecting radiant pipes using a non-contact infrared thermometer (which of course I own), I actually started looking forward to the task.
- Here’s a forty-five-minute video of Tom Lipton (oxtoolco) rebuilding an Albrecht keyless chuck. Here’s a much shorter Instagram video of SOW Member Colin Chu doing the same.
- I am told, by someone I trust, that we shouldn’t take the Swedish pastry calendar that literally. But this wise individual did recommend that I check out fika, the Swedish tradition of coffee and snacks which strikes me as delightfully normal.
- A decent explainer on why Dune’s ornithopters aren’t feasible. Somewhat related, one of my favorite things I’ve ever written is this ~700-word rabbit hole, which took me from ski lifts being installed, to a relatively obscure heavy-lift helicopter, to the modern day cost of spar-grade Sitka spruce, to the lifespan of wooden wind turbine blades. I just love it!
- Just a few days ago I was talking with someone – I think it may have been one of you! – about how Kickstarter had only ever raised ten million dollars, and how one of their earliest investments was from Union Square Ventures, and how the fund from which USV invested in Kickstarter had also backed a few companies that later had big IPOs, and how as a result there maybe wasn’t as much pressure on Kickstarter to have a big IPO itself, and how that meant that Kickstarter could kind of continue in perpetuity as a moderately profitable (but also decidedly low-growth) company. All of this makes perfect sense in my head – and yet! And yet, in December 2021, when the company was something like eleven years old, Chris Dixon made a tender offer to existing Kickstarter shareholders that ended up raising a hundred million dollars. And baked into the investment was “the expectation that Kickstarter would attempt a pivot to blockchain.”
So, I guess that’s something to add to my mental model of how companies work! - Here’s an obscure corner of the internet: Typography for Lawyers.
- The FAA lets on-demand public charter airlines follow less stringent safety and security protocols than commercial airlines need to. But, on-demand public charter airlines can’t establish scheduled routes and can’t sell single seats. But! You apparently can form two companies, one which flies the planes and another which sells the tickets, and then you can offer low-security, regularly-scheduled routes between small airports to a business clientele looking for “travel hacks.” The result: Revenue on track to a billion dollars in 2028, and also a potential rule change at the FAA which all of the normal “scheduled carriers” are lobbying hard for.
- A Paternoster is a rare type of elevator which runs in a continuous loop in two shafts. Cars go up, then over, then down, then back, then back up again, etc, with passengers hopping on and off at each floor. Passengers cannot ride over the top (or presumably the bottom) of the Paternoster, but GoPros can.
- I have spent a bit of time umarelling recently, and am using it as an opportunity to give myself little writing assignments. Here’s one recent result:
They spray the perfume to mask the smell of the digging. They’re digging to reach bedrock, which is quite a ways down, cranes lowering hundreds of feet of cable into roughly rectangular holes, huge carbide-tipped cutting heads churning away to break up the moraine. If you did this dry, or worse yet lubricated with water, then the sides of the holes would collapse; you don’t want this, so you pump in drilling mud to create a slurry which can then be pumped back out, and the holes maintain their integrity and end up as neat orthogonal shafts plunging from the chaotic cityscape into the stable geology below it.
The drilling mud is made of bentonite clay, which apparently smells bad, though I cannot confirm this due to the perfume that they spray. I am also having a hard time confirming what the perfume smells like. I have asked the site’s guard (or were they just someone standing around the entrance?) if they knew what the perfume was called, but they didn’t know, and other than it smelling vaguely of hardware store potpourri, I don’t really have words to describe the scent.
Anyway, it is sprayed from a series of nozzles perched atop the wall on the site’s perimeter. They’re rather conspicuous on the eastern side in particular; that would be Nevins Street, which has very little else to capture my attention on the blocks between Butler and Degraw, and even if there was something to pull my eyes away from the plumes of perfume, curling down over the forest green NYC construction fence, there would still be the fact that those plumes – slightly dispersed but still quite moist and fragrant – often end up directly on the path my face takes as I take the first few pedal strokes and come around the corner on my way home from the gym.
Thanks as always to Scope of Work’s Members and Supporters for making this newsletter possible. Thanks also to James, Ken, Colin, Avi, Mats, Reilly, and Mark, for helping source links this week.
Love, Spencer
p.s. - We care about inclusivity. Here’s what we’re doing about it.
