Linkteresting #2: Reading, writing, and webmarks

Hello again webmates!

Below are some notable things I’ve read, written, and consumed lately. Click links you’re curious about—that’s what the Web is for. ☕️

Reading

• What if? 2 by Randall Munroe: It’s just as funny and nerdy as the first one. The two books are by the creator of xkcd comics, and share the subtitle of “serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions”. That’s exactly right. If I had these books in college, physics would’ve been even more fun! It’s hard to choose the most destructive scenario in the books hell bent on breaking things but Proton Earth, Electron Moon probably takes the prize.

In the case of an electron Moon, the energy from all those electrons pushing on each other is so large that the gravitational pull wins, and our singularity would form a normal black hole. At least, "normal" in some sense; it would be a black hole as massive as the observable universe.

• Poetry by T. S. Eliot: Some of his verses strike eerily even for events and themes of the world today. I won’t point fingers but this one’s pretty telling:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless

• The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu: The explorations in this collection are brisk and punchy. I could see what Liu means when he says fiction is a fluid genre for him instead of its usually assumed divisions of science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, etc. Below are stories from the collection I particularly liked, with links to read most of them officially for free online:
  • The bookmaking habits of select species: If you love Sci-Fi and books, this fusion is for you.
  • Simulacrum: It reminded me of Black Mirror.
  • The paper menagerie: Heartbreaking
  • The waves: A very interesting exploration of relative aging in a spacefaring species.
  • Mono no aware: A beautiful story of grace and sacrifice.
  • The man who ended history: Literally sheds light on history, with brilliance.

But the past is consumed even as it is seen. The photons enter the lens, and from there they strike an imaging surface, be it your retina or a sheet of film or a digital sensor, and then they are gone, stopped dead in their paths. If you look but don’t pay attention and miss a moment, you cannot travel farther out to catch it again. That moment is erased from the universe, forever.

• There will come soft rains by Ray Bradbury: A fun little Sci-Fi story shared by a friend. It’s inspired by a poem of the same name by Sara Teasdale. Quoting the poem:

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Writing

• Achievements and shortfalls in global lunar exploration this half year (plus lunar poetry!)
• Special page: Explore our Moon 🌙
• Our Moon is two-faced. Science missions unravel its layers.

Researchers think Earth may be responsible for lending the Moon’s nearside a thinner crust than its farside. When the Moon coalesced as a molten body from leftover debris of Theia’s collision with Earth, it was about 15 times closer to us than it is today. It became tidally locked soon after, likely within ~100 days, a time that barely registers on geologic timescales.

• The Moon’s south pole is a place of promise and perils. Effective data sharing will benefit and save everyone.

Despite facing a whole new plane of challenges, the global rush to the Moon this century is grander in ambition than even Apollo. Countries and companies wish to repeatedly land more humans and robots than before, operate for longer than past missions have, and eventually construct and operate Moonbases that can harvest local resources like water ice and oxygen & metals in lunar soil. In the meanwhile, the budgets available are far less than half of Apollo for Artemis as well as programs globally. Moreover, about half the world’s robotic lunar landing attempts still fail.

• Collection: Slightly different articles on Mars and missions to it

More links

• Watched For All Mankind S5 and Star City. The two are from the same alt-history universe where the Soviet Union lands humans on the Moon first. I found them a bit too dramatic but entertaining nevertheless.
• Please use AI (shared by Abhigyan)

Why struggle
for the right words
when a machine can give you
beautiful ones?

• Accepting tradeoffs
• Fun things: Photo-graph-ie by Rasagy, and e-mail.wtf shared by Yash

Did you read a book or article lately that intrigued you? Message me: