No introduction… just the usual… a little nosegay of various things…
1.
Assembling family photo albums made me realize that I was missing the high-quality pictures my SLR takes. I started bringing my SLR on daily walks with the dog and notice that the routine feels newly enriched: now I think of framing shots; I notice how different the days are from each other... especially their light and how it draws my attention to different things. I post a round up of photos from the week on Instagram, picking a favourite from each day.
2.
Trying to capture the sculptural branches of a bunch of dead trees in Henteleff Park, I noticed a plane flying through the shot. I immediately thought of Lost and felt a wave of nostalgia... It was the first tv show Christian and I binge-watched on weekends when our daughter was a brand-new baby, we were brand-new parents and the show helped us escape the tethered-to-our-house feeling. It was so long ago… we rented the dvds from BlockBuster.
3.
Last weekend we were sad to have reached the end of the second season of Acapulco. I don't think I've ever felt a tv show grow on me as surprisingly as this one did... I could barely watch the beginning of the first season's episodes, and would distract myself from the cringe I felt by working on a puzzle in front of the television. But over time I was won over by its characters and now agree with what Rebecca Nicholson writes: "the overall effect is gentle, sunny and laidback, and the show wears its easy charm well"
4.
I get a thrill when I can pull off a weeknight meal with family guests... Last night I made Melissa Clark's Sesame Chicken with Cashews and Dates and it was perfect. Stars align, planes fly into shots, grapefruit is in season and you have the perfect occasion to make a loaf for dessert. I'd been wanting to make Smitten Kitchen's Grapefruit Olive Oil Pound Cake for years and finally did this week. It was delicious!
5.
I finished listening to The Sixth Extinction audiobook and loved every minute of being carried along on Elizabeth Kolbert's words. (I also especially like Anne Twomey’s voice as narrator.) I learned about paradigm-shifts and coral reefs:
(Chapter 5) The psychologists wrote up their findings in a paper titled "On the perception of incongruity: a paradigm." Among those who found this paper intriguing was Thomas Kuhn. To Kuhn, the 20th century's most influential historian of science, the experiment was indeed paradigmatic: it revealed how people process disruptive information. Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework [...]. Signs of mismatch are disregarded for as long as possible, [...]. At the point the anomaly becomes simply too glaring, a crisis ensues, what the psychologists dubbed the "my God" reaction. This pattern was, Kuhn argued in his seminal work, "The Structures of Scientific Revolutions" so basic that it shaped not only individual perceptions but entire fields of enquiry. Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline, would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more contradictions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, Kuhn wrote, [...]. Crisis lead to insight and the old framework gave way to a new one. This is how great scientific discoveries, or, to use the term Kuhn made so popular, "paradigm-shifts" took place.
(Chap 5) "Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world," is how Kuhn put it.
(Chapter 7) Reefs are organic paradoxes: obdurate, ship-destroying ramparts constructed by tiny gelatinous creatures. They are part animal, part vegetable and part mineral, at once teeming with life and at the same time, mostly dead. Like sea-urchins and starfish and clams and oysters and barnacles, reef-building corals have mastered the alchemy of calcification. What sets them apart from other calcifiers is that instead of working solo, to produce a shell, say, or some calcitic plates, corals engage in vast communal building projects that stretch over generations. Each individual, known unflatteringly as a polyp, adds to its colony's collective exoskeleton. On a reef, billions of polyps belonging to as many as a hundred different species are all devoting themselves to the same basic task. Given enough time and the right conditions, the result is another paradox: a living structure. The great barrier reef extends continuously for more than fifteen hundred miles and in some places it is five hundred feet thick. By the scale of reefs, the pyramids at Giza are kiddie blocks. The way corals change the world, with huge construction projects spanning multiple generations, might be likened to the way that humans do, with this crucial difference: instead of displacing other creatures, corals support them.
While writing this, I forgot I had put beans to boil and they are now cooling off outside, their burnt smoky-smell drifting off toward the neighbour’s. C’est la vie!
Happy Friday!