James' World 2

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Runners were some of the first people to embrace smartwatches. I remember back when a “running watch” was a brick-like GPS device strapped to your wrist, and it was a game-changer when those bricks started tracking heart rate as well.

These days, every smartwatch can track your heart rate, not to mention your location and potentially a half-dozen other things. So what makes a running watch special? Tons of extra fitness-centric features—and some critical small details, like physical buttons. Read on for my picks.

What to look for in a running watch

It’s easy to get lost in spec sheets and marketing claims, but at the end of the day what matters in a watch is whether it can do what you want a watch to do. Think of it like hiring an employee: you don’t want the person who can do the most things, you want the person who can do the job that you need done. 

So here are some things to think about when crafting the “job description” for your running watch. Some might be critical to you; some might be irrelevant. 

Does it have physical buttons? 

For most everyday functions, it may not matter if you’re clicking a physical button or booping an icon on a screen. But when you’re running laps at the track, your shaky, sweaty fingers are going to have a hard time with a touchscreen. For that reason, runners often prefer a watch with real buttons. All of our picks below have physical buttons. 

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Credit: Composite / Alisa Stern; Shutterstock / PeopleImages.com – Yuri A

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On the day that I was born—winter solstice, 1959—a headline in Life magazine proclaimed “Target Venus: There May be Life There!” It told of how scientists rode a balloon to an altitude of 80,000 feet to make telescope observations of Venus’s atmosphere, and how their discovery of water raised hopes that there could be living things there. As a kid, I thrilled to tales of undersea adventure with telepathic Venusian frogs in Isaac Asimov’s juvenile science-fiction novel Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. In 1975, when I was 15, a family friend—a planetary scientist—gave me a picture of the first-ever photograph taken from the surface of another planet: Venus. The Soviet Venera 9 probe had sent back a black-and-white image of a landscape with angular rocks and fine-grained dirt. A bright patch of sky made it seem much less unearthly than the Apollo moon shots I had obsessed over, and more like a strange, overcast desert land that you might hope to visit someday.

For many of my peers, though, Venus quickly lost its romance. The very first thing that scientists discovered with a mission to another planet was that Venus was not at all the Earthly paradise that fiction and speculative science had portrayed. It is nearly identical to our own planet in bulk properties such as mass, density, and size. But its surface has been cooked and desiccated by a suffocating ocean of carbon dioxide. Trapped in the scorching death-grip of a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus has long been held up as a cautionary tale for everything that could go wrong on a planet like Earth. As a possible home for alien life, it has been voted the planet least likely to succeed.

But I have refused to give up on Venus, and over the years my stubborn loyalty has been vindicated. The rocky vistas glimpsed by Venera 9 and other Russian landers suggested a tortured volcanic history. That was confirmed in the early 1990s by the American Magellan orbiter, which used radar to peer through the planet’s thick clouds and map out a rich, varied, and dynamic surface. To judge from the paucity of impact craters, the surface formed mostly in the last billion years, which makes it fresher and more recently active than any rocky planet other than Earth. Russian and American spacecraft also found hints that the primordial climate might have been wetter, cooler, and possibly even friendly to life. Measurements of density and composition imply that Venus originally formed out of basically the same stuff as Earth. That presumably included much more water than the trace equivalent to one thousandth of 1 percent of Earth’s oceans that we find wafting in the thick air today.

Confirmation comes from the measured ratio of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) to normal hydrogen. Venus’s atmosphere has proportionately much more deuterium than Earth’s does. This skew is a sign that the planet’s hydrogen has gradually escaped to space; deuterium, being heavier, leaks out more slowly than its lighter cousin, so that a difference builds up over time. Winding the clock backward, Venus must once have had much more hydrogen, which is to say, much more water.

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Venus

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San Francisco-born Orenthal James Simpson rose to fame in college before playing in the NFL.

In 1995, he was acquitted of the murder of his former wife Nicole Brown and her friend in a trial that gripped America.

In 2008, he was sentenced to 33 years’ imprisonment on unrelated charges of armed robbery. He was released in 2017.

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Reuters

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Around the world, children are far more likely than ever before to develop food allergies.

Inquiries into the deaths of British teenagers after eating buttermilk, sesame, and peanuts have highlighted the sometimes tragic consequences. In 2018, a six-year-old girl in Western Australia died as the result of a dairy allergy.

The rise in allergies in recent decades has been particularly noticeable in the West. Food allergy now affects about 7% of children in the UK and 9% of those in Australia, for example. Across Europe, 2% of adults have food allergies.

Life-threatening reactions can be prompted even by traces of the trigger foods, meaning patients and families live with fear and anxiety. The dietary restrictions which follow can become a burden to social and family lives.

While we can’t say for sure why allergy rates are increasing, researchers around the world are working hard to find ways to combat this phenomenon.

What Causes an Allergy?

An allergy is caused by the immune system fighting substances in the environment that it should see as harmless, known as allergens.

These innocent substances become targets, leading to allergic reactions.

Symptoms range from skin redness, hives, and swelling to – in the most severe cases – vomiting, diarrhea, difficulty breathing, and anaphylactic shock.

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Photo from Getty Images.

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This is tricky, click each title 1 through 5 for the long read desired, and close the new tab when you’re finished, then choose the next title. Enjoy!

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In this week’s edition:

• How Israel uses AI for assassination in the Gaza War.
• A father reflects on his son’s development.
• The rise of the term, “gaslighting.”
• Toni Morrison’s expansive rejection letters.
• The history of PostSecret.

1. ‘Lavender’: The AI Machine Directing Israel’s Bombing Spree in Gaza

Yuval Abraham | +972 and Local Call | April 3, 2024 | 8,066 words

The biggest news out of Gaza this week was the deaths of seven aid workers affiliated with the non-profit organization World Central Kitchen. The incident was nothing short of perverse: Israel targeted and killed people trying to make a dent in the imminent famine that Israel itself has engineered as part of its strategy to demoralize and destroy, in whole or in part*, the Palestinian population. etc, etc,etc —SD

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Illustration by Krista. Image by Getty.

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Click the link below for the five articles:

https://longreads.com

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The universe is kind of an impossible object. It has an inside but no outside; it’s a one-sided coin. This Möbius architecture presents a unique challenge for cosmologists, who find themselves in the awkward position of being stuck inside the very system they’re trying to comprehend.

It’s a situation that Lee Smolin has been thinking about for most of his career. A physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin works at the knotty intersection of quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology. Don’t let his soft voice and quiet demeanor fool you — he’s known as a rebellious thinker and has always followed his own path. In the 1960s Smolin dropped out of high school, played in a rock band called Ideoplastos, and published an underground newspaper. Wanting to build geodesic domes like R. Buckminster Fuller, Smolin taught himself advanced mathematics — the same kind of math, it turned out, that you need to play with Einstein’s equations of general relativity. The moment he realized this was the moment he became a physicist. He studied at Harvard University and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, eventually becoming a founding faculty member at the Perimeter Institute.

“Perimeter,” in fact, is the perfect word to describe Smolin’s place near the boundary of mainstream physics. When most physicists dived headfirst into string theory, Smolin played a key role in working out the competing theory of loop quantum gravity. When most physicists said that the laws of physics are immutable, he said they evolve according to a kind of cosmic Darwinism. When most physicists said that time is an illusion, Smolin insisted that it’s real.

Smolin often finds himself inspired by conversations with biologists, economists, sculptors, playwrights, musicians, and political theorists. But he finds his biggest inspiration, perhaps, in philosophy — particularly in the work of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, active in the 17th and 18th centuries, who along with Isaac Newton invented calculus. Leibniz argued (against Newton) that there’s no fixed backdrop to the universe, no “stuff” of space; space is just a handy way of describing relationships. This relational framework captured Smolin’s imagination, as did Leibniz’s enigmatic text The Monadology, in which Leibniz suggests that the world’s fundamental ingredient is the “monad,” a kind of atom of reality, with each monad representing a unique view of the whole universe. It’s a concept that informs Smolin’s latest work as he attempts to build reality out of viewpoints, each one a partial perspective on a dynamically evolving universe. A universe as seen from the inside.

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Lee Smolin at his home in downtown Toronto. All photos by Philip Cheung for Quanta Magazine.

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1. Speak softly and carry your trash

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If you stop to think about it, society is pretty fragile. A lot of it’s just agreements between total strangers to do certain things in certain ways all the way down, and if enough people stopped honoring those agreements, everything would collapse pretty fast. Most of those agreements are unwritten and unspoken—like not playing the bongos at 3 a.m. while your neighbors are sleeping—but many are enshrined in a written contract. And we should all be using contracts more in our lives, because they remove uncertainty.

A contract is just a legally binding agreement between two or more parties that sets out the terms of an agreement. You don’t need to be a lawyer (or hire a lawyer) to write one, and they can protect you and the other party in a variety of ways. Any time you enter into an agreement that involves money or property, you should have at least a simple contract in place to make sure things go smoothly—because if they don’t and you need to take someone to court (even small claims court), having a contract will significantly strengthen your position and improve the odds of things going your way.

Contract basics

First, you have to know a few basic things about writing a contract. You don’t need fancy language, formatting, or specific legal terms in there, but the contract does have to include a few basics to be considered legally enforceable:

• Consideration. There has to be an exchange of value, like when you pay someone to perform a service for you.
• Clear acceptance. What’s being offered (e.g., a fee and a service) has to be very clear, as does the other party’s acceptance of the terms.
• Legality. A contract that has illegal terms can’t be enforced, so forget about legally binding someone to commit crimes for your benefit.
• Capability. Both parties in the contract have to be competent, of legal adult age, and capable of understanding what they’re agreeing to.
• Mutuality. Everyone has to agree that they are, in fact, entering into a contract and agree to be bound by its provisions. In other words, you can’t trick someone into signing a contract.

Contracts don’t have to be lengthy, but they do have to be clear—any confusing wording or imprecise terminology may come back to haunt you. There are a lot of free downloadable contract templates out there, however, which you can either use as-is or alter to your needs. And if you have any doubts about your ability to craft a contract, you can always pay a lawyer to either write one for you or review one you’ve created yourself.

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The German historian Oswald Spengler considered our age the age of abstraction. Nowhere is this more apparent than in programming, where abstraction isn’t just a conceptual convenience but an absolute necessity. Programmers like to talk about their tools (rather abstractly) as a “stack.” At the top of the stack—the surface most of us encounter first—are simple markup languages, HTML being the best known. At the bottom are the “bare metal” languages of the machine. Thus, there is a hierarchy, and the further down in the stack you go, the less abstract—and, in a way, more difficult—programming gets.

It’s not really metal down there, of course. It’s sand—impossibly thin layers of silicon dioxide that conduct electrical impulses in ordered patterns we experience as a screen showing us a rectangle with text on it, flickering images, and so on. Still, you can see how Spengler, though he died before the era of digital computing, was on to something. None of us are keeping 1s and 0s etched in sand in our head, and yet we all manipulate them every day using friendly, high-level abstractions.

The danger of living in this Spenglerian moment is that it’s easy to mistake such abstractions for the world as it really is. This, I think, is why programmers often dive deeper into the stack as they progress through their careers. We think that maybe when we reach bare metal, our world will finally be real.

I started, like most, at the top of the stack. HTML. 1995. Geocities. Angelfire. Blink tags. Marquee. I’ll admit it: I loved me some marquee tag, which scrolled text across the screen. I loved marquee so much, I ran straight out of HTML and into the welcoming arms of Flash. Blame the Matrix website. Coolest animation ever.

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