Homemade Nuclear, Notifications, Art is our salvation, Shabaka

A high school student

Martin Gendell, a high school student in NYC, built a fusor and shared a video on the development process. It is a remarkable accomplishment, I found the presentation compelling (even though a lot of it went over my head), and I was inspired by the project.

I was reminded of the “Radioactive Boy Scout”, David Hahn, which is more tragic and less triumphant. I would like to think that society has progressed since David’s time, and that today we would have done better to accommodate an ambitious and brilliant young person.

Speaking of nuclear disasters

I came across very well made video essay: “The Lost Discipline of the Alarm: What Notification Design Forgot”. It is a deep dive into the science of notifications, disasters caused by poor implementation of notifications, and the standards and best practices that evolved as a result of these disasters. The video also explains the implicitions on our day to day lives, given our near constant exposure to notifications on our mobile devices, and how this impacts our ability to discern between what is important and what is not.

The Three Mile Island accident has come up a few times over the years in my job, and so I was somewhat familiar with it, but not with the Milford Haven Texaco refinery incident. I found the analysis performed in its aftermath very insightful.

I’m often tasked with the design and rollout of monitoring systems (albeit with much lower stakes than on nuclear reactors), so the notion of “alert fatigue” is near and dear to my heart. The video serves as an excellent reference for the current state of the art in notifications.

And forever we shall remember Stanislav Petrov

I can’t mention (near) nuclear disasters without acknowledging Stanislav Petrov. I haven’t seen the documentary about him (“The Man Who Saved the World”) yet, but it’s on my “to watch” list.

Creativity is the antidote

In “A chaotic guide to making stuff instead of doomscrolling” one can find tried and true methods to get the creative juices flowing. For me, creating something is an act of resistance to the incessant encroachment of the “Invisible Hand”.

Inspired by the video, this is an extamporaneous haiku:

Invented right now

to demonstrate my outlook

you can do the same

And here is great example of art (courtesy of the Wikipedia entry on crochet):

The world needs more whimsy! There are days where it feels like I am embodying a false dichotomy, with of nuclear powered datacenters and the apocalypse on one end, and holding hands while dancing barefoot to the tune of panflutes on the other.

I find solace in John Denver’s Garden Song. It’s almost unbearably earnest, however, when I learned more about him, I found that he himself embodied seemingly contradictory forces. He was a folksy environmentalist singer songwriter, a space exploration evangelist, an avid pilot, and he struggled with alcohol addiction, and he went through a couple of messy divorces.

He died tragically while operating a plane that had some clear safety concerns. Apparently John and his mechanic jerry rigged some Vise-Grip pliers to serve as an extension for the fuel selector valve handle. I wasn’t expecting to read through another post-disaster investigation when Garden Song came to mind, but there you are. Maybe it’s fitting in some poetic way, or maybe the universe is pure chaos and we merely assign meaning dictated by our biochemistry into the random events around us.

Shabaka

Recently I’ve been listening to Shabaka’s 2022 album, Afrikan Culture, as well as his earlier work with Sons of Kemet, Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do. His harnesses the mastery of his instruments and demonstrates a wild range as his music evolves from angry punchy youth to contemplative middle age in the span of 7 years.