Old World

The Practical Polymath #59

Hi Friends,

Greetings from London where I’m spending the weekend with family.

I was in Paris this week and got to meet some really interesting people. I want to share three ideas that I found particularly fascinating:

• Biohacking: Microbes get a bad rap and that needs to change. Bioengineering company Pili teaches microbes to turn sugar into ecologically sustainable dye for garments. It also imagined a bacteria-powered pen that refills itself.

• Natural artefacts: We have long opposed nature and culture, cities and green spaces, wilderness and development. This vision is counterproductive as it doesn’t acknowledge the importance of blending the two together as good urban and ecological practice. The concept of “natural artefact” was coined by Marion Waller to describe the kind of nature-based but man-made interventions that can help regenerate ecosystems. My favorite example is probably the High-Line in New York.

• Fertile future: French VC Marie Ekeland sees venture capitalism as a vehicle to shape the society and planet of tomorrow. But the current model of venture capitalism does not incentivize long-term, non-financial returns. So she came up with a new fund structure with no shareholders and no requirements to sell assets.

See you in two weeks,

Florian

My favorite spot in Paris, Kooka Boora Cafe

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Weekly Wisdom

🛠 Maintenance versus Innovation: Innovation is sexy, maintenance is not. Capitalism loves unicorns but doesn’t seem to care much about the need to repair decade-old infrastructure. And yet, the piece argues, “maintenance and repair (…) simply has more impact on people’s daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations.”

⛽️ Word Shackles: Metaphors are not innocuous linguistic devices. They influence what we do by acting as a boundary for what we think might be possible. And so our job is to be on the lookout for the limiting ones. The thread below unmasks the implications of talking about the body as a machine.

Gorm @metaphorician

After years of floundering, I think I'm finally getting it: You get energy by spending it. The fuel tank metaphor is completely misleading. The body supplies energy to meet demand. The tank *expands* if you use a lot of fuel. In other words, biology is fundamentally antifragile

Lateral Thought

“There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself (...) The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.” 

Christopher Alexander