Be Curious AF

Happy Tuesday! Last week I introduced the new and improved CURIOUS AF, and I invited you to become a member/shareholder of this space – on me. If you haven’t yet, click HERE to unlock your membership. Your first three months are free! (Unless of course you’d like to tip me.)

Last week I also pointed out that this may look like an email newsletter, but now it’s got a lot more going on under the hood. To paraphrase Hamlet, there is more to these pixels than is dreamt of in your Web 2.0 philosophy. Now you can read CURIOUS AF, but you can also be curious AF. The world favors open minds. This is a space designed for us to learn, think, and thrive. In the years to come, AI, Web3, climate change, and the shifting sands of geopolitical economies will reward those who can surf uncertainty with grace.

With all that in mind, here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about, right to your inbox.

Did you know that Earth itself is alive? The ground. The actual surface of the planet. The stuff we stand on outside (below the asphaltic concrete). It’s more than earth. From The New York Times: “Contrary to long-held assumptions, Earth’s interior is not barren. In fact, a majority of the planet’s microbes, perhaps more than 90 percent, live deep underground. These intraterrestrial microbes tend to be quite different from their counterparts on the surface. They are ancient and slow, reproducing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years. They often acquire energy in unusual ways, breathing rock instead of oxygen. And they seem capable of weathering geological cataclysms that would annihilate most creatures. Like the many tiny organisms in the ocean and atmosphere, the unique microbes within Earth’s crust do not simply inhabit their surroundings; they transform them. Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients. Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the groundwork for all other terrestrial life.”

There is also more to asphaltic concrete than meets the eye. You probably know that cement is used to bind sand and gravel to create concrete. It’s everywhere. But did you know that ancient Romans made cement in a much more sustainable way? Or that using an electrochemical process like ancient Rome’s can help us remove gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions each year? From MIT News: “At the core of portland cement’s huge carbon footprint is the use of limestone, which is nearly 50 percent CO₂ by weight. Nearly all that CO₂ is released when limestone is heated to high temperatures to create lime. The heating process also creates enormous amounts of CO₂ on its own, as it requires temperatures of 1,450 C, a temperature that is difficult to electrify efficiently.

“At MIT, Sublime’s team created an electrochemical process in which it breaks down calcium silicate rocks at ambient temperature. The reaction works with abundant raw materials and creates reactive calcium and silicates that are dried and blended into cement. The mixture has the same final strength and hardened phases as portland cement and meets a standard performance specification in the industry that allows it to be used in building construction.”

The asterisk is for those of you who open a browser to do something, but then something else catches your eye, so you go down a digital rabbit hole and stumble bleary-eyed back into the sunlight an hour later. If you’re that person, do your work first and leave this among your 173 open tabs for now.

But if you’re an effective time/task manager, or you have a spare hour to browse intentionally, check out Open Culture. Open Culture has hundreds of online courses, certificate/credential programs, books, movies, podcasts, lectures (by Hall of Famers like Richard Feynman, Joseph Campbell, Toni Morrison, Bertrand Russell, Margaret Atwood, and many others), and other fun stuff. You can learn 49 different languages! It’s all free and it’s all interesting. Just now I visited the site to get the URL to link here, and the headline article drew me right in: Ancient Egyptian Pyramids May Have Been Built with Water: A New Study Explore the Use of Hydraulic Lifts.

What I’m Watching –

Littlehampton is a little town in West Sussex, England, on the coast of the English Channel about 13 miles east of the University of Chichester (where my dear friend Laura Ritchie teaches) and about 40 miles west of Seaford, where my great aunt ran a retirement home after escaping from Berlin during the Holocaust. It’s a wide spot in the road, the kind of droll English village that features a pub, some nosy pensioners and other colorful local characters, a pig… and a scandalously funny (and in this case mostly true) story. From Variety: “A hundred years ago, before email and social media found ways to slap us in the face with unsolicited obscenity on a daily basis, the quiet English town of Littlehampton was scandalized by an outburst of poison pen letters — a nasty case of epistolary terrorism that today might be lumped under the heading of ‘trolling.’ Someone with lovely penmanship and a very salty vocabulary dashed off dozens (if not hundreds) of blisteringly offensive notes to members of the seaside community, igniting a police investigation and a series of trials breathlessly covered by the local press, then largely forgotten for almost a century.” From The Guardian: “Wicked Little Letters is charming, sharp, outrageous and definitely worth a watch.”