🏵️ What aloe, flax, & silica gel taught me about timing

On supply chains, spiders, and screwing up spaghetti sauce.

Please read the following headings to the tune of On the First Day of Christmas as I continue with this small (dare I say, Tiny?) experiment for helping me stay on top of sharing neat stuff with y’all.

🎓 3 Links I Learned From

• How Silica Gel Took Over The World via Scope of Work talks about the role of silica gel packets have in maintaining product quality in global supply chains. They’re those little things in packages that absorb moisture. Without them, transoceanic shipping would be all but impossible because humidity-sensitive goods would get destroyed. I loved this article because it's a nerdy deep dive on something mundane I come across all the time and never think about. It’s full of accessible explanations and fun metaphors like “if your windowpane is like a thin sheet of solid ice, then a silica gel bead is like a tiny snowball.” It’s also a nice reminder that timing matters.

• This article about the controversy surrounding Columbia University had several fascinating nuggets about the history of Columbia University, how high-level politicking works, how a board of trustees of an elite university functions (or doesn’t), soft power, charitable giving, and more. For example, before I read this article, I had no idea that Li Lu, a leader of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square, went on to become a billionaire investor and trustee at Columbia.

• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is a masterpiece of science fiction, complete with computers made from ants, farmed by a civilization of sentient spiders. The timeline is expansive and the plot surprisingly plausible for being so imaginative. I feel a little thrill every time I come across a real life fact that reinforces just how plausible Children of Time is. Reading Marjorie Weber’s explanation of how ants defend mites against caterpillars so they can graze on plant-damaging fungi reminded me powerfully of the ecosystems Tchaikovsky likes to write about. I liked that article almost as much as the one about how Portia spiders like the ones in Tchaikovsky’s book really are shockingly smart.

🌼 2 Remixed Highlights

I am not a food snob. I'm not even close to a connoisseur of much of anything. I have a boring American palate and a heterodox approach to most culinary experiences — my favorite steak comes from a mid-tier chain restaurant, I use hummus as a sandwich condiment, and I put grapes in my focaccia bread.

But I really enjoyed this article about what Sam Altman's kitchen habits can teach us about OpenAI. Not so much because I think it's prescient about the company's prospects (although I do think core personalities tend to shine through in a variety of contexts) but because I learned some nerdy things about knives, coffee makers, and olive oil.

it’s early harvest, when the olives are barely ripe. Harvesting fruit at the start of the season yields much less oil but the flavours are brighter. It’s expensive stuff.

Fruits that don’t continue to sweeten or soften once they're off the vine are called non-climacteric fruits. These include berries like strawberries, grapes, and cherries, as well as citrus fruits like oranges, lemons, and limes. Anyone who has ever eaten one knows that the timing of their harvest matters.

But I’ve always sort of just chalked it up as a trinary situation; underripe, ripe, overripe. Obviously, there are tradeoffs when it comes to olive oil quality, but when I thought about it at all, I figured it had more to do with the processing methods and things like the plant’s genetics or the local climate and soil type. And when I thought about olive oil quality at all (which is rare), I was more worried about things like metal vs. plastic containers and whether the container was adulterated with less expensive oils like canola or whatever.

Shortly after reading this article, though, I stumbled across this 2021 article about pre-modern textile production. Right there in my daily review, Bret Devereaux explained:

The exact time of harvest varies based on the use intended for the flax fibers; harvesting the flax later results in stronger, but rougher, fibers. Late-pulled flax is called “yellow” flax (for the same reason that blond hair is called ‘flaxen’ – it’s yellow!) and was used for more work-a-day fabrics and ropes.

Something clicked. I remembered how coriander and cilantro comes from the same plant, just at different times — you get coriander if you let the plant go to seed. I have no highlight source for this fact because I learned it the hard way when I mistook cilantro leaves for parsley and shoved a huge handful into a pot containing several gallons of homemade, garden-fresh pasta sauce.

📸 & A Photo From My Office

I enjoy gardening, but as the anecdote above indicates, I am not always particularly good about it. I forget to weed, I prune wrong — I’ve managed to kill mint! Most of a decade ago, I got an aloe plant from a neighbor. It was pretty big, about the size of a hardcover book. Somehow, I all but killed it. I managed to salvage one little spine, repotted it into a smaller pot for reasons I no longer remember, and tried everything I could think of to get it to grow. Special soil, varied watering schedules, changing temperature... It hung on for years, barely bigger than my finger, until I complained to my friend

Annie Normal

who is much better at keeping plants alive, and she suggested that it needed evening light instead of morning sun.

I swapped windows and now it’s going gangbusters.

The half-dead piece was as big as I ever got it for close to five years, but one piece of advice from a friend was enough to help it grow. There’s a moral in here somewhere, about being willing to try small environmental changes, the value of asking for help, and the power of sunlight.