Notices by Deb Chachra (debcha@saturation.social)

I got to introduce someone to the greatest website of all time yesterday:

https://www.mcmaster.com

[If you’ve never had occasion to use it: just go to that link, pick something, repeat. Or look around where you live or work for something that’s broken and needs replacing and look for that part. Or think about something you might want to make.]

Tomorrow is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women in Canada. I wrote about the precipitating event, and its role in my own life, on its 25th anniversary and republished it today: https://buttondown.com/metafoundry/archive/thirty-six-years-later/

@catsalad @GreenSkyOverMe My first thought too.

The belly is (always) a trap.

@skinnylatte In case it’s not on your radar, my friend Tse Wei Lim is from Singapore and is a chef and in tech and an (incredible) writer, and his book about Singaporean food is just coming out. I don’t think he’s sorted out US book events yet but I’m sure the Bay Area will be on the list. https://letthemeatcake.substack.com/

I wrote this piece during a US federal government shutdown in 2013 and everything I said then is just as true today, except I’m even more furious at the people who don’t understand the value of collective systems and universal provision.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/08/charities-government-civilised-society

@aubilenon @osma @inthehands Two points I make in the book that are relevant (and I suspect why it was suggested — thanks, Paul!): i) ‘infrastructure’ is used to describe many kinds of systems, although they all do have commonalities; ii) infrastructural systems are often highly place- and culturally specific.

The book has more detail and covers a lot more ground (that’s why it’s a book!) but I also wrote this:

https://comment.org/care-at-scale/

@skinnylatte Longtime Osedax fan here and so much of the good work is out of MBARI — a friend/colleague and I met with folks there about possible collaborations (we both did research on bone biology). Also wrote text for a visual essay on Osedax (site now defunct, alas), describing whalefall ecosystems as the ‘dark inverse of coral reefs’ (a carcass in the hadal dark rather than living coral in the sunlit shallows). Excited about making to Monterey to see the new deep sea exhibit!

On December 6, 1989, a gunman walked into the Ecole Polytechnique [engineering school] in Montreal. He went into a mechanical engineering classroom, ordered the men to leave, and shot the women. He then went through the building, continuing to target women, before turning the gun on himself. He killed 14 women (12 of whom were undergraduate engineering students) and injured another 10 women and 3 men.

"The social license to operate (SLO), or simply social license, refers to the ongoing acceptance of a company or industry's standard business practices and operating procedures by its employees, stakeholders, and the general public."

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/social-license-slo.asp

[I think of this a lot in the context of the fossil fuel industry but it is, of course, broadly applicable.]

I made a quilted winter cover for the AC in my living room (in lieu of taking it out), and also a very silly joke.

I had reason to revisit Cory Doctorow’s (@pluralistic ) long, thoughtful review of HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS yesterday and it’s so great — it means so much that he really, truly gets what I was trying to get across.

“This is a bold engineering vision, one that fuses Chachra's material science background, her work as an engineering educator, her activism as an anti-colonialist and feminist. The way she lays it out is just…breathtaking.”

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/

@cstross So, I think you touched on this in your responses, but bumping: the central tenet of materials science is that the structure, properties, and process of materials are inextricably linked. You can 3D-print a steel katana to submicron precision, but without the forging process and its effects on the atomic level, it won’t *behave* like a katana. The same is true for the flimsiest of plastic shopping bags, with extrusion and alignment of polymer molecules.

@cstross I think that our engagement with materiality, embodiment, and infrastructure is so deep and so tacit that all three are easily taken for granted, especially by people whose survival needs are entirely and reliably met. Which is a good thing, to be fair! But ‘let’s ship 3D printers to Mars!’ is directly analogous to a little kid thinking that food comes from the supermarket.

I get asked what my next book going to be and I say, “I don’t have a next book — I want to do the stuff that *this* book is about.” I’ve spent a lot of the past year talking and working with people around infrastructural futures — like a TED talk! — and I’m excited about more to come.

https://www.ted.com/talks/deb_chachra_the_invisible_networks_shaping_your_everyday_life?subtitle=en

Happy one-year book birthday to HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS! I still get messages every few days from people who’ve taken the time to tell me how much the book means to them or how it’s given them a new perspective — it’s been a genuine joy. Thanks so much to everyone who’s read it and shared it with the people around them.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

FREAKING FINALLY

"Buttons are back, baby!! This piece has been 15 years in the making, more or less."

@mimsical in the WSJ on the resurgance of physical buttons for interfaces.

"Fundamentally, the problem with touch-based interfaces is that they aren’t touch-based at all, because they need us to look when using them."

Materiality and embodiment ftw.

[gift link, courtesy of the author]
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/touch-screens-are-over-even-apple-is-bringing-back-buttons-86fb9ea8?st=XPWkwV&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

@beep Bumping this thread ICYMI: https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112859178453451593