And on the 7th Day she wrote her last new email
Maybe about science stuff, maybe about rewriting and process
Welcome to day seven of a daily email rewrite experiment.
To quote from day 1 “Every day for the next week I will send out a daily email. Then the following week, every day I will send a rewrite of the email from 7 days ago. I am not sure how long I will do this… I’m going to try for a month.” This is the last day I will include this message.
Rewriting
Although I strive to be in the moment I am drawn to thinking about tomorrow and my first rewrite. What is a rewrite? Is it an editing, a reworking, a polishing, a revealing, additive, subtractive, maybe some other mathematical operations… logarithmic (perhaps thats only for audio rewrites) - all of the above and none of the above. This is a meditation if refinement not in generation. I imagine an alchemical operation where I distill the original writing into its essence. In that case, I sort of wish I had written one of my newsletters as a short story or a musical performance or something.
When I think of rewriting I also think of copying, such as the artistic pedagogical technique of copying works of the great masters. I also think about Borges’ short story about Pierre Menard, who rewrites, or copies, Don Quixote and what does that mean. Maybe I will unpack the meaning in a rewrite.
There is also a rewrite for a url. With urls we can have redirects of a web page, when the url changes, or a rewrite when the url does not change. This is more search engine friendly. There is also the 301 permanently moved podcast, nor about servers but 301 seconds long. 301 is one possible status code returned when a url is redirected. 200 is the status code that is returned when everything is ok.
Science
I have been fascinated by magnetism for a very long time. What is it? There is a story that Isaac Newton had a lodestone ring that lifted 234 times its own weight. That is a ring of power!
Ferrofluid!
Blood and magnets - I actually think about this.
Magnets can apparently help with delivering insulin.
Machine Learning on Whale songs!
Ok that last bit did not follow the magnetism thread, but it is none the less amazing and related to science. I spoke with someone today who is doing something like this in order to create a map of whale songs for preservation purposes.
This is the last original newsletter, it is all rewrites from here on out.
x
Meredith