Apurva Shukla/writing

10-18-25: Internet goodies I read last week

  1. Philosophy for Designers 4: Design for lingering

    • Using the ancient Chinese incense clock (hsiang‑yin) as a metaphor, this essay channels Byung‑Chul Han’s The Scent of Time to diagnose a “temporal crisis”: our atomized, accelerated now, engineered by social feeds, email, and always‑on tools that prevent lingering. It proposes designing for vita contemplativa—tools that slow, deepen, and humanize time: slow‑release reading and learning, depth‑over‑breadth recommendations, intentional asynchronicity, reciprocal engagement, “time gifts,” and shared contemplation spaces. Small design gestures—eschewing autoplay and infinite scroll—can create refuges where duration, care for others, and savoring become possible. Quotes: - “We encounter the deep questions of design when we recognize that in designing tools we are designing ways of being.” - “The time of internet space is a discontinuous and point-like Now-time... The Now does not possess duration.”

  2. The Quest to Resurrect a Texas Ghost Town

    • An Austin writer goes chasing Texas ghost towns and nearly spooks herself at Baby Head Cemetery—until her dog’s “haunting” turns out to be burrs in his paws. After false starts like fenced-off Shafter and vanished Gay Hill, historian T. Lindsay Baker clarifies what really qualifies: remnants you can see, public access, and places spread across the state. In West Texas, Toyah and Barstow feel sandblasted but still lived-in. The search pays off in Jericho, an old Route 66 stop now being revived by Blair and Blanca Schaffer, who bought the town to honor family roots and host tours, stargazing, and future museum plans. The piece lands on a human truth: ghost towns are about purpose. Quotes: “A ghost town is a town for which the reason for being no longer exists.” “I can’t think of a better purpose than fulfilling a dream.”

  3. On Factory Tours.

      • A childhood tour of a Phillip Morris factory sparked the author’s lifelong fascination with industrial scale and process, despite moral ambiguity. - Factory tourism dates to the Industrial Revolution; Henry Ford championed openness, U.S. guides listed hundreds of tours, and River Rouge drew 243k visitors in 1971. - Jelly Belly exemplifies transparent, brand-building tours (1M beans/hour), delighting kids while prompting questions about sugar’s harms and broader societal impacts. - Fewer tours exist today: IP concerns are often overstated, while safety, contamination, and tour-specific infrastructure are real barriers. - At Bay Center Foods (Chick-fil-A’s lemon operation), ultra-automation and strict food safety dominate: 725k kg/day processed, full byproduct utilization, minimal staff. - Modern factories brim with creative automation; public curiosity persists (e.g., How It’s Made). - Opening factory floors can power recruiting; student tours hint at an underused talent pipeline. - 'Factories are rich sensory spaces.' - 'A modern plant is not the dark, dank, and dangerous place of the past.' - 'Factories, though complex societal artifacts, have an untapped magic that we should be using to encourage young people to build the future we want.'

  4. SQL Anti-Patterns You Should Avoid

    • SQL shortcuts like huge CASE WHEN statements, SELECT DISTINCT to hide join issues, or stacking views may speed things up initially but often cause messy, slow, and hard-to-maintain queries down the road. The real lesson? Treat your SQL like real code—plan your logic clearly, fix root problems instead of masking them, and keep your data transformations clean and accessible for everyone. It saves a ton of headaches and keeps your data trustworthy as projects grow.

  5. What Makes Data Valuable: The Truth About Data Network Effects