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The ocean an animal full of other animals Maya's Musing #43
type musings
created 2025/11/10 modified 2025/11/10

late spring wind sounds an ocean through new leaves. later the same wind sounds a tide… // the ocean an animal full of other animals.

Hi friends,

This month's newsletter title reflects the particularly ocean-centric nature of my life the past months, quoting from Donika Kelly's "When the Fact of Your Gaze Means Nothing, Then You Are Truly Alongside". I've experienced the sea via diving + swimming + boating + walking in the surf (learning to appreciate non-mammalian life the whole while); I've read about divers in Twisted (Colum McCann) and Playground (Richard Powers); I've added a couple ocean-themed songs to my 2025 playlist (WHALE is my fave, if you're curious).

I've been waiting to send this to have a working draft of my new personal website... developed mostly for fun, but feel free to take a look :)

Read on for a couple links, a couple games, some aviation info, and a few books I learned a lot from.

Cheers,

Maya

Games

  • Enjoying Hued, a very pleasing color guessing game — surprisingly, I've nailed it on a range of oranges (NASA jumpsuit, Nickelodean, bird of paradise...)
    • This reminded me to start playing Hexcodle again to hone my hex code intuition!
  • Coincidently stumbled across Colorfle, yet another color-mixing game, a couple weeks later— this one's more mastermind-coded, and I've found it tricky to identify the intended mix! Interestingly, though, I usually match in the high 90-percents on my first guess, just with an orthogonal set of colors.
  • From the same creator as Colorfle, we have Cubisum: essentially, it's a simple linear algebra problem (s/o bgrd, although I do not have the mental capacity to tackle these in any systematic way).

Aviation

  • Building a weather model from airplane data broadcasts— so many interesting components here!
    • Never knew about ADS-B messages, which are short broadcasts by every plane in the sky containing their position, heading, speed, etc., and which anyone can listen to with the right receptor.
    • You can infer wind speed by comparing a plane's ground speed & track (direction it's moving) and its air speed & heading (direction it's nose is pointing).
    • With enough planes, you can model real wind conditions quite accurately! And that's just the beginning of what you can do with this data.
    • Data viz of the wind models and even just plane locations is beautiful.
  • I've also picked up a new pastime of watching live air traffic on FlightRadar24. I love finding highways in the sky, for some reason– whether they’re made up of trans-Atlantic flights or the three lanes of planes lining up to land at O'Hare.

Books

Fire Weather — John Vaillant

  • (On the Front Lines of a Burning World)
  • 🇨🇦 Canada book. What I learned: all about the bitumin mining industry in Alberta and Fort McMurray; how fur trading played a vital role in the establishment of Canada; the insane power of modern wildfires; the danger and ubiquity of the WUI (the wildlife-urban interface)
  • This is one of those books I felt like I needed to narrate in real-time to someone else in order to fully express my surprise and interest! Extensive notes linked above, but here are two ideas that have resonated: have stuck with me:
    • The unimaginable scale of modern wildfires: the Chisholm Fire, a few years prior to Fort McMurray, burned three times faster than the Camp Fire in Paradise, CA (which was already insanely fast). We had to measure energy output in units of "megatons of hydrogen bombs": during peak 7 hour burn, the energy released was equivalent of 17 x 1 megaton hydrogen bombs, or 4 Hiroshima bombs per minute.
    • The Lucretian Paradox: we can't imagine what we haven't personally experienced; the worst thing that can happen has already happened. Some quotes capturing this well: - "Reality does not require human belief to be real." (Relevant at both a personal and societal level, I think.) - "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." — Albert Allen Bartlett, physicist

Empire of Pain — Patrick Radden Keefe

  • (The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)
  • Another "please let me tell you about this" book, more about the shocking historical context of opioids and medical advertising in general. This book has made me think seriously about philanthropy, and especially about the potential lasting and far-reaching consequences of any work in the biotech industry– and it's made me wonder what the Oxycontin of the modern day will be, 20 years from now.

Dog Park — Sofi Oksanen, transl. from Finnish by Owen Frederick Witesman

  • 🇫🇮 Finland book.
  • The narrative of Dog Park proceeds in two timelines, with one storyline set in modern-day Finland and the other in the former USSR. The plot centers on the global fertility market (i.e., egg donors, surrogacy) and its ethical implications, building an implicit metaphor with dog breeding.
  • Some aspects of the book that caught my attention: Olenka was a truly unreliable narrator, with unexpected bits of information about her history/actions/motivations regularly dropping in, providing some drama + suspense that contrasted with the soothing, relatively serene reading of the novel.
  • Another striking aspect of the novel was how viscerally Oksanen conveyed the tension between Olenka's guilt, resentment, need for forgiveness with Daria, her family, her colleagues and clients... the constant fluctuating internal dialogue of excuses, justifications, resolutions, frustrations, and apologies is such a relatable experience, and one that is not usually spoken. 
  • Overall, I did sort of struggle with following the actual plot, but that's probably because I was Listening While Distracted (TM).

Twisted — Colum McCann

  • A mystery of sorts surrounding a writer and his attempt at writing a story about the people who fix the underwater cables that carry all our information... the characters and plot were overall not compelling to me. However, I loved the language around the ocean and of free-diving, especially after having dived recently— including the description of "the ocean as being as close as you can come to heaven and hell combined."