Is the end of oil nigh?

The best of the week’s long reads in science and technology, including why the oil business may be in trouble and Google changing its name to Alphabet.

Home tech | Efficiency begins at home

Gains from technology are readily quantified when they happen in the workplace. They used to be fairly easily measured in the home, too: A washing machine substituted for a given quantity of labour. But how do you measure convenience, and pleasure, and novelty? “All the world’s music is streamed to my computer. We worry about the slowdown in growth and productivity. The evidence of our eyes seems to tell a different story.” (John Kay, 618 words)

Design | Non-Socratic dialogue on website design

If Socrates were discussing website design with Brad DeLong, and they took Vox as the benchmark of best practice, and Ezra Klein showed up in the comments, this is what you would get. Main point: The website is just a content-management system. The audience lives on social media. You can work hard to make your website distinctive and coherent, but for most readers the context is irrelevant. They found the article on Facebook. (Brad DeLong, Grasping Reality, 5,000 words)

Taste | Canon of taste

Is cooking an art on the level of music or painting? If so, what is the tongue’s equivalent of the four-note phrase which opens Beethoven’s Fifth? Perhaps it was something served in the 18th Century and then forgotten. But great art is timeless. Let us profit from modern science to recover the ingredients and flavours and techniques of past ages, and reconstruct a canon of great dishes in terms of which all others can be understood. (Jill Neimark, Aeon, 2,700 words)

Google | Do you trust Larry Page?

By any other name Google is still the second-biggest enterprise on the planet. So why create a new holding company, Alphabet? Because Larry Page is bored with the legacy business and wants somebody else to run it. “Page is a change-the-world nerd, and it seems clear that he found the day-to-day business of managing a very profitable utility to be not only uninteresting but a distraction from what he truly wanted to do.” (Ben Thompson, Stratechery, 1,780 words)

Marine life | A little kelp from my friends

Seaweeds are our great green fuel, “producing 70 to 80% of the world’s oxygen through photosynthesis.” All are edible, some are delicious. They pass for plants, but are really algae. The US government allows foragers 10lbs “wet weight” of algae per day for “personal use”; so you can take a tonne of seaweed a year from the Pacific and sell it to chefs by the ounce. “It’s a very big ocean. There’s a lot of seaweed.” (Rachel Khong, Lucky Peach, 5,400 words)

Social media | One app rules them all

Avert your gaze momentarily from Google to stare in wonder at WeChat, a Chinese platform which bundles the entire Web into a single app. You can order food, send money, book a doctor’s appointment, pay a water bill, play games, check in for a flight, read a magazine, all without leaving the WeChat interface. WeChat “shows what’s possible when an entire country leapfrogs over the PC era directly to mobile.” (Connie Chan, Andreessen Horowitz, 3,400 words)

Internet | Farewell, old internet

“The old internet was a world of communities. Our articles increasingly seem to be individual insects trapped in someone else’s web. The internet has the exact opposite problem of every other medium. Instead of going from something for everybody to something for a large series of hyper-specialised niches, we’re navigating the choppy seas where once stood an archipelago and now stands a continent.” (Todd VanDerWerff, Vox, 2,400 words)

Power | The troubled oil business

Advice to oil companies: Stop. Do something else. Your oil is no longer needed. “Demand is going away – not incrementally but fundamentally”. Young people shun cars, grown-ups will get self-driving cars; that change alone will account for most of the cubic mile of oil that the world burns each year. By 2050 America could run an economy more than twice the current size using no coal, oil, or nuclear power. (Amory Lovins, Medium, 1,630 words)

Mankind | We are creatures that should not exist

Matthew McConaughey’s misanthropic lead in True Detective, Rustin Cohle, is modelled in part on South African philosopher David Benatar, who argues that procreation is morally wrong because there is so much suffering in human life, and humans devastate other animals. “If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence.” (David Benatar, The Critique, 1,380 words)

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