Weekly Recs

Earthed, chicken pot pie and lonely interstellar spacecraft

Recommendations for the week ahead: what to read, watch, eat and more

📚 Earthed: A Memoir by Rebecca Schiller: When I was little, I hated working in my parents’ garden, and now I am so desperate to get my hands dirty, I plant flowers on a tiny patch of dirt in front of my apartment building. I loved Earthed the first time I read it and I am loving it now. You can read this bit in the Guardian to get a taste of it. What makes the book so beautiful is that Rebecca writes about nature but also about human condition: “Of late friends and strangers have been asking questions about our life here: would I recommend it, am I happy? The answer is both yes and no; a more complicated answer than anyone wants. Everyone – including me – wants neat and happy endings to stories of chasing a dream.”

📺 3 Body Problem: I know I am behind everyone on that one but if you haven’t watched it yet, go do it right away. Based on a novel by Liu Cixin, the show follows five physicist friends (and others) navigating the looming invasion by far more advanced alien civilization. I love sci-fi in each shape and form so I’m not the best judge, but I will say that cinematography of this was especially stunning.

📰 Last days of the lonely interstellar spacecraft: When the 50-year-old Voyager probe stopped sending messages home, Nasa had a problem. No one remembered how to fix it.

A beautiful read of almost sci-fi quality. FT is paywalled but the amount of quality content they have makes it worth it.

They started with a few safe and easy tricks, hoping for a magic fix. Switching between certain primary and back-up hardware was one. When nothing worked, they began to suspect the FDS’s memory, and that posed a problem. Normally they could load a fix on to the back-up memory and then swap that with the prime memory. But Voyager 1’s back-up memory was abandoned in 1981. One bit in each of its words is stuck. The last pattern the engineers wrote to it was “3333” in every location. Because of the broken bits, every word reads “333B” and always will.

Meanwhile, they began preparing a piece of code, so small you could memorise it, called min cmrot, short for “minimum command routine”. All it does is acknowledge its own existence, an interstellar “Hello, world” program. The instructions for writing it were discovered in some handwritten notes.

🎧 How To Fail With Elizabeth Day: Katie Price - ‘Everything bad that’s ever happened to me is because of men.’ TW: this episode contains discussion of sexual assault and suicide.

👩‍🍳 A Pretty Classic Chicken Pot Pie by Alison Roman. It really is a foolproof recipe. I don’t even use it as a recipe to be honest but more as a blueprint: once you figure out proportions, everything else fall into place, no matter what you put in it. I sometimes even use Filo pastry and it’s just as good if not better than the traditional one.

👩‍⚕️ Check your birthmarks and use sunscreen! I just had one removed and sent to cytology. I am sure everything is fine, but the earlier you check things, the better the results!

Have a lovely week,

Alena