[ recap ]

Last week we looked at attention: Mollie's map of Las Vegas, Valéry's two ways a work ends, and what happens when nothing is waiting for the thing you're making.

[ thoughts ]

I have been in Quito a week and the stairs still beat me. At night I have to sleep with Vicks under my nose.

The city sits at 2,850 metres (9,350ft). Air pressure here is about 72 kilopascals. At sea level it is 101, so each breath carries about a quarter less oxygen. The equator runs 25 kilometres north of here, which gives twelve hours of light and twelve of dark every day of the year, warm afternoons and cold nights, and no seasons to speak of.

I'm taking up pour-over coffee as a hobby while I'm here. It felt like the right thing to learn in a country that grows coffee in four separate climates.

Every guide gives the same number. Water between 93 and 96°C (199 to 205°F).

Water boils when its vapour pressure matches the air pushing down on it. Thin air pushes down less, so water boils at a lower temperature. Here it goes at about 90.7°C (195°F) and stops. The kettle is at full power, water is rolling, and will not get any hotter.

My maximum is below their minimum.

Surveyors in the nineteenth century used to carry a brass pot for this. Light the burner, boil the water, read the thermometer to a tenth of a degree, and a table turns that into your altitude. They called it a hypsometer.

You boiled water to find out where you were.

93°C went into the guides, and the guides never put the altitude they were written at, because the people writing them had no reason to think their audience were at one.

[ creativity ]

The man who worked out what altitude does to everything did it a hundred miles from my apartment, and he wrote it on everything.

Alexander von Humboldt reached Quito on 6 January 1802, stayed five months, and on 23 June set out for Chimborazo (stratovolcano).

He got higher than any European on record and turned back just short of the summit, bleeding from the nose and gums, and on the way down he began drafting the diagram that made his name.

Going up, he had noticed that plants growing at one elevation turn up again far from the equator at much lower ones.

Ecuador sells this now, as el país de los cuatro mundos (the country of the four worlds): coast, mountains, Amazon, Galápagos. Four climates in a country the size of the UK. The coffee grows in all four, from around 300 metres on the Galápagos up to 2,300 in Loja (1,000ft to 7,500ft).

I had never made pour-over before, so when it wasn't working I had no idea what wasn't working, because I had no correct cup in my memory to hold it against. All I had was the instruction, and the instruction doesn't say where it was written.

I asked a language model about it before I understood any of this and got 93°C, which is the right answer in the sense that it is what almost every guide says. Those guides were written in Melbourne and Portland and London by people who never recorded the air pressure, because they had no reason to know they were standing in it.

The language model would have adjusted if I had told it where I was. The failure wasn't that it couldn't handle Quito. Neither of us knew the question needed asking.

An assumption is only visible from somewhere it doesn't hold.

[ making ]

Humboldt came home in 1804 with five years of measurements and the problem of getting a mountain into the heads of people who would never stand on one.

What he made was a drawing.

The Tableau Physique, published with his Essay on the Geography of Plants, is a cross-section of Chimborazo roughly three feet by two (90 by 60cm), with the plants written onto the mountain at the heights he found them. Down each side run columns: elevation, temperature, humidity, air pressure, the line where snow stops melting, and the temperature at which water boils. He called it a microcosm on one page.

The finding would have fitted in a sentence. Instead he put the numbers on the page beside the plants, so that anyone reading it somewhere else could see what he had been standing in when he found it.

When you write something down for someone else, put the conditions next to the number. Where you were, what you were using, what you didn't measure.

Try it on something you already know how to do. Pick a process you have running well, a recipe, workflow or settings you copied from somewhere, and write out the steps as you would give them to someone else.

Then, down the side, write what you were standing in while you worked them out: the room, the machine, the materials, the version, the year. Most of that will be things you have never written down, because you have never had to.

[ sign off ]

The stairs will get easier. Erythropoietin rises within hours of arriving somewhere thin, and red cell mass follows over the next week or two. Six months from now I will not be thinking about the third floor.

The kettle will still not adjust, it’ll continue to boil at 90.7°C (195°F) for as long as I live here, and every guide I read will go on assuming an elevation I am nowhere near.

Stay the one doing the noticing.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.