#AcademicRunPlaylist - 9/22/25

It was another great fall day for a run, complete with some epic quantities of edible mushroom discoveries (pics soon!) and talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting talk by Hilde Kuehne on advances in self-supervised multimodal learning at the Soft Robotics Laboratory, ETH Zurich (SRL) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhVzzW5d4W4

Next was a fascinating talk by Keenan Albee on autonomous robots in space (!) at SRL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gti4MdYgYTE

Next was an incredible talk by Cynthia Sung on developing efficient multi-robot swimming systems using methods inspired by salp (an underwater jelly that grows in colonies) at SRL. Yet another example of how brilliant engineering work can be informed by non-tech research. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzZKGCE7Q60

Next was an engaging talk by Perla Maiolino on creating soft and perceptive robots with highly integrated sensors at SRL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8BxwDtGqqU

Next was "The Enlightenment: History of An Idea" by Vincenzo Ferrone. This book covers both the philosophical concepts and historiography of the Enlightenment, examining the period of the Enlightenment itself and how these ideas and events were interpreted and utilized over the following centuries. It's an extremely dense text, assuming some familiarity with fairly esoteric philosophical concepts, but Ferrone usefully marries that analysis with an excellent, if abbreviated, post-Enlightenment historiography. You also have to love a book that has a 30 page afterword solely devoted to critiquing another researcher's recent work in this area - bitchy in a way that only academics can muster. Highly recommend https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691161457/the-enlightenment

Last was "The Little Ice Age" by Brian Fagan. With the increasing importance of understanding past instances of radical climate change, Fagan's book on how the Little Ice Age influenced European societies over the centuries is a useful read. While I would've liked a more global perspective, he does demonstrate how radical climate change, beginning around 1300, dramatically altered conditions both gradually and violently, contributing to a number of crises across Europe and beyond. Highly recommend https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brian-fagan/the-little-ice-age/9781541618572/