Monday Cup Of Links #17 - Sharks in Kentucky, Retail Apocalypse, the Death of CollegeHumor
Happy Monday!
The Bay Area has two people confirmed with Coronavirus just this past weekend, and that has made me suspicious of even the tiniest throat tickle or cough.
There’s a lot of misinformation flying about to feed into our worst fears. Please look at primary sources only, like research papers, or case studies, or advice from the CDC. I find myself going nuts if I’m reading news articles or opinion pieces or anything like that. Stay safe!
Onto our links!
There’s a 330 million year old shark fossil in Mammoth Caves in Kentucky! What, there’s sharks in landlocked Kentucky now?! Turns out, Kentucky used to be under a shallow tropical ocean millions of years ago.
I’m pretty excited that the Indian government has decided to turn Rakhigarhi, the largest Indus Valley site that has been discovered recently, into a tourist site, with a museum and everything. Harappa and Mohenjodaro are the sites excavated like a hundred years ago, and they are in Pakistan, and the government hasn’t really taken care of the wealth of human history they have. Rakhigarhi is even larger than Mohenjodaro, and the DNA from some of the skeletons found there has led to a lot of interesting findings.
ICYMI: My Thursday piece on the Retail Apocalypse. The nature of retail is changing, and it’s important to understand how to cope.
Wired has a story tracing the history and present of CollegeHumor. I didn’t know they started in 2000, and the founders also started Vimeo, which predated Youtube (and Facebook). It’s a story of missed opportunities. They were ahead of the curve on everything, but somehow never became a market leader. Why? Is it that they tried to be all the things, and ended up not doing any of them well? It strikes me as an Internet-era National Lampoon, with less infighting and less financial success.
Joel writes about how he created a Twitter bot to help with marketing his books.
GIF of the week: Turkish Ebru Art.