Monday Cup Of Links #21 - CV Raman, Highway Robberies, Iron Aliens and Alien Jellyfish
Happy Monday!
I’m 4500 words into India House, and it’s a much easier writing experience because there’s so much source material to delve into, and I can stick to what I’m good at - adding feelings and interactions between people.
With the first coronavirus death in the US in Seattle, There’s been a lot of panic buying at grocery stores in my area. They are all out of soup and canned goods. This is probably a good time to call your local government authorities and ask how they are planning to deal with this sort of a crisis. Singapore is somehow doing a good job with containment.
Onto our links!
A volcano didn’t wipe out most of our species 74,000 years ago. It was thought that the Toba supervolcano in Sumatra exploded, with the ash blotting out the sun, and causing global cooling, which caused the global population to go down drastically. But now, a multinational team of archaeologists have found stone tools in a village called Dhaba, in Madhya Pradesh, dating from 80,000 years ago to 25,000 years ago - before and after the explosion. So it was probably not as devastating as people thought. This matters because then the genetic bottleneck might be because people moved out of Africa to populate other areas much earlier than thought. It’s also interesting to me because Dhaba is on the Sone river, which is a tributary of the Ganga. Settlements along it are probably older than we know, though in my head, Ganga is an iron age river.
Lyle wrote about what he learned from writing his first novel. Usually these pieces aren’t in this much detail, and this personal. That’s very important in providing context about why something worked, or didn’t. I highly recommend this piece.
ICYMI: Episode 3 of Anandamath - Highway Robbery. This was an action-packed episode with a bunch of bloodshed. The next episode is more emotional/philosophical, keep an eye out for that!
February 28 in India is celebrated as National Science Day, as it is the day Dr. CV Raman came upon his Nobel-winning discovery, the Raman effect. Here is a wonderful article talking about his motivations and philosophy towards science. I identify strongly with his itch for independence, which led him to establish the Raman Research Institute at a time when he could have become the director of any research institute in India, because he didn’t like the approach everyone else was taking. He didn’t want to do second tier work on western lines of thought which required importing instruments and other endeavors whose cost/benefit analysis didn’t hold up. Imitation is helpful to learn, but innovation needs to happen sooner or later. The more people understand this, the better.
They found an iron-based protein in a meteorite! This is the first protein identified in a meteorite, and this could have great implications for understanding how life originated. It also lends itself to scifi about a different kind of life-form, which is iron-based. These folks could live on Mercury, the most iron-rich planet in the solar system. How they would keep cool though, I don’t know.
GIF of the week: Alien Jellyfish.