Monday Cup Of Links #30 - Novel Excerpts, History Book Reco, Made-Up Words, Donald Knuth
Stay Safe. Stay Indoors. Stay Sane.
Happy Monday!
It’s over two months since the Bay Area ordered Shelter In Place. Some counties are planning to embark on the long road to opening back up. Which makes me nervous, because the US response to coronavirus hasn’t filled me with confidence, though the Bay Area has dealt better than most.
It annoys me to see people not take it seriously, and still go out to parks, play contact sports, and not wear masks when they go to get groceries. And not all grocery stores are doing well with enforcing masks or social distancing or limiting the number of people in the store.
I really hope they open very very slowly, because it doesn’t take much to turn it into exponential growth. What is scary is how having basically the worst illness of your life is still considered “mild” by hospitals, and it doesn’t seem like you get tested or placed under observation unless you’re pretty far gone. Reading some case studies, I realize it’s very easy to go from feeling totally fine to cytokine storm. We could probably have better outcomes if there was some facility where the infected could quarantine, while still being given meals, and easy access to a doctor if they found themselves getting worse.
Anyway, onto our links!
This Word Does Not Exist! A website that has a deep learning model trained on dictionaries, and generates words that sound very real, with meanings to match. But they are all made up, every last one of them! Here’s your chance to impress everyone with your embiggened vocabulary!
Why We At $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY. This is a good summary of every damn blogpost from every damn company announcing their shift to a new stack.
ICYMI: Drunk And Complaining About “The System” in 1906 - an excerpt from India House, my novel-in-progress.
I spent the last week reading Ocean Of Churn - How The Indian Ocean Shaped Human History by Sanjeev Sanyal. I highly, highly recommend it. Mr. Sanyal somehow manages to condense the entirety of the history of everything happening in the Indian Ocean Rim and beyond in this concise and easy to read book. I love how he manages to simplify complex histories in easy, understandable ways without dumbing it down. There’s history of not just India, but also of Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle-East, the African coast, and even of several small islands in the Indian Ocean. There’s a lot I learned from this book, too, as it focuses on the big picture that history textbooks can’t or won’t. For instance, India wasn’t known for spices (we resold spices from Indonesia to the West), the main industry was textiles. I didn’t realize that even though I had studied this topic in high school for years. And did you know Eli Yale founded Yale University using his gains from corruption while he was working for the East India Company in Chennai?
The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories. A beautiful portrait of Donald Knuth.
GIF Of The Week: Is it a fish? A shark? A dolphin?