Monday Cup Of Links #32 - Dinosaur in Space, Locust Attacks, Groundwater Revival
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Happy Monday!
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Onto our links!
I came across this piece about Bipin Chandra Pal, one of the nationalists in the Indian National Congress (as opposed to the majority of British loyalists). Though he and his son make frequent appearances in the books I’m reading for research, I hadn’t paid much attention to him. I didn’t realize that Bengal was reunited after partition in 1911, and that he was a driving factor behind it!
What I find in my sources was that when Scotland Yard was after Veer Savarkar in 1910 for abetment of the assassination of Sir Curzon-Wyllie, Savarkar was his paying guest for a short while, and he asked him to leave, because he didn’t want his son Niranjan tangled up with the police. Which made me have a low opinion of him, but from this article I learn that he actually went to prison for not giving evidence against Aurobindo Ghosh in the Maniktola bomb case. That redeems him in my eyes a little.I’ve been following lots of urban water-table revival stories in various Indian cities. Several people have been trying to revive silted-in ponds and lakes in urban areas. Usually it has been private individuals. In this case, the administrator in Karaikal revived ancient Chola-era networks that conserved rainwater and facilitated flow from wet areas to parched areas. Thanks to this massive public-private partnership, farmers resumed agriculture in some areas after 15 years!
This very fine blogpost summarizes briefly the history of Bangalore. I honestly didn’t know much about 99% of the things mentioned here, and this is a great starting point for if you want to dig deeper. The only Bangalore history I read growing up were of people nostalgic for the times when Churchill visited and lunched in the Cantonment. Understandable, given the people discovering these nuggets were from families which lived and worked in the British cantonment, which was set up in 1806 and probably hit its stride into being a full-fledged township about 60-70 years later.
There’s an extremely massive locust swarm that originated in the Middle East and has been moving east, destroying crops in its wake. It has now hit India. Why is this happening? Short answer: Climate change in the Indian Ocean. Longer answer: This Twitter thread talking about how this came about.
It has me wondering if this is why in Biblical imagery, locusts are a sign of the end of days? It’s possible in the story of Noah’s flooding, the same thing had happened, because it was the end of the Ice Age, and there was cooler water coming into the Indian ocean, which might have caused massive rains in the Middle East, apart from flooding because of rising sea levels.GIF of the week: We now have a dinosaur in space! Granted, it’s a sequined plushie, but it’s so adorable!
This short video of the Dragon launch in case you missed it.