Monday Cup Of Links #34 - T-Rex Crocs, Rainforest Shark Teeth, Origami Math
Writers Block Edition
This week has been slow, with regard to writing. I wanted to do 10,000 word weeks, a la NaNoWrMo, but life had other plans. While I’ve had other things keeping me busy, I must admit that writing the actual meat of the novel is pretty intimidating.
I’m trying to write the part which is the point-of-no-return. My characters organize a memorial event to the 1857 War Of Independence, in the heart of London, right on the 50th anniversary of the event, when everyone around them is calling Indians barbarians and marauders, and having plays, prayer meets, talks and newspaper columns about how this was such a tragedy that they would never let happen again. This causes a few of the characters to be expelled from their courses or lose their scholarships. After which the India Office, led by our villain, Curzon-Wyllie, starts taking a closer, more serious look at India House. Things start getting serious.
I’m intimidated because I don’t want to mess this up. Which seems easy to do, because most of it isn’t that interesting when I read about it from various sources, and there’s so many characters and so many moving parts.
Oh well, I can fix bad words, but I can’t fix no words. I ought to resume writing.
Onto our links!
They found evidence of two-legged crocodiles in Korea!!! These existed in prehistoric times. Maybe they were just regular old four-legged crocs whose prints just looked two-legged, like cats? No! They considered that, and the tracks don’t match up. There were definitely crocs that walked on two legs. But the images make it seem like they also had two smaller T-rex style arms. Evolution is weird. Here’s another article with scary renderings of what this creature might have looked like.
ICYMI: My Thursday piece on the privilege that makes one identify as a writer. I read 20 essays by writers on writing, and realized each of them dripped with privilege and delusion. It made me consider my own reasons why I thought of myself as a writer, and it led to wondering why others don’t, and what that means. Everyone ought to be a writer, and being a writer ought to be nothing more special than, idk, a florist or a programmer, or a construction worker.
This really adorable book from the 1890s called Geometry Through Paper Folding, written by T Sundara Row. It was edited by professors of math at Columbia and Michigan and published in 1917. I browsed through it, and I really love the tactile, kinesthetic approach to learning geometry. A small way to bring the love of math to people who might not be oriented towards numbers.
They found the earliest evidence of bow-and-arrow usage outside of Africa, in Sri Lanka. 48,000 years ago, Homo sapiens in a rainforest in Sri Lanka were using animal teeth as arrowheads to hunt monkeys and squirrels. At the same site, they found shark-tooth beads, though this is some distance away from the coast. This implies they might have had trade relations with coastal tribes. They are now trying to find contemporary sites on the coast. Isn’t that exciting? Interestingly, the site is called Fa-Hien caves, after a folk tale that the Chinese traveler to the Indian subcontinent, Fa-Hien stayed in these caves for a bit. There however doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support that, though it would be pretty cool if true.
GIF of the week: Weave effect on a painting.