Monday Cup Of Links #42 - Money For Nothing, Roman Monkey Graveyards, and the Mystery of Skeleton Lake
And yet another online machine learning program.
Happy Monday!
I’m still stuck indoors because of the terrible air quality from the fires, but it’s getting better.
Interestingly, there seems to be a shortage of quality home office furniture in the Bay area. Everyone’s working from home, and has needed to up the ante on their home office game, and now even the suppliers are out. But it’s possible to get quality furniture from an unlikely source - your community. Lots of people are moving out of the fun areas that are easy to commute from, to cheaper alternatives elsewhere, and they find office furniture the clunkiest to move. I don’t know the long term implications of this extent of remote work, but it’s been wonderful getting great ergonomic furniture at half the price or lower.
Onto our links!
The University of Fine Arts in Hamburg is giving people free money, with one catch - that they do absolutely nothing, and do so creatively. These “idleness grants” are for 1600 Euros each. It seems like my dream calling. But a quick look at the application questions makes me realize I’m probably not the ideal candidate. The only four questions are:
What do you not want to do?
For how long do you not want to do it?
Why is it important not to do this thing in particular?
Why are you the right person not to do it?
Which adds a kind of intentionality to the not-doing-anything. That’s what I’m not so good at. My usual pattern of idleness is to set out in the morning with a whole bunch of plans, and then get exactly nothing done on the list because I got distracted.
This seems to ask for very intentionally idle people. I think that filters out a lot of potential applicants. I eagerly await the results of this study.The Mystery Of Skeleton Lake. A 2-minute video summarizing the mystery of Roopkund, where they found a bunch of skeletons in 1942, and there’s no one explanation for why they ended up dead. They are all in good health and are men, women, and children of various ages, and there’s no weapons in sight, so it’s possibly not war or epidemic that led them there. It’s possible they all died in a hailstorm. But there’s three distinct groups of people there - Indian, Southeast Asian, and Mediterranean. So it’s possible different groups of people ended up there in different ways. Wonder how it all happened.
ICYMI: My novel excerpt from Thursday, which goes into how my protagonist finds unlikely allies in his writing a history book. I’m happy at the response this excerpt has received, and it keeps me motivated to keep writing!
Have you been trying to learn machine learning through free online courses? Well, here’s another bunch of courses you can take. Amazon’s Machine Learning University is now putting out all its content online, for free, open to the public. They all seem to be on how to use AWS tech for machine learning. I personally like that these courses exist, because they allow someone with little background to get started real quick and be building real world applications. Here’s their Youtube channel with the videos.
2000+ years ago, the Romans and Egyptians imported monkeys from India as exotic pets. When these skeletons were found in an animal graveyard in Berenice, an old, old port by the Red Sea, they assumed the monkeys were a local species. But further investigation revealed they are rhesus monkeys from India! They somehow managed to survive the journey from India to Egypt, but they didn’t last very long at the destination, because of the dry weather and the lack of a supply of fresh fruit. Their owners buried them like a member of the family. I find this whole thing very sad. Now in India, we import huskies, which are totally not built for the weather or for the population density. Sure, their owners love them, but isn’t it cruel to keep them in a hot, humid location that they aren’t built for? Or importing penguins into the Mumbai zoo, which resulted in the penguin dying. I find this whole thing so incredibly tragic and stupid.
GIF of the week: Soldier ants providing a protective cordon to worker ants going about their work.