Monday Cup Of Links #44 - Great Native American city, Climate change-based deurbanization, anti-social PSAs, and 100-ton press
Smoky Sepia Skies Edition
Happy Monday!
THE SKIES TURNED SEPIA LAST WEEK!
I’m not kidding. You can see pictures of the Bay area all over the internet where it looked like the universe decided it needed a giant sepia filter over everything. It genuinely messed with my mind, and I realized how desperately I need the sun and clear skies to stay sane.
The smoke has been coming down, and air quality has been terrible. There’s no air purifiers in any store close by, and the one I ordered off of Amazon probably won’t be here until the smoke has all dissipated.
Onto our links!
Drone surveys have found the remnants of a great city inhabited by the Wichita tribe, in Kansas. It could be the largest Native American city north of Mexico. They plan to do more remote sensing surveys so they can figure out interesting subterranean spots to excavate. What struck me most about this article is how it’s written like everyone involved with the city has ceased to exist. The city was documented by the Spanish in the 1600s and called Etzanoa, and it was only in the 18th century that European settlers drove them out. That’s not very long ago, and yet the approach to this doesn’t even consider what descendents of those citizens have to say about it. It’s a dark feeling, a more intense version of what I feel when people talk about my community and hometown like my perspective doesn’t even exist.
ICYMI: I wrote a piece about “settling” for marriage on Thursday. I find the conversation around “settling” to be quite toxic to say the least, and this is my small attempt to use personal experience, books, and other sources to demystify what people mean when they say “settle”.
Now we have a mathematical model confirming that the Indus/Saraswati civilization might have likely declined due to climate change. Paleoclimate analysis takes indirect observations to infer ideas about climate at a particular historical time. In this case, by observing a particular isotope in stalagmites in the caves in the area, they had developed a pattern of monsoon rains for the past 5700 years. But this sort of paleoclimate time series data is very noisy, and needs special mathematical analyses. Prof Nishant Malik at Rochester came up with one such model, which can easily find shifts even in the noisiest such datasets. According to his analysis, there was a major shift in climate just before the dawn of this civilization, and then there was a reversal in this climate shift right before the period of decline of the great cities of the civilization, which adds confirmation that it was climate change that gave rise to both the rise and decline of ancient Indian great cities.
This makes me wonder about the San Francisco Bay Area. The Spanish thought it was useless and dangerous to get to for 300+ years. And then they tried exploiting the natural resources for a while after. But after the earthquake of 1906, there was an earthquake shadow, where there have been no major quakes for over a 100 years. The European forestry practices also ensured no fires for a while. This aided in building up the area massively, beyond the scam town it was during the Gold Rush. Now that the earthquake shadow is lifting, and the fires are getting big and hot because of the decay of the forests. I wonder if this means the Bay Area will decline slowly, and we just happened to see it at its peak.I came across this opinion piece on why struggling through a degree you “have to” do for the employment opportunities might be better than just quitting to pursue your creative dreams. I agree with the author about the rigor it takes to pursue anything creative, and training in a rigorous field might be better to prepare your mind for that. Especially in a country like India, where creative degrees simply don’t have the same kind of rigor as part of the coursework. I feel like my engineering education makes me a better and more confident writer than if I’d done an MFA or some such. And in general, I think being grounded in something tangible makes one a better writer, simply because you have a point of view that’s not just something spoonfed from your teachers or the media.
Okay, this isn’t really a link I’m sharing, but I gotta rant about The Social Dilemma. It’s a Netflix documentary about how Facebook and other social media is bad. I don’t use Facebook beyond once a week, and I have all these convoluted ways to use it so I’m not getting spied on. In my experience, placing ads hasn’t worked well, and getting ad revenue on apps is worse than trying to make money off of Medium. So I’m not a big fan of ads or Facebook. But the way they take every single aspect of a tech job and make it sound sinister and scary and interview only the people who say they “quit for ethical concerns” (which is code word for “my stock vested”) makes me very skeptical of all their claims. If people are addicted to social media, I don’t think it’s because of so-called dark patterns. It’s more like people, especially young people, go where their friends are, and people aren’t able to have face to face social interactions all that much for various reasons, due to which they have completely shifted their socializing online. I personally didn’t have healthy social media usage patterns in my twenties. That was because my real life sucked, I had no support structures, and I just needed to escape.
I’ve found social media incredibly empowering. Given that, I wonder who has to lose the most from social media. It somehow feels like this narrative is mainly peddled by traditional media, which wants to make the internet sound scary, so that Facebook and Google, which have taken away their ad revenue and broken their monopoly on gatekeeping narrative, lose users. It won’t happen, but it serves to weave a narrative that can then be used later in making policy and such. This documentary is more like the DARE program or one of those anti-drug PSAs from 80s and 90s America. Designed to cause panic and outrage, based on cherrypicked facts, and pandering to a narrative that pearl-clutchers of all ages can latch on to.GIF of the week: 100-ton hydraulic press on all the things.