Monday Cup Of Links #45 - Australian-Tamil Queens, Hacking the PM, POISON GAS ALIENS
And some mental health research.
Happy Monday!
This past week’s seen a couple of thousand more words added to the novel. I have about 5-6 chapters that I can just autopilot on because I know the plot and it doesn’t get too twisty-turny just yet. It’s still in the fun-and-games side of things, which involve traipsing around Europe, outwitting Scotland Yard spies, and making bombs.
I had an interesting experience on the mental health front. Some of you might know I have an executive functioning disorder called Slow Cognitive Tempo. It’s not an official disorder yet, but it’s one that explains my mental health issues very well. It presents just like ADHD in terms of being easily distracted, hyperfocusing, and taking time to get things done, but unlike ADHD, it doesn’t affect impulse control, or present with memory issues. Instead, my distractions come from within me, and I do worse on tasks under time pressure.
It’s not a very well-researched disorder, so I was very glad to attend a Zoom talk by a researcher who works on this issue. I haven’t been able to get help with some of the issues caused by this disorder, even from qualified therapists, so I was eager to hear what someone on the cutting edge of this knew about it.
Unfortunately, I came away with more questions than answers. My issues are with being social in large groups, and with productivity (a lot of the techniques that work for ADHD help greatly, but since my strengths are different, I was hoping for something more tailored to how my brain works), and I was hoping to find some insights. The researcher seemed much more into the academic side of things than with the practical issues that come from having this disorder, and only confirmed that being social is one of the hardest things when you have SCT.
The researcher also dropped the fact that the symptoms of SCT are the worst in the morning, and get better as the day goes on. What? Why? How do you deal with this? Should I wake up late? Wake up early? Mornings are my Waterloo (or Panipat, if you will) and if my morning didn’t go well, I’d let it affect my entire day. It’s good to know I don’t have to carry that baggage. But how DO I optimize for this? I mailed the researcher. Let’s hope he responds.
Onto our links!
THERE MIGHT BE LIFE ON VENUS! You’ve probably heard of this already, but in case you haven’t, THERE MIGHT BE LIFE ON VENUS! Basically, phosphine gas is a sign of life, and they found that there’s phosphine signatures on Venus. They confirmed that with two independent observations from telescopes. Then they tried to figure out if there could be alternative explanations for the presence of phosphine, but it seemed increasingly unlikely. Now the most likely explanation is ALIENS. It’s still a long path to confirming all of this, but it is so very exciting to even entertain this possibility seriously!
The Australian Queen of Pudukottai. You’ve got to wonder why all the Indian princes in British India didn’t have wives from all over the world, when they could quite easily have, given their relative wealth and polish. Turns out, a big reason is that the British didn’t want to recognize such relationships officially, because, horrors, it might mean that Caucasians and Indians are equal. However, two kings defied this edict. The king of Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu had an Australian wife. The British then decided to make life difficult for him, and the rest of his tale unfolds like Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. He abdicated in favor of his brother, and then lived in exile in all the fancy parts of Europe. His son took American citizenship, got in trouble with the law kind of a lot, and went on to live the life of a man of comfort.
When you hack the Prime Minister’s identity using an Instagram post. The former PM of Australia, Tony Abbott, posted a picture of his boarding pass on Instagram. His confirmation number was not obscured. So a random person on the Internet decided to see what more he could get using that information. Turns out, it’s kind of a lot! The issue really is the Qantas website not really caring about security too much. Anyway this person didn’t want to be taken down by Secret Service, and went through the proper channels to let this security breach be known. It took months, but now all is well, and he got to talk to the PM about it.
Slate Star Codex is moving to Substack. After the brouhaha with NYT and SSC deleting his blog, NYT seems to have gone quiet on this story. SSC had a few reservations about Substack, and well, it turned out Substack listened, and decided to address his issues specifically. Oh, to be big enough that a site decides to do that for you.
The part of this update I’m most intrigued by is that he decided he can’t pursue anonymity anymore, really, and decided to work it out so that his job wouldn’t involve dealing directly with patients, so his name being associated with opinions online wouldn’t affect his job. It makes me sad that that’s the best solution we can come up with in this world we live in. But I guess anything more would involve putting genies back in bottles and we can’t have that.GIF of the Week: Pea plant growing from seed.