Monday Cup Of Links #46 - Clickbait programming language, Indian vaccines, Shellmound, and Where do you live?
Respond to this by telling me where you are located, so I can coordinate the timing of my posts better.
Happy Monday!
Some housekeeping is in order. I currently send out emails on Monday at 4am Pacific time, and whenever I manage to get a minute away from work on Thursday. Given that a lot of you reading this are based in India, I’m not sure this is still the best time.
So do me a favor. Respond to this email and tell me where you live. Depending on the responses, I’ll rethink when I send out my emails.
And, I’d love your feedback on what you feel about Write-Brained, the Monday emails, and my novel extracts. A big part of why I do this is to ‘perform in public’ and hone my writing, and I can’t do that well without your feedback!
Onto our links!
Indian queens as vaccination models. I found this BBC article that talked about the queens and princesses of Mysore who modelled for a poster popularizing smallpox vaccination. It’s a really beautiful painting of the Mysore royals. However, BBC being BBC tries to go all Brits-saved-the-world and says that before they came upon the scene, the preferred method of dealing with smallpox was through prayer, and that the priests opposed the vaccines. That’s untrue, however, because there’s accounts of door-to-door smallpox inoculations (tikah) in India going back to 1731. This predates the cowpox vaccine. However, the British banned this system in 1803 in some parts, but even until the 1900s, tikah inoculation was widely in use in several parts of India.
ICYMI: Meet Madam Cama. Last Thursday was Madam Bhikaji Cama’s birthday. Seeing as she’s an important character in India House, I posted my novel extract which introduced her, and pondered about what she was like to know and talk to. I’m going through so many sources, and while there’s enough and more description of the great deeds she did, her bravery, her kindness, and her never-say-die attitude, there’s no personal accounts of her, which makes this a bit of a difficult task.
West Berkeley Shellmound has been designated one of the most endangered historic sites in the US. It is an Ohlone historic and sacred site, where artefacts dating back 5,500 years have been found. The site is a parking lot right now, and it had been planned to convert it into a multistory complex with an underground parking lot, retail and housing. But thanks to Ohlone activism, this designation will help it preserve its sacred nature.
120,000-year-old human footprints have been found in Saudi Arabia. This would be the oldest evidence of human beings in the Arabian peninsula. Back then, the climate of the Middle East was very different. It was much greener and wetter and had several animals like hippos, tigers, buffaloes and elephants. While we think that the first large human migrations out of Africa happened 60,000 years ago, we think smaller groups of homo sapiens might have left Africa much earlier. If this is proven to be homo sapiens and not neanderthal footprints, it is a big breakthrough in what we know about where we came from.
Tabloid - The Clickbait Programming Language. A programming language after my own heart. It’s a joy to read, though I must admit I haven’t programmed much in it. It’s written in clickbait style, with constructs like “DISCOVER HOW TO” and “RUMOR HAS IT” and “SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT”. Also, you end every program with “PLEASE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE”.
Video of the week: How pencils are made.