Monday Cup Of Links #48 - Glowing Squids, 1st Century Computers, Genius Beatle
And No More GIF Of The Week, unless the spirit moves me.
Happy Monday!
This week, I went to my office after a whole year to bring back things that had been untouched in a year…. And you know what? I miss going out that far everyday. There’s a library as well as a bookstore right by my work, and I spent so many evenings just browsing either place. I miss taking walks around the gingko and oak trees when I’d go in early. And there’s just something that makes you feel alive when you’re out in a crowded, busy place.
And then I came home tired from the commute and slept for three hours and remembered why I’d die for my one day of work from home every week. I don’t regret being fully remote.
Onto our links!
They recreated the world’s first computer! In 1901, Greek sponge divers discovered the wreck of a 1st century merchant ship. In it was a lump of metal the size of a large dictionary. It was initially thought to be a rock, but there was a gear mechanism a researcher found in it. It was thought to be a calculator of sorts. They called it the Antikythera mechanism after the area where it was found. In 2002, the curator at the Science Museum in London realized it could be a model of celestial bodies revolving around a central earth, based on the way the gears were. He found the Sun, Moon, Mercury and Venus were represented. But there were more planets known in antiquity that were absent. So he hypothesized that there was a front half that was lost, and that the whole structure was used to predict eclipses. Now, researchers at the University College, London have recreated the front half in a digital simulation. To do so, they actually could rely on the instructions at the back of the model that explained how it worked!!
Now, they plan to actually recreate it and see if it works IRL. They also aren’t sure this construction was feasible back in the day. So there’s still a lot of interesting work to be done in this area.
The knowledge to build this was lost to time; such devices next appeared only in the 18th century. Given that the ancient Greeks worked pretty closely with Indians, I wonder what other cool technology the ancient world, especially ancient India had, that has been lost. Especially given so much Indian knowledge has been actively destroyed.
This is a great video explaining the whole thing.Turns out, some glowing squids have their lighting mechanism run by symbiotic bacteria. The link really is about the specific mechanism by which some bacteria are better adapted to colonize the Hawaiian bobtail squid’s lighting mechanism. But it’s news to me that bioluminescence in animals could be from bacteria. The baby squids are born free of luminescence, and they get the bacteria from their environment and begin to glow. This sort of thing makes me wonder what cool things we owe to our gut bacteria.
Paul McCartney As Management Study. I am a big Beatlemaniac, and George appealed to me the most, though I have a quiet admiration for Ringo and his hustle. But I had no idea about the wonder that is Paul. Paul is just There All The Time, and he’s the leader of the Beatles, a calm foil to John Lennon, so you don’t really think about why else he’s so well known. This short piece informs me however that his band after The Beatles, The Wings, sold more records than the Beatles did. Wow. And he’s done so many things right, and has basically been creating nonstop since 1956. It’s like when we just know Schwarzenegger is cool, but it doesn’t hit us that he became the best at so many different things - bodybuilding, beauty contests, movies, politics, and business, to start with. Usually it’s great when someone wins at even one of them, and he reached the top of at least five of these things. Paul is like that, but in the world of music.
And in more sea bug news, there’s a sea slug that cuts off its head, wanders around headless, and grows a new body when the old body gets infested by parasites. There’s a Tamil phrase that means “burn down your house because you’re scared of bedbugs”, which means an extreme action. That’s exactly what these sea slugs do! It’s a biological phenomenon called “Extreme Regeneration”.
I’m retiring the GIF Of The Week link. I don’t come across GIFs that blow my mind all that often, and when I do, it’s usually something mundane, like a recipe for fried cheese balls. It’s also annoying when most GIFs I find tend to be v.reddit links, which can’t be directly linked to, and then I have to do some hijinks to have them be an imgur or gfycat link instead. I’ll only post one on here if I come across something mindblowing during the week, instead of looking for something cool post-facto, just to shoehorn it in.