Monday Cup Of Links #54 - Dinosaur Footprint, Fad Psychology, Viking Ship Burial
Stay in, stay masked, stay strong, India
Happy Monday!
The US finally decided Indian lives matter and lifted the embargo on exporting essential raw materials so Indian vaccine manufacturers can step up production (after days of saying “America First!!!11”), so it’s a great Monday, for sure, that doing the right thing is cause for such celebration.
There’s members of my non-immediate family down with the virus, and several who have other health issues which they can’t get attention for because they are scared of contracting the virus. Weddings that were planned with a modicum of testing and social distancing now stand cancelled. For a lot of us, this wave has hit worse than previous ones.
In the midst of all this, I’m seeing so many people organizing to help others, and it fills my heart with so much hope. India is strong because of our social bonds, and our ability to come together in times of a crisis.
I must make a mention of how the media reportage is so different when it’s Western countries suffering from the virus versus the rest of the world. Italy, Britain and NYC had much worse peaks, and then, the narratives were all about resilience, people coming together to help and maintain sanity, and other such ‘triumph of the human spirit’ type stories, even as the elderly were being sent home to die because the hospitals were full. But now when India is going through a peak (which I believe will be much smaller, with much fewer deaths because the vulnerable have got at least one dose of a vaccine, and we now know how to deal with the virus), the stories can only be described as tragedy porn. I don’t want to amplify those voices, but please read the stories about the current wave in India with a critical eye.
While I’ve been distracting myself with Pitch Meeting and Black Lady Sketch Show videos on Youtube, I also read things that have to do with history and literature. Onto our links!
Archaeologist Marie Woods was out by the sea collecting shellfish for dinner, when she stumbled on a giant petrified dinosaur footprint! Fortune favors the prepared mind, indeed. They are now trying to preserve the footprint and somehow get it to a museum.
I learned about the Oseberg Ship Burial, which was a Viking ship dating back to the 800s found in a burial mound. The ship had the remains of two women, along with a number of grave goods. The two women had a mostly meat diet, which was a luxury in Norway back then (fish was the common food), and one of them showed signs of using a metal toothpick, which was another luxury. One of the women was estimated to be 80 and died of cancer, and the other in her fifties. Some theorize the 80-year-old was the mother of Norway’s first king. The younger woman is unknown, and could be her daughter, or a handmaiden. This ship was found and excavated in Norway in 1904-05, and we can see it now in the incredibly cool-sounding Viking Ship Museum in Oslo.
It impresses me to no end how Europe and America preserve their historical artefacts, and I really would like museums to be taken more seriously in India as well.As a self-help and social psychology junkie, I was happy to read Jesse Singal’s The Quick Fix - Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills, which goes into why some of the most popular psychology fads are wrong and shouldn’t be used the way they are. I am glad to say I bought into exactly zero of the concepts he tears down (e.g. grit, the implicit association test, self-esteem, power posing, positive psychology), so the book was for me 90% vicarious pleasure in watching the science behind them torn down. Which I think is another kind of an issue - while I hate the TED-ization of science, I am a little too happy to watch/read/listen to media about how everything we know is wrong and the system is all messed up. I watch the Netflix series Rotten and love to wax eloquent about how garlic doesn’t come from Gilroy or how avocados are fueling cartel violence, and I’ll gorge on junk food while watching documentaries about how junk food is bad. I suspect others do the same. I’m not sure this is an entirely healthy manifestation of cynicism.
They found these swan-shaped lamps all over Europe - in Italy, Bosnia, Hungary, Slovakia, and didn’t know what they were for. These were common in the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. Now after an excavation in Slovakia, it seems like these swans would have a chariot attached to them, with oil or animal fat, and these were used in burial rituals and other ceremonies.