Monday Cup Of Links #55 - Mammoth Bone Freezers, Egyptian pomegranate bottles, Ancient Indian Suburbs
And thoughts on success and despair
Happy Monday!
I’ve always been interested in the nature of success, and being a parent has that part of my brain on steroids.
A random Reddit comment reminded me of an excerpt in Hillbilly Elegy, where there’s a character Bob, who has found a decently paying blue collar job where he needs only to show up and be sober, and he repeatedly fails on both counts. Bob gets fired and then he ends up attacking the manager saying “How could you fire me, I’m an expectant father!”. The author talks about that episode he witnessed as one of the crazy aspects of life in the rust belt, where people constantly self-sabotage.
But when you try putting yourself in Bob’s shoes, I guess life to him feels like an endless drudgery where you trade your time for money and stability, to no real end other than a house and retirement, so why bother? There’s no bigger goal, nothing to aspire to. What really is the point of working hard?
I remember feeling that way more than a decade ago (though I showed up and was sober) at a job I didn’t particularly like. But I could keep going because my aim was to get into a decent machine learning program. If that hadn’t worked out, I might not have been too different from Bob. At that point, I was surrounded by friends and family, and was in a city with a lot of cool things to do, and had a pretty enviable life, so it isn’t clear why I’d feel that despair, but now when I think about it, it makes sense.
It felt like there wasn’t much room for me to try new things and succeed in them. I was just following a set path, and being around my family, I couldn’t really break out and take risks much. The only thing that broke me out of my rut was immigrating.
And then I came across people in my program who came from nearby towns, and suddenly, they were me back home, not really seeing a way forward, and I was my colleagues from small towns back home, surprised these people who were born in the uh, land of opportunity, would waste it all by half-assing their degree. It’s similar when I meet people whose parents own homes in the Bay area. They just don’t think they can top what their parents did (affording a Bay area home), and they just lead middling lives, not really trying new things.
The people who came from successful backgrounds who built on what their parents did however seem to have been part of a milieu where they came across people marginally more successful than them, as well as those a whole different level of successful, so it gave them a path they could aspire to which didn’t seem too inaccessible.
It feels like when you’re young, you need to see a path where you can aspire to things - but on your own terms. Which is why people in India and China aspire to go to the West, while people in the West try to teach English in China or do charity in Africa. When all the options seem lame or unrealistic to you for one reason or another, a despair sets in, irrespective of your socioeconomic status.
These are half-formed thoughts I came up with. I’m curious what you think! Reply or comment with your thoughts!
Onto our links!
They found a circular (well, cylindrical) structure made of mammoth bones in Russia!!!! A building! Made of mammoth bones! This dates back to the Ice Age (because mammoths). It seems like back then, trees and other vegetation became so few in Eurasia that the hunter-gatherers there couldn’t even find wood to burn. Instead, they burned mammoth bones. And used mammoth bones to build stuff. This particular structure was first thought to be a house, but they found fat and cartilage still attached to the bones, which would have made it smelly and unhygienic and attracting predators. They realized it was actually a meat freezer, where people stored meat for a snowy day.
I dug around and it seems like there’s 26 Paleolithic sites in the complex where this was discovered, and a museum and everything as well! There’s mammoth bones there as well as human remains and tools. And the museum is in one of the mammoth bone structures! Now I gotta go visit.Archaeologists found remnants of a 4000 year old crafts village named Bhabhaniyav near Varanasi, which was mentioned in ancient texts. They found a temple whose walls are 2000 years old, and which had pottery which was 3500-4000 years old. It seems to have been a satellite town to Varanasi all those years ago. And they found inscriptions on a pillar in the Kushan-Brahmi script which apparently was a thing 3500 years ago. I haven’t been able to find more information on this, like what ancient texts it was mentioned in, and in what contexts. Or what craft they were involved in, and what of this Kushan-Brahmi script.
It feels like we’ve got to excavate more of our old cities (which are often right by our new cities, like Kolkata is only a day’s walk from Tamaralipti, and Haldia is right by it). It could be very insightful into our past.Two bottles in the form of pomegranates at The Met. They are from the 13th century BCE from Egypt. They are glass! One of them is larger and yellow, the other is smaller and green. The yellow one probably contained pomegranate juice or wine for drinking. The green one apparently indicated an unripe, sour pomegranate, so it would have held pomegranate juice for medicinal purposes.
I found these to be so adorable to look at, and I’m surprised glass was a thing back then! Which I shouldn’t be, because the Indus civilization was exporting colored glass beads in the 19th century BCE.While I’ve never had to work on weight loss, I find it interesting to read food science, if only because it’s something pretty accessible to all of us. I read The Obesity Code a few months ago, and while I’m not into fasting, it was interesting to see someone saying that you shouldn’t have several small meals in a day and instead just eat three big meals and take a stroll after. And then this past weekend I read Conquering Fat Logic, which is a book about all the weight loss and weight gain misconceptions. It was interesting to read about how a lot of diet studies have been based on self-reported data, which is a huge issue because people with small appetites think they eat a lot and those with big appetites think they eat too little. So thin people would say they “eat chocolate all the time” while fat people wouldn’t, which leads to articles about how “eating chocolate makes you thin”. And then I came across this talk about processed food on Youtube, where I encountered a curious idea - processed food contains emulsifiers which can thin the mucous lining of your intestines. Friends and family members have developed food sensitivities and allergies later in life, and have been baffled about why. Now it all makes sense to me. And I’ll be reading food labels more carefully to spot and avoid emulsifiers. All that said, I don’t fully agree or completely endorse any of these books or talks, and you should make up your own mind about these things, and I myself change my mind several times on food science, so there.