Monday Cup Of Links #56 - Indian Retail, Carb-loving Neanderthals, Fancy Roman Villas
Did you know the Mayuri Veena is a thing?
Happy Monday!
I’ve had a realization about grit and perseverance. It’s easy to give your all to something if you know you’re only going to be doing it for a short while.
I guess it’s nothing new; Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt made a song about getting through the hard parts of being kidnapped and kept underground forever by taking it 10 seconds at a time. Brian Tracy in Eat That Frog talks about taking it one oil drum at a time. Trying to make it to the next landmark is something people do while on long hikes.
I guess what I’m saying differently is, the idea of doing something forever is extremely daunting to people. You see this in all the decisions people consider suboptimal - weight loss, saving money, not being angry. Behind each one of those ‘bad’ decisions is the prospect of having to put up with this kind of nonsense forever.
I realized that with my novel. I just couldn’t make any short term goals around it when I wasn’t writing it, and it just became more and more daunting. My goals involved word counts. But I can’t say with certainty that my work will be done at 60,000 words, can I? There’s editing, reediting, rewriting, replotting, the works. It just seems like a slog when I think about it in terms of word counts. I need better short term goals for my novel. Right now, I’m thinking about it in terms of story progression. It isn’t the best, because going from point A in the story to point B is fraught with a lot of uncertainty, and that uncertainty makes it daunting.
While the only real way out is to embrace the uncertainty, it’s also easier to keep writing once you’ve started, because a lot of the uncertainty disappears once you’re immersed in the story.
This daunting uncertainty is a thing for me with everything, not just my novel. I wonder if it has to do with having ADHD which makes it hard to visualize small details of imagined scenarios unless they are very very immersive.
Either way, starting off and telling myself it gets better is what seems to work for now.
Onto our links!
Neanderthals ate a lot of carbs. So apparently you need glucose to grow a big brain, and the hypothesis was neanderthals should have found a way to eat a lot of carbs, otherwise their big brains are inexplicable. How do they confirm this, though? Teeth research again. Scientists did a DNA analysis of long-dead microbes present in the mouths of 124 long-dead neanderthals, and found staphylococci. This bacteria binds to salivary amylase, which wouldn’t be possible unless the person was eating a lot of carbs.
Are our brains growing bigger now that we eat way more glucose than we need, on a regular basis? Are brains of people following keto smaller than the rest of us? I’m sure the answer to these things is that it takes several hundred generations for these to actually affect our genes, but it’s fun to wonder.A Roman villa was unearthed while earthquake-proofing a condo building in central Rome. It turned out to be mindblowingly opulent, and it is speculated it was occupied by a senator and his family. They had a bunch of cool things there, like lacquered bowls decorated with characters from Greek mythology, but the thing that apparently stands out the most is the mosaics. Most of it is black-and-white, made from putting together black and white stones, but some of them have colored components, like a green parrot or other birds. You can see more pictures in this Dailymail article on the topic. Now it’s been made into an underground museum which is open twice a week, and will be open more often if demand persists.
I read this pretty detailed piece on Digitizing Indian Retail. It focuses on how most retail in India is from small family-run stores, and during the pandemic, they were forced to go online, which revealed a lot of challenges. At the height of lockdowns with major supply chain disruptions, these small kirana stores were important in supplying neighborhoods with groceries. They offer great customer service, and inspire great loyalty, while the big-box online retailers don’t do so in the same way. This article focuses on how the challenges these stores have in going online can be helped. There’s a lot to learn from the Indian retail scene, especially for American retail, which is currently hit hard by the pandemic, and is consolidating such that only big box retailers are left still standing.
I’ve also got to say it’s great to read a piece like this, because most articles that would talk about Indian markets would go into “it’s a puzzling and confusing market which is counterintuitive” because they don’t put in the effort to do primary research. Glad that’s changing.Artefact of the week: Mayuri Veena from the Met museum. I didn’t know this was a thing to have a veena shaped like a peacock! It’s beautiful! And you can also get one on eBay for $984!