Monday Cup Of Links #58 - Pandemic Sleuthing, Ecstasy for Octopi, Sacred Grand Canyon
And a short story contest!
Happy Monday!
This is where I usually reflect on something I’ve been reading about or experiencing recently, but a fast-growing infant leaves no room to read or experience. I used to be able to read a few pages of a book or the highlights of a Reddit thread while my baby played on my lap, until about two weeks ago, but as she gains more awareness and curiosity, that’s impossible now. It’s an endless slew of “don’t eat that charging cable” and “please eat these vegetables”. I’m told it gets much worse before it gets any better.
Onto our links!
How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story And Embarrassed the Media. What a riveting piece. I love everything about it, most of all how a group of mostly anonymous people came together to do some detective work for the good of the world, powered only by publicly available information on the Internet. I’ve thought a lot about what a novel that’s based on internet sleuthing would look like. I couldn’t think of high enough stakes that would make for an engaging story. But what’s higher stakes than a global pandemic? Go read this piece! It’s great!
Short story contest about Indo-Cambodian ties going back thousands of years. 5000-10,000 words, deadline September 30. Your short story needs to be about the historic ties between India and Cambodia. This is an exciting topic, and I’ll definitely be submitting.
The cool thing I notice about this contest is the finalists will have a workshop to revise their work, and the winners will have their work published in an anthology. This is so similar to what we do at TL;DR Press, where we have calls for submissions to our themed anthologies every quarter, and all our entrants get suggestions on their stories which they can optionally incorporate and then give us a final submission. This is a big hit with our authors, because it is a frustrating experience to send your story out to so many venues and not know why it keeps getting rejected. And being able to help upcoming writers hone their craft is not only fulfilling, it also helps us as editors become better writers.Scientists at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine gave octopuses MDMA to study how socializing works among them. So MDMA causes a flood of serotonin in the brain, so it is a great tool to study how the brain reacts to serotonin. This causes feelings of euphoria and sociability, at least in rats and humans (So if you have a pet rat, you both can take some Ecstasy and enjoy the experience?). Rats and humans diverged in evolution 75 million years ago, more recently than humans and octopuses, who diverged 500 million years ago. So this experiment was to see if the mechanism that makes serotonin lead to sociable feelings evolved long ago or more recently.
So when they spiked their tanks with MDMA, octopuses became more friendly (they would previously only hang out alone and ignore the other octopus in the tank, usually kept caged to prevent fighting), touching and moving in sync with each other. So clearly, social feelings from serotonin were present much earlier than when mammals evolved. This means we didn’t evolve sociability as a response to something in our environment; sociability was an evolutionary accident!Did you know the Grand Canyon is a Native American pilgrimage site? The more I learn about Native Americans, the more I see similarities to Hinduism. In this case, there’s this concept of sacred geography in both cultures. Anyway, I learned about this when I was reading about the Tutuveni petroglyphs. Tutuveni means “newspaper rock”. It is a stop on the Hopi tribe’s pilgrimage route to Ongtuvqa (which is the Hopi name for the Grand Canyon), and pilgrims would carve their clan’s symbol to show that they had made the pilgrimage. There’s more than 5000 rock carvings, and it is an important heritage site.
As for why the Grand Canyon is sacred, I looked and I’m not sure I get the whole picture, but here’s where I kept ending up no matter what I searched. I briefly looked at Hopi beliefs, and it all seems to be a long rabbit hole to explore.Artefact of the week: The Didarganj Yakshi. She is a life-size apsara, made of polished sandstone, dated back to the Kushan Era (2nd century). She was excavated from the banks of the Ganga in 1917. She’s at the Bihar museum right now.
I’ve been hearing so many good things about the Bihar museum, and their website seems great too. Their collection and display seem excellent.