Monday Cup Of Links #61 - DRAGON MAN, BoneHenge, RK Narayan Interview
How do you think different species of oragutan react when they meet each other?
Happy Monday!
There’s a special kind of exhaustion that comes with keeping up with a child that desperately wants to be on the move, but doesn’t have the upper body strength just yet. We feel every muscle in our body, and have no brain power left at the end of the day. We’ve received a lot of advice about how to deal with it, and the end result is still extreme exhaustion, ameliorated by the joy of seeing a baby learn new things and explore the world.
Onto our links!
They discovered a skull belonging to another species of humans in China!!!!!!!!!!!! They call him DRAGON MAN because he was found in the Dragon River Delta. DRAGON MAN, just so you didn’t miss it.
They call his species Homo Longi, and that species is the closest relative to humans, not Neanderthals.
The skull is giant, and the brain was possibly 7% larger than the average human brain today.
The story of how the fossil was discovered is pretty interesting. A laborer in 1933 found the fossil, and probably realized it had scientific significance. Rather than turn it over to the Japanese who occupied his part of China then, he hid it in a well. He didn’t tell anyone about it all his life, probably because he was ashamed at having worked for the Japanese. On his deathbed in 2018, he told his family about the skull. They retrieved it and donated it to the Geoscience Museum of Hebei GEO University.
It’s so interesting to me that there were so many different species of humans before. I wonder how they considered each other when they met. In which case I wonder, how do different species of Orangutans interact when they meet?All India Radio has been releasing interviews from its archives onto Youtube. Personalities who previously had barely been seen or heard outside of print are now loud and clear, weighing in on all manners of things! I’m loving it.
This one is an interview of RK Narayan by UR Ananthamurthy. I loved RK Narayan, and I’m now rediscovering his genius by going over his short stories again. When I was in my teens, I would have given anything to listen to this interview. I hadn’t even seen a picture of RKN then. I had no idea what his life was like, apart from what he wrote about in his memoir, My Days, and I hungered for more.
This interview isn’t that fun. It’s in English and kinda stodgy to listen to. I much preferred RK Laxman’s interview on AIR, where he free-wheeled in Kannada about crows, politicians, and sundry other things. 60% of that interview was crows. And I loved it.Chip Huyen is writing a book about Machine Learning interviews, and an early draft is out on the internet, free and open source! I wanted to write this book five years ago. I didn’t, because the jobs I got from all those machine learning interviews kept me very busy. It’s awesome to see how comprehensive it is, and covers much more than I intended to. I wanted to write an ML crash course that you could read just before you went for an interview and seem like you knew your onions. I guess I still could, but I don’t interview as much at that level anymore.
I had talked about the mammoth bone structures at Kostenki 11 six weeks ago. The articles I found about that only had aerial views of those sites, and somehow I missed looking at what those structures looked like. To remind you, it were these cylindrical structures made from mammoth bones. They were first thought to be bone houses, but they found fat and cartilage attached to the bones, which would have made it all smelly, which led them to believe it was an ice age meat freezer. Also, they were building structures from mammoth bone, because the ice age had caused droughts which made trees die out.
Well, I came across this other piece that speculates the purpose of these structures, and wonders if it was an ice age Stonehenge (Bonehenge?). It also speculates differently from the original article I read. It’s possible they are talking about different structures from the same site, but I don’t know.
Anyway, the cool thing is they actually have a picture of that structure. And it’s faaaaaantastic. I love how they used the mammoth tusks to frame the entrance. That’s a sick meat freezer!