Monday Cup Of Links - 7
Thanksgiving Dinner Discussion Topics Edition
Happy Thanksgiving Week!
My novel is chugging along. A little slower this week; I’m only at 30,000 words. But I realized I hit a bottleneck with plot, and spent time on that. It looks like it’s at the interesting parts, where ass-kicking happens, and people die. Anyway, onto the links!
I came across India House in London. Innocuous name, no? Between 1905 and 1910, it was a hub for the Indian freedom struggle. They published an anti-colonialist newspaper called The Indian Sociologist, ran guns and money, and a lot of the revolutionaries involved in armed struggle against the British Raj lived at India house when they were students in London, usually studying law. Scotland Yard was always after them, but it ended when Madan Lal Dhingra assassinated a British official who was high up in the Indian administration. I’m incredibly fascinated, and I want to drop everything and write a novel about these guys.
A professor of psychology at the University of Toronto was served a takedown notice by the American Psychological Association, because he shared HIS OWN WORK on his blog. As someone who reads and occasionally writes research papers, I am extremely against putting the results of academic research behind a paywall, especially given this research is usually taxpayer funded, and reviewed by researchers who don’t get paid for this work. The authorities have shown they won’t hesitate to take it too far, like they did with Aaron Swartz. I’m glad we have we have arXiv to start with.
ICYMI my piece on the awful, awful book Lean out by Maria Orr. I simply had to write it. But I really want to move away from writing pieces that are more feeling than fact, though it’s very tempting to write emotionally charged pieces. I prefer being the person who learns something and teaches it to others more than the one telling everyone what to do, or how to be, and that’s going to be the line I take in my future pieces.
With AI increasingly being part of our daily lives, it’s hard to tell when AI is actually useful vs when it’s used as just a buzzword. Dr. Aravind Narayanan at Princeton has a talk on recognizing AI Snake Oil [PDF link]. I recommend everyone reads this piece.
The ‘Aryan Invasion “Theory”’ is increasingly being proven untrue. If you’re unaware, ‘Arya’ just means a highly respected person, and calling them a ‘race’ is stupid. It’s like if someone 3000 years later came across all the writings praising beautiful people, and concluded that The Beautifuls were a race who conquered the whole world. Here’s an extract from a book called The Aryan Journey which propounds the movement of people from the middle east to India. I haven’t cross-checked the sources, so I don’t make any claims of authority.
GIF of the week: A house-proud mouse tidies a toolshed.