LINKS - December 8th, 2021
Introduction to a new feature from Rhapsody
Today I’m starting a new weekly feature at Rhapsody. Each Wednesday, I’ll email links to five interesting things I came across in the last week. The links could be essays, videos, podcasts, photo stories—pretty much anything so long as it has to do with some aspect of the human condition. For now I’m simply going to call this LINKS.
A core objective of Rhapsody is for all of us to learn more about what it means to be human. To that end, me just writing essays or short blog posts feels insufficient. There’s so much interesting information and wisdom in the world. So I think curating some of it seems worthwhile.
Why Wednesdays? Because Wednesdays kind of suck. By the middle of the week, I am pretty sick of reading about the “news of the day” and I want something else. I want something with a larger perspective, something operating on a longer time horizon, something less immediate but undoubtedly higher stakes. That’s what I’ll include here. There will be a lot of science, archaeology, psychology, philosophy, biology, and history.
Also: Please feel free and encouraged to share things you read recently in the comments!
Pompeii’s Ruins to Be Reconstructed by Robot
By Jen Pinkowski, Scientific American
“Scientists at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) have a plan: Send in the robot. Their project—dubbed RePAIR (Reconstructing the Past: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics meet Cultural Heritage)—melds robotics, AI and archaeology in an attempt to reconstruct architectural features of Pompeii that would otherwise remain incomplete, because they’re either too complex or would require impossible amounts of human labor and time.”
How we became weekly
By David Henkin, Aeon
“Weeks serve as powerful mnemonic anchors because they are fundamentally artificial. Unlike days, months and years, all of which track, approximate, mimic or at least allude to some natural process (with hours, minutes and seconds representing neat fractions of those larger units), the week finds its foundation entirely in history. To say ‘today is Tuesday’ is to make a claim about the past rather than about the stars or the tides or the weather. We are asserting that a certain number of days, reckoned by uninterrupted counts of seven, separate today from some earlier moment. And because those counts have no prospect of astronomical confirmation or alignment, weeks depend in some sense on meticulous historical recordkeeping. But practically speaking, weekly counts are reinforced by the habits and rituals of other people. When those habits and rituals were radically obscured or altered in 2020, the week itself seemed to unravel.”
What Industrial Societies Get Wrong About Childhood
By Karen L. Kramer, Nautilus
“Schooling and growing up in small nuclear families have been the norm for only the past century or so in industrialized societies—just a brief flash in evolutionary time. Childhood in these societies is commonly thought of as a period requiring intense adult investment dedicated to learning and instruction. But research in nonindustrial, small-scale societies—the kinds of communities that all our ancestors lived in both deep in the past and until fairly recently—gives a different picture.”
Hominin skull and Mars panorama — November’s best science images
By Emma Stoye, Nature
“The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature’s photo team.”
Descendants of Cahokia
Hosted by Peter Gwin and Amy Briggs, Overheard at National Geographic
“How did people create Cahokia, an ancient American Indian metropolis near present-day St. Louis? And why did they abandon it? Archaeologists are piecing together the answers—but Cahokia’s story isn’t finished yet. Hear how an Osage anthropologist is protecting the remaining burial mounds and sacred shrines so the descendants of Cahokia’s founders can keep its legacy alive.”
For more information on this episode, visit natgeo.com/overheard.
Listen (I link here to Apple Podcasts, but it seems to be available anywhere you listen to podcasts.)