Hello, and welcome to another issue of Kat’s Kable! With no further ado, here goes. The list of ten good things to read for this week:

  • The Greatest Baroque Composer Never Known - Hangover from the music special edition from two weeks ago. Interesting piece about a Baroque composer of music who has been in obscurity for years and years. This is the story of Ignaz Franz Biber. Sadly, very few of his operas of his survive. One of his innovations is the mis-tuning of strings, where the musician plays one note but hears the other. Such an arrangement was required for some of his complex music.

  • What If Only Females Could See Color? - Very interesting. There are some species of animals wherein only the females can see colour, and the men can’t. This piece looks at the implications of this, and how it falls into our spectrum of feminism.

  • Sleeping Through the Night is a Relatively New Invention - Yes it is. Earlier our sleep patterns were not what they are now - nightly sleep would be bifurcated into two portions.

What’s strange, though, is that the sleep schedule we were trying so hard to re-create is a relatively new invention: of all the elements that make up what we consider the natural or normal way to sleep, not one of them seems to have been in force at any time anywhere before around 1800 in Europe and North America. This is worth reiterating: virtually nothing about our standard model of sleep existed as we know it two centuries ago, including the ideal of eight hours of unbroken sleep.

  • The Elephant Men of Odisha - Four daily wage labourers have earned the ire of society and their families, are being paid a pittance, but they do this to save a herd of elephants. Inspiring story for the week.

*When the elephants are harangued by a mob, the trackers lead them to safety amid traffic and crowds, they free them of the terror only a trapped wild creature knows. If the elephants are near railway tracks, the squad calls up the station master at the Athgarh station to get him to signal trains to slow down. *

Chapman tossed off those last words casually, but they represented one of the most divisive issues in mole catching today. Unlike mousetraps, mole traps do not kill instantly and do not always kill cleanly. The world of mole catching is bitterly divided between those who believe that traps should be checked every 24 hours – to ensure that any injured moles are dispatched quickly, rather than being left to die a slow and agonising death – and those who don’t.

Quietly, residents share strategies and spend hours studying Google Maps together. Some refugees attempt to cross the border on foot, through the forests of northern New York State. Others take closer but riskier routes, including a treacherous railroad bridge over the Niagara River. One Vive volunteer told me, “Not long ago, a guy showed up from Afghanistan and asked me, right away, ‘How can I find the railroad bridge?’ ”

  • The Astonishing Vision and Focus of Namibia’s Nomads - The Himba people of Namibia can see fine details and ignore distraction much better than most other human beings – a finding that may reflect the many ways that modern life is changing our minds and abilities. Very nice read. These Namibians fail less than the global average now at tests like the one below - both the orange circles are the same size, but they look different.

  • What Hospitals Waste - Great ProPublica story about hospital waste. This isn’t about bio-waste, but about syringes, tablets etc. that hospitals throw away before they expire. Elizabeth McLellan has now started Partners for World Health, which sends this equipment and medicine to places like Syria for free. Win-win.

  • The Most Ridiculous, Possibly Suicidal Sport You’ve Never Heard Of - The picture says it all.

Have a great weekend!