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Kaal posted:Those buildings are anthropologically fascinating, but not architecturally impressive. I beg to differ. Considering what they were built with (both tools and materials), I do find them impressive. I mean, just look at that 4-story tower.
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Jul 2, 2013 05:39
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Smart Car posted:The rod with a serpent entwined around it is the symbol of Asclepius, and that's still used as a symbol a lot of hospitals.  That's not a serpent.
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Jul 5, 2013 18:56
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Suenteus Po posted:What kinds of texts talked about farting unambiguously, medical texts? No, fart jokes. 
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Jan 20, 2014 07:08
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Mustang posted:Has anyone seen The Fall of the Roman Empire, the 1964 movie? I just came across it for the first time and noticed it looked pretty cool. The sets and costumes seem pretty impressive for 1964. Makes me wonder what other good old movies about the Romans are out there. In the History of Rome podcast, Mike Duncan recommended this one as being particularly realistic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvfLyx9TUbI Looks a bit fishy to me, though.
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Feb 13, 2014 19:59
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[quote="Brawnfire" post="425718526"] Why wasn't a decimal system devised for circles/angles? Or does decimal math work in commune with base 60 because they are both divisible by 10? /quote] Base 10 is natural to use because most humans have 10 fingers. Base 5 or base 20 are variations on this theme. Base 12 is actually more convenient because 12 has more divisors than 10; base 60 is even better, being evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. That is extremely useful when dealing with time or angles, so the system has stuck for these use cases. There actually is a decimal system for measuring angles, where a right angle is subdivided into 100 degrees. That is what the GRAD button on a calculator is for. Zopotantor fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Feb 14, 2014 |
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Feb 14, 2014 18:13
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Grand Fromage posted:A cup is a standard measure of volume that isn't complicated.   (Sorry for the lovely iPod picture.)
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Feb 15, 2014 20:26
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Deteriorata posted:Relating this to ancient history, this is why for most of history people living in towns did not have ovens in their own home. It was just too much bother and wasteful of fuel to heat it up just to cook for one family. There was usually a central bakery where the ovens could be continually monitored all day long and do all the baking for everyone. Fun fact: there is actually a communal bakehouse in the village where I live which is still in use.
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Feb 16, 2014 09:49
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Volmarias posted:Are those accounts on the giving or the taking end? I can totally see the "piss it out, boys, quick!" part being a devilishly clever bit of psychological warfare. Note thread title.
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Mar 6, 2014 18:35
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Octy posted:For anyone interested, the adaptation Rape of the Sabines is an educational film appropriate to all ages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7FKcUOi3-8 I prefer this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9wbse4HHII&t=32s
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Mar 26, 2014 18:49
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Install Windows posted:Many small cities and towns in the United States have downtown areas that are elevated over the natural ground level, usually due to a now covered stream or other body of water that originally drew people to settle there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground (I only know about this because Terry Pratchett mentioned it in a footnote somewhere.)
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Apr 19, 2014 16:07
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Al Harrington posted:any recommended version? I don't understand the question. Gaius Julius Caesar posted:Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur.
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Apr 28, 2014 16:57
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Grand Fromage posted:Why do people go back to those gods? They were all giant assholes. I don't get the motivation. Even now, Sithrak oils the spit. Warning: very  comics besides this one.
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Jun 14, 2014 14:59
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Kaal posted:Well cutting it is just the modern way of doing it, the old way is to grind the curved lens out of a flat sheet and then polish it. But it still isn't easy to come up with that clear glass sheet in the first place. Mirrors are much easier to produce than lenses, but you need to make them out of metal if you don't have a way to put on a reflective coating. (Although if you can generate high voltage and a bit of a vacuum, producing a sputtered coating seems to be surprisingly easy.)
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Jun 27, 2014 17:48
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Frostwerks posted:What's the hardest part of making a hot air balloon? The airtight envelope. According to Wikipedia, the Montgolfier brothers used sackcloth (which probably would be available in antiquity) and paper (which you'd have to invent first). Later they used taffeta, which is made from silk; that might be prohibitively expensive if you could even get enough silk. Hang gliders or even kites would be easier to build, and could still be used for things like military reconnaissance.
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Jun 29, 2014 09:53
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:Running for your life is good exercise, anyways. How is this not a thing yet? Be right back, got to put a business plan together.
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Jul 10, 2014 17:03
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Habesne scalaria in domo tuo?
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Jul 20, 2014 18:30
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Octy posted:The ancient equivalent of the French in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Mater tua acinis sambuci olet.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:23
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Grand Fromage posted:[...], extensive use of mercury to get the gold/silver out (not sure how this worked), [...]. Why Is Mercury Used In Gold Mining And Why Is It A Problem? "The three largest point sources for mercury emissions in the U.S. are the three largest gold mines."
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Aug 4, 2014 15:46
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Sleep of Bronze posted:But, allowing your neologism, that's not a 3rd person verb ending. Interpreting it, you have to contrive something spectacularly awkward with a 2nd person or it ends up meaning 'to he who the posts with the poo poo'. Needs a facit or to go participle or something. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8&t=125s
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Aug 10, 2014 08:13
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sullat posted:Also, when you beat up an older civ, it was customary to incorporate their gods into your pantheon, usually as subordinates. "Oh hey, you know Tiamat, the primordial demon of chaos? Our boy Marduk totally kicked her rear end, and so your gods said he could be the boss god. Which means you gotta pay tribute to us, too." IIRC they also literally stole gods - not just by conquest and looting statues and such, but by performing an appropriate ritual and saying, "your god's on our side now, suckers!  ".
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Oct 11, 2014 09:04
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Guildencrantz posted:Can someone give me the original Latin of that titular quote? I know I saw it here, but can't find it anywhere. The rest of the famous Pompeii graffiti would be great as well. It's only a fragment. CIL IV 3932 ... dolete puellae paedicat ... cunne superbe vale. My last Latin lesson was more than 30 years ago, but I think the comment for this entry says, "discovered in 1873 and very badly legible; now totally disappeared."  e: "femininity" is not what that word means 
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Oct 21, 2014 18:49
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Libluini posted:Could be, could be that Theurge is an even older form. Theurge is a nice word, but it means something completely different.
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Nov 3, 2014 08:51
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Libluini posted:More forest, plus more swamp. Germany is practically the land of the forests. Also, we have the habit of calling low mountain ranges "something something Wald", because they were/are covered by forest. The "Teutoburger Wald" is one of these (as are the Schwarzwald, Bayerischer Wald, Pfälzer Wald, ...).
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Nov 15, 2014 10:12
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Jerusalem posted:I know they had a falling out later in life, but why is Augustus/Agrippa remembered as one of the most awesome team of bros in history while Maecenas tends to be overlooked/forgotten? Forgotten as in, being the namesake for the term describing a patron of the arts in many European languages?
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Nov 27, 2014 17:50
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Jerusalem posted:Well drat, I'd have loved to read that (and similarly Caesar's "Anti-Cato") - anything from a guy alive at the time ripping on another guy alive at the time would be utterly fascinating. There are several of Cicero's polemics that survived (In Verrem, the Philippics, ...).
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Jan 3, 2015 14:00
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JaucheCharly posted:Patron makes a few calls and says that it's going to be fixed. The next afternoon, the patron calls, he has his stereo back and tells the friend that the people who broke in won't be bothering anyone on his block anymore. And then of course comes the bit about doing him a favor when asked, which may never happen ...
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Jan 16, 2015 01:08
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ColtMcAsskick posted:I hope you guys like epicurean philosophy because that is all those scrolls will end up being Still better than loving Stoicism. Seneca 
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Jan 22, 2015 17:25
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Oberleutnant posted:Buncha That's exactly the stuff I was ranting about. I missed out on Ovid (or possibly Horace), which they read in a parallel class, for this.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:28
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here but might help as an illustrative example of the attitude of some Romans to exercise:
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Smoothrich posted:Consuls and tribunes seemed to constantly struggle with imposing order on the cacophony of unregulated urban development and probably had slums and shanty towns popping up left and right like a bad Sim City map. Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JFw8M4PBUI&t=2790s
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Mar 13, 2015 17:56
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the JJ posted:*******landschneke Although I like the image of armored land snails with pikes, I think you meant "Landsknechte" ("Knecht" is cognate to "knight").
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Mar 15, 2015 09:16
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HEY GAL posted:That's not "soldier," that's "mercenary." Soldier in German is soldat, and these people use that word much less to refer to themselves. Deutsches Wörterbuch posted:
Before I derail the thread even more, what do the China experts think of the "Three Kingdoms" TV serial? I'm watching it on YouTube and really enjoying it so far, although I'm mostly rooting for Cao Cao (and I think he's supposed to be the villain?)
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Mar 15, 2015 16:01
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Enjoy: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3486446&userid=183787 Yeah, Smoothrich has a ways to go before being made into a smilie. Don't go there, please. In other news, I may need to stop watching Three Kingdoms; I saw that bow video and immediately thought, "hey, it's Guan Yu!"
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Mar 16, 2015 18:24
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JaucheCharly posted:Bow video? Three kingdoms? Guan Yu? This video: Guan Yu is a character in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," which is a partly fictitious account of the eponymous period of Chinese history. He's usually pictured with a "ruddy" complexion, e.g., in a recent Chinese TV series I was asking about earlier.
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Mar 16, 2015 19:55
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Tao Jones posted:Sea salt contains far less iodine than mined salt or the salt that's in animal flesh. I think you have that backwards.
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Mar 20, 2015 18:01
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Obliterati posted:You're thinking Vindolanda, a fort on Hadrian's Wall. The mundane is actually a pretty awesome discovery for this period, where we have a lot less idea of how the masses lived than we do the aristocracy. It even includes the first Latin text written by a woman. My favorite is number 628. Masclus posted:ceruesam commilitones non habunt quam rogo iubeas mitti 
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Mar 25, 2015 20:39
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Grand Fromage posted:I love Gladiator and make no apologies for it. Just a remake of this, which has Sophia Loren in it and is thus intrinsically better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ-sPXgSWCs
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Apr 4, 2015 12:25
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Halloween Jack posted:Everything I was taught about the 30 Years War implied that it was absolute anarchy and hell on earth for the common person. I mean, it went on for decades so there must have been lulls in the fighting, and there must have been times when some popular support was behind this offensive or that one, if only from outrage and desire for vengeance. But the famine, disease, and widespread looting and rape was just a nightmare to the average laborer and certainly many of higher status as well. Yeah, just look at this bit from the beginning of Simplicius Simplicissimus: Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen posted:Chap. iv. : HOW SIMPLICISSIMUS’S PALACE WAS STORMED, PLUNDERED, AND RUINATED, AND IN WHAT SORRY FASHION THE SOLDIERS KEPT HOUSE THERE
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Apr 10, 2015 05:39
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Nintendo Kid posted:It's dumb because we're actively on a) maintaining access to original recording media and b) transferring large amounts eternally onward from format to format. Sure, maybe the man of 6015 can't read the floppy disk but the floppy disk was probably transferred onward to holocube by like 2200 and into neural implant charges by 4000. But, but, those people in 4000 will never know that Han shot first. 
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May 2, 2015 18:56
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Friendly Tumour posted:Anyway, medical knowledge among other things the West forgot made a real and this time lasting return to Europe with the Conquest of Toledo and the Fall of Constantinopolis in the 14th century. Obviously it took time to spread and be integrated and to get improved on, but it's really the reintroduction of literacy that's the key point in when doctors stopped using cow dung on stab wounds. But then you find things like this.
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Jun 24, 2015 05:59
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JaucheCharly posted:Mary Beard quotes on of these saying that you shouldn't go to the baths with an open wound, unless you want to die. Without chlorine in the water, it gets nasty really, really fast. Not exactly the place that you want to take a dip as a female. The Roman Bath in Bath is closed for bathing not just because it is an incredible ancient monument, but also because there are some seriously nasty organisms in the water (Naegleria IIRC).
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Jun 24, 2015 18:55
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