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Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
:eng101: Cats are popular to this day in much of the Islamic world and many mosques permit cats to live on the grounds because Mohammed himself was a noted cat lover. One of his followers wrote of an incident where Mohammed's favorite cat Muezza was sleeping on the sleeve of Mohammed's prayer robe when he was preparing for prayer. Rather than disturb the sleeping cat, he simply cut the sleeve off the robe.

:eng101: The SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, one of the most advanced aircraft ever produced during the 20th century, was built to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Due to the extreme stresses the Blackbird's speed and altitude put on the airframe, much of the airframe was built out of titanium, a metal very seldom used at the time and difficult to obtain in large quantities. Most of the titanium used in the Blackbird was covertly purchased from the Soviet Union, the very nation the Blackbird was designed to spy on.

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Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Shakespeare wrote a "I hosed your mom" joke in one of his plays.

Archaeologists have found your mom jokes and dick jokes inscribed on the walls of Pompeii, grafitti made during Roman times.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

spog posted:

Frank Whittle invented the jet engine and offered it to the British Air Ministry in 1929 who weren't interested.

They wouldn't even give him the £5 patent renewal fee in 1935.

The academic paper that lead to the American invention of stealth aircraft (the paper was about how to accurately calculate the radar cross-section of any shape, Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works took the idea and decided to see just how tiny they could make an airplane appear on radar) was written by a Russian physicist in the 60s. The Soviet military thought his ideas were completely useless and because his paper had no military or economic value he was permitted to publish it internationally.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Arcsquad12 posted:

Yeah from what I know the crusades were actually a major impetus for advancements in science in Europe due to the reestablished trade with the byzantines.

Yup. The Islamic Golden Age ended because of the Mongols, not the Crusades.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Alhazred posted:

Yeah, they even crushed the assassins, a group that even Saladin feared. Fun story about the assassins: Ahmad Sanjar (a Seljuq ruler) tried to drive the assassins from one of their stronghold in Alamut. Hassan-i Sabbah, who was the leader of that group of assassins, sent envoys to negotiate peace but Sanjar rebuffed them. Then one morning when Sanjar woke up there was a dagger stuck in the ground next to his bed. Then a messenger arrived with a message from Sabbah: "Did I not wish the sultan well that the dagger which was struck in the hard ground would have been planted on your soft breast". Sanjar left Alamut alone from that day.

For another comparison, wonder why Baghdad and its environs were a major center of trade, civilization, learning, and agriculture back in the medieval period, and not anymore? The Mongols are why, and they systematically destroyed everything that made that kind of civilization and prosperity possible. It took until the twentieth century for population levels in what are now Iraq and Iran to return to pre-Mongol levels.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
During the founding period, there was serious talk of making German the official language of the United States rather than English.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Deteriorata posted:

IIRC that was actually the Pennsylvania legislature. Lots of German immigrants there.

Yep, and Philadelphia was the initial capital. Congress seriously considered rolling with German as the official language of the country for that reason.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Arcsquad12 posted:

The British army almost didn't adopt the Brody helmet in ww1. Shortly after it was introduced the army saw a massive spike in casualties admitted to field hospitals, so they figured there must have been a defect with the helmets. They soon realized however that the fatality rate had dropped because they had been overwhelmed by the influx of surviving casualties

Related, this same sort of process was how the Americans studied and improved their bombers' armor protection during WW2. Standard practice until 1944 or so was to look at where damaged planes had most been shot up and armor those parts. Around 1944, however, engineers realized they needed to study which parts of damaged aircraft weren't suffering extensive damage, because planes getting hit in those areas typically didn't return to base at all.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Rutibex posted:

It amazes me to this day that the world lets us hold on to all of this land. Canada has twice the land mass of the Roman Empire as its height. I mean honestly, if anyone wanted to take it we couldn't stop them :canada:

Canada's security is based on a simple arrangement: you're right next to and best buds with the most ludicrously heavily armed nation in the history of mankind. If anyone seriously attempted to invade Canada, your southern neighbors would take over the defense and there's a good chance Canada would just become a dozen or so new stars on the flag afterwards.

I'm not sure how many people would really notice the change, either.


Geopolitical defense by allying with the biggest military superpower of the age: it worked for the Gauls and it works for you.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Rutibex posted:

No I'm pretty sure the queen would save us.

She will. "They're all yours now, Americans. Treat them well."

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Migrating birds are believed by many historians to be how viking explorers found their way to the New World - they saw flocks of birds heading out across the ocean during migration, and some adventurous vikings decided to follow the migrating birds and see where they were going.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

chitoryu12 posted:

I think a Southern accent is also directly descended from colonial English.

It is. The Southern aristocracy very deliberately emulated the British aristocracy, including accents.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Nth Doctor posted:

WWI is just supremely hosed up in so many ways. It boggles my mind that a century on, Verdun looks hosed to hell and back underneath a blanket of golf-course-green grass and trees.


Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Yeah, goons have a long history of getting up to shenanigans in the gaming world. Pretty much every game worth playing (well, even many that aren't) has some kind of goon presence. Also consider that SomethingAwful is important enough to internet history and used to be a much more significant chunk of the internet population that that presence was also probably large, unruly, and tightly knit.

"INTERNET: SERIOUS BUSINESS" is a long time goon culture motto as there are few things goon groups love targeting more than other groups that take online games way too seriously. You really saw that in EVE in particular; while everybody else was waving their e-honor dicks around and seeing who had the most skill points or the highest KDA or whatever Goonfleet has a long history of just burying the other player corps in piles of destroyed ships. A core Goonfleet strategy has always been to have recruitment drives then tell the new blood to just like take this gigantic bag full of cheap ships and go get them blown up nobody cares about your KDA and if you do we think you're stupid. While everybody else was wanking about their kill boards goons were just kind of drunkenly farting around in a gigantic, unpredictable blob.

Goons, for whatever reason, have also always come up with the most imaginative ways to grief so that poo poo tends to get remembered.

And in Star Trek Online, goons by themselves completely shut down the public erotic role-playing scene. Then, in a time when fleets would charge pubbies huge prices for invites to get access to the stuff sold only by high level fleet facilities, goons invented space communism and would freely offer anyone who asked temporary membership in the fleet so they could get the goodies everyone else was charging an arm and a leg for.




That stuff mostly ended years ago, but we're still hated in that game.




Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Oh my goodness, that is the best thing ever. What is it with goons and space communism? That's a significant thing on Goonfleet too.

In this specific case, since I was around for it, it was because goons were getting pissed at the other big fleets exploiting the common pubbies - STO is a very casual game given that it's free to play and all. And while yes, the fleet holdings are very expensive and take a large fleet or one with very deep pockets to build and develop (and goons are both), we were building these things anyway for our own use and it cost us nothing to briefly let people into the fleet so they could travel to the fleet facility and buy what they wanted. We created a whole global chat channel just for pubbies to request temporary access to our stuff.

Even the devs like us. :)



Pubbies, not so much.



Maybe because we did things like this (before it got fixed).




We also made scrotum head custom aliens.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Iirc the Monitor’s underlooked advancement wasn’t just the armour but the fact it had a rotating turret.

And the fact that she carried enormous firepower for her size. Monitor was a pretty small ship by the standards of the era, and between the rotating turret, oversized cannons, and all-iron construction (like the HMS Warrior, she wasn't really an ironclad like the Virginia and HMS Gloire were), she was utterly superior to much larger wooden-hulled ships. There'd been some theories that sufficiently large batteries of guns might be able to batter apart an ironclad via stress and shock damage even if they couldn't penetrate the armor, but Monitor proved that wrong.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Platystemon posted:

The Civ V version is thematically appropriate:

Also, the Civ5 version is exclusive to turning your civ fascist. :v:

It's a really useful policy if you're going for a diplomatic victory as autocracy, and there's a reason the achievement for winning a diplomatic victory as autocracy is dubbed Axis Powered.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
Kinda goes hand in hand with its niche of being the ideology if you've got a big military. Order (communism, for those unfamiliar with Civ5) is geared to benefit civilizations with lots of territory and cities, which are likely to not be particularly well developed. Freedom (western style democracy) caters to geographically small but very populous and heavily developed nations.


Ironic or appropriate, your choice: the most natural early game civic to pair with Order is Liberty, Greco-Roman style early republicanism. Freedom pairs naturally with Tradition, old-style monarchy and oligarchy.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Tashilicious posted:

A lot of those rumours started because Catherine hosed, loved to gently caress, and did not appologize to loving.

Seeing as how this should be for men, they added onto it.

And in all seriousness, Catherine was known as a serial monogamist. She had a long string of lovers and treated them well with favors at court, but when she tired of one - which was rather frequent - she sent him on his way with no hard feelings. Catching her eye was known at the time to be a terrific career opportunity, and she was never known to be vindictive or spiteful about it.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Solice Kirsk posted:

Look buddy, WW2 was a long time ago. We need to make gigantic city destroying electric fire breathing mutant reptiles interesting again.

Also, the modern American Godzilla is an allegory for climate change. We woke him and the other kaiju up unintentionally with our advancing science and industry (Godzilla specifically was woken up by the voyage of the USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear powered submarine, when it was in the Pacific), and they're scarcely aware we exist at all. They're primordial forces of nature we can barely hope to comprehend, much less control, and are utterly heedless of the destruction they leave in their wake.

Japanese Godzilla actively sought out and killed the humans shooting at him. Modern American Godzilla doesn't give a gently caress and will merrily walk straight on past all the helicopters and tanks and jets shooting at him because why would he care about such tiny little things that can't hurt him?

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

InediblePenguin posted:

when Godzilla is climate change it's even WORSE to go "ah yes but, like, not MAN-MADE"

It's not man-made, but it's certainly man-caused.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

You'll pretty much never see this in media, but the Roman legions carried javelins for precisely the same tactic - and legion javelins were specifically built with long, thin 'necks' behind the tip so the javelin would bend after hitting an enemy or a shield, preventing it from being readily pulled out.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

One of the reasons elite military units tend to take over and get a lot of political power is because, well, what are you going to do? Kick them out? Then you have an elite fighting force you'll probably have to fight and no elite fighting force of your own.

This is why Saudi Arabia has a special branch of the military specifically dedicated to protecting the royal family from the other branches of the Saudi military, as a precaution against a coup.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
I wonder if British schools mention that the British Empire invented the modern concentration camp during the Boer War and that the Nazis explicitly cited the British model as the example they followed.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
https://twitter.com/WeirdMedieval/status/1519016072850153474

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
https://twitter.com/Trey_Explainer/status/1663898944496103424

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
https://twitter.com/LettersOfNote/status/644523690592485376

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Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
A goon sums up the strange history of how Mount McKinley's name got changed to Denali.

Haschel Cedricson posted:

Oh man, it is legit hilarious how it came about. Everybody in Alaska has wanted to revert the name back to Denali for a long time, but a bipartisan group of congressmen from Ohio were vehemently opposed to doing that because William McKinley was from Ohio. For forty years Ohio's congressional designation took advantage of a loophole in the law that stated the Board of Geographic Names wasn't allowed to consider renaming any landmark that was currently the subject of any pending legislation so at the start of every term of Congress one of them would propose a bill that specifically mentioned "Mt. McKinley" and then left it in pending status all term.

This loophole worked for forty years, and then the Obama administration found ANOTHER loophole that said if the Board of Geographic Names didn't make a ruling on a proposed change within a "reasonable" timeframe, then the Secretary of the Interior had the power to unilaterally make the decision. And since 40 years isn't "reasonable", it's back to Denali.

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