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goose fleet posted:How the gently caress do you determine if a historical figure is gay or not You try to find evidence that they had sexual relationships with persons of their own gender. lol just kidding you make poo poo up and wait for the controversy dollarydoos to roll in.
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Feb 1, 2016 03:06
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e: wrong thread
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Feb 3, 2016 08:23
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Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, and Paul Krugman are three different people. 
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Apr 4, 2016 19:20
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I still think it’s surprising that educated people knew the world was round a thousand years before Columbus set sail, but germ theory didn’t take hold till the nineteenth century.
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Apr 5, 2016 20:03
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I still think Democritus et al. get too much credit for hypothesising the existence of atoms. There was no particular evidence for it, they just thought it was an elegant idea. It was a coincidence that the world actually works that way. If they’d observed something like Franklin’s oil film experiment and that’s what made them believe matter was composed of discrete units, that would be different.
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Apr 5, 2016 20:30
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fpok24QaAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs29ky8DeBw
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Apr 14, 2016 01:13
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The WWII U.S. Army booklet 112 Gripes About the French is good reading. “Yeah, we know the French are dicks, but there are some mitigating circumstances. Please put up with them.”
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Apr 29, 2016 05:12
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The only thing that stopped Germany from getting a temporary new sun or two is that they rolled over too fast to conventional weapons.
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May 2, 2016 21:36
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The Nazis’ rejection of “Jewish” science isn’t exactly what doomed Uranprojekt (they didn’t have the resources anyway), but there’s a great irony in it. I believe that’s what Plucky Brit meant by they would have had to go “back to first principles” (and accept the work of Jewish scientists, or at least their conclusions).
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May 3, 2016 00:30
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MisterBibs posted:Not as much a student of history as much as I'd like, but it always blows my mind when I read about how lovely the Nazis were about... well, practically everything. There's this weird dichotomy to thinking about them: evil incarnate, but stupid ad poo poo at the same time. Historical Fun Fact: The Nazis spent more on their V‐weapons than the U.S. spent on the Manhattan Project. You decide: Which had a better return on investment?
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May 3, 2016 05:54
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Nuclear weapons have a great ROI as a deterrent to major wars. Then Armageddon happens and they go max negative.
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May 3, 2016 06:08
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Khazar-khum posted:There's an Ask/tell thread about getting married in the Catholic Church? Probably the liturgical Christianity thread.
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Jun 1, 2016 02:30
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Jesus has historically been pretty quotable.
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Jun 13, 2016 13:20
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Jerningham Wakefield, NZ MPquote:Because of his increasing alcoholism his behaviour was very erratic and he was an embarrassment to his supporters. He was one of the MPs sometimes locked in small rooms at Parliament by Whips to keep them sober enough to vote in critical divisions, though in 1872 this was defeated when political opponents lowered a bottle of whisky down the chimney to him. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 01:12 on Jun 16, 2016 |
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Jun 16, 2016 01:09
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Oxford University was founded before the Aztec Empire. This may be a popular titbit, but I haven’t seen it in the few months I’ve been reading the thread, at least.
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Jun 28, 2016 23:26
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A White Guy posted:In a sense, the Roman Empire continues to exist even today - The Catholic Church, an institution that gained a major amount of power in the Roman Empire with the ascension of Constantine I, i still a sovereign entity. Edit: beaten to it The Donation of Constantine is by no means the way the Catholic Church gained all their power, but it’s a document with a fascinating history so I’m posting it here.
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Jun 29, 2016 05:02
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Thomas Jefferson told Lewis & Clark to be on the look‐out for mammoths and giant sloths.
Platystemon has a new favorite as of 06:41 on Jun 29, 2016 |
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Jun 29, 2016 06:36
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Arcsquad12 posted:William Henry Harrison holds the record for shortest term in office of any United States President, from March 4th to April 4th, 1841. The Whig Party put him up as their candidate hoping to emulate the success of Andrew Jackson's election by banking on Harrison's fame as a war hero. Problem was, Harrison wasn't exactly the healthiest dude and was rather old when he took office. He also spent a lot of time outside, and caught pneumonia and died a month into his presidency. Daniel Webster was offered the position of VP, but declined, perceiving it as a dead‐end position. He did it again with Zachary Taylor, the second president to die in office. Man didn’t know how to take a hint.
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Jun 29, 2016 20:24
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Khazar-khum posted:Everyone knows the California Gold Rush started in 1848 at Sutter's Mill. This was the first discovery of gold in California, The find at Sutter’s Mill wasn’t the first discovery of gold in California, but it was the start of the California Gold Rush.
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Jul 7, 2016 07:11
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Angry Salami posted:Oh, it was worse than that - in addition to the Free Imperial Cities and Villages, there were also Imperial Knights - that is to say, individual knights who answered directly to the Emperor, and thus possessed the same privileges of "Imperial Immediacy" as any other state within the Empire. So basically in addition to that clusterfuck of a map people have posted, you'd also have a few hundred dudes who could claim their house as a separate territory, and ignore the taxes, laws and religious policy of any other prince of the Empire, because, hey, they're a state in their own right. Did they ride around wearing fedoras and asking AM I BEING DETAINED?
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Jul 20, 2016 09:40
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Carbon dioxide posted:What's that enclave near the south-east of the Dutch Republic? That may be Huissen, exclave of the Duchy of Cleves. e: Probably too small, though. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 19:13 on Jul 20, 2016 |
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Jul 20, 2016 19:01
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Christmas Present posted:I can't remember the context so this may be apocryphal, but I remember learning that in skirmishes with early German jet aircraft, Allied planes would make great use of their ability to actually be able to fly slowly, an ability the Nazis' air-hungry jet engines didn't have. I don’t know about props vs. jets, but Soviet pilots in Po‐2s took advantage of this against fighters like the Bf 109 and Fw 190.
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Jul 23, 2016 01:43
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Delivery McGee posted:Early in the war, the German fighters figured out that trick -- they'd follow the British bombers back across the channel and easily pick them off while they were landing -- but then, in typical Nazi comedy of errors style, the high command told them to stop doing that thing that was working really well because it wasn't producing visible results for the people. Hitler wanted bombers shot down over Germany, where das volk could see it happen, thus increasing their morale. Don’t tell me the British weren’t going to soon counter this tactic and counter it hard anyway.
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Jul 23, 2016 04:32
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A White Guy posted:Also, fun fact: The ridges on the edge of coins? Supposedly an idea thought up Isaac Newton, as a way to prevent people from shaving off gold from the currency without it being really obvious. Not really that important nowadays, but this was a Big problem in times when all currency was made of some valuable metal. The process is called 'reeding'. Reminder that Newton’s position as Warden of the Mint was just supposed to give him a cushy salary, but he took the job seriously. There’s a 2009 book about this, Newton and the Counterfeiter.
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Jul 28, 2016 23:33
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ToxicSlurpee posted:A fun fact that people don't know is that precious metal coins weren't the only thing that was effectively currency. Grain comes to mind; properly stored wheat could keep for a rather impressive amount of time and would be traded around basically like a currency. After all, everybody eats bread, right? Food is pretty much always in good demand and at the time was pretty hard to overproduce and devalue. Compressed tea worked well for this.  Rai, from Yap, are probably the strangest form of currency I’ve seen.  Pictured: a metric tonne of money
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Jul 28, 2016 23:51
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"TIME, 7 September 1953 posted:Science: Problem Child I came across this cited in the Wikipedia article on the history of the transistor. Alas, I do not have access to the full text. I’m surprised Google couldn’t find it transcribed elsewhere on the web, like in a university professor’s course pages. Fink was no Luddite. It’s funny to think that people like that had serious doubts about the transistor in 1953. What if the transistor had been a dead end? It’s almost unimaginable today.
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Jul 29, 2016 11:48
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It is possible to cook with seawater, it’s just that that doesn’t solve the curing/inland trade problem. It does help conserve fresh water, so historically it’s been done aboard ships and in coastal communities with limited fresh water sources. In general, it’s easier to mine fossil salt deposits than to evaporate seawater.
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Jul 29, 2016 14:42
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pidan posted:Contemporary fun fact: This reminds me of ridge & furrow patterns, visible to this day.  Oxen can do some serious earthmoving if given enough time. 
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Oct 22, 2016 19:35
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xthetenth posted:Lamentably that also is where a decent amount of Roman-era lead artefacts go as well. Low background lead is a little different than steel. Iron ore is fine. It’s the blast furnace that contaminates it with hot particles from the atmosphere. If you had a clean‐room blast furnace, that would work. It just happens to be cheaper to recycle pre‐1945 steel. Lead is contaminated by Pb‐210 straight out of the ground. This is because it’s found with elements of the uranium series (starting with U‐238), and they’re constantly producing Pb‐210. When the lead is refined, it’s made chemically pure. This halts the production of Pb‐210, but the Pb‐210 that already exists in the sample remains. If you need low‐background lead, you need lead refined no later than the eighteenth century so that that Pb‐210 has had suitably many half‐lives to decay.
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Oct 24, 2016 03:40
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I don’t put a massive amount of weight on the distinction between “swore allegiance to the führer because he wanted to blow poo poo up” and “blew poo poo up because he swore allegiance to the führer”. We only got to prosecute the latter, but the other guys were bastards as well.
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Oct 24, 2016 04:24
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xthetenth posted:Rommel's really really not a good example for trying to prove that there were a bunch of officers who weren't neck deep in nazi stuff. His reputation kind of turns on people not asking questions like "were there Jews in North Africa other than ones in allied armies?" and "Hey isn't his reputation based in part on a book by David loving Irving?". Rommel was head bodyguard to Hitler at the outbreak of the war. A good man in his position would have shot Hitler in the back.
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Oct 25, 2016 23:31
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Dunno-Lars posted:I read or heard someone say that Hitler was actually a good thing for the Allies. His incompetence played a huge part in Germany loosing the war, and had he been replaced by someone competent, things might have gone very different. I have no sources or anything, but it sounds plausible to me. I am sure someone else might have some more input on this. In late 1944, the Allies certainly thought so—that’s why they shelved the Operation Foxley plan to assassinate him. I think that in general Hitler’s incompetence is overstated, but whether or not time travelers should aim to assassinate Hitler, Rommel can hardly be the anti‐Hitler when he was literally guarding the man’s back at the critical moment.
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Oct 26, 2016 13:42
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California was an independent republic once. It didn’t last long and they didn’t do much, but it also wasn’t for reasons of slavery, so suck it, Texas. 
Platystemon has a new favorite as of 05:22 on Oct 27, 2016 |
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Oct 27, 2016 04:41
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bean_shadow posted:So the key, when time travel exists, is to go back in time and drag Hitler into the office to meet this guy. Convince Henry Tandey to pull the trigger. Foil kid Hitler’s rescue by Johann Kuehberger. Take him on some diversion that keeps him from the river. Or, for the stealthiest solution, knock on his parents’ door at just the right time to prevent his conception. Platystemon has a new favorite as of 14:38 on Oct 28, 2016 |
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Oct 28, 2016 12:09
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The only thing we know about the gesture is that the thumb was involved. e: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/Encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/polliceverso.html Platystemon has a new favorite as of 12:09 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 12:06
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So the y‐axis increases in the upward direction because that’s where the Abrahamic god lives?
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Oct 29, 2016 15:08
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Siivola posted:I just imagined a graph where the axes increased left and down and Bitcoin is going DOWN DOwn down!
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Oct 29, 2016 15:13
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The rationalisaiton I’ve seen for “thumbs down means he lives” is that it represents the lowering of a sword.
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Oct 29, 2016 15:20
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alriclofgar on Reddit posted:On a purely practical level, bronze makes better weapons than (pure) iron. Bronze has a Vicker's hardness (HV) of about 300, while pure iron is closer to 100HV. Practically speaking, that means that iron weapons are more difficult to keep sharp and are more likely to bend. You may have heard of the passage from Caesar's Gallic Wars where the barbarian warriors have to stop mid-battle and straighten their bent iron swords? Metallographic analyses of surviving swords from the period suggest that this was probably a true story. Gallic swords were typically made from pure iron with very high ductility (easily bent), and would not have stood up well to a protracted fight. Early iron weapons were, on the whole, not very good, and this didn't really change until steel became widespread in the early middle ages. Given a choice between a well-made bronze spear and an iron spear from antiquity, I would probably choose to fight with the bronze. Cite is: Gosden, C., (2012), Material, Magic and Matter: understanding different ontologies: in “Maran, J. and Stockhammer, P. (eds) Materiality and Social Practice. Transformative Capacities of Intercultural Encounters”, pp 13-19, Oxford: Oxbow Books.
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Oct 31, 2016 16:19
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There’s a gap of centuries. Order of events is clear, if not causation.
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Oct 31, 2016 16:34
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