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trickybiscuits posted:
The last time any outbreeding had occurred in his family was roughly the year 1550. He was born in 1661. He had an inbreeding coefficient of 0.254. The coefficient for brother-sister matings in the absence of any more outbreeding is .25. The Spanish royal family between 1527 and 1661 had 29.4% of children die before a year and 50% die before ten years, much higher than contemporary Spanish commoners. The Spanish Hapsburgs actually form a statistically valid sample for the correlation between inbreeding and infant mortality. 
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Nov 5, 2015 04:35
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Thanks to generations of inbreeding (mostly cousin-cousin and uncle-niece marriages), Charles II of Spain was more inbred than he would have been had his parents simply been brother and sister. When I first heard this I found a copy of his family tree and worked it out. Philip and Joanna of Castile are his greatx5 grandparents, greatx4 grandparents, and greatx3 grandparents, and ALL of his great-grandparents were descended from them. 
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HEY GAL posted:lol frederick was gay as hell son, nothing wrong with that Nahh, there's a lot wrong with him not sucking it up and having sex with a woman. 
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Nov 14, 2015 01:56
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ArchangeI posted:More than that, he took the Army his father had painstakingly built over an entire lifetime and threw it into battle, over and over and over again, taking horrendous casualties most of the time. Granted, he won most of the time, but I wonder if there wasn't a degree of "gently caress YOU DAD I'M GONNA KILL ALL YOUR SOLDIERS and also become a European Great Power or something, whatever" involved. Pretty sure he only really tried to start one war, the Seven Years' War was looming when they went into Saxony. After that he tried to increase power by modernizing rather than fighting wars.
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Nov 14, 2015 15:43
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System Metternich posted:Yeah, but it wasn't really because of his own merits. For like the longest time during the seven years' war it looked really bad for Prussia, especially after the battle of kolsdorf where Frederick almost died himself and where his army had been utterly routed. The allies could have marched on Berlin afterwards, but spent the time with internal bickering instead and didn't get to an agreement on how to proceed in time. The second stroke of luck happened in 1762 when czar Elizabeth died unexpectedly and was succeeded by Peter iii - a massive Frederick fanboy who then not only ended the war on his behalf but instead even signed an alliance treaty with Prussia instead, turning Russian troops on their former allies. This event is often titled as the “miracle of the house Brandenburg“, even though this name originally came from a letter by Frederick written after Kolsdorf in which he made fun of the inability of his enemies to use his weakness and end the war On the other hand would a less capable state have been in a position for those mistakes and flukes to matter?
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Nov 15, 2015 16:54
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Munin posted:I'm sure quite a few people on this board can't even say that... I'm sure there's also people not on this board having kids who won't see an internet device for years. The spread of internet capable devices is huge and amazing but it isn't total yet.
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Nov 28, 2015 15:13
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His visit lasted like a sentence, which is an eternity for Dickens.
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Dec 19, 2015 17:24
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:In 1919 a similar event happened in Boston, but involving molasses instead of beer. A seven meter high wave of treacle surged through the streets of the North End at over 50kmh, killing 21 and wounding over 150. The Boston Molassacre 
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Dec 21, 2015 05:12
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bulletsponge13 posted:While commonly issued Russian military arms and equipment tend to be stout, they also have developed a mythology similar to the German tank bullshit. Take the AK- besides it having more to do with German small arms design than commonly noted (funny enough, not much to what it bears cosmetic semblance to, the MP/STG44) thanks to captured German arms designers, it is also not the unstoppable gun that it gets credit for. It developed it's own myths thanks to early incomplete intelligence reports and experiences in extreme places where some of it's faults turned to features. More to do with German small arms design than commonly noted? It's got much more similarity to the Garand that goes without mention than anything German. http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2015/05/05/rifle-paternity-test-pinning-down-the-m1-garands-influence-on-the-ak/ It's a synthesis of a lot of good ideas from the time period and definitely deserves credit for putting them in one place, and suiting them to the parent nation's manufacturing capabilities.
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Dec 22, 2015 08:28
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Agean90 posted:I call them byzantine anyway because its a good way to differentiate out that period compared to earlier one It also artificially divides Eastern Roman history based on events that didn't even happen in the ERE.
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Jan 1, 2016 23:01
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:e: for content: A bunch of American immigrants deserted from the US Army during that war, a lot of them Catholics. There's a few reasons for this, one being that the US had a whole lot of prejudice towards Catholic immigrants and Mexico was a Catholic country, and one being that a huge bunch of recruits brought in for the war were Irishmen, especially those with military experience who basically were biding their time gaining experience for when the time came to fight for Irish independence, and the US recruiters straight up lied to them and told them war was imminent over the Oregon boundary dispute when the compromise had already been worked out. Add in peacetime "discipline" that spent a lot of time on the torture side of things, and there was a lot of reason to desert. The reason John Riley wasn't executed was for the same reason some soldiers weren't, which is that they deserted before a state of war existed. Interestingly, the real elite of the US army during that period was the horse artillery. The cavalry were experienced but mainly used to frontier fighting and the infantry and foot artillery wasn't drilled nearly to the standard of the horse artillery. Horse artillery is basically lighter guns where everyone rides, to make a much more mobile unit than men walking with horses pulling heavier guns. The main use was to be able to get to a key position for artillery quickly and start firing at important targets. xthetenth has a new favorite as of 05:54 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 05:50
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Funzo posted:The Elizabethans even made laws about who could wear what. They were difficult to enforce, but you could be fined for wearing clothing above your station. Landsknechte weren't subject to sumptuary laws and oh boy can you tell. 
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Jan 16, 2016 05:12
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If you want a direct charge against armor, you want the one where they went in with bagsful of smoke grenades and successfully peeled the infantry off of the tanks.
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Jan 17, 2016 18:06
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That's where the argument has a lot of grey area; a lot of those species were already on the decline. Some were pretty much on their way out before humans ever encountered them. Humans just sped it up. Of course that gets into the argument of what "natural" is. Humans are part of nature whether we like it or not and have spent a gently caress load of time adapting nature to ourselves. Agriculture and selective breeding are the big ones. What we found along the way is that preserving species is kind of a big deal because they might to out to be useful to us somehow and sometimes knocking a species that seems insignificant out completely wrecks an entire region and ends up with humans at a net loss. There's also some serious grey area with respect to timeframe. Is it natural if a species dies out because for example, the humans are doing seasonal burns to encourage growth of plants that benefit them? Because they did an absolute ton of that in the Americas well before serious agriculture. Just in general, North American agriculture was pretty cool. There were some farms, especially at Cahokia, but in other places there was a bunch of work to shape and push the environment to naturally produce more of what was wanted. They even got bison up to New England.
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Jan 21, 2016 16:40
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Khazar-khum posted:For a good example of 'noble savages who live in perfect harmony with the world', look no further than Easter Island/Rapa Nui. Or Cahokia, or even the Maya falling apart, even though that's more marginal places getting stressed past the limit without a solution to make things work again.
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Jan 22, 2016 16:42
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XMNN posted:Yep, I regularly do "conservation" work which is actively preventing nature from reclaiming a man-made habitat (heathland). Yeah, it really boils down to doing nothing being another possible choice with another set of ramifications rather than some default that will leave things as they are.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:47
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Time for things people don't generally talk about in Roman history with the Crisis of the Third Century. Basically to make a long and interesting story very short, Rome started falling apart after/during a string of bad emperors/power vacuums (26 emperors accepted by the senate in 50 years! :psyduckinatoga:). It got two spin-offs, the Gallic Empire and Palmyrene Empire during this time. After a while a major Gothic invasion was beaten back at Naissus, and two of the guys there became decent emperors. First was Claudius II Gothicus who beat back the Alamanni and took Hispania back from the Gallic Empire. Then after he died of the plague, Aurelian, his cavalry commander at Naissus, took over and kicked about as much rear end as any emperor. In five years he beat the Vandals, Visigoths, Palmyrenes, Persians and then finally ended the Gallic Empire. Suddenly the Roman Empire was a single entity with its border troops back in place. The economy was hosed (and that was pretty much permanent, a lot of the localized feudal economy all the way into the middle ages has its roots here), but the empire was back together. For this the Senate gave him the title Restitutor Orbis - Restorer of the World. So what was next after basically reassembling the Roman Empire and putting it in a position where it might rebuild? He was heading to campaign against Persia again, suppressing a revolt in Gaul and defeating marauders in Germany on the way, when one of his secretaries lied. Aurelian had gotten a reputation for handing out severe punishments to corrupt officials or soldiers, and afraid of what he'd do, the secretary forged a document listing the names of high officials as marked for execution by Aurelian, showed it to conspirators, who fearing for their lives killed him. That's Rome folks! SeanBeansShako posted:He's been the only guy so far who knew his limits when it came to power okay. He was the designated driver. That's more the original cool dude Marcus Agrippa who could've tried shenanigans but was totally cool being bros with Augustus and building sweet buildings. xthetenth has a new favorite as of 18:18 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 18:16
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I've heard at least one story of one of these guys basically responding with "Oh god please don't do that to me".
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Jan 23, 2016 20:52
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In fairness, about 90% of the Americas' population dying wasn't a deliberate action by the westerners. It's just that what they did to everybody else in every other instance was also horrifying. For that sort of discussion I'm a much bigger fan of 1491 and its implications though.
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Jan 24, 2016 01:26
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ToxicSlurpee posted:While European diseases didn't help there were actually awful plagues that were wiping out the American indigenous people before Europeans got there. When the Vikings showed up the place was way more densely populated. In fact after Columbus rolled up the Europeans started believing the Americas were a promised land deliberately set up by God to give to them because of how welcoming the land was. They kept finding fruit trees neatly growing in rows, land that was perfect for farming, and so forth. It was almost as if there had been a civilization there before them that set things up for human civilization! Those diseases were European diseases. A lot of Americans' first contact with anything European was catching smallpox. The Inka were in the middle of a civil war because of a power vacuum brought on by their ruler dying of smallpox, and got much more favorable a welcome because they seemed like a promising pawn. Similar things happened elsewhere, the Pilgrims came into a post-apocalyptic wasteland and were approached for help because regional rivalries meant that the people where they were had gotten nearly wiped out by smallpox but their enemies didn't seem to have had an epidemic. American societies weren't sitting there in a vacuum, they had trade links that served to spread disease as well.
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Jan 25, 2016 14:46
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Johnny Aztec posted:If more autists were like Jefferson, then it'd be cool. Instead, we get bronies, and memes. We get 20-something I'd like to see as few slavers running around as possible.
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Feb 1, 2016 01:45
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Before the Counter-Reformation catholic religious titles were often held or given to important people who didn't really give a gently caress about the church beyond the fact that it was a way to be powerful. Accounts of some of the popes from the medieval era are pretty much filled with accounts of heresy, hookers, massive orgies and heroic levels of alcohol abuse. Also the guys who gave us the word nepotism.
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Feb 3, 2016 05:20
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I can't help but think of Spartans torn between getting mad and saying the last bit is unnecessary and detracts from the burn.
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Feb 5, 2016 19:30
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:If we're going for multiday deaths, Smallpox wins every time. Just in the last hundred years before it was eliminated by vaccines, it beat out war. Not one specific war, or even all wars in those 100 years, but every war in human history combined. It was around for ~10k years even before that, so war has some catching up to do. And then there's the Americas.
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Feb 8, 2016 06:00
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dobbymoodge posted:PYF Historical Stultifying Conjecture. At least two of which kicked off a major war along religious fault lines.
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Mar 1, 2016 06:55
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The last outbreeding in his family tree was a century before his birth.
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Mar 22, 2016 03:10
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duckmaster posted:Germanys air defence capabilities were so much more advanced than Japans that it was never going to be a viable target. Germanys policy on hostile aircraft was to scramble fighters and intercept immediately, and if that failed to use ground based air defences to down the aircraft. They wanted any sort of information or equipment (in the form of captured pilots/aircraft) that might give them an 'edge' and were prepared to do anything to obtain it. If they hadn't been at war with the Soviet Union those air defences would have been even stronger. Wow you know so much more than the guys planning things did about what they'd do.
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May 2, 2016 21:28
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Plucky Brit posted:Nah. The science behind their nuclear weapons programme was fundamentally flawed, and would never have produced a viable bomb design without going back to first principles. New suns over Germany would've been courtesy of the US. Hey look it's a formation!
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May 2, 2016 23:58
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Plucky Brit posted:I raised the original point because I've heard a few alt-history fans say something along the lines of: 'If the Nazis had nuclear bombs, they could've put them on V2 rockets and become invincible.' This is technically true, however not only were they were never close to a viable nuclear bomb (blamed on lack of resources), they weren't even close to a viable theoretical design. Comparing the weight of a V2's payload and a nuke is illuminating. Also I'm pretty sure the Germans managed to disqualify graphite as a potential neutron moderator and then lose a huge amount of heavy water to sabotage.
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May 3, 2016 05:28
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A White Guy posted:'I'd rather be lucky than good'? Yeah, the Nazis were very lucky for about 9 years (1933-1941) and then things started sliding downhill. I'd say that Nazis incredible success was due largely to being in the right place at the right time, ie having daring young commanders who choose to punch through in exactly the place the French never expected them to, or attacking the Soviets just after they got done completely gutting their command structure. Getting going earlier and having the lead in rearmament was a big help in the early years. Having the experience from big war games helped win Poland, experience from Poland helped win France, and experience from France helped them get a long way into Russia.
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May 3, 2016 05:41
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Yeah. It's not often remembered but Washington and the District of Columbia in general was a swampy malarial hellhole until after the Civil War. How did that change?
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Jul 1, 2016 00:42
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Khazar-khum posted:Some WWI pilots claimed you could do this. The speed of the planes make it right on the edge of possible, but unlikely. It really isn't something you want to try, even as a desperation move. With no parachute, you'd be committing suicide. And yet.  Worked for Robert Klingman and I swear there's another carrier pilot who did the same. Jimmy Thach actually gave instructions on how to do it to his fighter squadron before Midway because the F4F-4 traded in a lot of ammo for two more guns and they were worried fighters would run out of ammo while on CAP duty.
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Jul 23, 2016 15:13
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System Metternich posted:In Germany they were affectionaly known as "coffin nails" Or tent pegs. Also, if you want one, just buy land in Germany and wait.
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Jul 26, 2016 16:50
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Platystemon posted: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. Silicon's likely on its last legs now, I'll be interested in what ends up supplanting it if anything. But there's been a lot of things that didn't seem sure until we did them. Just as an example, finfets and double patterning are both crazy and yet they've become doable and affordable.
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Jul 29, 2016 16:09
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A White Guy posted:In this way town smiths might have worked too - even if they weren't strictly paid in money, they were paid in some form of favor, be that grain, a dinner, some future help at a later date. Additionally, there's a real incentive in this proto-capitalist economy to horde real money, because you can buy anything with real money, but all your daily needs can be paid for in another way (like grain). So, basically, save the money for when poo poo gets bad, pay for everything else in favors. Good old Gresham's law.
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Jul 30, 2016 16:16
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Lamentably that also is where a decent amount of Roman-era lead artefacts go as well.
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Oct 24, 2016 02:38
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CoolCab posted:It's also worth noting that the attempted coup wasn't so much "wow! Hitler's doing the holocaust better stop him to save all the undesirables" for a bunch of reasons (including the timelines not matching up at all), it was because he was losing the war...badly. When the nazis were winning the same generals were, to various degrees of enthusiasm, willing participants in the holocaust. 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?". https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4tuviz/is_it_true_that_erwin_rommel_was_kind_to_his/
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Oct 25, 2016 19:59
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Goatman Sacks posted:Texas has seceded from two different countries to keep slaves. Key West has seceded three times. Once with Florida, once back to the Union, and once because a roadblock trying to interdict drugs was costing too much tourism revenue. That time they formed the Conch Republic and declared war on the US by breaking a loaf of stale Cuban bread over the head of a man in a US navy uniform. They sued for peace an hour later and asked for foreign aid.
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Oct 27, 2016 04:35
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:As well they should, because contrary to typical American history classes, that war was all about us being Canada-invading dicks. Better than the Mexican-American War. At least in 1812 the US decided on invading Canada and actually did it rather than recruiting a really quite Catholic army all pumped up to invade Canada and dragging them south to invade fellow Catholics.
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Oct 27, 2016 05:16
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Slime posted:Maybe they didn't seem gaudy to the romans, since they didn't have poo poo like mcdonalds to associated those colour schemes with. People for a long time would've killed for the sort of trivially cheap bright pigments that mcdonalds' garishness is made of.
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Nov 1, 2016 00:16
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El Estrago Bonito posted:The west would still hold on in many places for much longer, in places Mexico, Idaho, Eastern Oregon, and Manchuria it lasted arguably until WWII I'm vaguely aware that was a thing, but if you can elaborate on Manchuria, that'd be amazing. Wheat Loaf posted:I also enjoy stories like that of the Donner Party or the Bone Wars. The Donner Party fascinated me for a long time. I guess it is because I have a lot of (potentially misplaced) admiration for exploration, whether they were successes like, say, Douglas Mawson or Ernest Shackleton or comparative failures like George W. DeLong or the Burke-Wills expedition. You should read about the Polaris expedition, it's got everything where everything is incompetence, possible poisoning, strandings on ice floes (with a bonus of taciturn Germans who basically don't get any say in the historiography), and general oddity.
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Nov 3, 2016 15:31
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