I am not a performing monkey

https://x.com/atrupar/status/1829249371575108018

I can't believe Democrats are getting beer, football, camo, the American flag, patriotism, and the army in the national divorce.

take this quiz to see how many USA states you can name in 10 minutes, because i was curious to see if i still remembered. i got all but blanked on wyoming, maryland, and oklahoma. (and i only got nebraska, missouri, and mississippi in the last 10 seconds. when i blank out i BLANK out.)

Michael Handt

Evening at the sea

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Takeaways from Supreme Court’s Trump-14th Amendment ruling

I struggle to accept that anyone who was involved in writing the 14th Amendment would look at Trump, January 6, and everything he has said and done around it, would conclude that he is not the kind of person they were thinking about when they drafted it.

It seems like everyone, from Moscow Mitch to the activist SCOTUS, refuses to use the powers granted to them by the constitution to protect and defend America from people like Trump. Whether that’s because they agree with his policies, or they are just feckless cowards who are so insulated from the consequences of their actions they don’t have to live with them, the result is the same.

Emperor Frederick II. (around 1200) crossed the Alps with his own private zoo, including giraffes, in order to impress and dazzle his Germanic subjects, and it frigging worked. He also introduced legislation that a doctor was not allowed to also sell medicine (to prevent obvious charlatanery), but had to write a recipe for an apothecary to then redeem, which is a system STILL IN USE in Germany and other countries. He spoke several language, was tolerant towards his Muslim subjects in southern Italy (you read that correctly) and was opposed to trial by combat on reasons of it being unfair and irrational. Oh, and he wrote a book on ornithology. 

Ancient Persians knew how to make frozen desserts even in summer, thus basically being the inventors of ice cream.

My pet peeve is that everyone thinks that nobody traveled in the middle ages.

I have a letter from a monk at Ripoll, near Barcelona, sent to a monk in Fleury (Central France) asking that they return a book they had lent. The book was first obtained in Pavia (Italy). The monk wanted it back really fast because he hadn’t asked for permission from the librarian to loan it.

There was a study done on this in 1936 and apparently it had a 70% accuracy rate, which isn’t a patch on modern pregnancy tests but is very impressive for a civillisation that hadn’t invented the wheel.

Stone age people took surprisingly good care of each other. There have been skeletons found of people (homo sapiens and neanderthal) with physical disabilities that would have prevented them from providing for themselves who still lived fairly long lives and were buried nicely. Because it turns out even prehistoric humans thought that people had a right to life whether or not they were ‘useful’.

They also had a primitive form of surgery that involved drilling holes in people’s skulls, we think to prevent migraines or something. Whatever it was, it must have worked at least slightly, because we’ve found skulls with multiple healed over patches, meaning that people survived this and then kept coming back.

Not to mention language. I don’t know why this in particular is so hard for people to grasp, but if you’re talking about homo sapiens then there is literally no reason to assume that their language wasn’t as complex and fluent as ours. For that matter, a lot of what we in Europe think of as ‘the stone age’ was happening at the same time as the Ancient Egyptians were building pyramids and having a whole civilisation and shit.

The the point where we actually have pieces of his writing where he GOT BORED and started drawing pictures about how big and brave he was and drew a picture of himself as a warrior AND wrote his friend (presumably also a 7 year old boy)’s name on it to show him “Hey look at this cool thing I wrote about me fighting a bear”

hold on. *gets up to pull my book from my shelf*

OK! The boy’s name was Onfim because he had to write his name on his spelling exercises. The city was called Novgorod and is the most ancient recorded Slavic city in Russian history. The message to his friend was “Greetings from Onfim to Danilo” and just because he was unsure if the pictures he drew on his spelling homework made sense, he labeled the creature he was fighting with “I am a wild beast!”

Before these types of writing were discovered it was thought that the peasant class was illiterate and that writing was ONLY for the church and the ruling class. But after finding these as well as THOUSANDS of other letters, it became clear even the lowest peasant class in this time period were not only litirate but taught writing and spelling as serious subjects to the point where 7 year old peasant children could read and write.

Oh and in a completely different time period in a completely different country there’s also this fucker.

It’s rusted and its box has rotted away because it was made around 86 BC. So here’s a replica that’s been made of what it use to look like

And here’s a cross section

It’s from Greece and like I said, it’s from roughly 86BC.

It’s a computer.

On the front it calculates with extraordinary accuracy the movement of planets, constellations, moons etc etc and can be used for everything from religious holidays and rites to navigation by ship. The back is used for keeping score in the Olympic games of the various competitors, their athletes and nations etc etc.

Another fun one is the fact that the Steam Engine was first invented in the first century AD, however since it was fueled by wood because it had not been discovered that coal could be used as fuel, it was more a parlor trick to show people because it would cost more to employ a slave to fuel the machine with wood than what power the machine gave.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the steam engine is over 2000 years old.

The “People believed that the Earth is flat in the past” myth only became a “fact” that people believed in the 1800s. Every scientist since the ancient Greeks knew the world was round and there are even Bible passages referring to the Earth as round.

Quote from Historian Jeffrey Burton Russel:

“With Extraordinarily few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the 3rd century BC onward believed that the Earth was flat. The myth that people in the middle ages thought the Earth was flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of a campaign by Protestants against Catholic teachings. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper’s “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science” (1874)and Andrew Dickson White’s “History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom” (1896).

Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict.”

end quote.

Also here’s a illustration from the 15th century from the book “On the Properties of Things” by Bartholomeus Anglicus, showing the Earth covered in buildings and spires

Here’s one from the 13th century, showing the 4 seasons on a spherical Earth

There was a report some years ago that “the secret of Damascus Steel has been rediscovered”, but IIRC that was based more on analysis of historical examples to learn what made it special (carbon nanotubes etc.) rather than how to remake it.

There’s even a theory that “real” Damascus steel can never be made again because the source of its raw material - the particular iron ore, iron-bearing sand or whatever - has been exhausted or lost. You can’t make something properly if you can’t get the ingredients.

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Writer note: “watered steel” is a term you sometimes see because of the way light reflects in swirls and ripples from the layers of the metal…

…though it can also be patterning like the grain in wood.

It’s good for fantasy writing because it doesn’t include the real-world name “Damascus”. Google searches also turn up layered steel, folded steel, wootz steel and pattern-welded steel, which aren’t different names for the same thing, nor synonyms for Damascus steel.

Watered silk is called that for the same reason…

…and it’s why Kipling wrote…

“It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk.”

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The term “Damascus steel” nowadays most often refers to knives, swords and jewellery (I’ve seen some very nice rings) that look like this…

…while “damask” is fabric with a pattern woven into it, like the lustre-on-matte finish of Irish damask linen.

…and “damascene” is a decorative gold or silver inlay treatment for metalwork, though I think it’s often used as a catch-all term for similar-but-different techniques like koftgari (Indo-Persian)…

…Niello (European / Asian)…

…and zogan (Japanese).

Brad Turner with Condor - MASK (Kenner)