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Suenteus Po posted:I don't think anyone in the ancient world could make telescope lenses; barely anyone in the early modern period could. Cutting glass that accurately is really hard. 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. Kaal fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Jun 27, 2014 |
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Jun 27, 2014 06:40
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Cowpox vaccination is so pathetically easy, it's easy to imagine going back in time and getting it started. All you have to do is keep an infected population of humans or cows, get some cowpox pus on a sterilized metal needle, and poke people with it once every ten years or so. Three days of harmless, minor skin lesions near the infections site and boom, immune to smallpox for ten years. You can daisy chain the infection that produces the sores you need for the liquid to vaccinate people through humans or cows. Each "donor" will produce the pus for a few days. They managed to bring smallpox vaccination to the new world with a ship full of kids (ensuring they had not previously been exposed) before modern vaccines or refrigeration. If you could do that you could probably keep vaccinating people indefinitely on land. When you look at the history of smallpox it's tragic how many times cowpox vaccination was discovered and used on a local level before it was finally widely adopted in the loving 19th century.
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Jun 27, 2014 06:41
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Can we imagine what a chemist would do for the roman world? (Why, yes, high % booze ofc.) Something else: As a person who dabbles in woodworking, I'm always intrigued by precision tools from metal. Wood is easy, you use a plane, and that piece is straight in a few minutes, but metal? Toolmakers and smiths are awesome. You know, great quality tools don't make you an artist, but they augment the quality and precision of the stuff that you can do more than a layperson would expect. Good steel tools are a gift of the gods.
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Jun 27, 2014 12:00
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I'm wondering what you could achieve with modern theories of pedagogy. Not just in terms of raising children but also in potentially improving training for professions or the military if you have experience in those areas. On the one hand I can see those being super useful things that wouldn't be hand waved with 'why would we need to bother with this complicated stuff when we have slaves/etc?'. On the other hand, especially in education where there isn't an immediate, noticeable, impact I could see you just being regarded as some mad kook people let speak but noone would actually let waste the time of their soldiers/ruin their children's education. On a similar note I can see many potential improvements being rejected for similar reasons. Ancient peoples had a lot of beliefs and concerns we really don't appreciate in thinking about these things that would come into play in adopting new concepts/technologies. Just using zero took a long to catch on in mathematics and for a few hundred years many people really didn't like it on a conceptual level. There were Greek mathematicians that came pretty close to negative numbers but just thought the concept was too ridiculous to bother with (one had a book filled basically with equation analogs, one he posited would have required a negative answer and he doesn't try to solve it but basically says hey look some of these things are just silly). Hell numerical notation versus abacuses took a very, very long time to catch on for book keeping, although possibly if you could introduce the concept of double book keeping to a wealthy merchant (hello Crassus) you could secure yourself a comfortable life.
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Jun 27, 2014 12:00
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PittTheElder posted:I've heard the way to get really, really flat glass is to poor molten glass onto a sheet of molten metal, but I'm not sure how the glass cools in that case. The glass has a higher melting point, so it solidifies and then you just grab it outta the molten pool like pulling ice off a lake in winter
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Jun 27, 2014 16:03
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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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That's a good book but I wasn't even thinking about it when I mentioned a still. It's just the easiest thing for the most money that I think an average modern person could build based only upon understanding the concept. De Camp had a flawed understanding of Roman practical arithmetic - I don't think I would bother trying to introduce place value notation for use on wax tablets to a society that already has a place value abacus, unless I ran into a mathematician. The semaphore telegraphy is hands-down the best idea in the book from a changing history perspective but it's not a huge moneymaker. Beamed posted:Even worse: Lack of mathematical 0. The Romans had the concept of zero and used it in abacus calculations. There's just no numeral for it, though I think there are a couple of manuscripts from late antiquity that use N (for nulla) as zero.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:15
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PittTheElder posted:Although my favorite part of the whole time traveller thing is the language barrier. Sure I know a few Latin words here and there, but could I really learn it fast enough to demonstrate I might be useful to people? Would I have to find the ancestors of the East Frisians to really be able to have a conversation? Go look up some Old English/Anglo-Saxon and see how decent a conversation you think you could manage...(only even worse because centuries earlier). Learning Latin would probably be a better bet. (At least there are a reasonable number of people around these days who do understand a useful amount of Latin. I wonder if modern Greeks would have an advantage in this scenario, too, at least when it comes to the written language).
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Jun 27, 2014 20:41
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SniperWoreConverse posted:The glass has a higher melting point, so it solidifies and then you just grab it outta the molten pool like pulling ice off a lake in winter Right, I guess I should have said how well it cools when you do that, and whether the exposure of the bottom surface to a fairly hot metal effects the glass at all, or whether you have to keep the surface warm as well to try and keep the cooling even. The technical side of things. Also, modern glass is normally fused silica, which only melts at like 1700 degrees or something. I have no idea how you'd accomplish a fire that hot without a hot of other technologies first.
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Jun 27, 2014 20:51
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Right, I guess I should have said how well it cools when you do that, and whether the exposure of the bottom surface to a fairly hot metal effects the glass at all, or whether you have to keep the surface warm as well to try and keep the cooling even. The technical side of things. I think ancient Chinese blast furnaces could manage it.
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Jun 27, 2014 22:34
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Koramei posted:Haven't there been lots of cases of shipwrecked sailors getting stranded in a land completely alien to them and learning the language? I don't really think you'd have to demonstrate your usefulness, it's not like you're going to get executed for being unintelligible. There's a good chance you'd end up like the Spanish sailors who were shipwrecked in southern Mexico prior to Cortez's arrival. I.E. enslaved and sacrificed one by one to bloody idols. Of course that didn't stop one of the Spaniards from going native. One married a Cacique's daughter and convinced his Chief (according to Bernal Diaz del Castillo) to launch the ambush that prematurely ended the expedition of Francisco Córdoba. If I'm remembering right, he ultimately died in battle against Cortez and his band of pirates, probably trying to prevent the Spanish from doing to Mexico what they'd done in Cuba.
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Jun 28, 2014 01:05
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On everyone saying if thrown back in time say your future math knowledge is from Aristotle or the Egyptians, what do you when they ask to see the relevant works? And even if you just say you extrapolated from previous works there is also a chance that it wouldn't actually be something new where, depending on how far back youve gone, it could have been thought up in the many works lost to history to not much fanfare. It might make you look like an idiot when you claim youve discovered some novel technique knly for the response to be 'We've known about this for a while. So what?' Just some food for thought for possible time travelers; do some research first to make sure its actually revolutionary.
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Jun 28, 2014 03:17
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Pimpmust posted:I.13. If the wife of a man go out from her house and visit a man where he lives, and he have intercourse with her, knowing that she is a man's wife, the man and also the woman they shall put to death. This is the one that gets me. You just know someone chiseled that bit in after some Assyrian lawyer came up with the "well she didn't KNOW she was supposed to be married" defense.
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Jun 28, 2014 04:07
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I'm thinking about this time-travel thing, and I have bugger-all applicable skills, but I can at least do the languages. You lot dick around with your inventions, I'll solve the translation problems and take a cut.  Failing the convenient presence of other goons, I guess I become a rhapsode?
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Jun 28, 2014 04:30
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Mister Olympus posted:This is the one that gets me. You just know someone chiseled that bit in after some Assyrian lawyer came up with the "well she didn't KNOW she was supposed to be married" defense. I think that caveat is supposed to protect the man, in the case where he doesn't know that she's married.
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Jun 28, 2014 05:06
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A time traveler could introduce a severe, heavily legalist-influenced form of Confucianism to the court of Diocletian or Constantine. I think they would have enjoyed it.
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Jun 28, 2014 06:17
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Even basic medical knowledge that you learn in a first aid cert class would be incredibly valuable 2000 years ago.
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Jun 28, 2014 06:52
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Communist Zombie posted:On everyone saying if thrown back in time say your future math knowledge is from Aristotle or the Egyptians, what do you when they ask to see the relevant works? "I was shipwrecked, man. You expect me to have BOOKS?" Alternatively "loving Herostratus, that's what happened to them."
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Jun 28, 2014 07:14
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Tunicate posted:"I was shipwrecked, man. You expect me to have BOOKS?" I was going to reply with 'that doesnt mean you cant remember the title', but realized that would be plausible if you read it 'a while ago' or just saying one of the related ones could also work.
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Jun 28, 2014 07:37
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Arglebargle III posted:Even basic medical knowledge that you learn in a first aid cert class would be incredibly valuable 2000 years ago. The trick would be getting other people to believe you. Speaking of medical knowledge, what was the opinion on maggots as a medical tool in antiquity? It's funny that for all we correctly prioritize keeping a wound as clean as possible, there are situations where just letting a bunch of maggots go hogwild in there is a great choice.
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Jun 28, 2014 08:14
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Some species are great. Some will happily devour dead and living flesh indiscriminately.
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Jun 28, 2014 09:04
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PittTheElder posted:The trick would be getting other people to believe you. That'd be easy enough, simply do the stuff and it'll show itself to work, the doctor you wandered up to to be your benefactor in the first place gets more business, it gets done.
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Jun 28, 2014 16:37
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Arglebargle III posted:Some species are great. Some will happily devour dead and living flesh indiscriminately. Well I did not know that. That's the kind of thing I'd need to know to be a time traveling ancient doctor probably.
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Jun 28, 2014 16:48
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Arglebargle III posted:Some species are great. Some will happily devour dead and living flesh indiscriminately. And good luck getting some sterile ones if you find the right species.
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Jun 28, 2014 16:56
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PittTheElder posted:The trick would be getting other people to believe you. I dunno, I'm pretty sure you could extract fluid from any old mammal's adrenal glands and the first time you stab a recently dead guy in the heart with the stuff and he leaps off the table and starts running around people would be interested. You could even run animal trials pretty easily. Harvest dog adrenal glands (nobody cares about animal cruelty in this time period) and try to figure out how to extract adrenaline. Restrain a dog and induce circulatory failure, i.e. smother the dog. Deliver adrenaline to heart with some sort of crude syringe (watertight skin and fine quill comes to mind) and amaze everyone when the dog recovers from death. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Jun 28, 2014 |
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Jun 28, 2014 17:06
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PittTheElder posted:The trick would be getting other people to believe you. Thats easy. "Yeah man im from [far off empire no ones been to]. I was with an trade mission as a [insert what your trying to get hired as here]. We got attacked by [local mythological beast], I poo poo you not. Only survivor too, but it destroyed all my [medical texts, mathmatical proofs, whatever]."
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Jun 28, 2014 19:31
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Agean90 posted:Thats easy. "Yeah man im from [far off empire no ones been to]. I was with an trade mission as a [insert what your trying to get hired as here]. We got attacked by [local mythological beast], I poo poo you not. Only survivor too, but it destroyed all my [medical texts, mathmatical proofs, whatever]." Worst madlib ever.
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Jun 28, 2014 21:08
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All this talk of doctoring caused me to go read up on Galen again. I somehow completely missed that on top of everything else he did, he was also interested in a (very early, basic) form of psychiatry and even wrote a book about it - On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Passion. Was "psychiatry" a thing for the Ancient Romans? Or just a curiosity/theory?
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Jun 28, 2014 23:36
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PittTheElder posted:The trick would be getting other people to believe you.
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Jun 29, 2014 01:18
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I've thought about the time travel thing before and I think that the romans could probably get good use out of a hot air balloon.
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Jun 29, 2014 01:27
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gently caress memorizing useful stuff, I've just got this .jpg saved on my phone.
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Jun 29, 2014 01:37
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Jerusalem posted:All this talk of doctoring caused me to go read up on Galen again. I somehow completely missed that on top of everything else he did, he was also interested in a (very early, basic) form of psychiatry and even wrote a book about it - On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Passion. The treatment of melancholy was a thing. It's where we get the name (black bile).
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Jun 29, 2014 01:51
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Thanqol posted:gently caress memorizing useful stuff, I've just got this .jpg saved on my phone. I didn't really care for this one. It's mostly "Just do [wildly difficult thing]." with few details. Like Aluminum. Or Progesterone, which doesn't have the arrangement of the atoms. Pasteurization was cool, though. I didn't knoe exactly how it worked; I thought it was boiling. Speaking of pasteurization, was drinking milk a thing back then? If it was, who did and how did they drink it? If not, when did it start?
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Jun 29, 2014 03:16
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Rockopolis posted:I didn't really care for this one. It's mostly "Just do [wildly difficult thing]." with few details. Define "back then." As for the who, you can get a descent picture by tracing lactose intolerance by genetic predisposition. People who have it probably didn't pick up milk drinking/got to it late. IIRC ye old vikings were big on their dairy, as are most Europeans in general. Hence why for a long time tolerance was seen as the norm instead of some bizarre rear end mutation caused by strange dietary habits.
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Jun 29, 2014 03:39
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Drinking milk was kind of not a thing because it was perishable. If you lived on or literally within walking distance of a dairy farm you could drink milk, but there's only so much milk those people could drink. Like fresh produce, the main limitation on how much people can consume (and thus how much a farmer could get paid for!) is transport to population centers. Cheesemaking overcame that problem, so I think you could say with confidence that the overwhelming majority of dairy product people would have eaten was cheese or yoghurt. Cheese was unique in that it could transform very perishable milk or slightly less perishable yoghurts into stuff that would literally last for years, so it's even more desirable from that perspective. I'm not sure pasteurization would solve any of those problems, since, you know, refrigeration doesn't exist. You could invent canning which would preserve milk and also any other thing. I think that's a bit more useful. I also don't like the poster that much. Isolate penicillin by looking at food mold under a microscope, which hopefully you brought with you. A dynamo wouldn't be very useful in the ancient world! The lightbulb requires tungsten filament (you know where to get that right?) and a reliable vacuum flask (hope you ended up in the 18th century or later) and aluminum is downright laughable. Sure, just dissolve bauxite in cryolite and run a current through it -- a massive current. Invent the nuclear reactor first for best results! 
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 04:37
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The real trick would probably be just using knowledge of what's going to happen. If any records of sporting events survive, you can use them to bet on winners, and maybe cozy up to people who are about to get a windfall. There's probably also commodity trading junk that you could pull off, but I don't know of any particular cases.
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Jun 29, 2014 05:22
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SlothfulCobra posted:The real trick would probably be just using knowledge of what's going to happen. If any records of sporting events survive, you can use them to bet on winners, and maybe cozy up to people who are about to get a windfall. Short-sell slaves before the conquest of Gaul and Greece; grain futures during the conquest of Egypt? And stick by the Caesar kids, no matter how bad it looks. I wonder if the soothsayer in Julius Caesar was a time-traveler trying to save him?
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Jun 29, 2014 05:27
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If you're a time traveler and you fail to save someone, you're just not trying hard enough. 
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Jun 29, 2014 05:35
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Arglebargle III posted:I also don't like the poster that much. Isolate penicillin by looking at food mold under a microscope, which hopefully you brought with you. A dynamo wouldn't be very useful in the ancient world! The lightbulb requires tungsten filament (you know where to get that right?) and a reliable vacuum flask (hope you ended up in the 18th century or later) and aluminum is downright laughable. Sure, just dissolve bauxite in cryolite and run a current through it -- a massive current. Invent the nuclear reactor first for best results! I'm of the same opinion on that poster. It's a brilliant idea, but executed rather poorly I think. The one about the aircraft wing is particularly irksome; even if you were an expert aircraft designer, the lack of materials science and compact engines would make almost any flying machine impossible. If you were very good, I guess you might be able to build some sort of balsa wood, bicycled powered thing, but you're going to need to invent the bicycle first, along with all the little moving parts. And the explanation of how lift actually works just reeks of that grade school explanation about air having to move fast over the top to catch up with the bottom air. And then there's the one on Longitude. Of course you can determine your longitude with a chronometer, everybody understood that, the hard part was making the chronometer. Also you'd better hope you wind up in the 18th century and know where London is given how you've explained it. I think I'd be much better off going back with just my formula sheet from 11th grade physics. I understand how to derive them from principles, but it's nice to be able to check that you're doing it right. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Jun 29, 2014 |
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Jun 29, 2014 05:37
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sullat posted:Short-sell slaves before the conquest of Gaul and Greece; grain futures during the conquest of Egypt? And stick by the Caesar kids, no matter how bad it looks. I wonder if the soothsayer in Julius Caesar was a time-traveler trying to save him? For some reason I'm thinking of the short story where the crowd that watches the crucifixion is made up entirely of time travelers. Fake edit: Found it, it's called Let's Go To Golgotha! quote:In the future period where the story takes place, time travel has been invented and made commercially available. Among other historical events, tourists can book a time-traveling "Crucifixion Tour." Before setting out, the tourists are strictly warned that they must not do anything to disrupt history. Specifically, when the crowd is asked whether Jesus or Barabbas should be spared, they must all join the call "Give us Barabbas!" (a priest absolves them from any guilt for so doing). However, when the moment comes, the protagonist suddenly realizes that the crowd condemning Jesus to the cross is composed entirely of tourists from the future, and that no actual Jewish Jerusalemites of 33 AD are present at all. Actual Edit: quote:I think I'd be much better off going back with just my formula sheet from 11th grade physics. I understand how to derive them from principles, but it's nice to be able to check that you're doing it right. A high school textbook on pretty much any subject would be completely invaluable. Praise the great sage Macmillan, greater than Aristotle.
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