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HEY GAL posted:Absent cultural information you don't have, why would I think it's dangerous? If I came across something that looked like this nailed to a gate, the only thing that's telling me it's dangerous is the guys in the sketch cringing away from it. I have no idea what it is without knowing something about early modern sieges. Well sure and IEDs remain dangerous to this day because they're very difficult to recognize and operate. That being said, there's a fair difference between the danger of a small seemingly-innocuous bomb and the danger of a large vehicle moving along a predictable route. Whether we're talking about Romans or your guys, there both quite familiar with the concept of chariots and wagons, of large ships and heavy objects, of land routes and right of way, etc. They aren't children, they'd be able to adapt quite quickly. I don't want to overly argue the point, but it seems rather incredible to me to think that the Romans of all people are going to be all, "Hurr-Durr What's a Road?" I mean I'm trying to come up with a worse-case scenario for them, and it basically comes down to ideas like "The First Cohort comes across a stretch of disused highway, marches down it, gets hit by semi-truck coming over a hill, is more careful in the future." And that relies on them being incredibly unlucky with their cavalry scouts, ignoring the unknown sound of a vehicle, etc. I guess that this discussion rather taps into a larger point, which is that the complexities of the modern world aren't as mysterious as we might think they are. I mean obviously the average legionary isn't going to be heading up a dotcom corporation anytime soon, but when it comes to just living in our world it doesn't take too much explanation. Movies rather exaggerate the point when they have time-travelers not understanding the idea of bathrooms, or being mystified by the concept of currency, or frustrated trying to operate minor devices like automatic doors. But that sort of thing is really just part of traveling: Go to Pakistan or Japan or Germany and you'll have to deal with exactly that sort of issue, and you'll just have to fumble your way through. It's amusing to watch, but hardly something that you'll never pick up. Kaal fucked around with this message at 17:41 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 16:48
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Also are you telling me that traffic wouldn't stop and gwap if a whole loving roman legion was crossing the road?
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May 27, 2015 17:20
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Also are you telling me that traffic wouldn't stop and gwap if a whole loving roman legion was crossing the road? Do you care?
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May 27, 2015 17:21
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you could turn an entire legion into a giant self eating drooling mob by giving them a cell phone that has youporn loaded on it
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May 27, 2015 17:24
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To turn the point around a bit, if you were to head back into the past I have little doubt that you'd pick things up fairly quickly as well (assuming that you didn't die of disease*). Even without considering the idea of bringing modern science to ancient peoples, I think that you'd be quite capable of understanding how to live and move around. The biggest barriers would be language, a source of financial support, and understanding local laws - which are the exact things that travelers have issues with regardless of where they're from. You might never quite appreciate the finer details of Roman civil law or the inter-workings of 15th Century European bureaucracy, but you'd understand "These are the guys in charge, do what they say". *Disease is an interesting aspect to all this, but also one that gets rather exaggerated in these sorts of conversations. The European contact with the Americas gets rather played up as being the natural result of any contact between two disassociated peoples, but that is pretty problematic. The European crews did transmit heavy duty diseases to the vulnerable Native American populations, but a big part of that was how generally sick and diseased Europe was at the time. If a few hundred modern westerners visited the pre-contact Americas, they'd cause some problems but not to nearly the same extent as those European sailors. We don't carry smallpox, scarlet fever, typhus, or the measles. The biggest concerns would be influenza and chicken pox, and certainly that would be an issue and could cause deaths, but wouldn't result in the kind of world-ending plagues that were the result of European contact in the Americas. Conversely, if some of those diseased sailors sailed into modern-day New York and started walking around, we'd have a pretty tough time of it until we could get enough vaccines deployed. Kaal fucked around with this message at 17:37 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 17:31
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bewbies posted:you could turn an entire legion into a giant self eating drooling mob by giving them a cell phone that has youporn loaded on it Or just give them a pallet full of spray paint cans and point them towards the nearest ungraffiti'd wall.
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May 27, 2015 17:33
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The bit that'll really freak out the legion is the enormous stampede of reporters coming with iPad, notebook, camera, and microphone to try and get the legionaries to agree to the concept of an "exclusive interview," dragging with them classical history professors (who are even MORE enthusiastic) to translate.
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May 27, 2015 17:39
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Comstar posted:I'm still waiting for that Reddit post that was going to be turned into a movie about a Marine Corps FOB that gets transported in time to meet Julia Ceaser. It was going to be called "Rome, sweet Rome". That's a really fun idea , but it sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would get stuck in development for twenty or thirty years before eventually being rewritten into a low budget romantic comedy.
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May 27, 2015 17:45
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Kaal posted:To turn the point around a bit, if you were to head back into the past I have little doubt that you'd pick things up fairly quickly as well (assuming that you didn't die of disease*). Even without considering the idea of bringing modern science to ancient peoples, I think that you'd be quite capable of understanding how to live and move around. The biggest barriers would be language, a source of financial support, and understanding local laws - which are the exact things that travelers have issues with regardless of where they're from. You might never quite appreciate the finer details of Roman civil law or the inter-workings of 15th Century European bureaucracy, but you'd understand "These are the guys in charge, do what they say". It goes way beyond this. People really don't understand just how much what we assume as "normal" is based on the society that we grow up in, and how much of a severe dislocation it can be getting tossed into a totally different one. Just off the top of my head: 1) totally different conceptions of race, class, and social status 2) totally different attitudes towards sexuality 3) completely different priorities in how society is organized. There was a guy in the ancient history thread a few pages ago who had a hard time wrapping his mind around supporting people politically because of clan/tribe affiliations. How about diving head first into the intricate web of tribal/social/patronage relationships in ancient Rome? 4) different conceptions of space and time. Read up on medival mapmaking if you want to get some views of how to graphically depict the world that will bend your mind. I'm not even talking about poo poo like inaccurate coastlines, I'm talking about different ways of mapping important political and geographical relationships. 4) lack of knowledge of how to acquire even basic things. Where do you take a dump in ancient rome and how do you clean your rear end? Sure you can just go squat in a field like a dog and grab a fistfull of leaves, but if you hope to enter into society above the level of a filthy hobo you're going to need to figure that stuff out. We're talking some "three seashells" moments here. Yes, you could probably get along and meet your most basic of survival needs, more or less the same that you (theoretically) could if you were plopped into the African savanna with a tribe of hunter-gatherers 20,000 years ago. But engaging with society on any more of an advanced level would be a serious hurdle, and require a very long period of acclimation. poo poo, just look at all the problems that immigrants from radically different societies face today, especially if they don't speak the local language. Now remove every support structure and most of the frames of reference that help them. How do you get food? Do you know how a Roman market works? There is a lot of cultural poo poo going on even in just a money => food exchange that most people have an innate understanding of and take for granted. You might survive, but it would probably be at about the level of a mentally challenged beggar. Ghetto Prince posted:That's a really fun idea , but it sounds like exactly the kind of thing that would get stuck in development for twenty or thirty years before eventually being rewritten into a low budget romantic comedy. It sounds more like the sort of thing that would get developed into a horribly written patriot fap piece, probably co-authored by Tom Kratman
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May 27, 2015 17:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:It sounds more like the sort of thing that would get developed into a horribly written patriot fap piece, probably co-authored by Tom Kratman Last I read of it, it seemed like they were busy removing every last drop of interest from the story by making it about some small elite special forces squad or something.
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May 27, 2015 18:00
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Fangz posted:Last I read of it, it seemed like they were busy removing every last drop of interest from the story by making it about some small elite special forces squad or something. So you're confirming Kratman's involvement then?
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May 27, 2015 18:01
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Interesting Imgur picture series. About how the black Britishers would actually defend themselves from racist Americans who came over during WWII.
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May 27, 2015 18:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:It goes way beyond this. People really don't understand just how much what we assume as "normal" is based on the society that we grow up in, and how much of a severe dislocation it can be getting tossed into a totally different one. When in China, do like the chinese.
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May 27, 2015 18:13
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Raenir Salazar posted:Interesting Imgur picture series. About how the black Britishers would actually defend themselves from racist Americans who came over during WWII. Living in a country that, while still pretty racist, didn't literally lynch people for defending themselves kind of helps 
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May 27, 2015 18:21
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Cyrano4747 posted:It goes way beyond this. People really don't understand just how much what we assume as "normal" is based on the society that we grow up in, and how much of a severe dislocation it can be getting tossed into a totally different one ... poo poo, just look at all the problems that immigrants from radically different societies face today, especially if they don't speak the local language. Now remove every support structure and most of the frames of reference that help them. How do you get food? Do you know how a Roman market works? There is a lot of cultural poo poo going on even in just a money => food exchange that most people have an innate understanding of and take for granted. .... You might survive, but it would probably be at about the level of a mentally challenged beggar. Well suffice it to say that I disagree. It's not like the only thing keeping you out of the gutter is a precise conception of class status or how you draw a map. As you say, immigration happens all the time, particularly when we're talking about something as global and cosmopolitan as Roman society. They were very used to accommodating all sorts of cultures and mores. To them, you'd just be another foreigner trying to figure their way out in the big city. I don't think that you're going to end up living off scraps just because you need directions to the bathroom.
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May 27, 2015 18:22
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Comstar posted:I'm still waiting for that Reddit post that was going to be turned into a movie about a Marine Corps FOB that gets transported in time to meet Julia Ceaser. It was going to be called "Rome, sweet Rome". Just watch G.I. Samurai in the meanwhile. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTb0XGhuXmU
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May 27, 2015 18:25
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feedmegin posted:Super minor niggle - 'Yes, U-21 has struck again, and another dreadnought has gone down.'. No it hasn't And the whole point of sending those ships is that they were obsolete pre-dreadnoughts, too... 
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May 27, 2015 18:34
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, HMS Majestic was built in 1895.
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JaucheCharly posted:When in China, do like the chinese. 入鄉隨俗 enter village follow customs
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May 27, 2015 18:35
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P-Mack posted:入鄉隨俗 Exactly. Just poo poo on the sidewalk or in public transportation.
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May 27, 2015 18:55
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The anthropologist who rather controversially married a Yanomami teen took her back to the states for a while. She flipped out and thought a Jeep starting was a living animal and hid in the bushes. She also didn't understand mirrors and was prone to wandering naked. She has since returned to her village. Granted, the tribe doesn't count past two and she largely left due to missing her family rather than inability to survive.
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May 27, 2015 19:00
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JaucheCharly posted:Exactly. Just poo poo on the sidewalk or in public transportation. One of the Taiping military regulations was to not poo poo on roads or in houses. Talk about radical revolutionaries...
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May 27, 2015 19:05
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Hypha posted:One of my earliest memories was being terrified of buckets with the drowning child warning. It featured a silouete toddler upside down in the bucket in a shallow body of liquid, with a cut away of the lungs also filled with liquid. I did not understand what I was really supposed to be afraid of but I remember I was. If a 4 year old can associate fear with it, your warning sign probably works across a lot of divides. Also: SLEEPY BRAIN REMEMBERED! Not the article I found, but the series of talks that it was based on (I think): http://carta.anthropogeny.org/events/domestication-and-human-evolution TL;DR: is that we domesticated ourselves.
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May 27, 2015 19:47
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mlmp08 posted:The anthropologist who rather controversially married a Yanomami teen took her back to the states for a while. She flipped out and thought a Jeep starting was a living animal and hid in the bushes. She also didn't understand mirrors and was prone to wandering naked. She has since returned to her village. In New Guinea there were people from uncontacted tribes that were born into the stone age and learned to fly helicopters. While it would certainly be a huge adjustment, humans are remarkably adaptable and they would figure poo poo out soon enough.
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May 27, 2015 19:51
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It's interesting how many different "Bloody Sunday" events there have been.
Kanine fucked around with this message at 20:07 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 19:58
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WoodrowSkillson posted:In New Guinea there were people from uncontacted tribes that were born into the stone age and learned to fly helicopters. While it would certainly be a huge adjustment, humans are remarkably adaptable and they would figure poo poo out soon enough.
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May 27, 2015 20:04
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Arquinsiel posted:Tech is easier to learn than implied social contracts I think. See here for some amazing: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506466/given-tablets-but-no-teachers-ethiopian-children-teach-themselves/ People have seen this, right? http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/picks-from-the-past/12476/shakespeare-in-the-bush
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May 27, 2015 20:10
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Arquinsiel posted:This isn't just a high-level concept issue either. Look at feral children, neglected deaf people or the weird studies done on African tribes with totally different concepts of colour. Our languages do literally affect how our brains develop as we grow up on an individual level. You're confusing critical period of language acquisition (which is irrelevant) with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (which is straight up lies). In short : No.
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May 27, 2015 20:11
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The comedy should be about a couple legions falling into a time/space warp in the teutoberg forest and coming out of the Arc de Triumph. You can call it Varus Does Paris and feature the hijinks of thousands of burly men with
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May 27, 2015 20:46
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Xiahou Dun posted:You're confusing critical period of language acquisition (which is irrelevant) with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (which is straight up lies). Fangz posted:People have seen this, right?
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May 27, 2015 21:21
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Ooohh this is a fantastic moment to go off all pretentious about Wittgensteinian "form of life" and "how how understanding any part requires the grasp of the whole that comes only through experience."* Might be that time-traveling legionnaires would recognize the languages of command, hierarchy and uniformity still found in modern-day militaries pretty well compared to, say, the material and immaterial steps that have resulted in a developed world (sub)urban lifestyle. * P.N. Edwards, ‘Infrastructure and modernity: force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems’, in: T.J. Misa, P. Brey & A. Feenberg eds., Modernity and Technology (2003) 185–226, 185.
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May 27, 2015 21:24
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Hell, it weirded me out enough that modern Germans don't smile at strangers. And you're making me depressed that I can never ask the guys I study about their lives in person. 
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May 27, 2015 21:28
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Arquinsiel posted:I was thinking about this with regards to colour: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2011/08/horizon.shtml although the clip from the episode is hard to track down without digging into iplayer itself right now. I totally could be confusing things though. I can't watch that because I'm in the US, but I would stake my reputation as a linguist that either you or they are confused/wrong. As written your initial statement only has one bit that can be parsed and it's demonstrably false.
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May 27, 2015 21:37
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HEY GAL posted:Hell, it weirded me out enough that modern Germans don't smile at strangers. Strangers smiling are creepy, come on. And now suddenly I have the image in my head of creepy people in the streets smiling at me for no reason. Gaah!  Thank you. It's not like I needed that sleep.  This reminds me, earlier someone asked about books about the 30-Years War. Was Peter Englund's book devastation already mentioned? It's a bit Sweden-centric and covers a fair amount of stuff after the Peace of Westphalia, but otherwise it's pretty good.
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May 27, 2015 21:43
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Libluini posted:Strangers smiling are creepy, come on. And now suddenly I have the image in my head of creepy people in the streets smiling at me for no reason. Gaah!
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May 27, 2015 21:49
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strangers are frightening in general, stay in your house and make history effort posts
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May 27, 2015 21:50
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How many aircraft (on average) were in a WWII heavy bombardment squadron? Is there a way to find a list of all aircraft/crews in a particular BS? I'm having a weirdly hardly time just googling an answer, so on the off chance it varies wildly between groups/wings/whatever, I'm specifically looking for info on the 727th BS. If it helps, the 727th was part of the 451st BG, 49th Bomb Wing, Fifteenth Air Force.
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May 27, 2015 21:52
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HEY GAL posted:Strangers not smiling at you is frightening. You have no idea whether they're hostile to you or not. They're busy going about their life, thank you. Non urban areas still weird me out. Getting the hell out of each others' way is the height of politeness.
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May 27, 2015 21:54
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Radio! posted:How many aircraft (on average) were in a WWII heavy bombardment squadron? Is there a way to find a list of all aircraft/crews in a particular BS? I assume we're talking about the USAAF: 18 was the typical number, that didn't vary much. The national archives is the best thing I can think of to find particular info about planes and crews.
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May 27, 2015 22:05
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Xiahou Dun posted:I can't watch that because I'm in the US, but I would stake my reputation as a linguist that either you or they are confused/wrong.
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May 27, 2015 22:14
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Fangz posted:People have seen this, right? This is great. Should've had them watch The Lion King instead.
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May 27, 2015 22:16
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