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How tennisballs cost King James I of Scotland his life In 1437 a group of noblemen was fed up with the king and decided to kill him. On the day of the assassination the king's chamberlain had removed the bolt from the door of the room in which James and his queen were staying. When the group tried to enter the room the queen's lady in waiting, Catherine Douglas, tried to stop them by placing her arm through the staples to bar the assassins' entrance. Which was a considerable more badass move than running into the sewer tunnel which was what the king did. This could've been his escape but only a few days earlier he had sealed the exit to prevent his tennisballs from getting lost.
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Jan 15, 2016 19:06
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Solice Kirsk posted:When did "conservation" actually become a thing that the majority of people got behind? Was it sometime in the 1800's? I'd love to know when we went from "Boy, you don't see too many of these animals anymore.....pass me the rifle so I can shoot and eat it," to "Boy, you don't see too many of these animals around....we should stop shooting them." Depends on how loose your definition is. William the Conqueror, for example, set up laws defining certain forests as legally distinct w/supposedly harsh punishments for poaching animals from these areas if you weren't highborn. Those places could be considered a sort of early wildlife preserve. It was more for the noble's benefit than the animals' though. Can't bag a hart if your serfs have been depopulating the woods.
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Jan 15, 2016 19:23
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There was also a futile attempt to preserve the aurochs before they went extinct. Part of the problem was that extinction, as a concept, wasn't understood and even sometimes considered heretical. For example Thomas Jefferson expected there to be mastodons still roaming the American west when he commissioned the Lewis and Clark expedition.
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Jan 15, 2016 23:36
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Kill a thing... so much... there is no more thing...?!!?! Then again maybe back then they were like "Oh God would just make more even if we somehow killed them all."
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Jan 15, 2016 23:44
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AnonSpore posted:Kill a thing... so much... there is no more thing...?!!?! Pretty much, remember this was a time when a lot of people literally believed every species on earth had been on the Ark. As opposed to our more scientific age when... a lot of people believe that. Not to tar people like Jefferson with that brush necessarily though. A big part of Enlightenment thinking (heavily influential in the rhetoric of the American revolution) was critiquing religious dogma. But remember evolutionary theory wasn't quite a thing yet, so the whole idea of ecological niches and a species' existence being tied to the stability of that niche wasn't something that came readily to mind. So the way people thought of animals was more like "deer live in the forest," not "deer live in the forest when there's enough deer food and not too many deer-eaters."
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Jan 15, 2016 23:49
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Humboldt Squid posted:There was also a futile attempt to preserve the aurochs before they went extinct. Didn't Thomas Jefferson have his own version of the bible that was influenced by deism, where he removed all the parts about miracles and direct godly intervention? He doesn't seem like one of the people who would think God would keep the earth replenished with animals
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Jan 15, 2016 23:53
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I'd imagine it is pretty similar to climate change these days. Some people just can't (or won't) wrap their minds around something like "if we release a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere, things might change". It's too big of a scale to really comprehend and from a biblical perspective, it gives humans too much agency.
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Jan 15, 2016 23:56
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AnonSpore posted:Kill a thing... so much... there is no more thing...?!!?! One of the beliefs was that you could repopulate a species quite easily with only a male and a female and there were bound to be more out there somewhere. The other snag was that nobody was actually bothering to go out and study or count things to notice declines. In the case of passenger pigeons nobody was bothering to study their mating habits until it was too late. It turns out to successfully mate and reproduce you had to have a rather absurd amount of passenger pigeons being social with each other in safe places as well as particular types of trees in particular places. It turns out that animals reproducing is way more complicated than we though. Then there were things like habitat destruction and what have you. The conservation movement really gained steam in the early 20th century thanks to the nonstop outright ecological rape that the U.S. had gotten up to at the time. The view was "whatever, we can waste however much we want, there will always be more." Which turned out to be, you know, not all true.
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Jan 16, 2016 00:14
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Speaking of attempted American Ecological Fuckery, this is an article about Hippos that everyone should read. https://read.atavist.com/american-hippopotamus
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Jan 16, 2016 00:18
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Alhazred posted:The symbolism of viking weapons: Despite being Odin's weapon of choice spears were a lot more common than swords since they required a lot less iron and were therefore significantly cheaper and easier to make. Making a proper sword was very expensive and time consuming so if you saw a Norseman with a sword he was probably fairly wealthy and maybe even a nobleman of some sort. FreudianSlippers has a new favorite as of 01:08 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 00:31
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Somewhere in the Nile valley around 5000 years ago, someone realised that they could use the pictograms they were already using to represent words to represent sounds instead, so they could spell out new words phonetically. A few thousand years later the Proto-Sinaitic script was developed from that, which the Phoenicians then adopted and modified into their own alphabet. Then the Greeks copied the Phoenicians' alphabet, then the Etruscans copied theirs and then the Romans copied theirs and now a few thousand years after that you're reading these words in a form ultimately derived from some random bureaucrat's one weird trick for making doing your taxes easier. e: Also, Proto-Sinaitic is the ancestor of the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets and some monks in Bulgaria in the 800s decided it would be easier to convert the Slavic pagans to Christianity if they could read the Bible so they developed Cyrillic from the Greek alphabet. XMNN has a new favorite as of 01:08 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 01:01
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FreudianSlippers posted:Despite being Odin's weapon of choice spears were a lot more common than swords since they required a lot less iron and were therefore significantly cheaper and easier to make. Making a proper sword was very expensive and time consuming so if you saw a Norseman with a sword he was probably fairly wealthy and maybe even a nobleman of some sort. It also took a ton of training and time to learn how to fight with a sword properly. One of the reasons pole arms were extremely popular throughout history was that it didn't take much effort to train a bunch of peasants to stand in a line and point their sticks at the bad guys. In a way axes were similar; they used less metal than a sword and were also good tools. People had axes everywhere because they were useful. Peasant bowmen were also popular because a bow is pretty simple to make and your average peasant probably already knew how to use one on account of the fact that sometimes getting meat meant going out and hunting it. Actual sword guys like everybody fantasizes about were actually rather uncommon for a lot of reasons. Standing militaries also basically didn't exist for a very long time. Most fighting was done during the off season. Most people were still subsistence farmers so you kind of had to have everybody home on the farm for planting and harvesting. Major, long-term campaigns were uncommon and an exception rather than a rule. Fighting in winter was also often outright impossible. ToxicSlurpee has a new favorite as of 01:18 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 01:15
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there's a reason why the idea of the phalanx survived from Alexander all the way to the 19th century. "form a line and point the sticky end to the enemy" is a really really good tactic.
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Jan 16, 2016 02:01
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Aesop Poprock posted:Didn't Thomas Jefferson have his own version of the bible that was influenced by deism, where he removed all the parts about miracles and direct godly intervention? He doesn't seem like one of the people who would think God would keep the earth replenished with animals In Jefferson's case it was more not having a sense of deep time mixed with pride. He found mastodon fossils at montecello and hoped to find living examples to disprove the idea that new world animals were just "degraded" versions of old word animals E: http://www.earlyamerica.com/jefferson-primer/thomas-jefferson-paleontologist/ posted:there are some though, who feel that Jefferson does not deserve the title. They argue that the entire basis of his beliefs about paleontology were mistaken since he denied that any animal species could ever become extinct. “Such is the economy of nature, that in no instance can be produced her having permitted any race of her animals to become extinct.” (As cited in Curtis, 1901). It is this reasoning which allowed Jefferson to put forth the theory that there was a large herd of mammoths wandering wild in the Mississippi Valley and one of the reasons he sponsored expeditions to the West Humboldt Squid has a new favorite as of 02:10 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 02:04
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I think also in the time when we were still mapping out the world it was a lot easier to imagine that there were tons of extinct animals SOMEWHERE over the horizon we just had to find them.
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Jan 16, 2016 02:29
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Mans posted:there's a reason why the idea of the phalanx survived from Alexander all the way to the 19th century. Militaries would have used more elite sword guys if they could have but there was just no real way to. Incidentally this is also why swords, big shields, and horses were considered marks of the elite and why they show up on heraldry all the time. If you owned a horse, a sword, and a shield you were pretty damned wealthy and more than likely from a noble family. Oddly enough there were actually certain things in certain periods that were such strong symbols of nobility it was illegal for somebody who wasn't a noble to own them. Ruffs were one. Ruffs were considered a sign of nobility and there was this bizarre trend over time that the drat things just kept getting bigger. Of course people wealthy enough (i.e., merchants) to act like nobility but didn't have the blood for it would wear noble trappings anyway which pissed off actual nobles. The other thing about the times was that photographs hadn't been invented so it wasn't necessarily easy to know who was a noble and who wasn't at a glance. The king could dress like a peasant and blend in with common folks pretty easily if he really felt like it. This was the point of ludicrously expensive jewelry worn by royalty and why if you look at crowns some of them aren't really all that aesthetically pleasing. It was typically more like "let's cram as much expensive poo poo on this thing as we can." Whoever had a more expensive crown was higher up on the chain by raw wealth. This was especially true during the later middle ages when gold was everything. ToxicSlurpee has a new favorite as of 02:51 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 02:48
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Snapchat A Titty posted:After Denmark lost its navy to England in 1807, there came a lot of laws on forestry (the navy had right of first refusal on any oak, and new ones were planted several places). Of course a lot of the then-planted oaks didn't become useful for ship building until ships were made from steel. You can't mention that without mentioning Visingsö On the Swedish island of Visingsö there’s a mysterious forest of oak trees; mysterious because oak trees aren’t indigenous to the island. The origin of the forest was unknown until 1980 when the Swedish Navy received a letter reporting that their requested lumber was ready. The Navy didn’t know what the letter was on about, so they checked their records and it was discovered that in 1829 they had predicted a supply shortage of oak for warship building in the 21st century, and had ordered 20,000 oak trees to be planted in anticipation.
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Jan 16, 2016 02:55
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Militaries would have used more elite sword guys if they could have but there was just no real way to. Incidentally this is also why swords, big shields, and horses were considered marks of the elite and why they show up on heraldry all the time. If you owned a horse, a sword, and a shield you were pretty damned wealthy and more than likely from a noble family. 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. Here's a statute about ruffs, hose, and the length of swords and daggers wearable in public. http://elizabethan.org/sumptuary/ruffs-hose-swords.html
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Jan 16, 2016 03:20
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Captain Postal posted:You can't mention that without mentioning Visingsö Nice! I had not heard that story before. It's funny sometimes how shortsighted our ancestors were, even when they were being "proactive", as it were.
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Jan 16, 2016 04:07
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I was surprised to learn that one of my favorite albums, (Turisas - To Holmgaard and beyond, and it's followup, Stand up and Fight) is actually based on historical fact. It's heavily based on the varangian guard: quote:The Varangian Guard (Greek: Τάγμα των Βαράγγων, Tágma tōn Varángōn) was an elite unit of the Byzantine Army, from the 10th to the 14th centuries, whose members served as personal bodyguards to the Byzantine Emperors. They are known for being primarily composed of Germanic peoples, specifically Scandinavians (the Guard was formed approximately 200 years into the Viking age) and Anglo-Saxons (after the Norman Conquest of England created an Anglo-Saxon emigration, part of which found employment in Byzantium) quote:In 988 Basil II requested military assistance from Vladimir I of Kiev to help defend his throne. In compliance with the treaty made by his father after the Siege of Dorostolon (971), Vladimir sent 6,000 men to Basil. Vladimir took the opportunity to rid himself of his most unruly warriors which in any case he was unable to pay. This is the presumptive date for the formal, permanent institution of an elite guard. In exchange for the warriors, Vladimir was given Basil's sister, Anna, in marriage. Vladimir also agreed to convert to Christianity and to bring his people into the Christian faith. quote:The Varangian Guard was only used in battle during critical moments, or where the battle was most fierce. Contemporary Byzantine chroniclers note with a mix of terror and fascination that the "Scandinavians were frightening both in appearance and in equipment, they attacked with reckless rage and neither cared about losing blood nor their wounds". The description probably refers to berserkers, since this state of trance is said to have given them superhuman strength and no sense of pain from their wounds. When the Byzantine Emperor died, the Varangians had the unique right of running to the imperial treasury and taking as much gold and as many gems as they could carry, a procedure known in Old Norse as polutasvarf ("palace pillaging"). This privilege enabled many Varangians to return home as wealthy men, which encouraged even more Scandinavians to enlist in the Guard in Miklagarðr (Swedish = Miklagård = 'The Great City', i.e. Constantinople). The whole album is their journey to the east, and then it finally ends with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OQ_hQXRRMA It's really fitting for the grandeur and awe someone would have felt when going from a 'great hall' that's a step up from a mud hut to seeing the loving hagia sophia would be mind-blowing Full Battle Rattle has a new favorite as of 06:39 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 04:42
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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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RagnarokAngel posted:I think also in the time when we were still mapping out the world it was a lot easier to imagine that there were tons of extinct animals SOMEWHERE over the horizon we just had to find them. On a similar note, as the world was being mapped, there was not surprisingly a lot of guesswork about what lie and where. A major theory was that since we knew about a major landmass in the northern hemisphere, surely there must be an equally sized landmass in the southern hemisphere. "Wikipedia posted:Terra Australis (Latin for South Land) was a hypothetical continent first posited in Antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. Although the landmass was drawn onto maps, Terra Australis was not based on any actual surveying of such a landmass but rather based on the hypothesis that continents in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south.[1] This theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who uses the term Australis on his maps.[2] So a lot of mapmakers included Terra Australis. The Piri Reis map from 1513 is so good at it that some thought that this was proof Antarctica was discovered long before (modern) explorers did.
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Jan 16, 2016 06:38
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Over harvesting and over consumption are obviously at play but one of the big theories is that it declined suddenly because of livestock. Apparently feeding it to animals gave them some desirable trait or another which led to people grazing animals on the land which...hosed it up completely. Humans, being humans, wanted to keep consuming the stuff so it was eventually driven into nonexistence. What I find really surprising about it is that apparently no one thought "Hey, this stuff is getting kind of hard to find. I should grow some. People will probably pay a lot for it."
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Jan 16, 2016 06:40
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Tiggum posted:What I find really surprising about it is that apparently no one thought "Hey, this stuff is getting kind of hard to find. I should grow some. People will probably pay a lot for it."
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Jan 16, 2016 06:44
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Tiggum posted:What I find really surprising about it is that apparently no one thought "Hey, this stuff is getting kind of hard to find. I should grow some. People will probably pay a lot for it." They may have, but the actions of a handful of entrepreneurs (if they tried) just weren't enough. Say a few farmers did keep it alive for a while, maybe they get killed in wars or raids, or their children don't continue growing the same thing, or further climate change just makes it too difficult to grow the crop. It's been a long time and any number of things could have happened to a plant dangling by a thread.
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Jan 16, 2016 06:46
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That plant story always confused me. We started domesticating plants pretty much as soon as humans started settling down and staying in one place, how did no one ever start farming that in mass especially if it was so popular.
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Jan 16, 2016 07:48
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We figured out how to farm a few specific things but farming different things takes different skills and conditions. It may very well have been that the stuff grew wild and nobody managed to figure out how to cultivate it. Some living things require extremely specific conditions in order to survive.
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Jan 16, 2016 08:25
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Humboldt Squid posted:In Jefferson's case it was more not having a sense of deep time mixed with pride. He found mastodon fossils at montecello and hoped to find living examples to disprove the idea that new world animals were just "degraded" versions of old word animals Specifically, he was involved in a decades-long argument with the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, who'd argued that the American climate caused the long term physical and mental degradation of animals and people that migrated there. Apparently, Leclerc believed the Americas only received enough sunlight to sustain 'cold men and feeble animals'. Leclerc, it should be noted, never visited the Americas, but didn't see that as any reason not to pass judgement on the entire hemisphere as innately inferior. Needless to say, Jefferson wasn't going to take that lying down, and thus developed something of an obsession with showing the world that America could too support powerful animals. His first attempt was something of a failure - he attempted to send a stuffed moose across the Atlantic to show those eggheads in France what a big American animal looked like, but the antlers apparently went missing in transit, and the rest of the specimen didn't arrive in particularly good shape. Not to let that stop him, Jefferson then decided to focus on the biggest American animal he knew of, and started collecting mammoth bones, and advised Louis and Clark to keep an eye out for them in the west. He also set up a 'Bone Committee' dedicated to trying to get a complete skeleton of a mammoth, and kept his various specimens in the White House while president, making assembling them something of a hobby.
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Jan 16, 2016 08:35
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Even nowadays people have trouble figuring out if their food is involved in deforestation, soil erosion or over-fishing in remote regions, how were buyers in antiquity supposed to know if some farmers God knows where were over-grazing their pastures / ruining their soil with unsustainable farming methods.
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Jan 16, 2016 08:39
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Full Battle Rattle posted:I was surprised to learn that one of my favorite albums, (Turisas - To Holmgaard and beyond, and it's followup, Stand up and Fight) is actually based on historical fact. It's heavily based on the varangian guard: The varangian guard was also called "the emperor's winesacks" because of they had a habit of getting shitfaced drunk. Speaking of Hagia Sophia, there's been found several runic inscriptions on the walls. Alhazred has a new favorite as of 11:27 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 11:23
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steinrokkan posted:Even nowadays people have trouble figuring out if their food is involved in deforestation, soil erosion or over-fishing in remote regions, how were buyers in antiquity supposed to know if some farmers God knows where were over-grazing their pastures / ruining their soil with unsustainable farming methods. Many of the symptoms of unsustainable practices are first noticed by none other than the people who are doing the practice. This would've been especially true in Egypt, where long traditions of quasi-serfdom that would've made even 15th century Russians blush, had kept roughly the same population of farmers in place for generations. The reason why many of the agricultural disasters that befell the Later Roman Empire occurred was because the system had been engineered in such a way as to force those people to continue to use practices that destroyed their farmlands. I love me some historical analogue and this kind of cycle of enforced stupidity is a major factor in the destruction of more than a few empires. It's rarely that the farmers are doing the ~bad thing~ accidentally, and its often because their overlords are forcing them do the ~bad thing~ as a way to increase his own narrow self-interest. Inevitably, this leads to Really Bad Things along the line (usually with some sort of trigger, like war or a drought), and then violent social upheaval.
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Jan 16, 2016 11:53
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Captain Postal posted:You can't mention that without mentioning Visingsö Who... who sent the letter?
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Jan 16, 2016 12:08
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Samovar posted:Who... who sent the letter? The trees, duh.
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Jan 16, 2016 12:10
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Nah, it was the Lorax. He talks for the trees, you see.
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Jan 16, 2016 12:17
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steinrokkan posted:Even nowadays people have trouble figuring out if their food is involved in deforestation, soil erosion or over-fishing in remote regions, how were buyers in antiquity supposed to know if some farmers God knows where were over-grazing their pastures / ruining their soil with unsustainable farming methods. People can be pretty provincial, not knowing or caring what's happening a few miles away. They aren't thinking that they're maybe killing the last auroch or miniver; they're just thinking what it will get them. Plants are especially tricky, because they require specific soil types, water, etc. We really haven't domesticated all that many foodstuffs, and there are many plants that require such controlled environments that they can never be domesticated. Consider Sequoias, which need a very specific climate to thrive. They can be planted elsewhere, but won't necessarily survive. A high-minded forester who transferred a bunch of seedlings to 1890s Wisconsin in hope of spreading them across country would probably find himself with an expensive field of sticks.
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Jan 16, 2016 12:29
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Tasteful Dickpic posted:Nah, it was the Lorax. I talk to the trees, but they don't listen to me.
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Jan 16, 2016 12:30
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Full Battle Rattle posted:I was surprised to learn that one of my favorite albums, (Turisas - To Holmgaard and beyond, and it's followup, Stand up and Fight) is actually based on historical fact. It's heavily based on the varangian guard: Fun fact: Several runestones specifically mention people going to "Greece" (Byzantium). One of them has a Byzantine cross carved into it, which for some reason ended up being on the present day coat-of-arms of a local municipality:  
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Jan 16, 2016 12:50
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That's awesome. There's an ancient Greek lion statue in Venice with Norse graffiti on it. It ended up there after the Venetians convinced the 4th Crusade to take a little detour to sack Constantinople before totally going on to the Holy Land or whatever you guys, we swear.
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Jan 16, 2016 13:37
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XMNN posted:That's awesome. Wikipedia posted:Right side of the lion: "Lame-rear end Greeks totally didn't want us to put this sweet tag on their stupid lion, gently caress those guys. VIKING 4-LYFE, yo!"  
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Jan 16, 2016 13:45
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Samovar posted:Who... who sent the letter? The Swedish Forestry Department. I can only imagine there were several generations of civil servants who asked why the gently caress the Navy wanted so much oak delivered by 1980, only to be told it was top secret and a national security issue. ArchangeI has a new favorite as of 15:43 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 15:14
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