|
The Incan children of Llullaillaco are some of the best-preserved ice mummies found so far. Scientista discovered one of the mummies had a respiratory infection before death as well as headlice.
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 06:44
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 03:29 |
|
|
jyrka posted:Did it take 80 years for it to be invented or to be patented? 80 years to show up on mass-produced commercial scale, at least. 40 years after the can was patented in England, at any rate. I've seen quotes from the arctic explorers and whatnot in history books along the lines of "this tinned food is great, but it sure is a bitch to get it out of the tin now that the guy with the hammer fell into a crevasse." Wikipedia posted:The first cans were robust containers, which weighed more than the food they contained and required ingenuity to open, using whatever tools available. The instruction on those cans read "Cut round the top near the outer edge with a chisel and hammer."[2][3] The gap of decades between the invention of the can and can opener may be attributed to the functionality of existing tools versus the cost and effort of a new tool.[4] Related: the pull tab (at least as applied to beer/soda cans) was patented in 1962, and the modern tab that stays attached in 1975 (a version of the former that pulls the whole top off -- though I can't find which came first -- is still used for tennis balls and is gaining popularity over the traditional cans for soup, veg, pet food, etc.; the time of the can opener may be coming to an end). Before 1962, beer came in the same kind of steel can as vegetables, and required a church key to stab a hole in:  Which won my father's older brothers a lot of bar bets during the period when the breweries were switching over to the new aluminum cans -- my uncle would order a beer he knew to be sold in the new-style can, and find a sucker drinking a brand that was still using the old steel cans. "I betcha I can crush my can on my forehead." The roughneck drinking from a steel can, not having heard of the revolution in beverage packaging, takes the sure bet, and my uncle seemingly effortlessly (there's a bit of an art to it, you'll hurt yourself even with a flimsy modern aluminum can if you don't know the trick; cylinders are strong*) crumples the can against his forehead. Half the time, the mark would go double or nothing and try to smash his own (steel) can, and give himself a concussion. My pa, the middle one of the lot, even pulled it off a few times in Southeast Asia in 1969-'70, he with imported American beer against a local or Marine drinking the local brew, which still used the old cans (or was just dead stock from when the French still owned the place). Speaking of which, I'm pretty sure I've seen the "smashing the can on the forehead" thing in '40s cartoons -- at that time, it really did mean you were a certified badass. With the modern paper-thin aluminum cans, that joke (like many others of the era) has lost some of its impact, if you'll forgive the pun. *most people who aren't hugely fat can stand on an empty soda can, if they're careful. But touch the side (in the demo my high school physics teacher did, he poked it with the big end of a pencil), and the cylinder's integrity is compromised. So the trick to smashing a beer can on your head is to give it a little squeeze just before impact. Oh, cans and Vietnam reminds me of another fun fact: y'know Rambo, feeding his M60 with a bare belt? Yeah, no, the pig was designed to feed from a box clipped to the side, only Marines and idiots (but I repeat myself) would take the belts out of the box and throw them over their shoulders, and the gun would choke on a loose belt. Unless you wedged an empty C-ration can under the feedramp.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 11:23
|
|
Bad Angus! Bad!
|
Gabriel Pope posted:
I'd love to know more about this.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 11:32
|
|
|
The original tin cans a were made of very thick metal. The point of them was to keep food fresh for a very long period of time, useful for sailors and soldiers and so on. It wasn't until the manufacturers worked out how to make thinner cans (and they did that to lower their own costs) that the can opener was invented. Before that the tool you would need would be so large and unwieldy that a hammer would do the job just as well so a hammer it was. Original tin cans were more like mini oil drums than the cans we have today. Nowadays we buy cans more for convenience than as a long term storage solution; when they were first invented it was the opposite. Having access to fresh meat 3 months into a sea voyage was so incredible that nobody stopped to think "I wish they'd make the cans thinner so I could open this in five seconds instead of fifteen", they just thought "HOLY poo poo MEAT MEAT MEAT!!". I don't know how quickly after the development of thin metal cans the can opener came about, but I'd gamble it was a matter of months and not forty years.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 15:53
|
|
|
Apeshit Sixfingers posted:I'd love to know more about this. By the 17th century or so, the English were well on their way towards assimilating the native Celtic cultures of the British Isles. Between physical dominion of the Isles (somewhat unofficial in Scotland's case) and increasing economic hegemony from the nascent industrialization of England, enough English goods and culture were being exported that local traditions were being overwhelmed. Anglicization offered increased material wealth and generally met little resistance, so by the time Scotland and England formally united the Scots were well on their way to becoming English people with funny accents. The only holdouts were a few backwater highland clans that even other Scots looked down on for their backwardness. This process probably would have continued until native Scottish culture died out entirely, except that things turned political. The highland clans were (unsurprisingly) huge supporters of the royal Scottish House of Stuart, which became a thorn in the monarchy's side when the crown passed over to the House of Hanover. After several uprisings centered in the highlands, Parliament decided that the clans' Scottishness was to blame and passed a series of acts banning kilts and other aspects of highland culture in an attempt to suppress them. This was just too much for a lot of Anglicized Scots, since it completely destroyed the polite fiction that the Union (still less than half a century old) was an equal partnership. The fact that most Scots thought that the kilt-wearing highlanders were a bunch of idiot rednecks and a millstone around their country's neck was beside the point--they were their idiot rednecks and England had no right to gently caress with them. Swept up in the tide of feelings that would later coalesce into the Romantic movement, a lot of intellectuals began quietly wearing kilts, founding Scottish societies, and promoting the Scots language. By the time that the Acts of Proscription were repealed 40 years later, there were a lot of Scots eager to practice their heritage. Unfortunately their heritage had been illegal for a couple generations and had mostly been forgotten even before then--and even though traditional Scots were no longer legally second class citizens, they were still second class economically and pro-English landowners continued to oppress them pretty heavily. So there was a certain amount of guesswork involved in the Scottish revival. Pick a traditional Scottish folk song: chances are the version of it you know was written by Robert Burns around 225 years ago, maybe as an adaptation of an earlier song, but often an original composition. The Highland Games? Well, the Scottish clans definitely had athletic competitions, which periodically included some of the modern heavy games, but the canonical Highland Games were created in the 19th century. The Celtic harp? The construction and playing of the original were dead arts; Gaelic revivalists created a new design based on the ancient one. Even the kilts that patriotic Scots wore to thumb their noses at England were developed into their modern form in the 1720s--by an Englishman, no less. (Scottish bagpipes and pipe music have a pretty unequivocally authentic and unbroken tradition, though, mostly because it was kept alive in British army regiments.) I don't have time to get into it right now, but Irish culture follows a very broadly similar pattern--though the assimilation was much less amicable and the suppression was much harsher. the holy poopacy has a new favorite as of 17:38 on Mar 2, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 17:35
|
|
|
Gabriel Pope posted:I don't have time to get into it right now, but Irish culture follows a very broadly similar pattern--though the assimilation was much less amicable and the suppression was much harsher. Can you blame the English though? Look at how weird traditional Irish dance is.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 18:23
|
|
|
Since we're talking about Celts, let's talk about Cornish. Cornish is an odd Celtic language, in that it's only superficially related to true Welsh,Irish, or Scottish. Cornish is actually more closely related to Breton than it is to any other language. Much like the process already described, the Cornish had been undergoing Anglicization for almost 500 years, and the process by which the Cornish language slowly passed on took at least three centuries to complete. The last native Cornish speaker is said to have died in the late 1790s, but it is unlikely that Cornish ever completely died out - it was likely still spoken by some families in the home until the modern revival. Oh, yeah. The revival. In 1904, an Englishmen who happened to have a fascination with Celtic languages published "A Handbook of the Cornish Language", which sparked an intellectual fascination by the Cornish with their lost past. In 1929, a native Cornishman published a book called "Unified Cornish", which codified the orthography of the language. Unfortunately, he decided to base much of his orthography on 15th century Cornish(which he was personally fascinated with), which almost made it hilariously outdated. While people used it for most the 20th century, it's stiff formulation of the language provoked widespread dissatisfaction with it. In the 80s and 90s, this widespread dissatisfaction finally revealed itself in the form of no less than 8 different orthographies of the Cornish language, which by now has a very small but growing number of bilingual speakers. This has provoked widespread confusion in intellectual speakers, and this difference in orthographies made the momentum that the Cornish language had built up lose steam. In the latter 2000s, all parties agreed that the no less than 8 different standards needed a new, universal standard if this whole "we're bringing back the Cornish language" thing was going to continue its momentum, which led to them establishing a new 'universal' orthographic government-approved Cornish language handbook. So, yeah. Cornish is back in the game, despite having been definitely extinct. There are daycares and schools teaching Cornish in Cornwall.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 18:27
|
|
|
Anyone care to post about the Welsh now? I don't know much about them besides sheep jokes.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 18:48
|
|
|
Canemacar posted:Anyone care to post about the Welsh now? I don't know much about them besides sheep jokes. I had a conversation about the Welsh language with one of my Welsh lecturers and what he told me (although I'm sure there's more accurate sources) is that Welsh was the main language spoken in Wales, especially in rural wales, until the industrial revolution brought more movement of people within the country and between the Welsh and English populations. Wales was where a large amount of the coal enabling the industrial revolution was mined, and as the mining industry grew bigger in South Wales, migrant workers from England slowly grew to become the majority of the workforce and the language spoken in the work environment and in the surrounding regions shifted to English. It's now being taught in schools again and there's been a lot of measures in the last few decades to reintroduce it into stuff like signage and government documents. There's a generational divide where very old people might speak it, middle aged people probably can't speak it and young people (because it's now part of the school curriculum) can speak or read and write it. I'm not sure how recent changing all the signage was, I don't remember how it was when I visited Wales as a kid in the 90s, but now all the signage is in both English and Welsh. EDIT: (according to wikipedia) another big reason the language switched over to English was because the English government were racist and made all the schools in Wales teach exclusively in English 
Red Bones has a new favorite as of 19:51 on Mar 2, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 19:46
|
|
|
There's the The Lowland Hundred if you like Legends & Folklore and their influence on people. Long enough that I might as well just link it http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/myths_legends/wales/w_mid/article_1.shtml
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 20:15
|
|
|
Welsh is the Celtic language spoken by the most people today (~560,000 native speakers in 2011), so there's that. It's quite stable when compared with most other Celtic languages. Breton (about 200,000 native speakers) is under a lot of pressure from France, especially since a unified language for the French Republic in form of Parisian French has been the goal of most French governments since the 1789 revolution. Regional language support is still in a bad shape in France, Occitan for example (the language was was by the 50s still spoken by the majority of people living in the south of the country) is nearly extinct today. Scottish Gaelic and Irish both compete for the third place; there were about 57,000 Scottish Gaelic native speakers by the 2011 census (with an additional ~1,800 in Nova Scotia, though I think that that number's diminishing fast). The numbers for Irish are a little less clear-cut, with somewhere between 40-80,000 native speakers. They're both endangered, and we may well see their disappearance in our lifetime depending on whether those languages can resist the pressure and cultural influence of English. They probably won't go completely extinct, though, as there will always be a number of enthusiasts concerned with keeping them alive, as can be seen with Cornish and Manx - both died out and got resurrected again, with native speakers numbering about 700-800 between them. All other Celtic languages are extinct, the continental ones much earlier than the languages spoken on the British Isles, owing to the bigger pressure they had to suffer from Latin and the Germanic languages. Gaulish was the strongest Celtic language in the continent, and it appears to have died out by the 6th century (though some scholars suggest that in the Normandy it may have gone extinct only in the 9th century). In what is today northern England, Cumbric probably had died out by 1200, maybe even later. It's best-known remnant is probably the numbering system still used by some shepherds in the area to count their sheep (Yan tan tethera). Pictish in Scotland is virtually unattested, so we can't even say for sure that it's a Celtic language (though it probably was); it appears to have vanished by the 12th century.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 20:57
|
|
|
I doubt we'll see Irish or Scottish Gaelic go under, especially considering the support that both are getting from their collective governments, and with the rise of Scottish nationalism in their politics. Breton is probably the strongest candidate for getting wiped out in our lifetimes. Anyhow, historical fun fact time: Yellowstone National Park, one of the first parks of its kind anywhere in the world, was established by one of the most corrupt presidents of the entire 19th century, Ulysses S. Grant.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 21:13
|
|
|
Do you know that there has been a recorded instance of a navy losing to a cavalry charge? Well, now you do.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 23:11
|
|
|
queserasera posted:So the post about Franklin's lost expedition sent me on a four-hour Wikipedia surf last night. Thanks for making me look at this article again. I did not know that they actually FOUND the Erebus at the bottom of the sea. http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/franklin-expedition-ship-found-in-arctic-id-d-as-hms-erebus-1.2784268 I seem to remember accounts of the Inuit encountering one of the ships on a free-floating iceberg, going aboard and lifting a few trinkets, and encountering the body of a dead 'giant' on board. Bet that was the Terror living up to its name, it's probably also at the bottom of some other portion of the Arctic by now.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 01:21
|
|
|
Delivery McGee posted:Related: the pull tab (at least as applied to beer/soda cans) was patented in 1962, and the modern tab that stays attached in 1975 (a version of the former that pulls the whole top off -- though I can't find which came first -- is still used for tennis balls and is gaining popularity over the traditional cans for soup, veg, pet food, etc.; the time of the can opener may be coming to an end). You mean these ones?  When you say "gaining popularity", aren't they pretty much ubiquitous these days?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 03:31
|
|
|
Tiggum posted:You mean these ones? No, there are a lot of things that don't have them. For example, I like canned beets a lot but always have to break out the can opener to have some.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 03:34
|
|
|
Red Bones posted:(according to wikipedia) another big reason the language switched over to English was because the English government were racist and made all the schools in Wales teach exclusively in English They'd literally beat children in school in Wales if caught speaking Welsh. Same thing, but worse, happened in those infamous Indian boarding schools in the US and Canada. Corporal punishment in schools in that era was ubiquitous, and children were beaten until they became terrified of speaking their native languages. Worldwide there was often a lot more brutality to school-based language assimilation policies than just, "Oh students, we're going to be speaking English in this class."
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 06:49
|
|
|
Sucrose posted:They'd literally beat children in school in Wales if caught speaking Welsh. Same thing, but worse, happened in those infamous Indian boarding schools in the US and Canada. Corporal punishment in schools in that era was ubiquitous, and children were beaten until they became terrified of speaking their native languages. The opposite is true today for Indian schools. Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, CA, teaches the students native crafts and instructs them in their languages. Kids like it because it's a boarding school that gets them out of their often violent, tragic homes on the Rez. To become Miss Sherman IHS, girls have to make and wear traditional clothes and perform one of their rituals or tasks.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 07:07
|
|
|
Samovar posted:Do you know that there has been a recorded instance of a navy losing to a cavalry charge? Well, now you do.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 07:12
|
|
|
Sucrose posted:They'd literally beat children in school in Wales if caught speaking Welsh. Same thing, but worse, happened in those infamous Indian boarding schools in the US and Canada. Corporal punishment in schools in that era was ubiquitous, and children were beaten until they became terrified of speaking their native languages. This also happened in Norway (and the rest of northern Scandinavia), where the indigenous Sami people were sent to boarding schools and forbidden to speak their own language. It was illegal to use Sami as a teaching language in Norway until the late 1950's, and in the 60's people from the northern parts of the country would often not be allowed to rent apartments in the south. Additionally, toward the end of WW2, a lot of the northernmost region Finnmark was burned by the retreating German forces, practically ruining the homes and livelihoods of a lot of people. A lot of this is glossed over today in the national curriculum, adding to some still existing underlying tensions between the regions. Still, the contemporary discrimination toward the Sami people is probably strongest in the north of Norway, where "ethnic Norwegians" may try to actively distance themselves from the indigenous culture. Although nowhere near the scale of for example the treatment of native Americans, there is undeniably some chafing between those who embrace the Sami culture, and those who actively disprove of it. More appropriate for the thread's theme, I have been told by people involved in the "radical Sami movement" of the 1970's, that they were being contacted by other minority populations such as Palestinians, but also more militant separatists such as the IRA and Basque nationalists. The movement in Norway culminated in protests, hunger strikes, and mass-arrests in 1979, in conjunction with a new dam that was supposed to be built in the small northern city Alta. The construction of the dam would put Sami settlements underwater, and predictably the reactions were mixed, as it was seen by some people as just another assault on the indigenous people, enacted by the Norwegian government. In the autumn of 1979, as Sami and other sympathizers organized a mass act of civil disobedience at the site of the dam, the government put their foot down and moved in with police forces imported from different corners of the country (apparently 10% of all the police forces in Norway were at one point moved to Alta). The protesters were dispersed, and a lot of them were physically carried away and arrested/fined. In later declassified documents, it was revealed that the government was prepared to send in armed forces if necessary. By 1982, the Supreme Court ruled the building of the dam constitutional, and despite two Sami women traveling to Rome in order to petition the Pope, the opposition was silenced and the dam was built. The most interesting thing about this relatively small-scale event, however, is that the government was apparently investigating these protesters as a potential terrorist group, with ties to the IRA. It never got particularly violent, but one has to wonder what would have happened if the conflicts had escalated further. With 10% of the entire country's police forces being sent to handle the situation, the government undoubtedly took the conflict quite seriously. Today, the Alta-protests are seen as a pivotal moment in contemporary Sami activism, although the radicalism has mostly died out or gone quiet since the 70's ended, or at the very least gotten less aggressive. Here's a photo of a protester being taken away by the police:  And to get an impression of the remoteness of Alta: 
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 09:52
|
|
|
A weird thing regarding the Sami is the use of their culture in marketing for tourism in Lapland, particularly by people with zero cultural ties to the Sami. I interned for a man from southwestern Finland who worked with dogsled tourism just south of Lapland. Naturally this involved wearing "traditional" Sami clothing and hats to make an authentic Sami dogsledding experience. As an American, it would have been the equivalent of a guy from New York living in California offering traditional Navajo wigwam camping. All the while wearing a big 'ol warbonnet. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 14:38
|
|
|
Were the Sami those guys who were bitching about Frozen appropriating their culture with that reindeer guy?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 14:44
|
|
|
Mr. Flunchy posted:Were the Sami those guys who were bitching about Frozen appropriating their culture with that reindeer guy? no it was the tumblr brigade who got butthurt that the sami guy wasn't yellow and didn't have buckteeth and slanted eyes most samis seem to have liked the cartoon
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 14:48
|
|
|
 As we know, the Sami are proud people of color?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 14:50
|
|
|
Hogge Wild posted:no You see this kind of thing a lot. There's people who get mad on some ethnic group's behalf, while the ethnic group itself either doesn't care or has the opposite opinion. I think the Sami reaction was that they were just happy to be represented, even if it's not entirely accurate.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 15:37
|
|
|
Samovar posted:Do you know that there has been a recorded instance of a navy losing to a cavalry charge? Well, now you do. pro-click
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 16:40
|
|
|
Free Market Mambo posted:
Google seems to show me that Sami peoples just look like regular old white people. Still, I think making the Sami guy in frozen a Polynesian would have been more culturally appropriate.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 17:02
|
|
|
Odd as it seems, a lot of other indigenous groups hate the Sami. The Sami's experience, compared to the ongoing exploitation and additional awful poo poo that happens around the globe every day, is fairly tame, and nowadays, the Sami, especially in Sweden/Finland, are well-recognized and almost treated as an accepted ethnic group. Because of their protected status, the Sami regularly speak for 'imperialist' nations at the UN, wherein their speakers regularly argue native rights are totally fine right now, so we should stop talking about it you know? For example, at the most recent conference on indigenous rights, Sami speakers argued that because the state of native rights was so much better than it had been (  ), there was no need for a new conference, the next year. This may seem like kind of a minor thing, but the native movement places a lot of emphasis on getting things through the UN, such as the most recent UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.So nowadays, the Sami have a reputation amongst other indigenous groups as being traitors to the native movement. A Festivus Miracle has a new favorite as of 18:05 on Mar 3, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 18:01
|
|
|
Tiggum posted:You mean these ones? I've noticed a lot of soups sold in Canada don't have the tab when the American cans do for some reason.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 18:08
|
|
|
Aphrodite posted:I've noticed a lot of soups sold in Canada don't have the tab when the American cans do for some reason. Can openers are hard for us to get our fat sausage fingers around. With the pull tab at least one of our 15 kids can open up the can of sodium and sugar so we can heat it up and pour it straight onto our instant mashed potatoes covered in butter and BBQ sauce.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 18:34
|
|
|
Solice Kirsk posted:Google seems to show me that Sami peoples just look like regular old white people. Still, I think making the Sami guy in frozen a Polynesian would have been more culturally appropriate. I'm guessing that the idiots of tumblr don't know the difference between "Sami" and "Inuit". One's a bunch of native Europeans that have lived in a frozen wasteland since the glaciers withdrew 10000+ years ago. The other's a bunch of native Americans that have lived in a frozen wasteland since they walked there from Siberia 10000+ years ago.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 18:50
|
|
|
Wait is soup on mashed potatoes really a thing?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 18:57
|
|
|
My understanding is that while Sami look white, cutting edge phrenology and other scientific racisms had them as non white. So they'd be presented as non white in their scientific drawings of the races. Like the Irish were in America and England. Tumblr: embracing scientific racism for social justice.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 19:18
|
|
|
Aphrodite posted:Wait is soup on mashed potatoes really a thing? no
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 19:25
|
|
|
It's usually referred to as gravy.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 20:38
|
|
|
RCarr posted:It's usually referred to as gravy. Appropriate for this thread then, since wars have been started about the dumb ways Americans use the word gravy.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 20:42
|
|
|
Solice Kirsk posted:Google seems to show me that Sami peoples just look like regular old white people. Still, I think making the Sami guy in frozen a Polynesian would have been more culturally appropriate. So basically ingnorant people complaining that their badly researched world view isn't being represented in cartoons.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 21:23
|
|
|
You loving wish!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 21:28
|
|
|
Spanish historical fun fact! During the events of the coup leading up to the Spanish Civil War, General Franco (commander of the Canary Islands) kept waffling about if he and his troops were going to participate. This led to the other generals involved nicknaming Franco "Miss Canary Islands 1936" source
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 21:35
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 03:29 |
|
|
Fun facts about concrete! You've seen concrete. Seriously, poo poo is everywhere. It's one of the most useful building materials in existence and is the most used man-made material in the world. Use of concrete predates the Roman empire, possibly by thousands of years. Ancient people figured out concrete a loooooong drat time ago; Rome used the hell out of it. You'd think that something so drat useful would stick around but it kind of didn't. After Rome fell most people just plain didn't know about concrete let alone use it; the techniques were mostly lost and unused. In a few places concrete stuck around but all told its use was rare until around the 18th century. Then people went "holy gently caress balls this poo poo is incredible!" and its use exploded again. Interestingly cement, concrete, grout and the like tend to be made of various combinations of alumina and silica, which also happen to be the primary ingredients of clay. Ceramic materials also, of course, have a long, interesting history. A lot of that is shrouded in mystery; making ceramics predates writing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 5, 2016 09:54
|
|