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Squalid posted:this poo poo is even crazier than I remembered. I bet if you went back in time to the ancient era every town and village would have its own equally unbelievable and incomprehensible traditions Read about sin eaters “It is the custome at funerals to hire poor people, who were to take upon them all the sinnes of the party deceased. One of them I remember lived in a Cottage on Rosse-high way. (He was a long, lean, ugly, lamentable Raskel.) The manner was that when the Corps was brought out of the house, and layd on the Biere; a Loafe of bread was brought out, and delivered to the Sinne-eater over the Corps, and also a Mazar-bowl of maple (Gossips bowle) full of beer, which he was to drinke up, and sixpence in money, in consideration whereof he took upon him (ipso facto) all the Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him (or her) from walking amongste the lyvng after they were dead“
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May 2, 2020 03:56
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Typically I find small-scale politics of individuals trying to take power within a monarchic structure much more boring than the events that involve trying to wrangle a lot of people who haven't all bought into a monarchy. There's just a lot of he-said she-said kind of things that feel dubious or petty. Grand Fromage posted:The Greeks were the ones who came up with the LIBERATED EUROPEANS VS ORIENTAL DESPOTISM narrative to begin with. I don't think it was Herodotus, but it's not a later misreading. It's contemporary propaganda from the wars with Persia that has managed to survive in some form or another to the present day. From what I know, I think that a lot of it shook down to the Greek states trying to maintain their own power structures that Persian influence would screw with, but since the whole thing started as a revolt of persian holdings, the whole freedom angle doesn't really come out of nowhere, does it?
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May 2, 2020 04:02
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Dalael posted:For those of us not familiar with the podcast, would you elaborate on the point you mentioned? My bad, I phrased that wrong. I meant the point was he could speculate more. But I don’t recall exactly what his theory was, because I was cycling and running errands while listening so I was distracted a lot, and its like a 4 hour podcast. It’s episode 60 on the itunes podcast app. It may have been about the debate on which groups could be classified as being Celtic. Or it may have been about the barbarians battle strategies. I think he’s more prone to being hyperbolic, but I love his narration, and his voice and the way he speaks when he’s reading quotes.
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May 2, 2020 05:08
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The Athenians just gloss over how the Thebans buddied up to the Persians real quick, possibly for the rest of Theban history. As with all Greek things, you can't forget that they were wild xenophobes that demeaned their close neighbours and were willing to kill and/or enslave them all if they were pissed enough.
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May 2, 2020 05:12
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While I enjoy Carlin to some extent, my impression is that he has gotten worse about actually teaching you anything over time. The information density in his latest series on the pacific theater of WW2 is particularly bad: It's all metaphors, "can you imagine" and talking about how cool Douglas MacArthur is.Still fun to listen to, but learning is incidental.
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May 2, 2020 11:48
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military cervix posted:While I enjoy Carlin to some extent, my impression is that he has gotten worse about actually teaching you anything over time. The information density in his latest series on the pacific theater of WW2 is particularly bad: It's all metaphors, "can you imagine" and talking about how cool Douglas MacArthur is.Still fun to listen to, but learning is incidental.
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May 2, 2020 11:59
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Interesting: Herodotus considers it settled fact that the Nile delta was formed by alluvial deposition over tens of thousands of years. He's able to cite similar phenomena in Greece as well as some basic experimental evidence. Was Herodotus lost in 2nd millennium AD Europe or just ignored? Or was it another case like astronomy where virtually every educated person knew church doctrine was laughably wrong but were too afraid to publish? He gets the origin of marine fossils on mountains wrong but that's understandable.
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May 2, 2020 14:17
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Why, was there some controversy about how the Nile Delta came into existence that I'm not aware of?
Kassad fucked around with this message at 16:03 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 15:56
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military cervix posted:While I enjoy Carlin to some extent, my impression is that he has gotten worse about actually teaching you anything over time. The information density in his latest series on the pacific theater of WW2 is particularly bad: It's all metaphors, "can you imagine" and talking about how cool Douglas MacArthur is.Still fun to listen to, but learning is incidental. I don't think I can agree on this, two out of three parts so far mainly deal with Japanese history. I think MacArthur only shows up in the second part of part 3 or something, I don't even remember him. But it was nice hearing all those stories about how dysfunctional the Imperial Japanese government was. A lot like our own government back in the day, but also hosed up in a slightly different way.
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May 2, 2020 17:27
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Kassad posted:Why, was there some controversy about how the Nile Delta came into existence that I'm not aware of? "How old is the Earth?" is a question that didn't get settled for a long time, and the younger scale of answers (which include attempts to calculate back using ancestries in the Bible) would not have given enough time for the Nike Delta to form. That and "why does the Sun shine?" are questions that don't have provable answers until we start getting a good handle on nuclear physics in the 30s and 40s.
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May 2, 2020 17:44
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:"How old is the Earth?" is a question that didn't get settled for a long time, and the younger scale of answers (which include attempts to calculate back using ancestries in the Bible) would not have given enough time for the Nike Delta to form. I think that prior to the last few centuries, the "How old is the Earth" debate was mostly confined to the Biblical view vs. "eternalism" - Aristotle's view that the Earth has been around literally forever, with more or less the same kind of animals (including humans) that it has today. The eternalist view involves many obvious absurdities, which the late-antique philosopher John Philoponus pointed out. (For one thing, it's in tension with another of Aristotle's beliefs, the impossibility of an "actual infinity.") But it remained oddly popular among medieval scholars in the Muslim world and even (despite Church opposition) in Europe. I think philosophers as late as Kant were still taking eternalism seriously.
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May 2, 2020 18:02
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Libluini posted:I don't think I can agree on this, two out of three parts so far mainly deal with Japanese history. I think MacArthur only shows up in the second part of part 3 or something, I don't even remember him. But it was nice hearing all those stories about how dysfunctional the Imperial Japanese government was. A lot like our own government back in the day, but also hosed up in a slightly different way. Yeah, the McArthur-part may have been slightly hyperbolic of me. I do admire Carlin's flair for storytelling, but at sometimes he spends so much time on the metaphors and the "can you even imagine" that the story itself disappears from view. At some point the "serialized" episodes went from being 90ish minutes to being 4 hours each, and they really don't need to be. That said, he brings a level of performance to direct quotations and such that is difficult for other podcasters to match.
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May 2, 2020 18:10
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PawParole posted:Read about sin eaters this is really weird and cool and not something i expected to see coming out of Wales: quote:Professor Evans of the Presbyterian College, Carmarthen, actually saw a sin-eater about the year 1825, who was then living near Llanwenog, Cardiganshire. Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean, the sin-eater cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures by reason of the life he had chosen; he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.[8]
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May 2, 2020 18:47
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Silver2195 posted:I think that prior to the last few centuries, the "How old is the Earth" debate was mostly confined to the Biblical view vs. "eternalism" - Aristotle's view that the Earth has been around literally forever, with more or less the same kind of animals (including humans) that it has today. The eternalist view involves many obvious absurdities, which the late-antique philosopher John Philoponus pointed out. (For one thing, it's in tension with another of Aristotle's beliefs, the impossibility of an "actual infinity.") But it remained oddly popular among medieval scholars in the Muslim world and even (despite Church opposition) in Europe. I think philosophers as late as Kant were still taking eternalism seriously. Even recently, "big bang" was a derogatory nickname for the theory (and, ironically, it got opposition because it was being promoted by a Catholic and some reddit tier atheists thought he was putting too much religion in his astrophysics)
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May 2, 2020 18:49
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military cervix posted:While I enjoy Carlin to some extent, my impression is that he has gotten worse about actually teaching you anything over time. The information density in his latest series on the pacific theater of WW2 is particularly bad: It's all metaphors, "can you imagine" and talking about how cool Douglas MacArthur is.Still fun to listen to, but learning is incidental. he's basically semi-retired and the 2016 election broke his spirit. he's not going to make any more great stuff, probably, but the old shows are still there and good.
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May 2, 2020 18:53
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Jazerus posted:he's basically semi-retired and the 2016 election broke his spirit. he's not going to make any more great stuff, probably, but the old shows are still there and good. Check out his shorter form stuff. He's put out two episodes this year.
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May 2, 2020 19:20
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Kassad posted:Why, was there some controversy about how the Nile Delta came into existence that I'm not aware of? The timeline of Genesis and Deuteronomy put a cap on the age of the earth well below 10,000 years.
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May 2, 2020 19:32
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I was watching Spartacus (the movie) recently and took note of the fact that Crassus casually asks his protege, whose name I forget, whether he surrounded his camp with a moat and stockade. This is after protege-guy is defeated by the slave army and reports back to the Senate. He admits he did not, and everyone is astonished. So I suppose my questions are: 1) was it normal for encamped Roman armies to surround even a temporary night camp with a moat and walls, and 2) what would be the benefit of a dry moat for an encamped army in the field, and 3) how long would it take to construct all this?
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May 2, 2020 19:42
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Dry most equates the walls being higher ground.
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May 2, 2020 19:47
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PittTheElder posted:"How old is the Earth?" is a question that didn't get settled for a long time, and the younger scale of answers (which include attempts to calculate back using ancestries in the Bible) would not have given enough time for the Nike Delta to form. Arglebargle III posted:The timeline of Genesis and Deuteronomy put a cap on the age of the earth well below 10,000 years. Oh right yes, of course.
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May 2, 2020 19:51
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Arglebargle III posted:The timeline of Genesis and Deuteronomy put a cap on the age of the earth well below 10,000 years. Arglebargle III posted:... another case like astronomy where virtually every educated person knew church doctrine was laughably wrong but were too afraid to publish... HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:54 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 20:51
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As far as I know, there was no official church doctrine in the middle ages about Nile settlement or the age of the earth. There's never been any Catholic doctrine about the age of the earth. It's just not something the Catholic church has ever much cared about. Augustine came up with a general theoretical framework called "The Six Ages of the World", where he said the history of the world was divided into six ages, each of a 1000 years, starting with the creation of Adam. So, the first age is Adam to the flood, the second age is the flood to Abraham, the third age is Abraham to David, the fourth age as David to the Babylonian captivity, the fifth age, the Babylonian captivity to the birth of Jesus, and the sixth and final age, the birth of Jesus to the present. There was a bunch of general acceptance of this in the Middle Ages (which led to a bunch of religious excitement around the year 1000), but it was never official doctrine and you never had to believe it. It was just a method of classification Augustine invented. And why assume that educated people thought the Church was "laughably wrong"? Most of the educated people in the Middle Ages were pretty devout, and in a lot of cases, members of religious orders. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 21:29 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 21:16
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HEY GUNS posted:\ not the part where everyone has secret knowledge and just pretends to believe the church (which is a common idea both when talking about the middle ages and when talking about fictionalized medieval settings) and not the part where they're afraid. I notice a lot of people tend to kind of passively fail the Theory Of Mind, in that they assume that everyone really does deep down believe the same thing that they do, and if people seem to be on the other side of an issue, that's just lying out to promote [self interested goal] rather than legitimately having different beliefs.
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May 2, 2020 21:51
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Tunicate posted:I notice a lot of people tend to kind of passively fail the Theory Of Mind, in that they assume that everyone really does deep down believe the same thing that they do, and if people seem to be on the other side of an issue, that's just lying out to promote [self interested goal] rather than legitimately having different beliefs. I think you also get some slop-over. "This historical guy is really cool! However, he was probably something we would call a Roman Catholic nowadays. The RCC sucks and I don't like them. -- Obviously this historical guy didn't really buy what they were selling." Plus the impression of the historical church as having a totalizing influence instead of having large swaths where they didn't have an opinion.
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May 2, 2020 22:05
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Epicurius posted:As far as I know, there was no official church doctrine in the middle ages about Nile settlement or the age of the earth. There's never been any Catholic doctrine about the age of the earth. It's just not something the Catholic church has ever much cared about. In fact, there were actually some legitimate scientific mistakes brought about by treating the Bible as historical record. One of my favorite examples is Athanasius Kircher, who claimed in the 17th century to have deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs. While he was correct in guessing that they also represented sounds rather than being merely abstract symbols and that there was a connection to Coptic (and he was a legitimately talented linguist), he was hampered by the belief that hieroglyphs were a mystical language rather than mundane script and that one could unlock the secrets of the universe dating back to Adam and Eve by translating them. His final book, Turris Babel, was about trying to connect the events in the Bible to modern science to prove that what occurred was real history, and that included Babel really being the origin of all the disparate human languages (albeit through humanity dispersing and evolving from a single mother tongue rather than God forcing the languages on people). So with that, he attempted to translate hieroglyphs by finding similar symbols in Coptic and scripts that functioned similarly to his proposal on the hieroglyphs (like Chinese, which also evolved by using abstract characters representing specific things) as well as Pythagorean principles (based on his belief that Pythagoras was passing on knowledge from the Ancient Egyptians) filtered through his religious beliefs. This led to him making wildly false translations. This is one of his: quote:"The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis, the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis." What it actually said: quote:"Osiris says" And far from being dismissed as a quack, he was taken seriously! Contemporary historians and scientists actually agreed with his theories! Even if not all of the Bible was being read as literal fact like modern American evangelicals, it was still treated as broadly factual and included in study the same as Greek philosophers.
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May 2, 2020 22:25
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Arglebargle III posted:The timeline of Genesis and Deuteronomy put a cap on the age of the earth well below 10,000 years. Im pretty sure young earth creationism is more of a modern thing.
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May 2, 2020 22:28
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chitoryu12 posted:And far from being dismissed as a quack, he was taken seriously! Contemporary historians and scientists actually agreed with his theories! Even if not all of the Bible was being read as literal fact like modern American evangelicals, it was still treated as broadly factual and included in study the same as Greek philosophers. The problem was a lack of evidence or any way to prove anything. The timeline provided by the Bible was as close anyone had to evidence of geologic history. For most matters it didn't really matter, anyway. It wasn't until the 18th century that geologists took a good hard look at erosion and glaciation in particular and concluded that the processes involved had to be very slow and consequently the Earth itself had to be at least millions of years old.
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May 2, 2020 22:39
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evilweasel posted:Im pretty sure young earth creationism is more of a modern thing. I don't agree, and to build on what Epicurus said, in the early modern the pioneers of geology generally started working with the assumption of a young earth hypothesis. There directly based their work on a foundation laid by medieval theologians, and a lot of their research went into finding support for the idea that the earth was much older than suggested by biblical timelines.
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May 2, 2020 22:43
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There's a region in the northwest of the US where the terrain was formed by a series of catastrophic floods which had a hell of a time getting accepted because of how everything used to be attributed to Noah's flood
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May 2, 2020 22:44
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HEY GUNS posted:did not happen during the middle ages. Not the "church doctrine" part, not the "laughably wrong" part, not the part where everyone has secret knowledge and just pretends to believe the church (which is a common idea both when talking about the middle ages and when talking about fictionalized medieval settings) and not the part where they're afraid. Oh hey well my source is Galileo on this. Galileo says that everyone knows Copernican theory is right but they're just afraid to say so. He wrote that down. I think that assertion is in Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany. Are you guys really gonna "well actually" the Galileo affair? Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 23:31 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 23:25
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Arglebargle III posted:Oh hey well my source is Galileo on this. Galileo says that everyone knows Copernican theory is right but they're just afraid to say so. He wrote that down. Lol, he actually wrote that? That sounds like him. And certainly the trial of Galileo himself made more people afraid to say so. But there was also honest disagreement on the matter, which lasted for a while after Galileo. Even after pure geocentrism became untenable, the Tychonic system, in which the Sun and Moon orbit the Earth but the other five known planets orbit the Sun, was popular for a while and gave the same predictions as the Copernican system. Heliocentrism was only clearly proved correct by James Bradley in 1728. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 23:41 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 23:38
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Galileo's letters are long and rambling so I don't feel like digging through them, but I think I recall a paragraph on how astronomers everywhere are embarrassed to profess the geocentric theory because everyone has known it's unworkable for so long.
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May 2, 2020 23:42
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Arglebargle III posted:Oh hey well my source is Galileo on this. Galileo says that everyone knows Copernican theory is right but they're just afraid to say so. He wrote that down. I think that assertion is in Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany. You seriously believe the pop hist story of Galileo?
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May 2, 2020 23:42
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Arglebargle III posted:Galileo's letters are long and rambling so I don't feel like digging through them, but I think I recall a paragraph on how astronomers everywhere are embarrassed to profess the geocentric theory because everyone has known it's unworkable for so long. I can totally believe that Galileo would say that. It doesn't mean the other astronomers actually felt embarrassed.
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May 2, 2020 23:44
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Arglebargle III posted:Oh hey well my source is Galileo on this. Galileo says that everyone knows Copernican theory is right but they're just afraid to say so. He wrote that down. I think that assertion is in Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany. Galileo had a giant ego and was a lying idiot in many ways. With the evidence available at the time geocentrism was a very sensible position to take.
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May 2, 2020 23:45
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Zippy the Bummer posted:I was watching Spartacus (the movie) recently and took note of the fact that Crassus casually asks his protege, whose name I forget, whether he surrounded his camp with a moat and stockade. This is after protege-guy is defeated by the slave army and reports back to the Senate. He admits he did not, and everyone is astonished. Roman field camps had a wall and a ditch around them, and they did indeed build one every night according to the sources. The remains of some have been found. Presumably they brought the stakes for the walls with them and it was all a prefab structure. The ditch would be about six feet deep and surround the entire camp outside the wall, it's just another barrier for attackers. How long it would take, probably a couple hours? There's no way to be sure, but you can do a lot of work real fast with 6,000+ men who are well trained and practiced in it.
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May 2, 2020 23:45
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Arglebargle III posted:Oh hey well my source is Galileo on this. Galileo says that everyone knows Copernican theory is right but they're just afraid to say so. He wrote that down. I think that assertion is in Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany. Also I wouldn't call Galileo the middle ages.
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May 2, 2020 23:45
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Arglebargle III posted:Galileo's letters are long and rambling so I don't feel like digging through them, but I think I recall a paragraph on how astronomers everywhere are embarrassed to profess the geocentric theory because everyone has known it's unworkable for so long. What I recall from the Galileo affair is that the Pope and his advisors actually agreed with him, but wanted to introduce the idea to the public slowly and on their own terms. Galileo said "gently caress That" so they called in the Inquisition more to protect the Pope's authority than anything else. It was a rather complicated story.
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May 2, 2020 23:48
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Arglebargle III posted:Oh hey well my source is Galileo on this. Galileo says that everyone knows Copernican theory is right but they're just afraid to say so. He wrote that down. I think that assertion is in Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany. Yeah, it's like Tunicate posted. Galileo probably truly believed that unbelievable piece of bullshit. Hell, what if you now find some contemporary scholar from Galileo's time writing the exact opposite in a letter to some other noble, would your head explode?  Edit: Deteriorata posted:What I recall from the Galileo affair is that the Pope and his advisors actually agreed with him, but wanted to introduce the idea to the public slowly and on their own terms. Galileo said "gently caress That" so they called in the Inquisition more to protect the Pope's authority than anything else. What I recall from that affair was that the Pope wanted him to recant, but didn't think his heresy was bad enough to deserve the rose garden. Also there's this famous story about Galileo trying to make some dude look through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, and that dude adamantly refused to look through, since he preferred the idea of pure, unmarred spheres to the idea that some rocks may tumble wildly around Jupiter. He didn't want to take the chance he might change his opinion if he saw the moons with his own eyes or something like that. Libluini fucked around with this message at 23:54 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 23:48
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Like seriously Kepler's model was already well liked at that point, but Galileo hated it because (among other things) Galileo believed that the idea that the moon could somehow control the tides was occult nonsense, and HE had a perfectly good model of the tides sloshing around, which accurately gives them a 24 hour cycle *is told by local sailors that No, the tides are on a 12 hour cycle* which was a PERFECTLY good model of a 24 hour cycle and I trust my theory more than some dumbass sailors.
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May 2, 2020 23:50
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