bony tony posted:

I also just watched that Technology Connections video

3D Megadoodoo posted:

"The Greeks" had no opinion on the function of the brain.

Scarodactyl posted:

Aside from everything else about it, this is obviously not an authentic quote since the Greeks (and most people throughout history) didn't think of the brain as where intelligence is stored. That's a modern thing.

quote:

Well, this was a merry tour of the recesses of the Internet!

I began by repeating the search you already made. The first thing that struck me is how many people have copied the story across the web, often rephrasing it, but without ever changing or adding to its elements. As you already noticed, there doesn't seem to be any further ancient source behind it. The anecdote must therefore be a modern elaboration on Diogenes Laertios 6.54, which hasn't existed long enough to pick up further embellishments.

Google yields the most likely culprit: Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson (eds.), Philosophy: An Innovative Introduction: Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing (2010, reprinted 2018). This book uses short fictional stories as a way to introduce and teach philosophical concepts. One of its stories, 'The Cynic' by Charles Johnson, is told from Plato's perspective; it includes the anecdote in Diogenes Laertios, but then extends it with the exact riposte you've found elsewhere. It even gives us the pacing and phrasing that is common (with minor variations) to most of the versions this anecdote takes online.

It seems pretty obvious that this didactic fiction is the origin (and the reason) behind the extended anecdote. It is not historical. It does not occur in this form anywhere in the sources, and does not occur anywhere on the internet in a form that is demonstrably independent of Johnson's story.

The only problem is that you found three websites apparently dated to 2001, nine years before Boylan and Johnson published their story. However, as you said, the dates are all identical and this seems to be an issue with Google. When you go to the actual page and check the page info, you find that this one was actually published in 2015 and this one was first published in 2013 but edited as recently as 2018. The only one I couldn't verify was the broken PDF, but the pattern seems clear enough to assume that one also postdates 2010. If you change the Google search to show all results up to 31 December 2009, it adds only one page, which was published in 2009 but edited in 2018.

Tunicate posted:

Tunicate posted:

that's basically a myth, in the same way that columbus discovering the earth was round is a myth - in both cases these are people who believed something that was obviously false, who in have been mythologized and assigned modern beliefs instead of the ones the actually held, then treated as matyrs.

For instance, Semmelweiss' TRUE belief was specifically 'childbed fever is ONLY caused by pieces of corpses ('cadaverous particles') getting into women - so doctors who do dissections of cadavers spread it'.

To which the medical establishment sensibly responded 'so why do we also see this disease in hospitals that don't do dissections, then?'


Semmelweis certainly didn't believe it was a contagious disease - he's on record saying it definitely isn't!


People asked him for more data (since childbed fever was a disease that was well known to come in outbreaks, and he could have gotten lucky). He didn't publish any additional data for FOURTEEN YEARS - and in the meantime, even in his handwashing ward there was another outbreak of childbed fever.

Having had his 'no corpse hands = no fever' theory disproven, he revised his theory from 'cadaverous particles' being 'pieces of corpses', to 'things that can be produced inside living people as well', and blamed a lady on the same floor who had uterine cancer (given his lack of tact, probably with some comment like 'your poison womb is making the ICU too crowded').

Note that he wasn't even the first person to say 'hey maybe bad stuff on people's hands causes childbed fever', James Young Simpson published that theory ten years earlier - but he didn't say 'oh and that bad stuff is all corpse pieces and is the only way you get it' - making Semmelweis both late and wrong.

Torquemada posted:

Ack, someone needs to update his wikipedia page!

Platystemon posted:

I’m sure editors have had dozens of pages of edit war over it already.

quote:

The historic origins of wedding anniversaries date back to the Holy Roman Empire, when husbands crowned their wives with a silver wreath on their twenty-fifth anniversary, and a gold wreath on the fiftieth.

Covski posted:

The names of wedding anniversaries (gold, paper, diamond) etc are derived from the gift you would traditionally give to your spouse on the corresponding anniversary.

Covski posted:

The names of wedding anniversaries (gold, paper, diamond) etc are derived from the gift you would traditionally give to your spouse on the corresponding anniversary. This is INCREDIBLY obvious in hindsight, but for some reason this never clicked for me until I was looking it up on wikipedia for an unrelated reason, I somehow just thought they were unrelated arbitrary names.

bony tony posted:

I also just watched that Technology Connections video

Tunicate posted:

that's basically a myth, in the same way that columbus discovering the earth was round is a myth - in both cases these are people who believed something that was obviously false, who in have been mythologized and assigned modern beliefs instead of the ones the actually held, then treated as matyrs.

For instance, Semmelweiss' TRUE belief was specifically 'childbed fever is ONLY caused by pieces of corpses ('cadaverous particles') getting into women - so doctors who do dissections of cadavers spread it'.

To which the medical establishment sensibly responded 'so why do we also see this disease in hospitals that don't do dissections, then?'


Semmelweis certainly didn't believe it was a contagious disease - he's on record saying it definitely isn't!


People asked him for more data (since childbed fever was a disease that was well known to come in outbreaks, and he could have gotten lucky). He didn't publish any additional data for FOURTEEN YEARS - and in the meantime, even in his handwashing ward there was another outbreak of childbed fever.

Having had his 'no corpse hands = no fever' theory disproven, he revised his theory from 'cadaverous particles' being 'pieces of corpses', to 'things that can be produced inside living people as well', and blamed a lady on the same floor who had uterine cancer (given his lack of tact, probably with some comment like 'your poison womb is making the ICU too crowded').

Note that he wasn't even the first person to say 'hey maybe bad stuff on people's hands causes childbed fever', James Young Simpson published that theory ten years earlier - but he didn't say 'oh and that bad stuff is all corpse pieces and is the only way you get it' - making Semmelweis both late and wrong.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

If true I am quite relieved. I was genuinely upset for a while yesterday for this long-deceased person. I am well aware that life is never, ever fair but the irony of everything seemed a bit much. I am still empathetic but less troubled now

3D Megadoodoo posted:

I'm gonna drink a lava lamp.

Carthag Tuek posted:

Then you shouldn't read this:
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3749916&pagenumber=201&perpage=40#post495857184

Medicine and surgery are probably among the places where it's most immediately obvious how much Strong Men can gently caress poo poo up. So many big egos through the ages, patriarchs and bigots. So many lives lost.

Carthag Tuek posted:

Anyway, I guess dying two weeks after you get comitted to a 19th century mental asylum is a blessing in disguise

Carthag Tuek posted:

Sorry, re-reading my old post, I've clearly skipped over Levy being the main promotor of surgical sterility in Denmark and Howitz being too big a deal to let some Jew doctor tell him what to do, all the while Nielsen could tell who was right but had no voice. There's a lot of meat in her diaries, but I guess they haven't been translated into English.

Anyway, I guess dying two weeks after you get comitted to a 19th century mental asylum is a blessing in disguise

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Here's the Wikipedia article for Semmelweis, should anybody else be curious, because I looked him up after reading your post and am so distressed over the way this person's life panned out. Jesus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

spreading misinformation though apparently!

Carthag Tuek posted:

I would like a source for that, because that doesn't seem obvious to me at all (except as a cognate to like medals)

fwiw, "Guldbryllup" is mentioned in Danish newspapers in the late 1700s.

Carthag Tuek posted:

e: lmao the comment on the edit that put the citation needed tag there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wedding_anniversary&diff=897261286&oldid=894934433

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Thing I can't believe I just figured out: Pillsbury baked goods. For those unfamiliar, they're premade to-be-baked tasties such as croissants ("crescents") and cinnamon rolls and biscuits. They come in a tube that's scored all the way down in a spiral and, the package advises you, just unwrap it and press a spoon against one of the seams; the tube will pop open and you're good to go.

Except that never works for me. Are my spoons weak? Am I weak? Is every Pillsbury tube I purchase defective or am I somehow pressing a spoon against a pre-scored seam wrong? I always end up bashing them against the counter and my roommate thinks me batty. I have so much trouble with the drat things. I don't understand at all.

Today I realized I can just give the little poo poo a quick untwist motion and boom. Open Sesame Pillsbury.

I feel at once triumphant and very, very stupid.

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

Thing I can't believe I just figured out: Pillsbury baked goods. For those unfamiliar, they're premade to-be-baked tasties such as croissants ("crescents") and cinnamon rolls and biscuits. They come in a tube that's scored all the way down in a spiral and, the package advises you, just unwrap it and press a spoon against one of the seams; the tube will pop open and you're good to go.

Except that never works for me. Are my spoons weak? Am I weak? Is every Pillsbury tube I purchase defective or am I somehow pressing a spoon against a pre-scored seam wrong? I always end up bashing them against the counter and my roommate thinks me batty. I have so much trouble with the drat things. I don't understand at all.

Today I realized I can just give the little poo poo a quick untwist motion and boom. Open Sesame Pillsbury.

I feel at once triumphant and very, very stupid.

John Lee posted:

All the Pillsbury things I recall have a paper thing you pull, and it unwraps in a spiral until the inner pressure overcomes the now weak and flimsy paper and BAMPs outwards. Am I crazy here? What's this spoon business?