Some Guy TT posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/WeirdMedieval/status/1564361178075332608

indigi posted:

3D holofoil image.

indigi posted:

the plural of dice is deece, as in "those are pretty deece" or "DMs are deece nuts"

Sherbert Hoover posted:

Was there any real difference between Flavius Aetius and Ricimer aside from their ethnicity? Seems like the whole nefarious barbarian general trope of late antiquity is more of an institutional problem than anything to do with the migration.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Only one of them ended up having a huge meltdown in the Forum.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Only one of them ended up having a huge meltdown in the Forum.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Only one of them ended up having a huge meltdown in the Forum.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Only one of them ended up having a huge meltdown in the Forum.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Only one of them ended up having a huge meltdown in the Forum.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Only one of them ended up having a huge meltdown in the Forum.

Azathoth posted:

for real, is that part of the etymology on snot? because split pea soup looks like snot from when you're really sick and is about as appetizing to consume

quote:

Surgical amputation of a limb 31,000 years ago in Borneo

The prevailing view regarding the evolution of medicine is that the emergence of settled agricultural societies around 10,000 years ago (the Neolithic Revolution) gave rise to a host of health problems that had previously been unknown among non-sedentary foraging populations, stimulating the first major innovations in prehistoric medical practices1,2. Such changes included the development of more advanced surgical procedures, with the oldest known indication of an ‘operation’ formerly thought to have consisted of the skeletal remains of a European Neolithic farmer (found in Buthiers-Boulancourt, France) whose left forearm had been surgically removed and then partially healed3. Dating to around 7,000 years ago, this accepted case of amputation would have required comprehensive knowledge of human anatomy and considerable technical skill, and has thus been viewed as the earliest evidence of a complex medical act3. Here, however, we report the discovery of skeletal remains of a young individual from Borneo who had the distal third of their left lower leg surgically amputated, probably as a child, at least 31,000 years ago. The individual survived the procedure and lived for another 6–9 years, before their remains were intentionally buried in Liang Tebo cave, which is located in East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, in a limestone karst area that contains some of the world’s earliest dated rock art4. This unexpectedly early evidence of a successful limb amputation suggests that at least some modern human foraging groups in tropical Asia had developed sophisticated medical knowledge and skills long before the Neolithic farming transition.

Some Guy TT posted:

Some Guy TT posted:

Some Guy TT posted:

Crusader posted:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05160-8

Tulip posted:

This is incredible and I'm so amazed that they could tell it was an amputation during life and not post mortem. I mean I know how they do it but its still incredible to me. Also given the extreme paucity of paleolithic remains, there's an implication here that this wasn't a one-off.

quote:

Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing

Socrates (469-399 BCE) was a Greek Philosopher who thought and taught through argumentative dialogue, or dialectic. Socrates did not write down any of his thoughts, however his dialogues were recorded by his student and protégé, the philosopher Plato (428 – 347 BCE). Here Socrates discusses the deficiencies of writing.

SOCRATES: … Among the ancient gods of Naucratis in Egypt there was one to whom the bird called the ibis is sacred. The name of that divinity was Theuth, and it was he who first discovered number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, as well as the games of checkers and dice, and, above all else, writing.

Now the king of all Egypt at that time was Thamus, who lived in the great city in the upper region that the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes … . Theuth came to exhibit his arts to him and urged him to disseminate them to all the Egyptians. Thamus asked him about the usefulness of each art, and while Theuth was explaining it, Thamus praised him for whatever he thought was right in his explanations and criticized him for whatever he thought was wrong.

The story goes that Thamus said much to Theuth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.”

PHAEDRUS: Socrates, you’re very good at making up stories from Egypt or wherever else you want!

SOCRATES: But, my friend, the priests of the temple of Zeus at Dodona say that the first prophecies were the words of an oak. Everyone who lived at that time, not being as wise as you young ones are today, found it rewarding enough in their simplicity to listen to an oak or even a stone, so long as it was telling the truth, while it seems to make a difference to you, Phaedrus, who is speaking and where he comes from. Why, though, don’t you just consider whether what he says is right or wrong?

PHAEDRUS: I deserved that, Socrates. And I agree that the Theban king was correct about writing.

SOCRATES: Well, then, those who think they can leave written instructions for an art, as well as those who accept them, thinking that writing can yield results that are clear or certain, must be quite naive and truly ignorant of [Thamos’] prophetic judgment: otherwise, how could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?

PHAEDRUS: Quite right.

SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.

PHAEDRUS: You are absolutely right about that, too.

SOCRATES: Now tell me, can we discern another kind of discourse, a legitimate brother of this one? Can we say how it comes about, and how it is by nature better and more capable?

PHAEDRUS: Which one is that? How do you think it comes about?

SOCRATES: It is a discourse that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener; it can defend itself, and it knows for whom it should speak and for whom it should remain silent.

Plato. c.399-347 BCE. “Phaedrus.” Pp. 551-552 in Compete Works, edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis IN: Hackett.

mawarannahr posted:

Socrates: right or wrong?

Chamale posted:

I was reading about the trial and execution of Socrates and I got the impression that he deserved it, which is very different from what I was taught in school. He collaborated with a dictatorship that murdered a lot of Athenians, and in his defence he claimed that he didn't resist them but he didn't actively help them. There was an amnesty for anyone who committed crimes during the tyranny, so he was executed on a pretext of corrupting the youth, but really it was vengeance against the Spartan tyranny. Are there other historians who have this view on him, or am I way off base?

They knew about rocks that emit light when crushed because they have phosphorus in them. A chemist would have known about it, but probably not the average person. Thomas Browne wrote about it in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which is a fun 17th-century book about applying the scientific method to a lot of contemporary beliefs.

mawarannahr posted:

Socrates: right or wrong?

Eldoop posted:

I think he's sort of right in that people won't bother committing certain things to memory if they know they can just look it up, but I don't think that leads to a general "forgetfulness" or lack of understanding or whatever so much as just a shifting of how and where we "remember" different types of information. Instead of having to commit all the little fine details of something to memory, we can just remember the broader strokes and remember where to look up the precise figures. Like I could tell you some general things about, idk, The Odyssey, but I couldn't recite it from memory, because all I need to know for the life I live is those broad ideas. And if I ever do need more precise information I know where to find it easily, although even that knowledge in a lot of cases can be reduced down to just "google it". And the bit about writing enabling people to "hear many things without being properly taught" is I think especially wrong. It's very easy to memorize something without understanding it, as Socrates himself shows in some other dialogues!

quote:

Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation

Louisa Dahmani and Véronique D. Bohbot

Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation devices and applications have become ubiquitous over the last decade. However, it is unclear whether using GPS affects our own internal navigation system, or spatial memory, which critically relies on the hippocampus. We assessed the lifetime GPS experience of 50 regular drivers as well as various facets of spatial memory, including spatial memory strategy use, cognitive mapping, and landmark encoding using virtual navigation tasks. We first present cross-sectional results that show that people with greater lifetime GPS experience have worse spatial memory during self-guided navigation, i.e. when they are required to navigate without GPS. In a follow-up session, 13 participants were retested three years after initial testing. Although the longitudinal sample was small, we observed an important effect of GPS use over time, whereby greater GPS use since initial testing was associated with a steeper decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial memory. Importantly, we found that those who used GPS more did not do so because they felt they had a poor sense of direction, suggesting that extensive GPS use led to a decline in spatial memory rather than the other way around. These findings are significant in the context of society’s increasing reliance on GPS.