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Even if you're not in itally it's worth looking around for what Roman ruins are nearby. They left that poo poo loving everywhere. I forget what city it was in Germany (maybe Bonn?) but I distinctly remember a city tram stop that was built so that it backed up against some dilapidated roman something. I want to say it was like a wall with an arch and maybe a second wall intersecting it. Cologne is chock full of them if you're in the neighbhorhood.
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Sep 12, 2020 17:34
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If you're ever in southern France Pont du Gard was pretty freaking impressive. I didn't have time to go to Nîmes, unfortunately, that trip was just not long enough.
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Sep 12, 2020 17:53
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We hit up the City museum, Mask of Destiny and the Circus Maximus. Also revisited a few spots due to a party member who hadn’t seen it yet. Wonderful day again. I could walk around for weeks there.
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Sep 12, 2020 18:11
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Some good news, a long awaited update to Carbon dating has arrived: The article, with some additional info on how Carbon dating works. To summarize, a lot of dates across Human history can now be re-dated a bit more accurately, and the earliest part of history you can use Carbon dating for has moved back a bit. I also didn't know Carbon dating works only up to ca. 50k BC. I guess there's a reason we can't just Carbon date the last dinosaurs or something, huh.
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Sep 12, 2020 18:16
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Baron Porkface posted:What fairy tale does the Wild hunt come from? I only heard about it from the witcher or maybe Warhammer. Probably originally proto Indo-European since it's all over the loving place.
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Sep 12, 2020 18:45
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Grand Fromage posted:Rome is naturally one of the more expensive parts of Italy, but the further south you go the cheaper it gets. The one specific thing I remember was a Coke in Rome was 5 Euro, but in Campania was 0.50 Euro. Also good bottles of wine down south were like three Euro. I guess airline tickets aren’t bad now hah.
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Sep 12, 2020 18:47
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I had to join the navy to get cheap tickets here. Hell they just gave them to me to get to Italy.
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Sep 12, 2020 18:51
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I've only been to Milan and Reggio Emilia and both those places were insanely cheap (by northern European standards probably expensive by American standards)
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Sep 12, 2020 18:58
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Libluini posted:I also didn't know Carbon dating works only up to ca. 50k BC. I guess there's a reason we can't just Carbon date the last dinosaurs or something, huh. Yeah, it has a hard limit. Fortunately there are other radioactive atoms we can use for older dating, like potassium-argon dating.
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Sep 12, 2020 19:10
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Dinosaur “bones” are also not carbon I don’t think
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Sep 12, 2020 19:13
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Yeah they're replaced by minerals so you can use rock dating methods for them. Carbon's for living matter. I think potassium does both.
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Sep 12, 2020 19:21
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After a certain point, enough of the radioactive carbon has decayed that we can't measure how much ( if any) is left. Current techniques are accurate to measuring roughly 1/1000 of the normal carbon radioactivity (which is already tiny) but when you are at such small levels your dates are sensitive to how accurate your calibrations are, and better calibration is what the updates to carbon dsting standards is about.
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Sep 12, 2020 19:21
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Libluini posted:Some good news, a long awaited update to Carbon dating has arrived: Carbon-14 has a half-life of about 5700 years, so every multiple of that halves the amount left. By the time you get to 50,000 years, you're down to about 1/210 of what was there originally, and it gets hard to count accurately.
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Sep 12, 2020 19:56
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah, it has a hard limit. Fortunately there are other radioactive atoms we can use for older dating, like potassium-argon dating. Hey, neat! Didn't know there were other dating methods besides Carbon. Seems like posting that article already paid off, as I learned even more from this thread thanks to it. 
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Sep 12, 2020 20:12
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Libluini posted:Hey, neat! Didn't know there were other dating methods besides Carbon. Yep! The other big one is uranium-lead dating, which lets you go well into the billions of years. Not useful for living things, but super useful for geology. There's a whole bunch of others too but carbon, potassium, and uranium are the big three.
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Sep 12, 2020 20:37
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euphronius posted:Dinosaur “bones” are also not carbon Some still have a little bit of organic material in them! The radioactive carbon’s half life is only like 5700 years anyway so that creates a hard limit to how far back it can go. Edit lol I left this post sit way too long
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Sep 12, 2020 20:42
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Baron Porkface posted:What fairy tale does the Wild hunt come from? I only heard about it from the witcher or maybe Warhammer. It's in Walter Map
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Sep 12, 2020 20:59
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cheetah7071 posted:Complexity is not something that can be meaningfully measured but for example modern Finnish has 14 noun cases compared to 9 in reconstructed proto-Finnish I think "inflected" was the term I was looking for, that's a little more specific.
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Sep 12, 2020 21:08
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The Wild Hunt pops up a couple of times in the Icelandic sagas. Usually as a bad omen.
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Sep 12, 2020 21:12
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Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur isotope ratios are also used in biology and archaeology for more recent stuff, can tell something about what how something living ate or lived, as different isotopes vary how they move and sort through trophic levels, marine or terrestrial or even different photosynthesis systems.
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Sep 13, 2020 08:11
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SlothfulCobra posted:The reliance on slavery did suppress industrialization, but so far as I know, that wasn't particularly a driver for abolition, since most of the powerful people in the south were married to the order of things and suicidally dedicated to preserving it at any cost. Even after forcible emancipation, racism and slavery-lite continued onward at great economic cost to society (on top of the human and moral cost). Long-term economic advantage of a free and equal society normally gets overlooked compared to moral imperative to end suffering and inequality, and even then it can be tough to get anything done about it. I always thought of it as a process of natural selection (i.e states that abolished slavery post industrialization gained the economical advantage in the long run, as you stated). This would allow them to eventually become militarily and diplomatically (through foreign aid and the like) more powerful, and thus enforce their values on other states that haven't yet abolished slavery whenever they did come into conflict with states that still practiced slavery. I'm sure there's also a ton of other factors that I haven't read about as well. At the very least, I know this is how it worked with more advanced military techniques or technology, and the loser generally adopts the military practices of the winners if they survive the war. Cetea fucked around with this message at 08:30 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 08:12
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Cetea posted:I always thought of it as a process of natural selection (i.e states that abolished slavery post industrialization gained the economical advantage in the long run, as you stated). This would allow them to eventually become militarily and diplomatically (through foreign aid and the like) more powerful, and thus enforce their values on other states that haven't yet abolished slavery whenever they did come into conflict with states that still practiced slavery. I'm sure there's also a ton of other factors that I haven't read about as well. At the very least, I know this is how it worked with more advanced military techniques or technology, and the loser generally adopts the military practices of the winners if they survive the war. Slavery financed industrialization. The profits made from slavery flowed into financial institutions which then had the capital to loan for large industrial ventures. The flow of cash from southern plantations to northern (and British) banks and from thence to northern industrial entrepreneurs is a major factor in how the US industrialized. The same is also true for English industrialization, with the money coming from both British slave owners (especially the extremely lucrative Caribbean sugar plantations) and, post the US Revolution, the newly independent American slaveowners. Even after the British officially banned slaver and the slave trade their financial system made huge amounts of money off of it. Also "the loser adopts the winner's military techniques" is a problematic read of history, at the best. The vast majority of the time wars are decided by factors other than specific weapons or tactics. History isn't a tech tree. There's no 20% malus to having inferior rifles or a commander who's command score is ten points lower than your opponents, and fixing the problem for the losing side is rarely as simple as adopting some structure or strategy that they employed against you. Hell, usually the war prompts major reforms in the military that won it, to boot.
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Sep 13, 2020 16:55
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Falukorv posted:Carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur isotope ratios are also used in biology and archaeology for more recent stuff, can tell something about what how something living ate or lived, as different isotopes vary how they move and sort through trophic levels, marine or terrestrial or even different photosynthesis systems. You can use it to figure out where people grew up too. There's different ratios of isotopes in water? I think? in different parts of the world, and that gets incorporated into your dental enamel as a kid. And since enamel doesn't naturally regrow or replace, the teeth are a permanent record of where you're from.
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Sep 13, 2020 17:11
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Grand Fromage posted:You can use it to figure out where people grew up too. There's different ratios of isotopes in water? It's called strontium and it is in water. Libluini posted:I also didn't know Carbon dating works only up to ca. 50k BC. I guess there's a reason we can't just Carbon date the last dinosaurs or something, huh. I've heard that nuclear bombs have really hosed up carbon dating. That the bomb tests released so much C-14 in the atmosphere that it will be impossible to use this method in the future to date archaeological finds. Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 19:28
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Geiger counters use (used?) steel from the scuttled German fleet at Scapa flow because steel made after 1945 is too radioactive.
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Sep 13, 2020 20:04
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Salvaging pre-nuclear steel from sunken ships is a huge (and often illegal) business. Basically every sunken ship from WWI or WWII that's less than 1000 feet down and not within the territorial waters of a country that cares, has been destroyed for scrap. War grave or not.
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Sep 14, 2020 04:32
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That’s usually less about pre-nuke steel and more about the wrecks being located near poor people who want to feed their kids. That poo poo is just getting fed into the normal scrap pipelines.
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Sep 14, 2020 04:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:Slavery financed industrialization. The profits made from slavery flowed into financial institutions which then had the capital to loan for large industrial ventures. The flow of cash from southern plantations to northern (and British) banks and from thence to northern industrial entrepreneurs is a major factor in how the US industrialized. The same is also true for English industrialization, with the money coming from both British slave owners (especially the extremely lucrative Caribbean sugar plantations) and, post the US Revolution, the newly independent American slaveowners. Yes, slavery was absolutely one (out of many) of the causes of industrialization (I actually posted multiple journals above to back this). And industrialization was also one of the main causes of ending slavery, by making non-industrialized states not as competitive, thus forcing said states to industrialize (again, posted journal articles above). As a result, it went from slavery -> industrialization -> industrialized states surge ahead in power compared to non industrialized states (while no longer needing slaves within their own borders to function), causing others to follow in their steps. This does not mean that an industrialized state cannot profit off slavery, but that it offers incentives for states that still have slavery to industrialize. Of course a state could refuse to industrialize, but that would mean they got economically and militarily left behind, thus making them weaker and more prone to being defeated by their enemies who did industrialize. And then once most states reached that level of development, the slave trade suffered as a result, as there was simply less demand for raw, unskilled human labour. After all, we no longer need massive amounts of human labour to farm (yes, many states did farm without slavery even in the medieval era, but many also did, thus increasing demand for slaves in the agricultural sector), nor do we need them to cultivate sugar, quarry stone, or mine in dangerous areas (advanced tools require a level of training that you wouldn't want to invest into a slave). This is not to say that the reasons for abolishment were purely economical, there were also religious and ideological reasons for it as well; I simply support the side that says the economical reason was more important (as an economically advanced state also tends to have a more educated population, which leads to cultural shifts as well), but there are good arguments for all three factors (and presently there's still no consensus, so technically you can hold any position and be 'correct' as it were). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1750-0206.2007.tb00684.x (as one of the many studies on the economical reasons why the slave trade ended). And as for your second point, I am not talking about just technology, I am talking about general logistics, organization, cultural, or any other kind of adaptation. The best example would be the Napoleonic Wars; the logistical innovations he made, the tactics he used in his early victories, all of these were eventually adopted by his enemies after their earlier defeats. As for 'fixing the problem', the losing side often spent years reforming themselves after a major defeat, if they survived at all. If we were to draw inspiration from classical history, the earliest Roman troops used a Greek Hoplite style of army; they adopted the gladius from the Gallic tribes they fought, as they performed better in the terrain (generally hilly) that the Romans often fought in the early days (this is not to say that the Roman maniple is objectively superior to the phalanx, merely that it was superior in the environment where the Romans fought in). There's also the famous example how Scipio out-Hannibaled Hannibal during the Battle of Zama, though his implementation of the envelopment was a little simpler (and naturally, Rome already had a far superior logistical system in place, which was why they could recover from Cannae in the first place). Wars are a cauldron of innovation in that it forces a state to recognize deficiencies (wherever they are, it does not matter if it's technological, ideological, tactical or logistical) and thus improve upon them (this applies to the winner as well as the loser). If they fail to adapt to the theater of war better than their opponent, generally that state is defeated, and that usually leads to a whole host of changes to society, if they are not destroyed entirely. I do not appreciate you straw-manning my argument. Of course, I would love to hear an argument (or an example) of how an non industrialized state that successfully abolished slavery (yes, Emperor Yongzheng of the Qing did abolish all slavery officially, but it still persisted in many forms, such as selling your daughter to someone for marriage, up to the 1940s at the very least) all on its own without outside pressures (in the forms of diplomatic or economic sanctions and etc); to me that would be a pretty good argument for how ending slavery had nothing to do with industrialization. Cetea fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 04:56
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Arglebargle III posted:Up until the early 20th century there were still hill tribes in southern China who were well-known for abducting lowland girls and keeping them as slaves. “Up until the early 20th century” is optimistic; there remained until at least the 1990s a brisk illegal trade in stolen children to the remote countryside for desperate families that need the labour, and I wouldn’t like to commit to the practice having ended today. I was recently reading David Graff’s Medieval Chinese Warfare, which asserts that during the post-Three Kingdoms pre-Tang period there was too much productive land available relative to the peasants available to farm it (due to lots of people dying), leading the petty kings/warlords to spend a lot of time invading each other to steal population who could be resettled and set to work. It’s not exactly slavery, but it’s not exactly not slavery, either. The Tang penal code also has the crime of móu pàn (谋叛), a subset of treason that includes leaving the country or your city without permission, although I don’t know how far down the social scale this would have been applied. Abducting people for sale also seems to have been common enough to be treated in the Tang code as equivalent to conspiracy to murder, which suggests the existence of an active market in human misery. Again; not slavery in the Roman and certainly not the triangle trade sense, but not exactly not slavery either. E: naturally abduction for sale of a relative is a more serious crime than abduction for sale of a stranger. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 06:29
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Cetea posted:Yes, slavery was absolutely one (out of many) of the causes of industrialization (I actually posted multiple journals above to back this). And industrialization was also one of the main causes of ending slavery, by making non-industrialized states not as competitive, thus forcing said states to industrialize (again, posted journal articles above). As a result, it went from slavery -> industrialization -> industrialized states surge ahead in power compared to non industrialized states (while no longer needing slaves within their own borders to function), causing others to follow in their steps. This does not mean that an industrialized state cannot profit off slavery, but that it offers incentives for states that still have slavery to industrialize. Of course a state could refuse to industrialize, but that would mean they got economically and militarily left behind, thus making them weaker and more prone to being defeated by their enemies who did industrialize. And then once most states reached that level of development, the slave trade suffered as a result, as there was simply less demand for raw, unskilled human labour. After all, we no longer need massive amounts of human labour to farm (yes, many states did farm without slavery even in the medieval era, but many also did, thus increasing demand for slaves in the agricultural sector), nor do we need them to cultivate sugar, quarry stone, or mine in dangerous areas (advanced tools require a level of training that you wouldn't want to invest into a slave). This is not to say that the reasons for abolishment were purely economical, there were also religious and ideological reasons for it as well; I simply support the side that says the economical reason was more important (as an economically advanced state also tends to have a more educated population, which leads to cultural shifts as well), but there are good arguments for all three factors (and presently there's still no consensus, so technically you can hold any position and be 'correct' as it were). If slavery directly leads to industrialisation, why was Germany one of the leading industrial powers and not Portugal or spain? They had plenty of slave capital heading home, unlike the germans. The industrial revolution is a unique event in human history, and probably the result of an conflux of causes together more than one element. Also... medieval europe abolished slavery quite effectly just by strength of moral authority - it was one of the big changes the normal invasiom brought to England. In general slavery is something you see as a romam holdover the catholic church puts a lot of time into fighting over the early mediveal period. Unless you're taking such a expansive definition of slavery that africans s being shipped over to sugar plantations and a noble marriage are exactly the same thing, in which case I don't know what to tell you.
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Sep 14, 2020 08:52
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Nothingtoseehere posted:If slavery directly leads to industrialisation, why was Germany one of the leading industrial powers and not Portugal or spain? They had plenty of slave capital heading home, unlike the germans. The industrial revolution is a unique event in human history, and probably the result of an conflux of causes together more than one element.
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Sep 14, 2020 09:00
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Hey, can you guys recommend me a textbook on classical rhetoric as understood by educated Italians around 1400? I’d rather read one written for a modern audience but I guess an English translation of a period source would do. I want to say it’s for an RPG because that'd be cooler, but no, I’m trying to understand a martial arts manual.
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Sep 14, 2020 09:41
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Nessus posted:Didn't the Junkers basically have serfs? And I suppose you could say Germany was able to take advantage of the capital produced from slavery if indirectly... but that is certainly an interesting point. Leibeigenschaft is pretty much slavery. Though, you get to keep bits of your produce, yay! The correct question is, where does the capital for german industrialisation come from. "Germany" pre 1870 heh.
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Sep 14, 2020 11:41
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Not having slavery was easier too because if your workers got sick or ill gently caress em there’s more yokels from the country looking for work to stay alive.
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Sep 14, 2020 11:45
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LingcodKilla posted:Not having slavery was easier too because if your workers got sick or ill gently caress em there’s more yokels from the country looking for work to stay alive. More over you have to pay for a slave upfront, which increases debt and financial instability, especially with the primitive credit systems of the early modern era.
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Sep 14, 2020 11:53
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Power Khan posted:Leibeigenschaft is pretty much slavery. Though, you get to keep bits of your produce, yay! In the latter case however I was thinking in the sense that the various profits of slavery in England and France etc. did not just sit there like a heap of gold, that stuff moved around, and some of that would have benefited the Germanies. Like slavery profits being invested in German concerns or used to purchase German products, that kind of thing. Though I imagine a comparable impact was the noble potato.
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Sep 14, 2020 12:08
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Nothingtoseehere posted:If slavery directly leads to industrialisation, why was Germany one of the leading industrial powers and not Portugal or spain? They had plenty of slave capital heading home, unlike the germans. The industrial revolution is a unique event in human history, and probably the result of an conflux of causes together more than one element. I never claimed that slavery always lead to industrialization, but was merely a major factor in its rise (particularly the transatlantic slave trade, there's a great number of papers that show how it spurred the industrialization of Great Britain, mostly as slavery produced the raw materials, and the industry in Britain processed said raw materials into more valuable goods, which in turn could be sold and traded for more slaves, which produced even more raw materials and etc). There are of course other factors, such as geopolitical incentives, demographic shifts, access to resources, and many others that I haven't read about yet. Again, I'd point out all the papers I have linked above that shows this one way or another. Furthermore, as another poster said, it would be very hard to say that Germany did not benefit from slavery one way or another, seeing it was in the same system economically as the powers that did benefit directly from slavery (neighbors being flush with cash generally creates opportunities). As for slavery in Europe, the Ottoman Empire had a very well entrenched system of slavery (and it was the strongest land based power in Europe for at least a century). In Russia, 'serf' was just another byword for slavery, as you could actually buy, sell, and kill many of them without cause (there were some other 'serfs' that was of a slightly different class that did have more rights). In medieval Western Europe, they did still have slaves (particularly in Scandinavia. up to the late 13th century), but they were not too common, and usually were foreign prisoners of war. Most of the time though, the serfs made more money for the lords than an actual slave (less management required, no upfront cost, as another poster pointed out, so saying it was abolished by 'moral authority' alone would be a stretch; there were likely many factors involved). Even so, life as a serf was pretty harsh, and having one bad winter could easily mean you'd starve to death. Not to mention how some random conflict between nobles could end up leveling your farm (simply because of a marching army for instance), with your crops being foraged away by one side or another. In the ERE, they had a pretty entrenched system of slavery as well, but their serfs did enjoy certain rights even in wartime (as the army was forbidden from foraging crops in their own lands without permission, needing to pay for them instead). Marching across a farm also required prior notice, and care was taken to ensure that minimal damage was done to private property. (Source: Maurice's Strategikon) Cetea fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 13:03
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So Emperor Valerian was captured in battle by the Sassanids and lived in captivity until his death. But how believable are the reports from western sources that he was subjected to such indignities as being used as a footstool? I've read some primary sources written generations after his death, but haven't seen any Persian ones.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:32
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Kevin DuBrow posted:So Emperor Valerian was captured in battle by the Sassanids and lived in captivity until his death. But how believable are the reports from western sources that he was subjected to such indignities as being used as a footstool? I've read some primary sources written generations after his death, but haven't seen any Persian ones. If you could use a Roman emperor as a footstool, wouldn't you? Case closed.
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Sep 14, 2020 20:02
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Kevin DuBrow posted:So Emperor Valerian was captured in battle by the Sassanids and lived in captivity until his death. But how believable are the reports from western sources that he was subjected to such indignities as being used as a footstool? I've read some primary sources written generations after his death, but haven't seen any Persian ones. They’re questionable for sure. The footstool story (and also that of his being flayed and his skin hung up) comes from Lactantius’ Deaths of the Persecutors which is hardly an unbiased source and has every interest in making Valerian’s capture and death as disgraceful as possible, since that’s the whole point of the book: gently caress around with Christ and find out. On the other hand there is no extant Persian or Roman source that could contradict this; if we set aside Lactantius here then we don’t know anything about Valerian’s end apart from that he died in Persian captivity. Lactantius was a major religious intellectual of his day, a member of Constantine’s circle, but we don’t really know what reason he had to make this claim about Valerian and he doesn’t bother to argue it for us. e: editing to add a bad rear end cameo of Shapur ganking Valerian  Here’s also the pertinent passage of Shapur’s commemorative inscription on the subject. No mention of what happened to Valerian after his capture, although this would be the place to brag about it: quote:18. I’m not sure why he cites Germany twice, particularly since the second time he seems to be placing it in the Mediterranean... skasion fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 22:16
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