ishikabibble posted:

Hitlerine is the worst mouthwash.

Krankenstyle posted:

For reference: People were short as hell in the olden tymes. I know Victoria was a bit later than this, but some time ago I went through the conscription rolls for my hometown, and in 1802 the average height of adult males was 62.45 zealandic inches; these are slightly longer than imperial inches, being 1/24th of zealandic alen (62.81 cm), which is 2.62 cm, whereas 1 imperial inch is 2.54 cm.

So: Adult males in my hometown were in 1802 on average 1.63 m or ~5'4.5" imperial.

You can really tell when you walk through doorways in old houses

Der Kyhe posted:

The modern day North Korean guards at the DMZ are also noticeably smaller than their South Korean counterparts and that split is less than 80 years ago. And probably both countries send their best, most imposing dudes to that job. So it definitely is nutrition and harshness issue.

Also, American/European dudes tend to impose both of them, so there are also some genetics involved, possibly?

quote:

Bol came from a family of extraordinarily tall men and women. "My mother was 6 ft 10 in (2.08 m), my father 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m), and my sister is 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m)", he said. "And my great-grandfather was even taller—7 ft 10 in (2.39 m)." His ethnic group, the Dinka, and the Nilotic people of which they are a part, are among the tallest populations in the world. Bol's hometown, Turalei, is the origin of other exceptionally tall people, including 7 ft 4 in (2.24 m) basketball player Ring Ayuel

Gargamel Gibson posted:

For real? I googled "alexander selkirk goatfucker" and found nothing.

quote:

He fashioned tools, became adept at catching goats—some of them for fornication, others for food and pelts.

Wipfmetz posted:

Btw: please do not confuse "dutch" with "deutsch" on the internet. Thank you.

DONT TOUCH THE PC posted:

Where does that leave the Danes?

edit:
By which I mean, it seems that Danes are swamp-Germans, but also Scandinavians?

hard counter posted:

edward vii was the one with the sexsled no-one's 100% sure on how it was supposed to work

ChubbyChecker posted:

Alhazred posted:

Fun fact: When the platypus was discovered people realized that it was anatomically built to lay eggs but they had yet to find an egglaying platypus. The solution was to shoot platypuses en masse to find one with eggs. In 1884 William Hay Caldwell arrived in Australia and hired 150 aboriginals to kill every platypus they could find. Finally Caldwell managed to shoot one platypus that had just laid an egg and had another in it's cervix.

ToxicFrog posted:

Most cheeses and yoghurts are cultured, i.e. a useful microorganism does most of the work of turning the milk/cream into the finished product. Lactose is good food for bacteria (that's what happens with lactose intolerance: if you can't process it in the small intestine, it passes into the large intestine, where your intestinal microbes use it to go on a massive bender instead), so the bacterial culture eats the lactose and excretes delicious flavour. Since the sensitivity is to lactose specifically, not casein or other milk components, this makes it comparatively safe to eat.

Note that this doesn't apply to uncultured cheeses (paneer, haloumi) or yoghurts (some mass-produced yoghurts are made with gelling/flavouring agents rather than bacterial cultures and still have all their lactose) -- those are just as unsafe as drinking the milk straight.

Cream also has less lactose than the milk it's made from, since it has proportionally more fat (which does not contain lactose). Butter has much less, for the same reason.

Pookah posted:

I used to work with a really nice guy from Quebec. Obviously, he spoke french, and also english to a certain extent, but definitely not fluently. Anyway, he was working as a french language games tester, so it was playing through stuff in french and logging any issues with the translation. His bugs kept getting sent back by the translators as technically correct but only in extremely old-fashioned french, not modern french from France. So yeah, my understanding is that québécois french retains both vocabulary and grammatical rules that haven't been common use in french from France in a long time. It's pretty cool.

Krankenstyle posted:

for future reference, swamp germans are the dutch. norwegians are mountain apes.

danes are potato something, i forgot

DACK FAYDEN posted:

Raven Rock is insane.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Pretty sure one of the universal things in history is soldiers being idiots.

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Modern History TV is a youtube channel with a charming British fellow doing quick 5-10 minute bits on how people used to live in the medieval period.

One of the episodes which youtube just radomly recommended to me was about hoods. Now that sounds like the least interesting thing in the world, but it covered the origins of the chaperon, which the more astute nerds will recognise as the incredibly stupid looking hat worn by Roche in the Witcher series.

The less astute nerds, like myself, will simply be astounded that it was a real loving hat people actually wore.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XvEK6d9hEM

Red Bones posted:

A fun game I like to play is looking up words on etymonline dot com to see which English words I can find with the most obscure roots outside of the standard French/Latin/Germanic. Fun ones I have found so far are trousers (Gaelic), haggard (unknown, pos. Finnish term for an old horse via Danish or Dutch), yoghurt (Turkish), kudos (Greek), and harridan (French, unknown origin, possibly just referred to one specific person that people really didn't like).

On a similar note, I'm also studying German at the moment and it's interesting how, in line with the scale of German immigration to the US, how many of the differences between US and UK English involve US English having more commonalities with German. E.g. use of words like "kaput", "gerkin" instead of "courgette", more widespread use of "auto-" when referring to cars (.e.g. "auto industry").

The Mighty Moltres posted:

Atari was putting out games with no thought for quality assurance, and people ended up being like "This is trash, gently caress video games."
E.T. the Extraterrestrial is the most notorious of these flops.
This led to Nintendo promoting its "Seal Of Quality" feature on games not only produced in-house, but also from third parties.
And nowadays we have AAA rated titles from companies worth billions.
But for a while in the 80's, the world came very close to just scrubbing video games altogether.

Alhazred posted:

If you were a really lovely musician in the middle ages you could be forced to wear the flute of shame:

The device would be fastened to your neck and your fingers would be clamped down to the keys. You were then paraded through town so that people could throw various vegetables at you.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

I mean, as hangman of nazis, he did ok. Give credit where credit's due.

Falukorv posted:

For me Claudius Gothicus looks most "modern" of the bunch, or the one i could most easily imagine on the street without looking out of place.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

e: I just learned the ancient Greeks had no less than five different gods whose only purpose was to gently caress up your pottery.

Peanut President posted:

also why the gently caress wouldn't americans support the IRA? We have a common origin: hating the english

FreudianSlippers posted:

Rod Stewart is really into model trains. Apparently he's spends most of his time on tour for the last 25 years painting tiny trees and other props for his massive decades in the making track.

Even as a young rockstar in The Small Faces days he'd go to model train conventions in disguise.

Pook Good Mook posted:

They were also planning to invade Britain in river barges and boats made out of concrete

AvesPKS posted:

It's been awhile since I took the class but I thought the Germans were early adopters in developing and utilizing bureaucratic methods, at least? With the obvious sinister implications later.

drrockso20 posted:

*Allied and Soviet propaganda against the Nazis is actually rather peculiarly bipolar about them, like it'll go from super serious to super silly in a way that can give someone whiplash

zedprime posted:

You can have my beaver burgers though.

Der Kyhe posted:

The difference between Stalin and Germany was that the Soviets mostly killed their own.

Carbon dioxide posted:

"Deutsch" itself comes from a word that means something like "of the people"

Deutschland - Land of the people.
Deutsche Sprache: Language of the people.

And so on.

jsoh posted:

there's two lakes and a town in Western Canada called slave lake because the Cree called the people there slaves on account of how they raided and enslaved them all the time

Platystemon posted:

wtf apparently this is true

The word the Cree actually used was awahkaan. This doesn’t sound like “slave”, but that is its literal meaning. Europeans were like “You use the same word for people forced to work in bondage and your northern neighbors? Great idea. We will do the same in our language.”

Weembles posted:

On the "well actually, classical sculpture was all brightly painted" topic, I just learned about a very well preserved example of it:

https://twitter.com/OptimoPrincipi/status/1430887215429681161?s=20