Tag: history

Antarctica in 650?

A new paper combines literature and oral histories, and concludes that Māori, the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand, were likely the first people to explore Antarctica’s surrounding waters, and possibly the continent in the distance. They write that Māori and Polynesian journeys to the deep south have been occurring for a long time, perhaps as far back as 650, and are recorded in a variety of oral traditions.

2023-06-24: This claim is false and ideologically motivated.

“These stories, presented without nuance, qualification or critique, make extraordinary claims without offering commensurable evidence”. The Hui Te Rangiora story was a Rarotongan tradition translated by ethnologist Stephenson Percy Smith​ near the end of the 19th century and debunked by Te Rangi Hīroa​ (Sir Peter Buck​) who wrote that “so much post-European information has been included in the native text” he could no longer accept the traditions as accurate and ancient.

This means O’Regan, Tau and the others were in the position of repeating work Te Rangi Hīroa did 100 years ago.

In serious historical circles, relying on Smith is problematic.

“These scholars haven’t learned anything over the past 50 years”.

Tiberius, Imperial Detective

This is, I believe, the only time in recorded Roman history that an emperor decided to investigate a murder by examining the scene of the crime. These things just didn’t happen in Rome because they didn’t have the same ideas about evidence and crimes that we have. Their murder trials didn’t involve people looking at daggers or gloves or other bits of physical evidence. They just involved people reciting really good speeches at each other, each using the same rhetorical strategies, mostly about the character of the defendant and/or victim and their general demeanor in life rather than the actual events of the case in question, until the jury or judge picked whichever person they liked best. Examining a crime scene wasn’t a particularly important part of that process. Tiberius going off to have a look at the window from which Apronia fell was therefore very surprising. So surprising, in fact, that Silvanus hadn’t even bothered trying to tidy up after the murder had been committed. The emperor was able to see immediately what Tacitus calls “traces of resistance offered and force employed.” Frustratingly, he does not elaborate on what these signs were. Maybe chairs had been flung across the room, or curtains had been torn down, or there was blood on the soft furnishings. This blows my mind a little bit. Silvanus was a rich man. He had a significant household of enslaved people. And yet he apparently didn’t even bother to ask them to tidy up a bit and make it look rather less like there’d been a fatal incident in the bedroom. No one took it upon themselves to have a wee whizz round with a mop while he was out with the emperor. Presumably, no one expected the august Tiberius to take time out of his busy day being in charge of all of Western Europe and North Africa to nip round for a look. No other emperor would have done this, even for their mum’s best friend’s grandson.

Tetris revolution

The improvements have added up. To qualify for the 2020 C.T.W.C., players had to achieve a near max-out within 2 hours. This standard of play left behind veterans who had qualified in each of the previous 10 years. Jonas, with his 1 max-out in qualification, entered the tournament ranked 31th among 64. Joseph, having scored a world-record 12 max-outs, came in as the No. 1 seed. By the quarter-final, the entire old guard had vanished. The remaining players were all of the YouTube generation, with many explicitly crediting its algorithm for introducing them to classic Tetris.

The Musical Human

There are other ancestral ghosts hidden in the Western canon. When Bach set lines from the Song of Songs in his cantata Wachet auf, he drew on a tradition that goes back at least as far as the Sumerian hymns written by the world’s first known composer, Enheduanna, in the third millennium BC. Likewise, the 6/8 time of the final movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is African in origin, brought into Europe through popular dances in the 15th century.

NYC Gems

This is a pretty great and comprehensive list of what makes the city awesome.

Following up our master list of 160 secrets of New York City, we bring to you 160 hidden gems of New York City! Every one of these hidden gems are places for you to discover. Some show the uniqueness and quaintness of New York City’s architecture, others reveal the infrastructure that supports New York or the history hidden in plain sight. Some are simply off-the-beaten path. All, we believe, are hidden gems in their own right. The majority are publicly accessible although some only on limited occasions. Some come from our book about the secrets of Brooklyn, but this list covers all 5 boroughs of the city. Many others come from the archives of Untapped New York and some come from exciting user-generated submissions on our Facebook page. So without further ado, here are the hidden gems of New York City!

Rome in 3D

a good amount of progress since we last looked at this

History in 3D lives up to its name. The virtual recreations of ancient temples, cities, palaces and fortresses are vividly rendered in granular detail with realistic lighting effects and animated fly-ins. They’ve built models of everything from Sevastopol in 1914 to the flooding of Titanic’s grand staircase to Corinth in the 2nd century.

4 years ago, their most ambitious project, a reconstruction of Rome’s city center as it was in 320 Rome in 3D, made its debut on their YouTube channel. They had already been working on it for years and had enough of it ready to make a riveting trailer, a few tantalizing minutes of what promised to be the most comprehensive virtual recreation of ancient Rome ever made. The aim was to integrate it into a game engine, building a fully realized city based on the latest, most accurate information to provide an immersive experience of walking its streets.

Last month, History in 3D released their latest Rome in 3D video. They assured followers that the project was still ongoing, that they had encountered challenges and obstacles but were surmounting them and coming back better than ever, deploying new technological tools to redesign buildings and objects. The new trailer showcases the Forum, the beating heart of Roman society, and it is a huge leap forward in quality.

Orphan Vaccine Carriers

humanity was a lot braver / ingenious 200 years ago. today, people sit on their fat asses debating useless things, like whether human challenge trials are “ethical”:

At the end of the 18th century, smallpox was probably the scariest disease on Earth. It spread alarmingly quickly, and every cm of people’s skin, including their face, would erupt with 1000s upon 1000s of painful, pus-filled sores. Edward Jenner observed something strange, however: People who caught a related disease called cowpox never came down with its deadlier cousin. So in 1796, he began giving people cowpox intentionally, rendering them immune to smallpox and creating the first vaccine.

But the breakthrough introduced another dilemma: How could doctors deliver vaccines to people who needed them? The real trouble started when doctors tried to vaccinate people who were far away. The lymph could lose its potency traveling even the 350km from London to Paris, let alone to the Americas, where it was desperately needed: Smallpox outbreaks there were verging on apocalyptic, killing up to 50% of people who got the virus. Every so often threads of dried lymph did survive an ocean journey—a batch reached Newfoundland in 1800—but the lymph was typically rendered impotent after months at sea. Spain especially struggled to reach its colonies in Central and South America, so in 1803, health officials in the country devised a radical new method for distributing the vaccine abroad: orphan boys.

The plan involved putting 24 Spanish orphans on a ship. Right before they left for the colonies, a doctor would give 2 of them cowpox. After 10 days at sea, the sores on their arms would be nice and ripe. A team of doctors onboard would lance the sores, and scratch the fluid into the arms of 2 more boys. 10 days later, once those boys developed sores, a third pair would receive fluid, and so on.