Tag: history

DARPA Skynet

poindexter tried to build what the nsa has today. of course he was fired for it, but nsa still built it.

From 1983 to 1993 DARPA spent over $1B on a program called the Strategic Computing Initiative. The agency’s goal was to push the boundaries of computers, artificial intelligence, and robotics to build something that, in hindsight, looks strikingly similar to the dystopian future of the Terminator movies. They wanted to build Skynet.

Camden, Somalia

fires raged, violent crime spiked and the murder rate soared so high that on a per-capita basis, it “put us somewhere between Honduras and Somalia. They let us run amok, it was like fires, and rain, and babies crying, and dogs barking. It was like Armageddon.”

Mongolian princess hat

One of the most immediately recognizable symbols of the European Middle Ages is the towering, often conical or cylindrical, women’s headdresses popular throughout Europe in the 15th century. To this day, the tall, often veil-decorated “Princess Hat” is immediately known even to American children as a sign of feminine stature, nobility, and elegance. Tiny, cheap versions of this hat are sold to women and little girls by the millions at Renaissance Faires, theme parks, costume shops, and carnivals all over the United States. They look something like this:

In just about every American imagination, nothing is more essentially European than the elaborate, gravity-defying tall headdress or henin worn by the noblest women of history. Indeed, the European Henin is synonymous to many Americans as a visual symbol of frail femininity, “Faire Maydens”, milky complexions and delicate white women who must be protected by knights, preferably in shining armor.

The heads this historical hat truly belongs on are not only those of women of color, but unrivaled Warrior Queens who ruled a vast empire, went to war with infant sons strapped to their backs, and commanded armies of 10Ks?

The Henin did not spring out of nothingness to adorn the heads of European noblewomen. It is modeled directly after the willow-withe and felt Boqta of Mongolian Queens, which could reach 2m in height.

Medieval kids’ doodles


it is awesome that not just images of jesus (we have far too many of these) survive from the middle ages.

Here’s something very special. In the 1950s archeologists made a great discovery near the city of Novgorod, Russia: they dug up 100s of pieces of birch bark with all sorts of texts written on them. The 915 items are mostly letters, notes and receipts, all written between the 11th and 15th century. The most special items, however, are the ones shown above, which are from a medieval classroom. In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do: crude drawings of individuals with big hands, as well as a figure with a raised sword standing next to a defeated beast (lower image). The last one was drawn by Onfim, who put his name next to the victorious warrior. The snippets provide a delightful and most unusual peek into a 13th-century classroom, with kids learning to read – and getting bored in the process.

Ancient music

Needs more singing, but otherwise quite remarkable.

The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world. The epitaph has been variously dated, but seems to be either from the 1st or the 2nd century CE. Because of the clear alphabetical notation Seikilos’ song is playable today. Lyre expert and ancient music researchers Michael Levy has a wonderfully virtuoso performance on his YouTube channel for which he uses a wide range of lyre techniques to give it that zesty drinking song vibe.

2015-01-07: Babylonian songs. I’m a sucker for this kind of research. It’s no more than an educated guess, but still remarkable.

But how does one reincarnate music that no human voice has uttered for millennia? A key step was to really understand the language. She carefully studied historical analysis of the stresses and intonations of Babylonian and Sumerian for hints as to how it may have sounded, and researched how language is converted into music in similar Semitic languages.

2016-05-02: Medieval lost songs

An ancient song repertory will be heard for the first time in 1 ka this week after being ‘reconstructed’ by a Cambridge researcher and a world-class performer of medieval music. However, the task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1 ka ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musicians would recognize them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct ‘lost’ music from this era – precisely because the pitches are unknown.

Amazing. Sample at

2018-08-06: Ancient Greek music

The sense and sound of ancient Greek music has proved incredibly elusive. This is because the terms and notions found in ancient sources – mode, enharmonic, diesis, and so on – are complicated and unfamiliar. And while notated music exists and can be reliably interpreted, it is scarce and fragmentary. What could be reconstructed in practice has often sounded quite strange and unappealing – so ancient Greek music had by many been deemed a lost art. But recent developments have excitingly overturned this gloomy assessment.

2019-03-12: More greek music reconstruction.

Much of what we think of as Ancient Greek poetry, including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, was composed to be sung, frequently with the accompaniment of musical instruments. And while the Greeks left modern classicists many indications that music was omnipresent in society – from vases decorated with lyres, to melodic notation preserved on stone – the precise character and contours of the music has long been considered irreproducible. However, the UK Classicist and classical musician Armand D’Angour has spent years endeavoring to stitch the mysterious sounds of Ancient Greek music back together from large and small hints left behind. In 2017, his work culminated in a unique performance at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, intended to recreate the sounds of Greek music dating as far back as Homer’s era – 700 BCE.

 

2021-04-20: Recreating ancient instruments

Tharun Sekar spends hours building and perfecting the yazh. A distant cousin of the harp, the 2 ka instrument was once a mainstay in royal courts, and produced “the sweetest sound.” Then, it disappeared, preserved only in historical texts—until now.

The yazh is 1 of a handful of lost or obscure folk instruments that Sekar has been recreating. It takes Sekar 6 months to build a yazh. Each handcrafted instrument is made from a solid block of wood, and, when finished, is 60cm tall, with 7 or 14 strings, a distinctively carved peacock head, slender neck, and a bowl-like resonator.

2022-08-19: Nikkal

To find the oldest known complete song, you need look back 3400 years. Composed of lyrics, musical notation and tuning instructions for a Babylonian lyre carved into a clay tablet, it is called Hymn to Nikkal, or Hurrian Hymn No 6. Archaeologists found it in the early 1950s – alongside 30 other, incomplete, Hurrian hymns – during an excavation at the Royal Palace of Ugarit in what is now northern Syria. Nikkal, Heilung’s interpretation of Hymn to Nikkal, is the album’s penultimate track. The band based it on the 1984 academic paper A Hurrian Musical Score from Ugarit: The Discovery of Mesopotamian Music by Marcelle Duchesne-Guillemin, a pioneer of ancient music theory. She believed that the piece contained intervals that, together, form a 2-part harmony. It was a perfect fit for Heilung, with their 2 vocalists. The result is 3 of Drif’s most hypnotic minutes, as otherworldly as it is beautiful.