So vast was the extent of the Mongol Empire that the samurai of Japan and the Teutonic Knights of Prussia had each fought the same enemy while being unaware of each other’s existence.
Tag: history
Development of C
The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment, it has become one of the dominant languages of today. This paper studies its evolution.
neat
Samaritan Genography
recent archaeological findings, coupled with deeper examination of religious texts, have led researchers to propose that the Samaritans were Jews themselves. During the Babylonian Captivity, not all Jews were rounded up by the Assyrians. Some stayed behind, possibly marrying other Assyrian exiles who themselves had been relocated. This would make sense given that, even though Samaritans are not considered Jews, they share many of the same ancient Hebrew rituals. While these rituals have evolved for 100s of years among most Jewish sects, they remain unchanged among the isolated Samaritans, even to this day. This also fits well with the historical animosity of Jews toward Samaritans because of their association with non-Jews.
they need to do more of that to defuse the nonsense and irrational beliefs about “heritage” in the near east
Genes and Languages
did people (and therefore their genes) migrate to a new region, or was it just a transfer of cultural traits (such as language) from one region to the next?
There are countless other examples in human prehistory of cultural vs. genetic diffusion, with different disciplines often yielding different hypotheses.
Mayan underworld portal
Mexican archeologists have discovered a maze of stone temples in underground caves, some submerged in water and containing human bones, which ancient Mayans believed was a portal where dead souls entered the underworld.
paging harrison ford.
London And Its Dead
10000s of skeletons that lie hidden beneath the streets, houses and offices of London have been revealed for the first time on a map, in a collaboration between the Museum of London and The Times.
2014-06-25:
they fell through the surface of the tennis courts only to find themselves standing in a maze of rotting coffins hidden just beneath the soil, an infernal honeycomb of badly tended graves like something out of Dante.
crazy
Burrnesha
Pashe Keqi recalls the day nearly 60 years ago when she decided to become a man. She chopped off her long black curls, traded in her dress for her father’s baggy trousers, armed herself with a hunting rifle and vowed to forsake marriage, children and sex.
Had she been born in Albania today, she would choose womanhood.
“Back then, it was better to be a man because, before, a woman and an animal were considered the same thing. Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men and are even more powerful, and I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”
TileStack
HyperCard is back. Now to find those old disks…
The good news for fans of HyperCard is that once we realized the similarities between what we were doing and what HyperCard had done, we decided to embrace the connection 100%. As a result, we’ve set out to have TileStack support and be compatible with HyperCard in as many ways as possible. That’s why we took the time to build an importer that can convert your old HyperCard stacks into TileStacks, and why, when it’s feasible, we model features of TileStack around the concepts found in HyperCard.
2022-04-22: TileStack didn’t last, but the Internet archive now has emulated stacks. I certainly remember the funky clip art in one of them.
map of new york, 1777
History of the Web
lots of clowns in that essay, but still awesome overall
Gregor J. Rothfuss 