MUD-Dev was the principal location of high-level technical and design discussion for all forms of online world design, folks from Meridian 59, UO, Dark Sun Online, The Realm, EverQuest, and many of the other graphical worlds participated as well.
Tag: history
Gunkanjima Island
pictures of hashima island, off nagoya
Gondwana Tepuis
Throughout Venezuela, there are 10s of sandstone mesas, or tepuis. These tepuis are “remnants of what geologists believe were the mountains of the ancient supercontinent known as Gondwana.” Incredibly, some of these “isolated mesas are 2 ga old, preserving an array of unique plant and animal life that rivals that of places like the Galápagos.”
Windows Promo
accidentally brilliant microsoft promo video, from 1986. today they might create something like that just for the virality of it.
voting with +1
quite possibly the earliest +1 🙂
Graphing human lifelines
Throughout a person’s life, their body traces a continuous path over the surface of Earth. By considering only their east-west motion we can graph this path in 2 dimensions, assigning the vertical dimension to time. If the lifeline of every human who’s lived in the last 100 ka were combined into one map it must look something like this. At the top, the first humans expand throughout Africa, and then gradually east, reaching China by 60 ka BP. (The simultaneous expansion into Europe is unfortunately masked by the overlapping African longitudes.) Between 15 ka and 10 ka BP humans probably crossed a temporary landbridge into the Western Hemisphere and quickly reached the eastern tip of Brazil.
Before The Dawn
Using genetic anthropology to reconstruct the 90% of modern human history that is unrecorded. The discoveries are coming in fast; no doubt we’ll have a revival of alternative history books soon 🙂 We are beginning to uncover all the near-extinction events in our history that left marks in our mitochondria and Y-chromosomes. more vast and scary than any foundation myth.
2023-04-06: The 0-sum games that held humanity back for 300k years
The default condition of humans is no different from the default condition of other animals: Males fight each other over females. In humans, in apes, in deer, in insects. Despite apes being more intelligent than insects, they live in the same stability. And the same can be said about the human default: Despite being more intelligent than apes, humans are just as stuck in their ecological niches until the powerful among them get incentives to develop.
We are used to seeing human development as a line of progression. Step by step, generation after generation, humans are commonly thought to have added one small invention and observation after another, culminating in big breakthroughs and discoveries. I think it could be more useful to see human history as episodic. On some occasions, humans focused on the things that are possible to develop, that is, technology and teamwork. During most of the time, human males focused on a pursuit with little development potential: How to snatch as many females as possible from other males. However intelligent a species is, it will not develop as long as all its intelligence is used to play a 0-sum game.
Generations
A list of generations, raw history being written
2013-02-23:
Famous Trials
some of them are pretty bizarre, like the scopes trial
Reductiones in Paraguay
In the 17th-century Jesuit missionaries began to educate amerindians and settle in the theocratic communes (“reductiones”). Their native wards proved capable of learning the skills and arts required to build magnificent churches and compose baroque music.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 