The symbol "℞", sometimes transliterated as "Rx" or "Rx", is recorded in 16th century manuscripts as an abbreviation of the late Latin instruction recipe, meaning 'receive'.[2][a] Originally abbreviated Rc, the later convention of using a slash to indicate abbreviation resulted in an R with a straight stroke through its right "leg".[2][c] Medieval prescriptions invariably began with the instruction from the physician to the apothecary to "take" certain materials and compound them in specified ways.[7]
Whoever put that together really went for it
Two alphabets and an abbreviation symbol in one word
I'm still reading The Guns of August (in bits and pieces, I'm slow) and this feels like the penultimate description of the French strategy ala 1900-ish to 1914
“Thank God we don’t have any!” replied a General Staff artillery officer in 1909 when questioned about 105 mm. heavy field artillery. “What gives the French Army its force is the lightness of its cannon.” In 1911 the War Council proposed to add 105s to the French Army, but the artillery men themselves, faithful to the famous French 75s, remained unalterably opposed.
Like, oh no. Oh buddy.
Edit: just a whole, whole lotta "hey, uh the Germans have heavy guns and are using reserves in their main assault forces." To which the French response was "nuh-uh now let's run directly at em with bayonets lol"
I'm still reading The Guns of August (in bits and pieces, I'm slow) and this feels like the penultimate description of the French strategy ala 1900-ish to 1914
“Thank God we don’t have any!” replied a General Staff artillery officer in 1909 when questioned about 105 mm. heavy field artillery. “What gives the French Army its force is the lightness of its cannon.” In 1911 the War Council proposed to add 105s to the French Army, but the artillery men themselves, faithful to the famous French 75s, remained unalterably opposed.
Like, oh no. Oh buddy.
Edit: just a whole, whole lotta "hey, uh the Germans have heavy guns and are using reserves in their main assault forces." To which the French response was "nuh-uh now let's run directly at em with bayonets lol"
I looked up what a French 105 would be, and it turns out you just replace the lemon juice and simple syrup with an ounce of limoncello. Seems legit.
I'm still reading The Guns of August (in bits and pieces, I'm slow) and this feels like the penultimate description of the French strategy ala 1900-ish to 1914
“Thank God we don’t have any!” replied a General Staff artillery officer in 1909 when questioned about 105 mm. heavy field artillery. “What gives the French Army its force is the lightness of its cannon.” In 1911 the War Council proposed to add 105s to the French Army, but the artillery men themselves, faithful to the famous French 75s, remained unalterably opposed.
Like, oh no. Oh buddy.
Edit: just a whole, whole lotta "hey, uh the Germans have heavy guns and are using reserves in their main assault forces." To which the French response was "nuh-uh now let's run directly at em with bayonets lol"
I looked up what a French 105 would be, and it turns out you just replace the lemon juice and simple syrup with an ounce of limoncello. Seems legit.
Damn that'd be good. I gotta buy some more limoncello now.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
The beads were by bangles and bracelets with fiber twine that could be carbon dated, with nearby charcoal for verification. They had been made in Venice in the 1400s, because that jewelry had been buried no later than 1480. Yeah, there was pre-Columbian trade across the Bering Strait - it could and was crossed by the locals in their boats; people had family connections on both sides going back further than memory. The pretty blue beads could have been taken east on the last days of the old Silk Road (or maybe by boat via the Red Sea to India and on), and passed along from trader to trader until they ended up in Siberia, and then across the narrow strait to Alaska.
It's one of those things that had been considered likely for a while, but it's always nice to have hard evidence. The human world has been an interconnected place for a long time.
I would love to read a book that was the fictionalised but really well researched story of those beads making their way from medieval Venice to Alaska in 40 years and how those trade routes worked. We hear a lot about The Silk Road that brought goods from Asia to Europe, but it has never occurred to me to consider what those trade routes brought back.
What Will Future Homes Look Like? Filmed in the 1960's - Narrated by Walter Cronkite24:32 https://youtu.be/2ivp442RLS8 This film, made in the late 1960's, tells what future homes will look like in the 21st century or 2001 to be exact.
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Crossposted from D&D
Peru has all sorts of cool ruins. You know about Machu Picchu, and may know generally about roads and terraces and foundations and such, but have you heard of Moray? They lie about 50 km northwest of Cuzco.
What's so great about that, you might ask? That's no grand ruin of great temples or a lost city. It's a concentric series of fancy holes in the ground.
Well, for starters, they are bigger than you might be thinking.
There are ag schools today who would do a murder for a setup like that. And there's a very specific reason why I bring up ag schools: archaeologists believe Moray was the agricultural research station for the Inca Empire. Those circles mean that in any given spot, there would be specific microclimates for experimentation. Different places would get more sunlight, sunlight at different times, be warmer or cooler, etc. There can be a 15C (59F) degree difference between the warmest and coolest spots - a very useful thing for an empire that spanned between tropical rain forest and alpine peaks. Chemical tests show that the soil in different terraces (and different sections of terraces) had been brought in from various and distant locations in the empire too. It really seems like they were really trying to figure out what worked best for the very different places across their vast lands.
It could also help explain how Peru has over 4000 unique varieties of potato. People can eat meals of variety in flavor and texture that's just a bunch of different potatoes. Sure, people had been cultivating potatoes for a long time, but in many places across the world, a variety is just "this one thing we happen to raise in the area" and the next variety is just "the thing that's grown in the next area." Incans meanwhile were growing upwards of 60 varieties of potatoes in the same terraces, all with different blight and frost resistances (and flavor and texture profiles and uses and so forth). Moray might have been selectively breeding for new varieties while also testing them for different conditions. Once they had some promising ones, the researchers could cut up the tubers and clone them for further testing and eventual distribution.
This was an incredibly sophisticated setup and thought process. Serious scientific agricultural research didn't start up anywhere else in the world until the 1800s. The Inca were doing this centuries earlier, without iron or likely a proper writing system (not entirely sure about how quipu worked). Famines had always been common across the world, a major cause of the collapse of nations and empires throughout history. The Inca actually went "how can we make sure famines don't happen and that we ensure we have enough food" when literally everyone else was "guess we die when the crops inevitably fail." Their food surpluses helped fuel their incredible logistical feats, moving vast armies of soldiers to battles or armies of workers to infrastructure projects.
Tl;dr Incan crop circles for SCIENCE!
+35
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
That is incredibly cool. Thanks for sharing, I'd never heard of the place!
Anyone read any good books about the Incan Empire that isn't just the horrible bit with the Spanish?
I wanted to say that the tweeter made a mistake with the phonetics. The Χ is not a X but a χ, for an English X you would need a Ξ. But the title uses Latin letters, too, so it can be whatever you want.
@Jedoc there is a podcast called Fall of Civilisations and they have an episode on the Inca Empire. I thought he did a really good job talking about the civilisation before the Spaniards turn up (he talks about that bit as well). It’s where I learnt about those research farms they had.
Did you know they ran their administrative system on a series of knots tied in ropes? It took a while to learn and was a very important job? They were essentially accountants for the empire. A lot of the knot stuff wasn’t destroyed because the Spanish were too incurious to realise what it was.
Paul Cooper, the creator, meticulously cites all of his references so it’s easy to follow up on anything that takes your fancy
E: if you do check it out and you like it, please check out the Easter Island episode. I think it’s his best episode
@Jedoc there is a podcast called Fall of Civilisations and they have an episode on the Inca Empire. I thought he did a really good job talking about the civilisation before the Spaniards turn up (he talks about that bit as well). It’s where I learnt about those research farms they had.
Did you know they ran their administrative system on a series of knots tied in ropes? It took a while to learn and was a very important job? They were essentially accountants for the empire. A lot of the knot stuff wasn’t destroyed because the Spanish were too incurious to realise what it was.
Paul Cooper, the creator, meticulously cites all of his references so it’s easy to follow up on anything that takes your fancy
E: if you do check it out and you like it, please check out the Easter Island episode. I think it’s his best episode
Fall of Civilisations has movie-length visual episodes also! They're super good!
@Jedoc there is a podcast called Fall of Civilisations and they have an episode on the Inca Empire. I thought he did a really good job talking about the civilisation before the Spaniards turn up (he talks about that bit as well). It’s where I learnt about those research farms they had.
Did you know they ran their administrative system on a series of knots tied in ropes? It took a while to learn and was a very important job? They were essentially accountants for the empire. A lot of the knot stuff wasn’t destroyed because the Spanish were too incurious to realise what it was.
Paul Cooper, the creator, meticulously cites all of his references so it’s easy to follow up on anything that takes your fancy
E: if you do check it out and you like it, please check out the Easter Island episode. I think it’s his best episode
Also where I learned about Moray. Heard about it and had to read more. It's easier to site links than "listen to these minutes of a podcast" though.
And a +1 recommendation for the Easter Island episode. It was absolutely not what Jared Diamond claims; it was the same thing that happened to the rest of the Americas. Disease and colonization, not ecocide.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
We still don’t know how to read quipu, but there’s a ton of them left.
Also important to note that the empire was only really an empire for about 100 years and 5 emperors. Prior to that it was a small tribal kingdom surrounded by a lot with fairly syncretic cultures
Posts
The weird R with the crossed line isn't even a Greek letter
Whoever put that together really went for it
Two alphabets and an abbreviation symbol in one word
Like, oh no. Oh buddy.
Edit: just a whole, whole lotta "hey, uh the Germans have heavy guns and are using reserves in their main assault forces." To which the French response was "nuh-uh now let's run directly at em with bayonets lol"
I looked up what a French 105 would be, and it turns out you just replace the lemon juice and simple syrup with an ounce of limoncello. Seems legit.
Is there a Kate Beaton comic to this effect? I feel like it must exist.
Damn that'd be good. I gotta buy some more limoncello now.
That's almost physically painful.
I get the same feeling every time someone uses Ø instead of O as a decoration.
They are very different sounds.
The stupid font they use for the monster energy drink makes it look like "mønster". That's Norwegian for "pattern".
The beads were by bangles and bracelets with fiber twine that could be carbon dated, with nearby charcoal for verification. They had been made in Venice in the 1400s, because that jewelry had been buried no later than 1480. Yeah, there was pre-Columbian trade across the Bering Strait - it could and was crossed by the locals in their boats; people had family connections on both sides going back further than memory. The pretty blue beads could have been taken east on the last days of the old Silk Road (or maybe by boat via the Red Sea to India and on), and passed along from trader to trader until they ended up in Siberia, and then across the narrow strait to Alaska.
It's one of those things that had been considered likely for a while, but it's always nice to have hard evidence. The human world has been an interconnected place for a long time.
https://youtu.be/2ivp442RLS8
This film, made in the late 1960's, tells what future homes will look like in the 21st century or 2001 to be exact.
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
Peru has all sorts of cool ruins. You know about Machu Picchu, and may know generally about roads and terraces and foundations and such, but have you heard of Moray? They lie about 50 km northwest of Cuzco.
What's so great about that, you might ask? That's no grand ruin of great temples or a lost city. It's a concentric series of fancy holes in the ground.
Well, for starters, they are bigger than you might be thinking.
There are ag schools today who would do a murder for a setup like that. And there's a very specific reason why I bring up ag schools: archaeologists believe Moray was the agricultural research station for the Inca Empire. Those circles mean that in any given spot, there would be specific microclimates for experimentation. Different places would get more sunlight, sunlight at different times, be warmer or cooler, etc. There can be a 15C (59F) degree difference between the warmest and coolest spots - a very useful thing for an empire that spanned between tropical rain forest and alpine peaks. Chemical tests show that the soil in different terraces (and different sections of terraces) had been brought in from various and distant locations in the empire too. It really seems like they were really trying to figure out what worked best for the very different places across their vast lands.
It could also help explain how Peru has over 4000 unique varieties of potato. People can eat meals of variety in flavor and texture that's just a bunch of different potatoes. Sure, people had been cultivating potatoes for a long time, but in many places across the world, a variety is just "this one thing we happen to raise in the area" and the next variety is just "the thing that's grown in the next area." Incans meanwhile were growing upwards of 60 varieties of potatoes in the same terraces, all with different blight and frost resistances (and flavor and texture profiles and uses and so forth). Moray might have been selectively breeding for new varieties while also testing them for different conditions. Once they had some promising ones, the researchers could cut up the tubers and clone them for further testing and eventual distribution.
This was an incredibly sophisticated setup and thought process. Serious scientific agricultural research didn't start up anywhere else in the world until the 1800s. The Inca were doing this centuries earlier, without iron or likely a proper writing system (not entirely sure about how quipu worked). Famines had always been common across the world, a major cause of the collapse of nations and empires throughout history. The Inca actually went "how can we make sure famines don't happen and that we ensure we have enough food" when literally everyone else was "guess we die when the crops inevitably fail." Their food surpluses helped fuel their incredible logistical feats, moving vast armies of soldiers to battles or armies of workers to infrastructure projects.
Tl;dr Incan crop circles for SCIENCE!
Anyone read any good books about the Incan Empire that isn't just the horrible bit with the Spanish?
Isn't that when the moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie?
That's a Moray
Correct
Did you know they ran their administrative system on a series of knots tied in ropes? It took a while to learn and was a very important job? They were essentially accountants for the empire. A lot of the knot stuff wasn’t destroyed because the Spanish were too incurious to realise what it was.
Paul Cooper, the creator, meticulously cites all of his references so it’s easy to follow up on anything that takes your fancy
E: if you do check it out and you like it, please check out the Easter Island episode. I think it’s his best episode
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Fall of Civilisations has movie-length visual episodes also! They're super good!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT6Y5JJPKe_JDMivpKgVXew
Also where I learned about Moray. Heard about it and had to read more. It's easier to site links than "listen to these minutes of a podcast" though.
And a +1 recommendation for the Easter Island episode. It was absolutely not what Jared Diamond claims; it was the same thing that happened to the rest of the Americas. Disease and colonization, not ecocide.
Also important to note that the empire was only really an empire for about 100 years and 5 emperors. Prior to that it was a small tribal kingdom surrounded by a lot with fairly syncretic cultures
Is a nice tent
and the help deserves a nice tent. (the implication being the actual ottoman noble would have been in an even more extravagant tent)
In my pants
I'm not following
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
that's good, it's always a bad idea to follow someone into their pants tent
Come again?