The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her
That checks out for Scotland.
TIL Rome once had an empress.
Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I'm afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control
That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there's no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses
TIL. Did the Greeks get less patriarchal over time? In the classical era they were Taliban-tier and complained they even had to see women.
I'm afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene's reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her
I had to look that up, it's just too good to pass.
(Cassius Dio, contemporary historian) tells us that the empress teased her companion (the wife of Argentocoxos, a Caledonian chief) by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:
“We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”
A bit further below, however
The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above.
We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster . These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.
These don't look too dissimilar to things I'd doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.
It's fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The "head with arms and legs" stage seems universal, and amusing.
I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
Teacher has threw it on the trash. 😂
Imagine how his teacher feels. The little shit doodles all through his class, and who do we build a statue of? The kid‽
A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said "if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country"....
...and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.
Later, some dude was like "screw your catholicism, I don't like my wife any more, I'll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife," and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.
I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that's about it.
Your version makes more sense 😃
I doubted the blow, but it could be true; turns out the Columbian Exchange started around 50 years before the Church of England broke from Catholicism
Oxford University Is older than the Aztec civilization.
And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn't fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.
The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we'd all be speaking an Australian language or something.
I read about it once. I think it was up to medieval times where sahara had lots of green batches and oasis? Though thats in the range of natural climate change.
Btw. most Alpine passes were unpassable from 900 to 1300, we had a mini ice age then.
Nah, green Sahara ended pretty early in the bronze age. The old kingdom Egyptians were really just getting the tail end of it. It was definitely natural, I don't think that's in question; the (non-mini) ice age was simply ending, about on schedule. It would have been a much slower change than what's happening now.
There were a few trees that managed to hang on in one area, though, with the last being "accidentally" run over by the colonial-era French.
Harvard University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than Harvard University.
Edit: Which isn't really surprising, but I posted anyway for the sake of completeness. Oxford is so old it's not super clear when in the middle ages it started.
There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was "As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge."
The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.
He even tried it a second time
Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!
As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.
Was finding the number odd (expecting a longer orbit) but looks like the solar system has already orbited the center of the milky way 18 to 20 times.
Imagine that much change in earth in 20 years.
That North and South Korea maintain a fax line between their countries... which they use almost exclusively to send threats and insults to each other.
Also related to North Korea, the hilarious fact that Dennis Rodman, former NBA player, is so well liked by the Kim family that he's basically a diplomat to North Korea, or at least the one they turn to when things really start going badly.
Another fun fact about North Korea: They have their own Linux Distro by the name Red Star OS, which has its 3.0 version leaked to the Internet, while the newest known version is 4.0.
My observations while trying out the leaked 3.0 are:
*It is a fedora derivative,its package manager made me think it's something close to CentOS 6.3.
*It's visuals are really similar to Mac OS. Perhaps the state official behind this project really liked Mac?
*Every piece of software installed has its credits removed, they have help prompts that refer to them being made in some sort of university.
*It leaves strange markings to created files. I couldn't understand what they do exactly, but I assume it could be used to track the computer that made the files.
*Their browser does not support https, and does not have English support at all.
*Packages intended for developers aren't installed by default, doesn't have a remote repository but instead was intended to be installed with a physical media drive.
*Just for fun, I tried to request the Linux kernel's source code that the developers behind used, as it's licensed by GPL. I was unsuccessful; which means this is the first time a state sponsored software is violating GPL.
Report to the FSF so they can help you sue North Korea.
Wow that's interesting! Gotta be at least in the running for the rarest Linux distro ever
There exists state sponsored Linux distros for various reasons. As far as i can recall China, India and Turkey has their distros available publically. I also remember reading about a distro Russia was working on, but I don't remember what happened to it. Could be a project to use internally by Russian govt.
"Mad" Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.
And still survived. Legend
Allegedly German soldiers said that they didn't shoot him because they assumed he'd lost his mind, and took pity on him
You'd think it'd make them do the opposite, idk about you but I'd be more scared of that guy than regular troops and I'd be gunning for him. "He's clearly crazy, lord knows what he'll do."
The only confirmed bow and arrow kill of WW2!
And after the war he went on to become an early pioneer in surfing!
The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn't understand it and was "beaten to death" by a French mob after it descended to the ground.
Okay, so it was actually unmanned, and it was a hydrogen balloon, but it does seem to be a pretty widely repeated story from a contemporary newspaper. This was shortly after the first hot air balloon flight and might have had less fanfare, so it seems a bit more reasonable that peasants 21 km away wouldn't have heard anything about it until the large levitating blob was coming at them.
(He even "decreed" the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)
And the city just humored him.
Hey, that dude was in West of Loathing. Now I know he was a real dude.
End of the bronze age. Have a set of letters between citystate rulers, one writing that help is urgently needed as seaborne invaders have been spotted nearby and his military is off with the hittite empire.
The response back, in modern slang amounts to "lol ur fucked."
Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?
Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.
Yep. It was 50/50 given that he only knew it was moving from between two points somehow. Tough luck, Benny. (Specifically, he was the one that figured out charge is conserved)
Now we all have to deal with circuit diagrams that don't match what's actually happening inside the components, which confuses at least me when I have to think about electrochemical reactions, semiconductors and/or induction.
Edit: He actually didn't have complete circuits at that time, it was all static experiments where charges were moved manually. Fixed.
Can you eli5? Or like I’m a dumb dumb idiot? Please.
Electricity is one of those things I so badly want to understand and just seem to not be able to.
On diagrams you'd use + as the "source" of elecricity, i.e. you assume electricity flows from + to - (poaitive to negative). Electricity as far as physics goes is an effect created by electrons, which are defined as negative in charge.
DC is electricity where the literal flow of electrons from point A to point B make the current (so it flows from negative to positive, since it's the flow of "negative" electrons that carries electricity). Benjamin Franklin assumed logically that electricity obviously must flow from positive to negative (since it's the logical choice), but alas, he was wrong as far as history sees it.
So today, whenever you're dealing with electrical diagrams current/electricity is assumed to flow from + to - while in the physical domain it's the negatively charged electrons that create what we call electricity.
AC is a bit different - here electrons aren't flowing directly from point A to point B, but rather wiggling about or "alternating" in place and it's this alternating movement that carries the (still negative) charge. But even for AC it still holds true that electrical charge is the "negative" charge of electrons and that this movement of electrons alternating in place enables them to move this "negative" charge of theirs from one place to another.
I assume you know about the saying "opposites attract" - for electricity and charge it's literally true, so you can view power consumption as the "positive" charge of protons (which is immovable because protons are bound to the cores of their atom), while it's the "negative" charge of electrons which are located in the outer shells of metal atoms that can leave their atoms and move their charge that are viewed as the source/carrier of electricsl energy.
I put negative and positive in quotes because to get back to your question about defining why Franklin was wrong:
As it stands, there are two conventions on electricity. One is used in diagrams and often attributed to Franklin, the one that says that electricity flows from the positive (+) to the negative (-) pole. The other is the physics convention that protons hold positive charge while electrons hold negative charge, and this is where the disparity comes from. I don't know which convention was chronologically earlier, but I assume it's the physics one since Franklin is the one cited as "wrong".
Obligatory I'm not an electrical engineer - this is only what I remember from my physics classes. Please assume it mostly correct but maybe not technically for every minute detail (the only use of "power" is technically very wrong among other things, but that's the gist of it).
Electricity is the flow of electrons, who move from negative to positive, the opposite of what you would normally expect.
Maybe I'm biased because I'm a welder, but it always made more sense to me that electricity flows from the negative. Like , if the positive moved, wouldn't you change the element of the wire after a while? It also helps that you can tell the difference if an arc is positive or negative relative to the stinger depending on how the metal reacts, at least to a welder. I know that doesn't make any sense at all but it does to another welder lol
So, when Ben Franklin named them, it was in terms of something like "excess of electricity". A positive excess of charge, like in the glass he used to define the term, is actually a deficit (negative excess) of electrons, which are the real fluid.
Later on Crooks (I think?) figured out that if he cleared all the air out of a tube with mercury, he could force electrons out of the metal into open space, at the negative cathode end, and at that point they realised it was backwards.
Okay, so I see someone else already did an effortpost, so I'll just add on.
Benjamin Franklin assumed logically that electricity obviously must flow from positive to negative (since it’s the logical choice), but alas, he was wrong as far as history sees it.
Well, I'm sure he knew it was a guess. He was a smart man. He picked glass as the thing that picks up "electric fluid" in static electricity experiments, becoming "positively charged", in other words a positive excess of fluid, when in fact it loses electrons. Until someone invented vacuum tubes a century or so later nobody could tell the difference.
Positive-to-negative is called "conventional current", and circuit diagrams are still drawn that way. Unfortunately, the charge and direction of the particles moving (rather than just that they are moving) can become important if you want to understand electrochemistry, for example. Metal ions are positively charged (missing an electron), and so they're going to come off of the electrode where electrons being removed, and plate on to the electrode where they're being added. You have to remember the conventional current is opposite to the actual current to picture a battery running a circuit, and if it's connected to a bunch of digital chips in a complicated way, I, at least, can get lost.
If that's still unclear, any further questions are welcome.
I find it fascinating that electricity is fast enough that this is a thing. You would never get this wrong with water, and if you did things wouldn’t work right, but electricity is basically instant.
Interestingly, electron flow is only a few mm/minute, on average. The field propagation travels at around 2/3 the speed of light (200,000,000m/s).
One of Sir Issac Newton's famous phrases is
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!
The fact that they dug up Oliver Cromwell's body for a posthumous execution. It's just insane on so many levels
Did they not just dig it up so they could put his head on a spike for all to see?
Ask anyone from Ireland or Scotland at that time if it was justified and your head would be on a feckin spike for even questioning it 😂
No it was by trial and meant as punishment. Quite common even, but I first heard of it in relation to Cromwell c.s.
The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.
Probably the one about tin cans and can openers. IIRC, can opener was invented decades after the tin
To be fair that makes a lot more sense than it happening the other way around
For a few years you just had to find a sharp rock
How did they open cans before then?
Originally tin cans were large things meant for military campaigns, so they used a chisel or similar large stabby thing.
I actually don't know. Presumably with a knife
There was a roman emperor named Pupienus which is pronounced poopy anus
What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behavior like that.
Well, at least that brisket was good enough for jehovah.
"Well it's a joke name sir!"
Biggus Dickus
There are lots of great answers here so I want to post something entirely silly and much much more recent:
About 8-9 years ago someone on Reddit transcribed and revised the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven to instead be about an Emu.
For the life of me I have never been able to find it again.
Oh great. First, the Emus won a war against Australia, greatly boosting their egos. And later on, they started censoring their mention online.
In other news... there seems to be a bird in my backyard that keeps taping on my backdoor window.
Upvoted bc i want someone to find and share it.
Good luck. It wasn't a post, it was a top level comment and I have a dim memory of it only being slightly related to the post topic.
There's a lot to choose from, but it's early so I'll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.
I mean once it's happened twice it must become a cultural thing so the third one is inevitable
True!
One started the 48 years war! I remember that from highschool. What were the other two?
TBH I kinda forgot the rest of it, since the fact there were three and they had such an unusual theme was the interesting part. Pre-modern history can seem a bit repetitive to me, it's one group of aristocrats trying to knock off another group ad infinitum. I prefer to read about technology, culture and common life, where it's known.
Looks like the first one was proto-protestant rebels, and sparked a religious war. The second was a coup against a Hungarian king who was getting too powerful for the defenestrator's tastes, and featured the defenestration of already dead bodies, 'cause why not.
More people have been thrown from windows in Prague since the third one you were thinking of, but none of them has really caught on as an event. It was sometimes Russian assassins, or course.
The US newspaper billionaire William Randolph Hearst owned enough of congress that he started a war with Spain.
"You provide the pictures and I'll provide the war"
The Emu War
The Alberta Rat Wars
Uh oh I’ve not heard about those!
Tell ya what, you go fight a herd of dinosaurs and see who wins
~Everyone thinks it's funny until they face off on an emu~
In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds" for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.
"A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon, the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys, and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness."[26]
During the sign-off theme, the phone began ringing. Houseman picked it up and the furious caller announced he was mayor of a Midwestern town, where mobs were in the streets. Houseman hung up quickly, "[f]or we were off the air now and the studio door had burst open."[4]: 404
How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven't you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?)
This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.
Wasn't that just one newspaper reporting it which was more or less just an advert for the play?
No. In fact, I quoted the first-hand accounts of the people in charge of the broadcast.
Yes, there may have been less of a panic than as advertised, but it wasn't a gross (or intentional) distortion. The drama was also only broadcast once.
The offices of the city of Trenton, New Jersey, a location within the dramatization, had its communications paralyzed for 3 hours due to the calls made to ask the city well.
That one of the US presidents died from eating too many cherries.
The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her
That checks out for Scotland.
TIL Rome once had an empress.
Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I'm afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control
That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there's no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses
TIL. Did the Greeks get less patriarchal over time? In the classical era they were Taliban-tier and complained they even had to see women.
I'm afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene's reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her
I had to look that up, it's just too good to pass.
A bit further below, however
Sauce - https://senchus.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/julia-and-the-caledonian-women/
We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight
who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster 
. These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.
These don't look too dissimilar to things I'd doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.
It's fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The "head with arms and legs" stage seems universal, and amusing.
I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
Teacher has threw it on the trash. 😂
Imagine how his teacher feels. The little shit doodles all through his class, and who do we build a statue of? The kid‽
A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said "if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country"....
...and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.
Later, some dude was like "screw your catholicism, I don't like my wife any more, I'll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife," and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.
I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that's about it.
Your version makes more sense 😃
I doubted the blow, but it could be true; turns out the Columbian Exchange started around 50 years before the Church of England broke from Catholicism
Oxford University Is older than the Aztec civilization.
And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn't fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.
The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we'd all be speaking an Australian language or something.
I read about it once. I think it was up to medieval times where sahara had lots of green batches and oasis? Though thats in the range of natural climate change.
Btw. most Alpine passes were unpassable from 900 to 1300, we had a mini ice age then.
Nah, green Sahara ended pretty early in the bronze age. The old kingdom Egyptians were really just getting the tail end of it. It was definitely natural, I don't think that's in question; the (non-mini) ice age was simply ending, about on schedule. It would have been a much slower change than what's happening now.
There were a few trees that managed to hang on in one area, though, with the last being "accidentally" run over by the colonial-era French.
Harvard University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than Harvard University.
Edit: Which isn't really surprising, but I posted anyway for the sake of completeness. Oxford is so old it's not super clear when in the middle ages it started.
There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was "As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge."
The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.
He even tried it a second time
Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!
As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.
Was finding the number odd (expecting a longer orbit) but looks like the solar system has already orbited the center of the milky way 18 to 20 times. Imagine that much change in earth in 20 years.
That North and South Korea maintain a fax line between their countries... which they use almost exclusively to send threats and insults to each other.
Also related to North Korea, the hilarious fact that Dennis Rodman, former NBA player, is so well liked by the Kim family that he's basically a diplomat to North Korea, or at least the one they turn to when things really start going badly.
Proof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/12/20/north-and-south-korea-exchange-faxes-threatening-to-attack-each-other/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-sends-fax-threatening-strike-south-korea-without-notice-flna2d11781034 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-KRTB-4721
Another fun fact about North Korea: They have their own Linux Distro by the name Red Star OS, which has its 3.0 version leaked to the Internet, while the newest known version is 4.0.
My observations while trying out the leaked 3.0 are:
*It is a fedora derivative,its package manager made me think it's something close to CentOS 6.3.
*It's visuals are really similar to Mac OS. Perhaps the state official behind this project really liked Mac?
*Every piece of software installed has its credits removed, they have help prompts that refer to them being made in some sort of university.
*It leaves strange markings to created files. I couldn't understand what they do exactly, but I assume it could be used to track the computer that made the files.
*Their browser does not support https, and does not have English support at all.
*Packages intended for developers aren't installed by default, doesn't have a remote repository but instead was intended to be installed with a physical media drive.
*Just for fun, I tried to request the Linux kernel's source code that the developers behind used, as it's licensed by GPL. I was unsuccessful; which means this is the first time a state sponsored software is violating GPL.
Report to the FSF so they can help you sue North Korea.
Wow that's interesting! Gotta be at least in the running for the rarest Linux distro ever
There exists state sponsored Linux distros for various reasons. As far as i can recall China, India and Turkey has their distros available publically. I also remember reading about a distro Russia was working on, but I don't remember what happened to it. Could be a project to use internally by Russian govt.
"Mad" Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.
And still survived. Legend
Allegedly German soldiers said that they didn't shoot him because they assumed he'd lost his mind, and took pity on him
You'd think it'd make them do the opposite, idk about you but I'd be more scared of that guy than regular troops and I'd be gunning for him. "He's clearly crazy, lord knows what he'll do."
The only confirmed bow and arrow kill of WW2!
And after the war he went on to become an early pioneer in surfing!
The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn't understand it and was "beaten to death" by a French mob after it descended to the ground.
I'm skeptical. Can I bother you for a source?
It wouldn't bother me at all.
Okay, so it was actually unmanned, and it was a hydrogen balloon, but it does seem to be a pretty widely repeated story from a contemporary newspaper. This was shortly after the first hot air balloon flight and might have had less fanfare, so it seems a bit more reasonable that peasants 21 km away wouldn't have heard anything about it until the large levitating blob was coming at them.
Wait, I said manned? D'Oh!
Wasn't he also on death row? He was offered a pardon, if he survived.
Yes, they did that for all those experiments back then.
San Francisco had an emperor.
(He even "decreed" the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)
And the city just humored him.
Hey, that dude was in West of Loathing. Now I know he was a real dude.
End of the bronze age. Have a set of letters between citystate rulers, one writing that help is urgently needed as seaborne invaders have been spotted nearby and his military is off with the hittite empire.
The response back, in modern slang amounts to "lol ur fucked."
Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?
Appears to be referencing this story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse#:~:text=In%20response%20to%20a%20plea%20for%20assistance%20from%20the%20king%20of%20Alasiya
Its from the book 1176 BC by Eric H Cline.
Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.
Yep. It was 50/50 given that he only knew it was moving from between two points somehow. Tough luck, Benny. (Specifically, he was the one that figured out charge is conserved)
Now we all have to deal with circuit diagrams that don't match what's actually happening inside the components, which confuses at least me when I have to think about electrochemical reactions, semiconductors and/or induction.
Edit: He actually didn't have complete circuits at that time, it was all static experiments where charges were moved manually. Fixed.
Can you eli5? Or like I’m a dumb dumb idiot? Please.
Electricity is one of those things I so badly want to understand and just seem to not be able to.
On diagrams you'd use + as the "source" of elecricity, i.e. you assume electricity flows from + to - (poaitive to negative). Electricity as far as physics goes is an effect created by electrons, which are defined as negative in charge.
DC is electricity where the literal flow of electrons from point A to point B make the current (so it flows from negative to positive, since it's the flow of "negative" electrons that carries electricity). Benjamin Franklin assumed logically that electricity obviously must flow from positive to negative (since it's the logical choice), but alas, he was wrong as far as history sees it. So today, whenever you're dealing with electrical diagrams current/electricity is assumed to flow from + to - while in the physical domain it's the negatively charged electrons that create what we call electricity.
AC is a bit different - here electrons aren't flowing directly from point A to point B, but rather wiggling about or "alternating" in place and it's this alternating movement that carries the (still negative) charge. But even for AC it still holds true that electrical charge is the "negative" charge of electrons and that this movement of electrons alternating in place enables them to move this "negative" charge of theirs from one place to another.
I assume you know about the saying "opposites attract" - for electricity and charge it's literally true, so you can view power consumption as the "positive" charge of protons (which is immovable because protons are bound to the cores of their atom), while it's the "negative" charge of electrons which are located in the outer shells of metal atoms that can leave their atoms and move their charge that are viewed as the source/carrier of electricsl energy.
I put negative and positive in quotes because to get back to your question about defining why Franklin was wrong:
As it stands, there are two conventions on electricity. One is used in diagrams and often attributed to Franklin, the one that says that electricity flows from the positive (+) to the negative (-) pole. The other is the physics convention that protons hold positive charge while electrons hold negative charge, and this is where the disparity comes from. I don't know which convention was chronologically earlier, but I assume it's the physics one since Franklin is the one cited as "wrong".
Obligatory I'm not an electrical engineer - this is only what I remember from my physics classes. Please assume it mostly correct but maybe not technically for every minute detail (the only use of "power" is technically very wrong among other things, but that's the gist of it).
Electricity is the flow of electrons, who move from negative to positive, the opposite of what you would normally expect.
Maybe I'm biased because I'm a welder, but it always made more sense to me that electricity flows from the negative. Like , if the positive moved, wouldn't you change the element of the wire after a while? It also helps that you can tell the difference if an arc is positive or negative relative to the stinger depending on how the metal reacts, at least to a welder. I know that doesn't make any sense at all but it does to another welder lol
So, when Ben Franklin named them, it was in terms of something like "excess of electricity". A positive excess of charge, like in the glass he used to define the term, is actually a deficit (negative excess) of electrons, which are the real fluid.
Later on Crooks (I think?) figured out that if he cleared all the air out of a tube with mercury, he could force electrons out of the metal into open space, at the negative cathode end, and at that point they realised it was backwards.
Okay, so I see someone else already did an effortpost, so I'll just add on.
Well, I'm sure he knew it was a guess. He was a smart man. He picked glass as the thing that picks up "electric fluid" in static electricity experiments, becoming "positively charged", in other words a positive excess of fluid, when in fact it loses electrons. Until someone invented vacuum tubes a century or so later nobody could tell the difference.
Positive-to-negative is called "conventional current", and circuit diagrams are still drawn that way. Unfortunately, the charge and direction of the particles moving (rather than just that they are moving) can become important if you want to understand electrochemistry, for example. Metal ions are positively charged (missing an electron), and so they're going to come off of the electrode where electrons being removed, and plate on to the electrode where they're being added. You have to remember the conventional current is opposite to the actual current to picture a battery running a circuit, and if it's connected to a bunch of digital chips in a complicated way, I, at least, can get lost.
If that's still unclear, any further questions are welcome.
I find it fascinating that electricity is fast enough that this is a thing. You would never get this wrong with water, and if you did things wouldn’t work right, but electricity is basically instant.
Interestingly, electron flow is only a few mm/minute, on average. The field propagation travels at around 2/3 the speed of light (200,000,000m/s).
One of Sir Issac Newton's famous phrases is
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!
The fact that they dug up Oliver Cromwell's body for a posthumous execution. It's just insane on so many levels
Did they not just dig it up so they could put his head on a spike for all to see?
Ask anyone from Ireland or Scotland at that time if it was justified and your head would be on a feckin spike for even questioning it 😂
No it was by trial and meant as punishment. Quite common even, but I first heard of it in relation to Cromwell c.s.
A double agent was so good, he won medals from both the UK and Germany during WW2
The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.
Probably the one about tin cans and can openers. IIRC, can opener was invented decades after the tin
To be fair that makes a lot more sense than it happening the other way around
For a few years you just had to find a sharp rock
How did they open cans before then?
Originally tin cans were large things meant for military campaigns, so they used a chisel or similar large stabby thing.
I actually don't know. Presumably with a knife
There was a roman emperor named Pupienus which is pronounced poopy anus
What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behavior like that.
Well, at least that brisket was good enough for jehovah.
"Well it's a joke name sir!"
Biggus Dickus
There are lots of great answers here so I want to post something entirely silly and much much more recent:
About 8-9 years ago someone on Reddit transcribed and revised the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven to instead be about an Emu.
For the life of me I have never been able to find it again.
Oh great. First, the Emus won a war against Australia, greatly boosting their egos. And later on, they started censoring their mention online.
In other news... there seems to be a bird in my backyard that keeps taping on my backdoor window.
Upvoted bc i want someone to find and share it.
Good luck. It wasn't a post, it was a top level comment and I have a dim memory of it only being slightly related to the post topic.
There's a lot to choose from, but it's early so I'll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.
I mean once it's happened twice it must become a cultural thing so the third one is inevitable
True!
One started the 48 years war! I remember that from highschool. What were the other two?
TBH I kinda forgot the rest of it, since the fact there were three and they had such an unusual theme was the interesting part. Pre-modern history can seem a bit repetitive to me, it's one group of aristocrats trying to knock off another group ad infinitum. I prefer to read about technology, culture and common life, where it's known.
Looks like the first one was proto-protestant rebels, and sparked a religious war. The second was a coup against a Hungarian king who was getting too powerful for the defenestrator's tastes, and featured the defenestration of already dead bodies, 'cause why not.
More people have been thrown from windows in Prague since the third one you were thinking of, but none of them has really caught on as an event. It was sometimes Russian assassins, or course.
The US newspaper billionaire William Randolph Hearst owned enough of congress that he started a war with Spain.
"You provide the pictures and I'll provide the war"
The Emu War
The Alberta Rat Wars
Uh oh I’ve not heard about those!
Tell ya what, you go fight a herd of dinosaurs and see who wins
~Everyone thinks it's funny until they face off on an emu~
looking forward to the movie!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uI9IjmZ93M
In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells's "The War of the Worlds" for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.
This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare's Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.
Wasn't that just one newspaper reporting it which was more or less just an advert for the play?
No. In fact, I quoted the first-hand accounts of the people in charge of the broadcast.
Yes, there may have been less of a panic than as advertised, but it wasn't a gross (or intentional) distortion. The drama was also only broadcast once.
The offices of the city of Trenton, New Jersey, a location within the dramatization, had its communications paralyzed for 3 hours due to the calls made to ask the city well.
That one of the US presidents died from eating too many cherries.
https://www.grunge.com/630116/how-cherries-are-tied-to-president-zachary-taylors-death/
Australia started a war with emus and lost
and the movie just came out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uI9IjmZ93M
Rasputin having such a massive cock that Boney M had to made a song about it.
But the ladies begged, "Don't you try to do it, please!"
Oh, that rasputin song. Guy was in a situation where he had to make himself appear more manly.
Germany could have disavowed the Zimmerman Telegram and avoided or postponed the U.S. entering The Great War, but they fucking owned that shit.
Napoleon's penis
Risky click but worth it.
.... Whyyyyy?!
W H A T
This is a great thread