Are you looking at me?
TIL horses originated in North America, migrated to Asia and were domesticated, went extinct in North America, and were brought back over again by the Spanish thousands of years later.
Shamelessly ripped from a Reddit TIL I saved a year ago and just found.
https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearn...rica_migrated/
The recent anniversary of Brian Boru's death in 1014 sent me down a rabbit hole related to his reign and the internal fall out after his death which ultimately led to the dilution of the Dalcassian tribe (Na Dál gCais) as a serious force in Irish monarchy. We have such a powerful, interesting and rich culture and history, and i think it gets forgotten about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalcassians
On another note, can anyone recommend a good book or articles on the Annals of the Four Masters?
The Antikythera Mechanism. The worlds oldest computer dating from 2 BC. It was used to track the moon and sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses and astronomical positions of the stars, sun and moon. Apparently it totally changed the way we look at the history of technology.
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p09pc...ldest-computer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
Pretty cool.
Not so much the position of the stars (on a human timeframe they pretty much just rotate in the sky daily as they're too far away for much paralax), but it could track the planet the Greeks knew of.
It's an amazing device. They pulled it out of a shipwreck over a century ago, but it just just junk in a drawer until x-ray tomography revealed the innards. People have spent decades figuring out what it could do. The bronze-work in it and the nature of the gearing is more intricate than anything we see again until the late middle ages. It can't have been an isolated device - the craftsmanship in it has to be built up over generations - but it's possible that other similar devices were melted down for their bronze later on. Sadly, written records from that far back are very fragmentary, and we'll likely never know the full extent of the technology they had. It's kind of a caution too: the march of progress isn't as relentless as they made it out to be in school.
It makes some approximations of the motions of the sun, moon and planets that have allowed people to find the time period where its approximations fit best, which I think has put the likely construction around 300 BCE.
You can't spell failure without FAI
Nicotine and shrapnel are named after people. (I actually genuinely found out both of these yesterday, completely independently of each other)
One of Henry Shrapnel's early demonstrations of his new weapon was at Vinegar Hill in 1798.
Jean Nicot was the French ambassador to Portugal, who introduced tobacco to France in the 16th century
A DeLorean's speedo only goes up to 85mph
Jungholz Enclave
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungholz
Jungholz is a village in the district of Reutte in the Austrian state of Tyrol that is accessible only via Germany.
Jungholz forms a pene-exclave of Austria that is connected to the rest of Austria by a single point, which is the summit of the mountain Sorgschrofen (1,636 m, 5,367 ft). As well as housing border post number 110 on the normal international border between Tyrol and Bavaria, a second border starts and, having gone round Jungholz, ends there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung..._Bezirk_RE.png
..when you say to someone else "you pick the wine", check the price and don't leave it until the bill arrives !!
Forget about the performance or entertainment. It's only the result that matters.
The word robot came into English from a polish play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). The robots in the play were organic rather than mechanical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
From the wiki entry it replaced older words android or automaton. Automaton or, automata have a long history going back to the ancient Egyptian and Greeks. From Mythical - like Daedalus or Hephaestus, to historical like Hero. But, just to tie it back in to somethign that was mentioned above, the only surviving example is the Antikythera mechanism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton
Cornwall has a pie called a stargazy. It's because the fish are baked into it so that they're gazing up at the stars.
That's a no from me anyway.
Today I learned about Amyloid plaques (don't go down this rabbit hole)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyloid_plaques
and Howard Cunningham , who is among other things one of the people we have to blame for poor workplace implementations of a reasonable idea (if you know you know, it's right there in his bio), and Cunningham's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
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