TIL: Today I Learned

It was there before the country was.

When Lewis and Clark came through, the city formally changed ownership between three countries (Spain, France and the US) in a single day. There are still small French-speaking pockets in the area (Prairie Du Rocher, St. Genevieve) and neat French and British colonial forts, homes and buildings around.

Before that it was at one point the largest city north of Tenochtitlan as part of the Cahokia complex, which controlled a wide ranging trade and cultural exchange network. The inhabitants left so many burial and ceremonial mounds that St Louis was called Mound City by the locals until around 1900. By that point the moundites had destroyed every mound they knew about to provide landfill and flood control along the river.

And before that, well I can show you rocks in the area with fossils of sea life that are older than the concept of god by a couple hundred million years. I actually have some awesome crinoids and a rare Archimedes Screw (squid shell) I dug out of the Prairie Du Long Creek bed.

 

Pay me another visit if you're ever back in town, hobbs! You too if you ever fly into that airport again, Tim!

Cahokia was once huge, though the big mounds are way over around Collinsville. Maybe Mound City was a suburb of it? But sadly, most of the information that could have been gained was destroyed long ago.

 

Mound City (St Louis) was part of the ancient urban sprawl, such as it was. The town called Cahokia now isn't really related to the ancient Cahokia, which as you note is in modern Collinsville (both in Illinois). Plus I suspect people back then from all around St Louis would have called themselves Moundites just like I say I am from St Louis even though I never lived in the city proper.

Oh man I would kill to go on a hike through the river bluffs with you guys. That would be a treat.

 

No fossils, but I could show you some spectacular views up in the San Gabriels. It's challenging hiking for a former midwesterner though, because you guys don't get much experience with thin air. Six thousand feet and you tend to do fish impressions. Of course, so do I, but I'm old.

 

Hardly more than a mile high; the air doesn't get thin for another five thousand feet...

 

Yeah, when I lived in the Rockies I thought that too, but that was almost four decades ago. I'm a coastal sort now.

 

Do you still have Calico Ghost Town? My family visited there when I was the first grade. It was kinda cool.

You could also go to Lake Los Angeles and try and find either the lake or Los Angeles.

 

@hobbsyoyo there's also a google extension that can copy PDFs and images, so anything that doesn't translate automatically you can copy and paste into google translate if you really need to.

Coincidentally, East Cape Girardeau is exactly the same. Beautiful green city on the Missouri side, run down trailers, shacks, and strip clubs on the Illinois side. Literally that's all there is, three or four strip clubs, a convenience store or two, maybe a bar, and two or four dozen very-low value residential.

 

After WW I, parts of the Verdun battlefield were used to dispose of poison gas...by burning it. Some of the soil is now 17.5% arsenic.

 

Isn't that wonderful... your own personalised news channel, like your car navi, where you can choose the kind of voice and for the news also the appearance of the newsreader.

For sure there are still some improvements to make, but with RL newsreaders often close to Barbie and Ken, the difference will fade over time.

For state propaganda ideal. You can easily write and optimise text for max desired impact with some fast polling feedbacks. And most importantly you can instill authority and bonding in that AI appearance, as a guardian angel friend, to guide your people to the convenient opinions.
The reversed,complementary tool of Big Brother.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46136504

 

Technologically seen fascinating, otherwise pretty creepy :/.

 

In case any one was interested in the why of the thing -

The land was formally held by Spain at the time, yet the real owner was Napoleon/France. Then Napoleon sold the land that wasn't really his (but totally was) to the new United States which promptly dispatched Lewis and Clark to inspect and report on the new holdings. When they rolled through, they did a formal hand off of the city and kind of on a lark they decided to acknowledge the open secret that it had really been the French and not the Spanish that had controlled the area for (I think) decades at that point. So they retired the Spanish flag, raised the French, retired that and then raised the American one.

There was actually a trail marker for the expedition about a mile from where I used to live in Columbia, Illinois.

 

Looking at the map there seems to have been some growth, but long ago when I was in college I took a holiday to a classmate's home in South Lake Tahoe, California. At that time the appropriately named Stateline, Nevada, which could be reached by crossing a street, had more casinos than residents.

 

It turns out that the standard for what is a kilogram has been losing atoms over time and it is time for a re-calibration.We certainly can't afford to have all those bags of sugar be a few grains short!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/13/world/kilo-measurement-scli-intl/index.html

 

I'm not getting bigger! The kilos are getting smaller!

 

We don't care. At least they aren't metric.

 

I am now totally opted in on the kilo thing, unless someone determines that the pound thing is shrinking even faster.

 

The pound has been shrinking for decades. Today it is at $1.30. I remember when it almost $3.00.

 

godDAMMIT beat me to it