TIL: Today I Learned

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in 1030 the viking ages end and the middle ages begin when Olav the Holy dies at Stiklestad kthnx
 
Interesting fellow, but if we're going to choose 11th Century dates, clearly the end of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066 is the superior date. :p
 
Why should 11th century England of all places define the end of a pan-euro era? ;)

Lohrens stated a Norwegian-specific date, so I suggested a date significant to England (and later France and Ireland too). I never said it was definitive. :)
 
Late 4th/5th is borderline for me. That's in that Late Antique/Early Medieval gray area. By the time you hit the 6th, you're pretty decidedly in the Medieval period in my book. See: trying to figure out if Augustine is Late Antique or Medieval. It varies by university/book/library, and that dude was writing De ciuitate Dei in 395-397.
 
I tend to kick it back to the 530s for the Late Antiquity/Early Medieval border. Theoderic and Clovis both clearly viewed themselves as ruling with the Roman framework and the Eastern Empire was largely fine with the arrangement. With Justinian and contemporary Imperial propaganda pushing the idea that the Roman Empire had fallen rather than simply getting some new caretakers I feel provides as clean a break as one can get.
Plus, it allows for some poetic irony in that Justinian, often called "the Last Roman" would be the one that saw Europe shift from the Classical Roman world to the Medieval "Barbarian" world.
 
TIL: Although Bioware never officially established a canon ending for Mass Effect 3, there is actually a small snippet of dialog in Mass Effect Andromeda that may imply the "refusal" ending (the one where the Reapers end up completing their harvest of all advanced life like they normally do) from the extended cut ending is the canon ending for Mass Effect 3.
 
That doesn't sound likely. After all, the entire setup of the game was to avoid pinning down a canonical version of events, so why hint at it at all?
 
That doesn't sound likely. After all, the entire setup of the game was to avoid pinning down a canonical version of events, so why hint at it at all?

Because maybe they did want to establish a canon ending but knew if they came right out and said it, the community would be mad no matter which ending they chose as canon. So they adopt the official position of not establishing a canon ending but then drop a few subtle hints in Andromeda for those perceptive enough to pick up on them.
 
Late 4th/5th is borderline for me. That's in that Late Antique/Early Medieval gray area. By the time you hit the 6th, you're pretty decidedly in the Medieval period in my book. See: trying to figure out if Augustine is Late Antique or Medieval. It varies by university/book/library, and that dude was writing De ciuitate Dei in 395-397.

I tend to kick it back to the 530s for the Late Antiquity/Early Medieval border. Theoderic and Clovis both clearly viewed themselves as ruling with the Roman framework and the Eastern Empire was largely fine with the arrangement. With Justinian and contemporary Imperial propaganda pushing the idea that the Roman Empire had fallen rather than simply getting some new caretakers I feel provides as clean a break as one can get.
Plus, it allows for some poetic irony in that Justinian, often called "the Last Roman" would be the one that saw Europe shift from the Classical Roman world to the Medieval "Barbarian" world.

I think the medieval periodization clearly varies with geography. It begins much earlier in the West than in the East, where the collapse of the urban classical civilization doesn't really happen until the early 7th century with the Muslim conquest of Egypt, whose grain had hitherto supported the cities of the East Roman Empire. There was also the reorganization of the Byzantine military with the themata replacing the cosmopolitan professional military.
 
Using Medieval or Middle Ages is doing no more than defining it a period between the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and the Renaissance.

You can also say that Medieval period started with Feudalism and Guilds. Essential ingredients of governance and economy of most of that Middle Age period. More a definition of the own merits and essentials.
Both started in the early 9th century. With Charlemagne as first emperor of the second Roman empire (in 800)
 
TIL the origin of the word soccer. Purportedly the name is British in origin. There were many football type sports back in the day and eventually some British folk got together and decided on a set of rules that everyone should play by. They called this "Association Football". That isn't exactly a catchy term so some enterprising young lads nicknamed it "assoccer" which eventually became just soccer. The sport was popular among the lower classes of society who called it football and it eventually spread across the world. Only in some countries football already existed as a separate sport so soccer was the term that stuck.

Also a related tidbit. The term football originally meant any game that was played by "peasants" which was usually played on foot regardless if kicking was involved in the sport, whereas the aristocrats sports tended to be played on horseback.
 
According to the meteorologist on the radio, over the long term, heat waves kill more people in the US than any other natural disaster, averaging 178 per year. (By contrast, an average of 74 people per year were killed in the US by foreign terrorists, from 1975-2015. Priorities, eh? The Defense Department should just buy everyone an air conditioner.)
 
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So is St. Augustine. ;)
Definitely not that far back. :)
I meant St. Augustine of Canterbury!
That isn't exactly a catchy term so some enterprising young lads nicknamed it "assoccer"
The same people who call breakfast ‘brekkers’ and rugby ‘rugger’, so it's three capital offences already.
BenitoChavez said:
Also a related tidbit. The term football originally meant any game that was played by "peasants" which was usually played on foot regardless if kicking was involved in the sport, whereas the aristocrats sports tended to be played on horseback.
Yes, ‘foot’ modifies ‘ball game’, i.e. a ball game played on foot, but 'Murican handegg features people mostly standing about, which makes it more akin to baseball or cricket, really.
 
According to the meteorologist on the radio, over the long term, heat waves kill more people in the US than any other natural disaster, averaging 178 per year. (By contrast, an average of 74 people per year were killed in the US by foreign terrorists, from 1975-2015. Priorities, eh? The Defense Department should just buy everyone an air conditioner.)

Why compare the number of deaths by heat wave to the number of deaths by terrorism? It's a comparison that makes no sense other than to awkwardly shoehorn in some political statement about US defense spending. The comparison and your mention of the DoD is especially awkward considering dealing with natural disasters is not one of the DoD's responsibilities. Natural disasters and the relief efforts associated with them are the responsibility of DHS.
 
An artificial intelligence system called BioMind has managed to defeated a team
comprised of 15 of China's top doctors by a margin of two to one. The Next Web
reports the details: When diagnosing brain tumors, BioMind was correct 87
percent of the time, compared to 66 percent by the medical professionals...

Best comment on article...
It's not a tumah!
 
a 66% accuracy sounds very low - the article unfortunately does not go into detail except to state it was some kind of judged competition. I'd love to see that...

Of course it's a silly comparison!
Doctors don't make judgments from x-ray results or other imaging methods in a
few seconds.

When my cousin, a neurosurgery prof. in Lithuania, tried to tout an expert
system for diagnosing certain types of stroke, he came up against a beautiful
method some doctors used to circumvent the shiny "instant diagnosis" machine and
program.

Here's how those hoomans reasoned...

If a doctor follows the advice of (for want of a better term) an AI, then they
could be subject to a law suit if it was deemed to be a poor choice.

If they ignored the advice of the AI, then they could be subject to a law suit
if that advice was deemed to be better than what they chose.

Their solution? Push the cart holding the computer and code into the corner and
pretend it didn't exist.

QED. :)
 
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