Today I Learned #3: There's a wiki for everything!

[Zardnaar]

New democracy rankings.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/436008/new-zealand-placed-fourth-in-global-democracy-index

1. Norway
2. Iceland
3. Sweden
4. NZ

Best Korea last place.

 

[Takhisis]

1. Norway
2. Iceland
3. Sweden

New SatW comic in 4… 3… 2… 1…

 

[The_J]

TIL: There are kangaroos in France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_kangaroo#France

It is sometimes said there is a population of kangaroos living in the wild in the township of Émancé, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) southwest of Paris.[2] In fact, they are red-necked wallabies.[3] These wallabies are descended from a breeding population which escaped a zoological reserve in the 1970s.[4]

 

[Samson]

TIL: There are kangaroos in France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_kangaroo#France

We have wallabies in the UK:

In recent years, feral red-necked wallabies have been seen bobbing along dark stretches of road in Kent, scampering into towns in Devon, fighting police in St Ives, and patrolling the graves in London’s Highgate Cemetery.​

 

[Zardnaar]

He we got wallabies as well. Damn Aussie. Bad Arwon bad.

 

[Samson]

TIL about the best name of a campaign group ever:
Pregnant Then Screwed

Pregnant Then Screwed exists to end the motherhood penalty.
We campaign on the many issues which impact working mothers and offer free advice and support to those who face pregnancy or maternity discrimination.
​

Spoiler Logo? :

 

[Hrothbern]

TIL that the oldest bread so far known is from 14.400 years ago. Empiral evidence found (crumbs) at a hunter-gathers tribe location in Jordan. This would be 4.000 years before agericulture started.
(Just flat plate bread. The oldest sourdough bread is AFAIK an Egyption invention).
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/31/7925

Despite being one of the most important foodstuffs consumed in the modern world, the origins of bread are still largely unknown. Here we report the earliest empirical evidence for the preparation of bread-like products by Natufian hunter-gatherers, 4,000 years before the emergence of the Neolithic agricultural way of life. The discovery of charred food remains has allowed for the reconstruction of the chaîne opératoire for the early production of bread-like products. Our results suggest the use of the wild ancestors of domesticated cereals (e.g. wild einkorn) and club-rush tubers to produce flat bread-like products. Cereal-based meals such as bread probably become staples when Neolithic farmers started to rely on the cultivation of domesticated cereal species for their subsistence.

 

[Samson]

TIL that a rude letter from Apophis, ruler of the Hyksos invaders, complaining about the snoring of the hippopotami in the sacred pool at Thebes initiated the war that ultimately led to the restoration of the rule of the pharaos in Egypt in the 16th century BC. Unfortunately, this war also led to the death of the addressee, Seqenenre Taa II, 14th pharaoh of the Theban dynasty.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

TIL that a rude letter from Apophis, ruler of the Hyksos invaders, complaining about the snoring of the hippopotami in the sacred pool at Thebes initiated the war that ultimately led to the restoration of the rule of the pharaos in Egypt in the 16th century BC. Unfortunately, this war also led to the death of the addressee, Seqenenre Taa II, 14th pharaoh of the Theban dynasty.

That's part of the plot of the Children of the Lion series by Peter Danielson, though he fudged the timeline a bit to make all the 40-year biblical events happen on a more reasonable scale. He also set this closer to the time of the Trojan War.

I've been reading Egyptian history to see what parts of the novel series are based on real events and what parts are things Danielson made up himself (obviously, the dynasty of armorers and artisans are original characters).

 

[Arakhor]

I don't recall the letter being part of it, but the French author and Egyptologist Christian Jacq did a trilogy about Queen Ahhotep, Seqenenre's probable sister and mother to the next pharaoh, Ahmose I. It's called The Queen of Freedom.

 

[Berzerker]

"A team of archaeologists, led by Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, has unearthed Britain’s third-largest stone circle in the Preseli Hills of western Wales that they believe was dismantled, moved 175 miles to England's Salisbury Plain and rebuilt as Stonehenge, according to research to be published Friday in Antiquity, a peer-reviewed journal of archaeology."

It would be interesting to see if they had to move their henge to keep up with the sun's journey southward over the millennia. For example, 8,000 years ago the Earth's tilt was larger and the summer solstice was over 24 degrees above the equator. Its around 23.44 today. Imagine the people who built these structures fretting over the fact all their hard work was being ruined by a wandering sun. They just didn't migrate, they moved their sacred stones too.

edit; that link isn't working, maybe it will when the article is published.

Now all we need is a resident mathematician to calculate the distance from the older site to Stonehenge and compare it to the changing solstice.

oops, the article says 175 miles between the 2 sites, but I think Stonehenge is SE of the older site. so maybe around 160 miles.
And the Earth is about 25k around the poles so thats about 12,500 mi divided by 180 degrees or about 70 mi/degree.

That cant be right, that would be closer to 2 degrees. So much for that idea.

 

[Kyriakos]

"A team of archaeologists, led by Mike Parker Pearson of University College London, has unearthed Britain’s third-largest stone circle in the Preseli Hills of western Wales that they believe was dismantled, moved 175 miles to England's Salisbury Plain and rebuilt as Stonehenge, according to research to be published Friday in Antiquity, a peer-reviewed journal of archaeology."

It would be interesting to see if they had to move their henge to keep up with the sun's journey southward over the millennia. For example, 8,000 years ago the Earth's tilt was larger and the summer solstice was over 24 degrees above the equator. Its around 23.44 today. Imagine the people who built these structures fretting over the fact all their hard work was being ruined by a wandering sun. They just didn't migrate, they moved their sacred stones too.

edit; that link isn't working, maybe it will when the article is published.

Now all we need is a resident mathematician to calculate the distance from the older site to Stonehenge and compare it to the changing solstice.

oops, the article says 175 miles between the 2 sites, but I think Stonehenge is SE of the older site. so maybe around 160 miles.
And the Earth is about 25k around the poles so thats about 12,500 mi divided by 180 degrees or about 70 mi/degree.

That cant be right, that would be closer to 2 degrees. So much for that idea.

Look at ancient Britons, man, so interesting, they built a rocky monument related to the sun.


It is commendable, ok, due to the age it was created. It is pretty curious that it wasn't followed by anything, though...

 

[Samson]

Look at ancient Britons, man, so interesting, they built a rocky monument related to the sun.


It is commendable, ok, due to the age it was created. It is pretty curious that it wasn't followed by anything, though...

It was followed by mead and mushrooms. Come on, you have been to briton, you know what we are into. What did you expect, high art and democracy?

 

[Kyriakos]

It was followed by mead and mushrooms. Come on, you have been to briton, you know what we are into. What did you expect, high art and democracy?

I was just thinking that at least in 8th century BC Greece, the astronomical observations about the Sun were quickly followed by the use of trigonometry in solar watches, which in turn led to attempts to calculate solar and lunar movements, leading a couple of centuries later to a full system which predicted those things.
Then again maybe in ancient Britain, much like in ancient Egypt, Babylon etc, the class of priests just didn't feel like sharing any info, and what info they had died with them.

 

[PhroX]

There's a much simpler explanation as to why it was moved - it was meant to observe the sun. And as anyone who's ever been to Wales can testify, it's always raining there, so....

 

[Hrothbern]

I was just thinking that at least in 8th century BC Greece, the astronomical observations about the Sun were quickly followed by the use of trigonometry in solar watches, which in turn led to attempts to calculate solar and lunar movements, leading a couple of centuries later to a full system which predicted those things.
Then again maybe in ancient Britain, much like in ancient Egypt, Babylon etc, the class of priests just didn't feel like sharing any info, and what info they had died with them.

Priests were the knowledge bearers and predictive abilities their magic power, whether on herbs, sun & moon eclipses, or the best time to seed. The latter perhaps best explaining why astronomical knowledge becomes important when agriculture becomes important.

Terps, mounds, dikes and more dikes
Our first priority in coastal NL was to know when it was low and high tide (each twice a day), when it was spring or neap tide (each twice a month, hight tide becoming higher from allignment sun and moon) and I guess they struggled with the long cycle of the perigean spring tide as biggest high tide happening every 7.5 lunar months at max effect, where the moon is not only closest to Earth, but also coincides with tide and sun-moon allignment. I never read anything in early chronicles about the perigean effect, but it did add some decimeters water height.

 

[Kyriakos]

Priests were the knowledge bearers and predictive abilities their magic power, whether on herbs, sun & moon eclipses, or the best time to seed. The latter perhaps best explaining why astronomical knowledge becomes important when agriculture becomes important.

Terps, mounds, dikes and more dikes
Our first priority in coastal NL was to know when it was low and high tide (each twice a day), when it was spring or neap tide (each twice a month, hight tide becoming higher from allignment sun and moon) and I guess they struggled with the long cycle of the perigean spring tide as biggest high tide happening every 7.5 lunar months at max effect, where the moon is not only closest to Earth, but also coincides with tide and sun-moon allignment. I never read anything in early chronicles about the perigean effect, but it did add some decimeters water height.

A great many centuries before the industrial revolution in Britain, some greek inventor used steam to open doors and do other stuff to help the local egyptian priests look like they possesed magic powers
There's also the famous case of the mechanical singing birds and all-around mobility of the throne of the Byzantine emperor, who would amaze barbarians foreigners in this way too.

 

[AmazonQueen]

A great many centuries before the industrial revolution in Britain, some greek inventor used steam to open doors and do other stuff to help the local egyptian priests look like they possesed magic powers
There's also the famous case of the mechanical singing birds and all-around mobility of the throne of the Byzantine emperor, who would amaze barbarians foreigners in this way too.

But your reliance on a slave economy meant you didn't have an industrial revolution and so these inventions remained novelties.

 

[Kyriakos]

But your reliance on a slave economy meant you didn't have an industrial revolution and so these inventions remained novelties.

I doubt the existence of slaves was the crucial part - probably it was more a case of the roman rise/conquest putting an end to actual innovation. I would suppose that if Hero of Alexandria had lived a few centuries before, in some free city instead of an empire, steam would have been put to better use...

 

[AmazonQueen]

I doubt the existence of slaves was the crucial part - probably it was more a case of the roman rise/conquest putting an end to actual innovation. I would suppose that if Hero of Alexandria had lived a few centuries before, in some free city instead of an empire, steam would have been put to better use...

I've seen it put down to a lot of causes.
Slave labour meaning Greeks and Romans having no use for labour-saving machinery, inability to make steel of high enough quality, lack of concept of zero in mathmatics.
Fact remains it wasn't put to practical use in that era