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

[Samson]

The reason the aeolipile did not kick off the industrial revolution was that it is a spectacularly inefficient way of extracting useful work out of chemical energy. It is said that it takes more energy to put the fuel into than you get out, so it would be better to turn a wheel than stock the fire.

To get efficient energy out you need a decent cylinder, and you need much better than iron age metallurgy and tooling for that.

 

[Kyriakos]

The reason the aeolipile did not kick off the industrial revolution was that it is a spectacularly efficient way of extracting useful work out of chemical energy. It is said that it takes more energy to put the fuel into than you get out, so it would be better to turn a wheel than stock the fire.

To get efficient energy out you need a decent cylinder, and you need much better than iron age metallurgy and tooling for that.

Imo if the work doesn't come across as a miracle, it is all inefficient

 

[r16]

you will not want to make a slave too important , by teaching technology you yourself do not understand . Meaning it pays to have freemen as masters of what they do . Accordingly the lack of slaves in England or similar Western countries is not a humane choice or whatever , considering Anglos had no issues in having slaves in Americas . And of course lndustrial Revolution happens not because of some brilliance happening here and there but there has been enough accumulation of wealth which then allows people to buy in volume that can not be matched by artizans .. So that people will imagine of designing machines to produce more to satisfy the demand .

 

[Hrothbern]

"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.

Here the Guardian article today on that relocation of those stones.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...inks-stonehenge-to-its-original-site-in-wales

Geoffrey had written of “stones of a vast magnitude” in his History of the Kings of Britain, which popularised the legend of King Arthur, but which is considered as much myth as historical fact.

Parker Pearson said there may well be a “tiny grain” of truth in his account of Stonehenge: “My word, it’s tempting to believe it … We may well have just found what Geoffrey called the Giants’ Dance.”

Somehow the story of King Arthur, now framed as the fight against the invading Saxons after the Roman occupation, could be much and much older and refer to the period of Stonehenge.
The Round Table of Arthur becoming the round circle of stones.
Perhaps the element of the invading Saxons is the element of the from mainland Europe invading Bronze Culture tribes who not only conquered Britain but based on DNA killed almost all existing tribes in Britain, the tribes who did build Stonehenge.

 

[GinandTonic]

I've seen it put down to a lot of causes.
Slave labour meaning Greeks and Romans having no use for labour-saving machinery,,,

According to the Texas Public Policy Foundation you've got that all wrong. Burning coal ended slavery.

First harnessed in the English Industrial Revolution, fossil fuels spawned unceasing economic growth-an unprecedented productivity of most benefit to the poor until then consigned to poverty and enslavement across the world.

In 1807, the British Parliament finally passed William Wilberforce’s bill to abolish the slave trade in the British Empire. In the same year, the largest industrial complex in the world powered and illuminated by coal opened in Manchester, England. Thus began the century-long process of converting mankind’s industry from the power of muscle, wood, wind, and water to stored solar energy in fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels dissolved the economic justification for slavery.

Mad as a fish.

 

[AmazonQueen]

According to the Texas Public Policy Foundation you've got that all wrong. Burning coal ended slavery.



Mad as a fish.

I suspect the Texas Public Policy Foundation has it the wrong way round. Ending slavery encouraged using other power sources.

 

[GinandTonic]

I suspect the Texas Public Policy Foundation has it the wrong way round. Ending slavery encouraged using other power sources.

Well the in depth rebuttal in the link comes to the conclusion that it's complicated.

(My view, not the author's) you've got the industrial revolution only really being possible with the existence of a middle class. You've got the weirdly contradictory nature of the revolution freeing people from the land and condemning them to slums, making them work far more hours but giving them far more stuff than ever before.

The debunkers argument is that the cotton mills increased the demand for raw cotton by orders of magnitude, which meant the plantation owners increased their slaves to meet that demand. She makes a lot of how this fed into the American Revolutionary War but doesnt mention the mill workers refusing to process confederate cotton. I guess, it's complicated.

Edit -

Also I wondered off down a couple of wiki holes and now I'm not sure what was in the article or the wiki holes.

 

[AmazonQueen]

TIL (because following links about one subject can end up teaching you about all sorts of other things if you have the attention span of a butterfly) that the last pit pony in a UK mine is still alive having retired in 1999.
They were used in NCB mines up until 1994.
Theres a sculpture made of coal waste of one near Caerphilly https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/sultan-the-pit-pony

 

[Takhisis]

TIL (because following links about one subject can end up teaching you about all sorts of other things if you have the attention span of a butterfly)

1) If you have a longer attention span then you learn all about one sort of thing instead
2) What is the attention span of a butterfly?

 

[AmazonQueen]

1) If you have a longer attention span then you learn all about one sort of thing instead
2) What is the attention span of a butterfly?

1. Much more boring
2. A song by Kid Loco

 

[Samson]

We all know that the beer from microbreweries is better, but as uncle Joe (may have) said "Quantity has a quality all of its own", and that is particularly true of beer. Therefore the first macro brewery is a major find, and we have found it:

Egypt unearths ‘world’s oldest’ mass-production brewery

A high-production brewery believed to be more than 5,000 years old has been uncovered by a team of archaeologists at a funerary site in southern Egypt, the tourism ministry said on Saturday.
The site containing several “units” consisting of about 40 earthenware pots arranged in two rows was uncovered at North Abydos, Sohag, by a joint Egyptian-American team, the ministry said in a statement on its Facebook page.
The brewery likely dates back to the era of King Narmer, it quoted the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, Mostafa Waziry, as saying, adding it believed the find to “be the oldest high-production brewery in the world”.

According to Waziry, the brewery consisted of eight large areas which were used as “units for beer production”.
Each sector contained about 40 earthenware pots arranged in two rows.
A mixture of grains and water used for beer production was heated in the vats, with each basin “held in place by levers made of clay placed vertically in the form of rings”.
Archaeologist Matthew Adams of New York University, who heads the joint mission with Deborah Vischak of Princeton University, said studies have shown that beer was produced at a large scale, with about 22,400 litres made at a time.
​

 

[Ferocitus]

TIL...Most proteins have only a single functional, folded configuration. But some can fold themselves into more than one shape to perform different jobs as needed.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/metamorphic-proteins-change-their-folds-for-different-jobs-20210203/

It wasn't mentioned in that short article, but different protein foldings could play a part in memory formation.
It seems memories are not formed on first exposure, but when they are recalled. The same proteins are involved, but some become slightly distorted allowing access to previously inaccessible parts of the molecule.

 

[Hrothbern]

TIL...Most proteins have only a single functional, folded configuration. But some can fold themselves into more than one shape to perform different jobs as needed.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/metamorphic-proteins-change-their-folds-for-different-jobs-20210203/

It wasn't mentioned in that short article, but different protein foldings could play a part in memory formation.
It seems memories are not formed on first exposure, but when they are recalled. The same proteins are involved, but some become slightly distorted allowing access to previously inaccessible parts of the molecule.

Regarding memorising... nice to know that thought !

With gluten intolerance it is not (so much) the water soluble glutenin protein that is causing coeliac, but the gliadin protein that can easily cross cell walls, from the food in the intestines of a breastfeeding mother all the way into the milk.
Gliadin is such a multi-configuaration protein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliadin

 

[Ferocitus]

Regarding memorising... nice to know that thought !

With gluten intolerance it is not (so much) the water soluble glutenin protein that is causing coeliac, but the gliadin protein that can easily cross cell walls, from the food in the intestines of a breastfeeding mother all the way into the milk.
Gliadin is such a multi-configuaration protein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliadin

Brain Cell DNA Refolds Itself to Aid Memory Recall
Researchers see structural changes in genetic material that allow memories to strengthen when remembered.

“It’s almost like warming up for a workout,” explained Steve Ramirez, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University. As a memory forms, engram cells gear up to express genes that will create and strengthen connections among them. Cells can only take full advantage of these latent changes, however, when the memory is called to mind again. “They’re ready to run and enable the process of recollection,” he said.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/brain-cell-dna-refolds-itself-to-aid-memory-recall-20201102/

I wish that the word engram didn't immediately fold my proteins and remind me of some weird scientology contraption.

 

[Ajidica]

Somehow the story of King Arthur, now framed as the fight against the invading Saxons after the Roman occupation, could be much and much older and refer to the period of Stonehenge.
The Round Table of Arthur becoming the round circle of stones.
Perhaps the element of the invading Saxons is the element of the from mainland Europe invading Bronze Culture tribes who not only conquered Britain but based on DNA killed almost all existing tribes in Britain, the tribes who did build Stonehenge.

'Historical King Arthur' is a pet topic of mine, so I felt obliged to comment.
The idea of the 'Round Table' is found nowhere in any vaguely contemporary sources to the period King Arthur was supposed to have lived. (Indeed, following the period he was supposed to exist, the late 5th and early 6th century, the only mention of Arthur being a historical person occurred 300 years later in Historia Brittanium. There is a passing reference to a skilled warrior who was not Arthur in Y Goddodin, but that isn't exactly strong evidence. For example, Procopius refers to a warrior was the 'Achilles of the Vandals' and we would not read Achilles as a real person based on that.) Rather, our first recorded reference to a Round Table appeared in an adaptation/translation of History of the Kings of Britain.
Geoffrey of Monmouth essentially took a number of folk legends and fables and stapled them to legends surrounded a rather obscure Welsh hero.

 

[Birdjaguar]

'Historical King Arthur' is a pet topic of mine, so I felt obliged to comment.
The idea of the 'Round Table' is found nowhere in any vaguely contemporary sources to the period King Arthur was supposed to have lived. (Indeed, following the period he was supposed to exist, the late 5th and early 6th century, the only mention of Arthur being a historical person occurred 300 years later in Historia Brittanium. There is a passing reference to a skilled warrior who was not Arthur in Y Goddodin, but that isn't exactly strong evidence. For example, Procopius refers to a warrior was the 'Achilles of the Vandals' and we would not read Achilles as a real person based on that.) Rather, our first recorded reference to a Round Table appeared in an adaptation/translation of History of the Kings of Britain.
Geoffrey of Monmouth essentially took a number of folk legends and fables and stapled them to legends surrounded a rather obscure Welsh hero.

all that may be true, but I'm pretty sure that the Lady of the Lake is real.

 

[Hrothbern]

Geoffrey of Monmouth essentially took a number of folk legends and fables and stapled them to legends surrounded a rather obscure Welsh hero.

And here my heart and mind open up.

In for example traditional Australian folk legends there are stories describing why that lake is there or that mountain exists with fairy magic roots of a big rainbow snake etc.
An urge to put an explanation on why things existed, how they originated, were created, came into being. And ofc often small moral or emotional wisdom elements woven in.
Our addiction to shape order and meaning.

And such elements can wander from the one "story" to another, giving credibility to new stories as being old and related-associated to the time of beginning or an era of legitimyicy.
The French magazine Planète (1961-1972), introduced "fantastic realism" to a broader public. "Nothing that's strange is foreign to us!" In the Netherlands it became Bres/Planète starting from 1965. It still exists but has less stories like on Arthur or the Swan Apollo dancing on Stonehenge, or Enki the fisherman God of Sumer, etc.
The pre-internet period for fantastic explanations of little archeological evidence.
They had also stories on how such elements, like "something round and important" wandered from story to story.

Religions that conquer areas or tribes often also incorporate old elements of former belief systems. Perhaps fully or at arms length.... or as tolerated superstition until a more strict period starts deleting some old element.
The Christian system was until 800 and even 1200 very tolerant to old elements as long as they slowly drifted to the periphery (like the white rags you hang in that special tree that is still "accepted").
The Islam tolerates the "evil eye", but now Erdogan is enforcing a strict wave to diminish that "superstitious" old element in Turkey (for probably banal political reasons).

Such pools with elements are great for fantasy writing, like I think Geoffrey did with political motives.

 

[Ajidica]

Such pools with elements are great for fantasy writing, like I think Geoffrey did with political motives.

Of course. Until quite recently, history was not written to record things 'as they were' but to impart lessons. King Bob was defeated by Prince Frank because King Bob was immoral and dissolute, whereas Prince Frank loved God and ruled with fairness and justice. When William of Malmsbury wrote that Geoffrey of Monmouth was lying in History of the Kings of Britain, he might have believed that Geoffrey had made up his sources, but he might also have written that because Geoffrey came to different moral lessons that William.
Around the time History of the Kings of Britain was written, there was a lot of tension between the Normans and Welsh; and it is not unreasonable that Norman writers might have wanted to "appropriate" the idea of King Arthur. That he was not some mythical Welsh war-leader, who would return to drive the foreign invaders out of Britain; but that he was a king who brought peace and order to all of Britain and lived in virtue and morals, which just so happened to be the exact same virtues and morals of the Norman conquerors.

Though at no point do we have any evidence that Arthur was seen as anything other than a most Christian ruler. As far as Merlin, I'm not aware of any "Merlin the Pagan" showing up in literature until Margaret Murray and the neo-Paganism idea achieved some popularity in the early 20th century.

 

[r16]

never heard of banning evil eye or whatever . Unless they are doing in their foreign news media things , as a sop to their masters in the Gulf . Pagan signs refused so that they can keep on turning the country into pagans .

 

[Hrothbern]

never heard of banning evil eye or whatever . Unless they are doing in their foreign news media things , as a sop to their masters in the Gulf . Pagan signs refused so that they can keep on turning the country into pagans .

A PR fatwa
From Dutch national news end of January: Mr Diyanet: a Fatwa:

The Turkish religious authority condemns wearing the 'evil eye', an amulet to which certain powers are attributed.
According to Diyanet, the authority that heads over 85,000 mosques, it is not permissible in Islam to expect help from anything other than Allah. "For that reason, it is not permissible to wear evil eye amulets and similar things around the neck or anywhere in order to benefit from them," said a recently released fatwa.
The evil eye, in blue, white and black, is widely used in Turkey. Evil eyes are used to avert forces, but also as wall decoration or in jewelry. The symbol can often be found on knick knacks offered in tourist shops. Since 2018 there is an emoji of the evil eye.

Belief in the special powers of the talisman goes back thousands of years. The idea is that they protect against looks from others that can cause harm. Newborn babies are said to be extra sensitive to harmful influences, just like pregnant women.

"Many people believe in the power of the evil eye," a Turkish construction engineer told Al Jazeera news channel. "I know many examples of people who first got compliments for something, like a new pair of shoes, and then tripped. That's the evil eye, many people think. It doesn't hurt to have some protection anyway."

https://nos.nl/artikel/2365616-turkije-amuletten-met-boze-oog-horen-niet-bij-islam.html