sillyquiet

12 ms·

91.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
"They made" natives fight each other is a weird way of putting it. Warring tribes were more than happy to use the Europeans against their enemies. And many of those enmities long predated the arrival of Europeans.
92.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
yeah, unfortunately (I guess??!) smallpox didn't reach Europe until the Crusades.
93.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Some cultural context, this bowl is probably associated with the Urnfield culture, a wide-spread cultural horizon that was probably associated with Indo-European language speakers (probably late proto-Indo-European or pre-proto-Celtic). The
94.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
I played around with the second generation Mindstorms in college, it was pretty fun even for 20 year old me. I still have the bricks, motors and sensors! (I even still have the RCX and the weird infrared thing you use to program it). This i
95.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
You'd probably be interested in seeing the collaboration he did with Old Norse linguist Dr. Jackson Crawford in which he and Dr. Crawford had a scripted but mutually intelligible conversation in Old English and Old Norse. https:/
96.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Yep. Have had a Brother HL-2270 (b&w laser printing) for years, and couldn't be happier with it, especially coupled with a PI-based CUPS server for AirPrint capability and the like. The only thing I miss about not having an inkjet
97.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
I am not an astronomer or involved in this project but I am crazily nervous and excited for the launch, orbital placement and deployment of this telescope. It seems sooo epochal and important.
98.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
The civil engineering-oriented channel Practical Engineering has a pretty good video on Roman concrete vs. modern. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL0BB2PRY7k The primary tldw; is the fact modern concrete uses steel rebar f
99.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
On of the primary indicators when a grave site is examined to determine whether the society it belonged to were agriculturalists was to examine the incidence of dental caries. Low # of caries = non-agricultural society, i.e., one that lived
100.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Sorry, but no. Those kind of pithy meaningless comments are great for reddit or twitter, but I think these forums have the room for better expression of our ideas.
101.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
There's a point where all nuance and complexity is lost such that the model becomes useless. IOW this is, besides being incorrect, over-simplified. Your assumptions, especially for the future, are completely unjustified in this format.
102.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
no offense, but this is absurdly reductionist. I guess its apropos for twitter.
103.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Very very true, but to clarify too, those roles aren't as cut and dry either - it's true hunting was mostly a job for boys and young men, but older less spry men were also crafters and fabricators for their societies. They were al
104.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
I meant that sentence as a follow on to the preceding - I was talking about the work performed by people that don't live in rich privileged agricultural societies. > You don't reap the benefit of what you create And your risk i
105.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Those existing hunter gathers, almost invariably, have close economic contact with modern agricultural societies, so unfortunately there's a limit to how much studying them can tell us as far as that goes.
106.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
'Gathering food' is not the extent of the 'work' that hunter-gatherer societies performed, which is kind of the basis of that ridiculous pop-anthropology notion of hunter-gathers working some silly low number of hours pe
107.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
This is the kind of article that can only be written in rich, privileged times by rich, privileged people. For the majority of history and or for the majority of people even today, 'work' was what you did to fulfill the most botto
108.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
I didn't find his politics, or any politics really, very out of place in the novels, they seemed (to me) a natural part of the story telling. But, full disclosure, I am a bit libertarian myself, politically so maybe I didn't notic
109.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
yes, agreed, I really listed it because it's a necessary (imo) prologue to the events in `Marooned in Realtime`
110.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
See my reply to the other child of this comment, but basically I don't see a solid roadmap anymore from here to there - sure there's a a lot of progress and advances but taken as a whole, the singularity idea doesn't account
111.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Yeah, this covers it for me. Maybe outdated isn't wrong so much as nothing more than a fun intellectual exercise and what if - there's no road map, there's no solid technological basis for reaching a singularity, imo there&#x
112.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime" My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of th
113.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Yeah, and this means the regulation of shady activity on the part of the legislature falls to the legislative body itself. And I get the philosophy behind it, but it's the figurative fox guarding the henhouse here. This is why any leg
114.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
The best accessible archaeology reference I can recommend is "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language", and that book can guide you to many other resources.( https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/97806911
115.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Ah gotcha, yeah, the notion of the 'Aryans' as the ancestors of Europe was a common misconception of early European archaeology even when it didn't have the racist propaganda connections.
116.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
well, possibly, but as they are probably the ancestors of many North Indian, Iranian, and Afghanistani peoples that gene didn't stay dominant for their line. (Though I guess it shows up in that region now and again). And they certainly
117.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
> Whether or not these deities were similarly associated with the planet Jupiter is a different question though. Very doubtful, those names are modern applications to the planet. Although, there is zero doubt they were aware of and cogni
118.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
The racialists of the late 19th Century and early 20th co-opted the term, but there was a real peoples that really called themselves 'Aryans'. They weren't blue eyed blonde-haired, that's for sure, and the weren't
119.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
Nah, the naming of the planet came much later, I don't think the planet itself was ever worshipped. And the Proto-Indo-Europeans are not the Aryans - the Aryans were a much later daughter culture in Western Afghanistan, Northern Iran a
120.
by sillyquiet 5y ago
The sky father was the chief god of the steppe people that lived north of the Black and Caspian Seas during the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, so 'Jupiter' as such was worshiped for 2000 years before the Greek speakers called him

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