When I was about 13 or so, I was blown away when I learned that ancient Greek and Roman statues used to be painted (paywalled; cached PDF) and were not commissioned to be ghostly-white. An all-time favorite is this Greek sculpture of a Persian archer. Source: “We know Greek statues weren’t white.…
Sears, the department store, sold DIY homes via catalog for 32 years between 1908 and 1940 through a program called Sears Modern Homes. They offered 447 different housing styles which you can see here. The designs were not ‘remarkable’ in any way: Sears themselves admit that they were “not an innova…
And because no good deed goes unpunished, Fletcher claimed to have been harassed by his own community and he also found bullet holes in his barn. Fletcher used the proceeds from farming the land to pay the taxes for the interned Japanese. From 1942 to 1945 he managed the Tsukamoto, Nitta, and Okamo…
I can stare at photographs of the Nefertiti Bust all day. It’s just so alive. It was carved out of limestone and covered in stucco/plaster. The eyes were made out of quartz and affixed with beeswax. Just so beautiful. Wikipedia has a 3D model you can look at.…
In 1967, the Films Division of India1 asked all kinds of 20-year olds about their dreams and how they felt about the future of a nation that was, itself, 20 years old. Here’s the original video. A lot of the kids who speak English in the video (starting at 5:00) attend the august Indian Institute of…
In the succession of religions, there are only so many ways the old gods can end up. They can fade away, in which case they are lost to us for good; they can be held up to scorn as pagan demons who persisted in their old, evil ways; or they can be recruited into the new faith as its servants and d…
Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine right up until we try to explain our calendar to them “yeah we divide our year into a number of sub units called ‘months’ made up a number of days, and they’re not all the same l…
This (beautifully formatted and well-paced-and-delivered and surprisingly sparsely attended) talk by Gabriel Lebec on the fundamentals of Lambda Calculus is one of my favorite talks ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VQ382QG-y4 As Lebec explains, the lovely bird names come from this book called…
I see I’ve been summoned. Your comments in this thread make it clear that nothing will change your position. It’s a difficult position to combat, because it’s in such a defiance of literally anything written on the topic in at least the last 50 years. You are not operating off the same foundations o…
This is the city of Madras The home of the curry and the dal Where Iyers speak only to Iyengars And Iyengars speak only to God. I’d read this years ago some place and forgot where. Thought it would be in some Religious Studies textbook back from when I was (briefly) a Religious Studies major. Nope…
The Borremose Man died in the 7th century BCE. He was bludgeoned to death from the back of his head and had a rope with a slip knot tied around his neck. It is believed that he was a human sacrifice. He was found in the Borremose peat bog in Himmerland, Denmark in 1946. Shortly after, two other, le…
Carved by someone in Ancient Egypt between 3700–3500 BCE. […] most of them represent nude females with their feminine attributes emphasised by carving and careful drilling. With their slim figures, narrow waists and full hips they present an ideal of the female body that will change little over t…
Translation copyright 2001 John T. Quinn; all rights reserved. Introduction Philogelos (The Laughter Lover) is a collection of some 265 jokes1 likely made in the fourth or fifth century CE. Some manuscripts give the names of the compilers as the otherwise-unknown Hierocles and Philagrios. Other manu…
A young Elizabeth I found herself on the throne of England immediately “besieged by suitors” to whom she made “no firm promises” but sent very nice-sounding letters. One such suitor was a young Eric XIV of Sweden. He was so thirsty, he offered to come to England to visit her. That’s when she fired o…
The Alt-History YouTuber Whatifalthist decided to dip his toes into real history again and made a YouTube video in which he supposedly breaks down his top 11 historical misconceptions, in which he says a section entitled “7: All of Pre-Colonial Africa.” As a massive enthusiast of pre-colonial Subsah…
This is one of the most seriously badass representations of Shakti I’ve seen in a while. The goddess is shown seated on obsessed boy (Corpse or Preta). The corpse is placed on a pedestal. The deity has a skeletal body, veins can be seen clearly. Its face is ferocious and wrathful; eyes are poppin…
any history of COVID-19 in the US should really start off with an anecdote about how the chernobyl miniseries came out in 2019 and there was immediately a conclave of pundits smugly declaring that we would never respond to a disaster with such epic and malicious mismanagement @small_jawn…
This is such a wonderful idea. Stand opposite the glass and you’d know what Kruševac Fortress in Serbia looked like in its heyday: Franklin Court in Pennsylvania is another example of how one could illustrate architectural history. Franklin Court was the site of the handsome brick home of Benjami…
This is a silk hankerchief from c.1860 used by one or more people to cheat1 on the Imperial Examinations. Via the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Here are a bunch of Art History Professors discussing this artifact and its history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85gAfiJGpVM They’d use all sorts of th…
04 September, 1957 Dorothy Counts, the first and at the time only black student to enroll in the newly desegregated Harry Harding High School in Charlotte (NC), is mocked by protestors on her first day of school. Bystanders threw rocks and screamed at Dorothy to go back to where she came from. The…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuRW1zkEQpw…
I’ll try and cover a few of your specific points, starting with the fact Apocalypto did not intend to portray the Aztecs, but the Maya. The film does (poorly) mash in some aspects of Aztec sacrifice, if only to further its goal of being colonialist apologia and torture porn. Fortunately, the sheer a…
Bas Uterwijk’s AI portraits1 look just like photo shots, but are largely generated by an algorithm. He uploads drawings and paintings, often images of people who lived before the invention of photography. With the help of a neural network he creates realistic interpretations that appear as if they…
I found out I am to thank the Ottomans for a lot of my favorite things to eat and drink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGKrKJ1iKtg Baklava (which dates back two thousand years, to the Assyrian Empire) Coffee made the Right Way™ The modern kebab Shawarma Sherbet Dolma (stuffed food) and Sarma (wra…
Constructed around 1100 BCE, it had “995 graffiti left by visitors […], ranging from the 1st century BC to the 4th century AD” a 1,000 years later.…
This is the "the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world" and dates from “either from the 1st or the 2nd century AD.” It was found engraved on a tombstone and was “dedicated by Seikilos to Euterpe, who was possibly his wife.” (W…
I couldn’t finish this gripping yet harrowing podcast about the Black Dahlia murder and, whether or not he was complicit, an absolute monster of a human being.…
I am so proud to be an Iowan. Iowa is fucking awesome, and here is why: In 1838, before we were even a state, our Supreme Court upheld the law that in Iowa escaped slaves couldn’t be forced to return to a slave state. The same year it became law an unmarried women could own property. In most of…
Vox on the history of plain-white Roman statues and how historians attempt plaster reconstructions with the original colors. Like this one:…
Good talk by Siteshwar Vashisht at FOSDEM 2019 on maintaining the Korn shell and old codebases in general. I came by his work while reading up on the fish shell. Featured this nugget He talks about how they removed dead/inapplicable code and micro-optimizations, refactored a lot of legacy code, imp…
Michael LaPointe writing for The Atlantic on The Pearl of Lao Tzu But elsewhere in the Miner letter, the curator terms the specimen a “pearlaceous growth,” and stresses that it ought not to be classified as a precious pearl. The gems we commonly know as pearls are formed within the organic tissue o…
Saw this minor dis by Safari and then this video on the history of Java. Also by the author: something of a tribute to Flash (RIP.)…