One of Sir Issac Newton’s famous phrases is
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!
This is a great thread
and the movie just came out.
Probably the one about tin cans and can openers. IIRC, can opener was invented decades after the tin
How did they open cans before then?
I actually don’t know. Presumably with a knife
Originally tin cans were large things meant for military campaigns, so they used a chisel or similar large stabby thing.
To be fair that makes a lot more sense than it happening the other way around
For a few years you just had to find a sharp rock
Rasputin having such a massive cock that Boney M had to made a song about it.
But the ladies begged, “Don’t you try to do it, please!”
(He even suggested the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)
Hey, that dude was in West of Loathing. Now I know he was a real dude.
And the city just humored him.
In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.
“A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon, the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys, and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness.”[26]
During the sign-off theme, the phone began ringing. Houseman picked it up and the furious caller announced he was mayor of a Midwestern town, where mobs were in the streets. Houseman hung up quickly, “[f]or we were off the air now and the studio door had burst open.”[4]: 404
How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven’t you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?)
This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.
Wasn’t that just one newspaper reporting it which was more or less just and advert for the play?
No. In fact, I quoted the first-hand accounts of the people in charge of the broadcast.
Yes, there may have been less of a panic than as advertised, but it wasn’t a gross (or intentional) distortion. The drama was also only broadcast once.
The offices of the city of Trenton, New Jersey, a location within the dramatization, had its communications paralyzed for 3 hours due to the calls made to ask the city well.
The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her
I had to look that up, it’s just too good to pass.
(Cassius Dio, contemporary historian) tells us that the empress teased her companion (the wife of Argentocoxos, a Caledonian chief) by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:
“We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”
A bit further below, however
The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above.
Sauce - https://senchus.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/julia-and-the-caledonian-women/
TIL Rome once had an empress.
Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I’m afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control
That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there’s no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses
TIL. Did the Greeks get less patriarchal over time? In the classical era they were Taliban-tier and complained they even had to see women.
I’m afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene’s reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her
That checks out for Scotland.
The US newspaper billionaire William Randolph Hearst owned enough of congress that he started a war with Spain.
“You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war”
Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!
As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.
Was finding the number odd (expecting a longer orbit) but looks like the solar system has already orbited the center of the milky way 18 to 20 times. Imagine that much change in earth in 20 years.
We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight
who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster 
. These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.Teacher has threw it on the trash. 😂
Imagine how his teacher feels. The little shit doodles all through his class, and who do we build a statue of? The kid‽
These don’t look too dissimilar to things I’d doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.
It’s fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The “head with arms and legs” stage seems universal, and amusing.
I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was “As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge.”
The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.
He even tried it a second time
That one of the US presidents died from eating too many cherries.
https://www.grunge.com/630116/how-cherries-are-tied-to-president-zachary-taylors-death/
End of the bronze age. Have a set of letters between citystate rulers, one writing that help is urgently needed as seaborne invaders have been spotted nearby and his military is off with the hittite empire.
The response back, in modern slang amounts to “lol ur fucked.”
Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?
Its from the book 1176 BC by Eric H Cline.
Appears to be referencing this story:
There’s a lot to choose from, but it’s early so I’ll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.
I mean once it’s happened twice it must become a cultural thing so the third one is inevitable
True!
One started the 48 years war! I remember that from highschool. What were the other two?
