I actually really like those reconstructed images of Parthenon and greek statues in color. Or the ancient pyramids before people started using them as quarries. Imagine how cool they all must have looked when they were brand new!
I quit after 10 minutes and only got 92, slightly below average. The weird thing is that I forgot countries that are familiar to me or which I've thought about or read about very recently:
Jamaica, Ukraine, Belgium, Singapore, Bhutan, Uganda, Kenya, Venezuela, and the Marshall Islands
I was typing constantly for the first 5 minutes before abruptly hitting a wall.
I had the exact same experience the first time I did this a couple of years back. I've managed to get 100% on that quiz but it's still surprisingly easy to forget countries you think about regularly. Like the States of America game they do in Friends.
I actually really like those reconstructed images of Parthenon and greek statues in color. Or the ancient pyramids before people started using them as quarries. Imagine how cool they all must have looked when they were brand new!
I admit, the pyramids would've looked a lot cooler back in the day. They used to be covered in marble with either a gold or electrum top, so they'd gleam in the sun. The Greek statues in color aren't so bad, it's mainly the buildings that I personally don't like the look of.
One of the most interesting things about the Parthenon, is that it's actually curved. So, the human eye will actually perceive a very large straight object as being bent slightly. The ancient Greeks understood this, and built the Parthenon slightly curved, so that it would look straight to the human eye. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon#Architecture
I was just listening to an episode of "The Rest is History" (BBC series taking a comic look at historical topics). There was a nice snippet there, which I don't remember hearing before, along the lines of Annie Oakley being responsible for WWI.
She was a famous sharpshooter and was touring Germany in 1889 when Kaiser Wilhelm II came to her show (part of the Buffalo Bill tour). One of her famous tricks was shooting the ash of a cigar held in someone's mouth. That was normally her husband, as volunteers were generally not too quick to come forward, but on this occasion the Kaiser stepped up to the mark. Unusually for Annie, she felt rather anxious about this and asked the Kaiser to hold the cigar in his hand rather than his mouth - but successfully shot the ash off anyway.
After WWI broke out Annie said she regretted not taking the chance to adjust her aim a bit when taking that shot ...
I'm sure there's lots of places you can find this story, but here's one.
I was just listening to an episode of "The Rest is History" (BBC series taking a comic look at historical topics). There was a nice snippet there, which I don't remember hearing before, along the lines of Annie Oakley being responsible for WWI.
She was a famous sharpshooter and was touring Germany in 1889 when Kaiser Wilhelm II came to her show (part of the Buffalo Bill tour). One of her famous tricks was shooting the ash of a cigar held in someone's mouth. That was normally her husband, as volunteers were generally not too quick to come forward, but on this occasion the Kaiser stepped up to the mark. Unusually for Annie, she felt rather anxious about this and asked the Kaiser to hold the cigar in his hand rather than his mouth - but successfully shot the ash off anyway.
After WWI broke out Annie said she regretted not taking the chance to adjust her aim a bit when taking that shot ...
I'm sure there's lots of places you can find this story, but here's one.
Hah, I've done a fallout: new vegas playthrough as Annie Oakley.
James Naismith invented basketball at the Springfield, MA, YMCA teachers college. One of the members of Naismith's original team, an Englishman named Nicholas McKay, introduced the sport to Indiana when he accepted a position as director of the YMCA in Crawfordsville upon graduation. The YMCA was two or three doors down from the former law offices of General Lew Wallace. Wallace is best known as the author of the novel Ben Hur but had served in the Mexican-American War and the US Civil War; Wallace's troops delayed General Early's march on DC long enough to save the city. As thanks for this, he later became ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and was appointed territorial governor of New Mexico, where he signed Billy the Kid's death warrant.
Thus there is a direct connection between basketball and the most famous outlaw in the old west, thanks to Ben Hur
16th century artillery master Franz Helm wrote about how to use gunpowder and fire in warfare. He describes a method for setting fire to a city you can't approach. Now strapping burning things to the backs of cats sounds like a terribly bad idea to me, but at least it gave us this illustration of a cat with a jetpack. You go, rocket cat.
This reminds me of a classic American project in WWII to create a better bomb to inflict such devastation on the Japanese that they would surrender - the bat bomb!
Ultimately they went with plan B that used something even smaller, but burned way hotter. Rumor has it, thought, that the bat bomb project was undone only when a visiting general demanded a demonstration, and was understandably upset when his base promptly burned down that night...
16th century artillery master Franz Helm wrote about how to use gunpowder and fire in warfare. He describes a method for setting fire to a city you can't approach. Now strapping burning things to the backs of cats sounds like a terribly bad idea to me, but at least it gave us this illustration of a cat with a jetpack. You go, rocket cat.
This reminds me of a classic American project in WWII to create a better bomb to inflict such devastation on the Japanese that they would surrender - the bat bomb!
Ultimately they went with plan B that used something even smaller, but burned way hotter. Rumor has it, thought, that the bat bomb project was undone only when a visiting general demanded a demonstration, and was understandably upset when his base promptly burned down that night...
Next link over (military animals), "Ramses II had a pet lion which fought with him during the Battle of Kadesh."
Going back to the subject of slavery briefly. The history of Freetown in Sierra Leone is interesting as it was founded by a group comprised largely of black ex-slaves from the Americas and was at the time the only port on the African coast that didn't tolerate slavery or the transport of people for the purposes of slavery.
Going back to the subject of slavery briefly. The history of Freetown in Sierra Leone is interesting as it was founded by a group comprised largely of black ex-slaves from the Americas and was at the time the only port on the African coast that didn't tolerate slavery or the transport of people for the purposes of slavery.
Whereas next door in Liberia, the numerically small Americo-Liberian minority group - principally former US slaves and their descendants - completely dominated the country for a century and a half politically, culturally, and economically, and rarely intermarried with the indigenous people, who appear to have little say in their government.
The largest man-made explosion prior to the nuclear age occurred at the Battle of Messines in WW1, when Allied engineers (mostly Australian, I believe) tunneled under a German hilltop position and planted 400 tons of explosives beneath it. 10,000 Germans (along with the entire hill) were instantly obliterated when the mines were detonated.
All that remained of the hill was an enormous crater - here's a photo of people surveying the damage sometime afterward:
The day before the blast, British Major-General Charles Harington famously said, “I do not know whether or not we shall change history tomorrow, but we shall certainly alter geography.”
The largest man-made explosion prior to the nuclear age occurred at the Battle of Messines in WW1, when Allied engineers (mostly Australian, I believe) tunneled under a German hilltop position and planted 400 tons of explosives beneath it. 10,000 Germans (along with the entire hill) were instantly obliterated when the mines were detonated.
All that remained of the hill was an enormous crater - here's a photo of people surveying the damage sometime afterward:
The day before the blast, British Major-General Charles Harington famously said, “I do not know whether or not we shall change history tomorrow, but we shall certainly alter geography.”
A ship collided with another ship carrying explosives for the war effort, triggering a fire onboard the ship. The resulting explosion was 2.9 kilotons and killed over 2000 people.
My Grandpa was just a kid living there at the time. He was getting ready to leave for school and just when he was about to open the front door, the explosion hit, and slammed into the door. He hid under the kitchen table after that. Fortunately they were far enough away the explosion didn't blow through the door or knock the house down.
According to Wikipedia there are a few man-made explosions slightly larger than Halifax, but it's certainly right up there. The scale of the blast can be illustrated by the fact that they found the 1,140 lb anchor shaft of the ship "Mont Blanc" 2.5 miles from the site of the explosion.
The list on that page you linked to shows the Halifax Explosion as the largest before nuclear weapons. The Heligoland/British Bang was 1947 and The Minor Scale and Misty Picture tests were 1987. Those weren't nuclear blasts, but they did happen after the invention of nuclear weapons.
When the first nuclear bombs were being developed during the Manhattan Project, some of the scientists involved were apparently worried that they could cause a chain-reaction that would ignite the entire atmosphere. In later interviews, some of the scientists said this was a genuine concern for a long time while others said it just took them a few hours to prove that it was impossible.
I think the scariest thing about the development of the nuclear bomb wasn't that scientists were afraid of the possibility of a world endning chain reaction, it was that they did it anyway.
When you're dealing with cutting-edge research involving massive energies, you probably wonder if you're going to destroy the world all the time. In reality, the chain reaction was exclusive to a certain subset of elements, and even then, only a certain isotope at a certain purity.
We keep doing it, and keep surviving, because our curiosity is bigger than our fear and our fear is bigger than the danger.
I think the scariest thing about the development of the nuclear bomb wasn't that scientists were afraid of the possibility of a world endning chain reaction, it was that they did it anyway.
Yeah, I think the same can be said for various types of tech and genetic research these days, esp. now that the Human Genome Project has offered all sorts of possibilities for 'fiddling' around with DNA. There is usually a bad side that comes with the good it seems, unfortunately, and the exploitation that can go with it.
Having worked for a while in R&D (albeit in beer brewing rather than anything world-changing) I know how almost euphorically exciting it can be to see the potential opportunities that are opened up to you when you begin to truly understand how something works on a fundamental level.
However, just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
@Balrog99 As it happens I do have an internationally recognised qualification in "Advanced beer tasting" no less. The training course (run in-house by the very large international brewery that I worked for at the time) consisted of two "taste training" sessions a week over the course of six months - and yes, I did have to sit practical exams.
@Balrog99 As it happens I do have an internationally recognised qualification in "Advanced beer tasting" no less. The training course (run in-house by the very large international brewery that I worked for at the time) consisted of two "taste training" sessions a week over the course of six months - and yes, I did have to sit practical exams.
That sounds tough but if you ever need an external consultant I would be willing to give it a shot.
Did you know that you have the ancient Romans to thank for both graffiti and pornography?
The Egyptians were making pornographic graffiti long before the Romans existed. Google image search for "hatshepsut and senenmut graffiti" for one example. Also the Greeks produced pornographic pottery.
Sounds a lot like they were reading Xenophon's Anabasis when they came up with that system.
I first read the Anabasis when I was a journalist in the US Army. You could argue that he's the first war correspondent we know of. He was a retired general from Athens and only went along on the expedition so he could write a book about it. When the Persians murdered the Greek officers, he was elected overall leader of the 10,000.
Wasn’t there something in the constitution that had to make the States wait till 1808 to address slavery?
The constitution contains a provision that bans the importation of slaves after 1809. What this led to was the development of slave breeding farms, especially as the soil on the big plantations started to play out. By the time of the civil war, Virginia's biggest cash crop was slaves. One of the fears that led to the civil war was that the Radical Republicans would carry through on their promise to end slavery in all federal territories. That would mean no new slave states to sell their product to.
Malta, Liechenstein, San Marino and Monaco are all even smaller European countries. The Vatican is smaller still, but I think that's technically defined as a city state rather than a country.
With all the hoopla about Meghan Markle, it's worth noting she's not the first black American to marry into European royalty. In 2000, Angela Brown, a black Panamanian-American fashion designer married Prince Maximilian of Liechtenstien.
I quit after 10 minutes and only got 92, slightly below average. The weird thing is that I forgot countries that are familiar to me or which I've thought about or read about very recently:
Jamaica, Ukraine, Belgium, Singapore, Bhutan, Uganda, Kenya, Venezuela, and the Marshall Islands
I was typing constantly for the first 5 minutes before abruptly hitting a wall.
So some scientists are starting to suggest that the Amazon river basin, might actually be man made.
In North America, the Iroquois and other tribes engaged in large scale ecological engineering designed to keep the deer herds artificially large. Besides killing off as many of the predators as they could, they used controlled burns and artificial meadows to increase the deer's food source. The area was vast, covering most of New England and continuing up into Canada.
According to this list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods, China has experienced the top 5, and 6 of the top 10, deadliest floods in recorded history (the Holy Roman Empire experienced 3 of the remaining 4). The worst floods are estimated to have killed in the millions.
On top of that, China was the site of the single greatest man-made disaster in recorded history, when the government elected to destroy local dams as a means of halting the Japanese advance during the second Sino-Japanese War. Although this strategy may have been "successful" insofar as stemming the tide (no pun intended) of battle, it is estimated to have killed somewhere between half-a-million and close to a million Chinese villagers. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood
Comments
One of the most interesting things about the Parthenon, is that it's actually curved. So, the human eye will actually perceive a very large straight object as being bent slightly. The ancient Greeks understood this, and built the Parthenon slightly curved, so that it would look straight to the human eye.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon#Architecture
She was a famous sharpshooter and was touring Germany in 1889 when Kaiser Wilhelm II came to her show (part of the Buffalo Bill tour). One of her famous tricks was shooting the ash of a cigar held in someone's mouth. That was normally her husband, as volunteers were generally not too quick to come forward, but on this occasion the Kaiser stepped up to the mark. Unusually for Annie, she felt rather anxious about this and asked the Kaiser to hold the cigar in his hand rather than his mouth - but successfully shot the ash off anyway.
After WWI broke out Annie said she regretted not taking the chance to adjust her aim a bit when taking that shot ...
I'm sure there's lots of places you can find this story, but here's one.
Thus there is a direct connection between basketball and the most famous outlaw in the old west, thanks to Ben Hur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
Ultimately they went with plan B that used something even smaller, but burned way hotter. Rumor has it, thought, that the bat bomb project was undone only when a visiting general demanded a demonstration, and was understandably upset when his base promptly burned down that night...
I laughed so hard when I found about the painted Greek statues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone_Company
It also has an amazing 500 year old cotton tree slap bang in the middle of the town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americo-Liberians
The largest man-made explosion prior to the nuclear age occurred at the Battle of Messines in WW1, when Allied engineers (mostly Australian, I believe) tunneled under a German hilltop position and planted 400 tons of explosives beneath it. 10,000 Germans (along with the entire hill) were instantly obliterated when the mines were detonated.
All that remained of the hill was an enormous crater - here's a photo of people surveying the damage sometime afterward:
The day before the blast, British Major-General Charles Harington famously said, “I do not know whether or not we shall change history tomorrow, but we shall certainly alter geography.”
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/history-of-the-first-world-war-in-100-moments/a-history-of-the-first-world-war-in-100-moments-a-blast-that-obliterated-10000-germans-9517223.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
A ship collided with another ship carrying explosives for the war effort, triggering a fire onboard the ship. The resulting explosion was 2.9 kilotons and killed over 2000 people.
My Grandpa was just a kid living there at the time. He was getting ready to leave for school and just when he was about to open the front door, the explosion hit, and slammed into the door. He hid under the kitchen table after that. Fortunately they were far enough away the explosion didn't blow through the door or knock the house down.
Source: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/chung1/
We keep doing it, and keep surviving, because our curiosity is bigger than our fear and our fear is bigger than the danger.
However, just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
Tell me you're a taste-tester and I'm going to turn as green as @mlnevese. Well, he's actually blue now but you get my drift.
P.S. Beer brewing isn't world changing? Say it isn't so!
According to this list, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods, China has experienced the top 5, and 6 of the top 10, deadliest floods in recorded history (the Holy Roman Empire experienced 3 of the remaining 4). The worst floods are estimated to have killed in the millions.
On top of that, China was the site of the single greatest man-made disaster in recorded history, when the government elected to destroy local dams as a means of halting the Japanese advance during the second Sino-Japanese War. Although this strategy may have been "successful" insofar as stemming the tide (no pun intended) of battle, it is estimated to have killed somewhere between half-a-million and close to a million Chinese villagers. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood
The pictures below show a rather exquisite looking rock in the sand... right?
Nope! It's actually this: