Falu gruva, the copper mine in Falun, Sweden, was operational for over a thousand years, closing back in the 1990s. For a long time, two thirds of all copper in Europe came from there.
By the 17th century, cave-ins were common. There were centuries old tunnels and shafts everywhere and no one hade actually kept track of them. In 1687 the inevitable happened: a huge part of the mine collapsed. It created what is known as the Great pit, which is over a 100 meters deep (check out the photo in the wikipedia article). This could have killed hundreds of workers but no one was actually hurt. That's because it happened on Midsummer's eve, the only day except for Christmas when no one was working in the mine.
I've heard theories that the miners knew that the mine would collapse sooner or later and that someone decided to help it along to avoid a huge catastrophe. Or the Midsummer thing could just be one of the luckiest coincidences in history.
@SharGuidesMyHand Nice. That wild pattern on the back of the spider almost looks like some ancient design one would come across during an archeological dig.
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.
I hate to rain on your parade, but Xenophon, the writer of the Anabasis, was actually a young man when he signed up for the expedition. He was about 28-29 when they first left, not even old enough to speak in the Athenian assembly. Pretty much nothing is known about him before the expedition, other than he was a student of Socrates. It's pretty doubtful he could have been a strategoi before then, just due to his age. He did speak eloquently after the generals were killed, and put forth some good ideas, so he was put in charge of the rear guard. Timasion the Dardanian was elected top Strategoi above Xenophon. He didn't write about it until 30 years later, so it's not likely he went along with the intention to document the war, but I can't say for sure he didn't.
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.
I hate to rain on your parade, but Xenophon, the writer of the Anabasis, was actually a young man when he signed up for the expedition. He was about 28-29 when they first left, not even old enough to speak in the Athenian assembly. Pretty much nothing is known about him before the expedition, other than he was a student of Socrates. It's pretty doubtful he could have been a strategoi before then, just due to his age. He did speak eloquently after the generals were killed, and put forth some good ideas, so he was put in charge of the rear guard. Timasion the Dardanian was elected top Strategoi above Xenophon. He didn't write about it until 30 years later, so it's not likely he went along with the intention to document the war, but I can't say for sure he didn't.
I wish I had a picture of this, but when I was a kid in Florida I saw a spider with a silver skull on it's back. Googling images doesn't turn up anything that looks quite like I remember.
"An island in Brazil has so many snakes that humans aren't allowed on it — and it's the stuff of nightmares
About 25 miles off the coast of Brazil, there is an island where no local would ever dare tread. Legend has it that the last fisherman who strayed too close to its shores was found days later adrift in his own boat, lifeless in a pool of blood.
The mysterious island is known as Ilha da Queimada Grande, and it is in fact so dangerous to set foot there that Brazil has made it illegal for anyone to visit. The danger on the island comes in the form of the golden lancehead snakes - a species of pit viper and one of the deadliest serpents in the world.
The lanceheads can grow to be over a foot-and-a-half long and it's estimated that there are between 2,000 and 4,000 snakes on the island, which unsurprisingly is known as Snake Island. The lanceheads are so venomous that a human bitten by one could be dead within an hour.
Snake Island is uninhabited now, but people used to live there for a short period up to until the late 1920s when, according to legend, the local lighthouse keeper and his family were killed by vipers that slithered in through the windows. Today, the navy periodically visits the lighthouse for upkeep and makes sure no adventurers are wandering too close to the island.
Another local legend claims that the snakes were originally introduced by pirates seeking to protect buried treasure on the island.
In reality, the vipers' presence is the result of rising sea levels - a less exciting origin story than paranoid pirates to be sure, but still interesting.
Snake Island used to be part of Brazil's mainland, but when sea levels rose over 10,000 years ago, it separated the landmass and turned it into an island.
The animals that wound up isolated on Queimada Grande evolved differently from those on the mainland over the course of millennia, the golden lanceheads in particular. Since the island vipers had no prey but birds, mother nature helped them develop extra-potent venom so that they could almost immediately kill any bird. Local birds are too savvy to be caught by the many predators that inhabit the island and the snakes instead rely on birds who visit the island to rest as food.
Lancehead snakes, which are the golden lancheads' mainland cousins, are responsible for 90 percent of all snakebites in Brazil. A bite from their golden relatives, whose venom is up to five times more potent, is less likely to actually happen due to their island isolation. However, such an encounter is far more likely to be lethal if it does happen. There are no fatality statistics of the golden lanceheads (since the only area they inhabit is cut off from the public), however someone bitten by a regular lancehead faces a seven percent chance of death if untreated. Treatment does not even guarantee a lancehead bite victim will be saved: there is still a three percent mortality rate.
It's hard to imagine why anyone would want to visit a place where a painful death lurks every few feet. However, the vipers' deadly venom has shown potential in helping to combat heart problems. This has led to something of a black market demand for the venom. For some lawbreakers, the lure of the money is incentive enough to risk almost certain death on Queimada Grande."
So how about this guy, Hulagu Khan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulagu_Khan One of the more interesting Khans. While he never was Great Khan, he ruled over a big chunk of the middle east. He's the one that was responsible for the sack of Baghdad, and the shift of power in the Islamic world to the Mamluk Turks in Cairo. His wife was a Nestorian Christian, and she convinced him to spare the Christians in Baghdad. He was however a Buddhist. He also is the one that sieged Alamut and destroyed the Assassins.
There's a really cool book I read awhile back called The Empire of the Steppes by Rene Grousset. It covers a lot of central Asian history that gets skipped in most history books. Most of the time you only hear about these regions in passing, as where people like Attilla or Ghengis Khan came from. There's a huge amount of information on the silk road and various peoples like the Xiongnu or the Yuezhi. Some theorize that the Xiongnu might be the original Huns, or their relatives. It gets into a lot detail on how Buddhism, Christianity (mainly Nestorianism), Islam and even Judaism spread to China across the silk road.
I've been reading Vallis by Phillip K Dick, which has caused me to go down the rabbit hole and read more about gnosticism. It's kind of a fascinating view point. There's a supreme God, and what is basically a bunch of minor gods, the creator actually being a malevolent lesser god. Essentially the soul and sacred knowledge holds a spark of the divine from the supreme god, and the material world is evil. It's really weird for a Judeo-Christian based religion, although it's heavily influenced by Greek thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
So how about this guy, Hulagu Khan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulagu_Khan One of the more interesting Khans. While he never was Great Khan, he ruled over a big chunk of the middle east. He's the one that was responsible for the sack of Baghdad, and the shift of power in the Islamic world to the Mamluk Turks in Cairo.
I can't remember where I read this, but there are speculations that the sack of Baghdad (back in the mid-13th century) was so utterly devastating that the region hasn't recovered from it even today. Apart from the power shift and huge depopulation, the vast system of irrigation canals that had been around since ancient times was destroyed and no one was really around to repair it anymore. Which led to a huge change in the region's agricultural output and ability to sustain a large population. I remember someone saying that the sack of Baghdad was comparable to dropping a nuclear bomb over Athens in the time of Aristotle.
Timur The Lame, better known as Tamerlane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timur destroyed the qanat system in Persia, and the region has definitely never recovered. Iran used to be a much more fertile area due to the irrigation systems that had been in place since the Persian Empire.
The Persians even had an early form of air conditioning. They'd use a windcatcher to force air into the Qanats over the cold water. The air would then be forced up into palaces or other buildings of the nobility. They could even use it for refrigeration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher
The man pictured above may be the greatest professional prizefighter, pound-for-pound, that ever lived.
He was born Edward Henry Greb, but famously fought under the name "Harry" Greb. He held the World Middleweight (160-pound) title from 1923 to 1926, but that only scratched the surface of his accomplishments. He is "officially" recognized as having just over 100 wins, 8 losses, and 3 draws in his career, but he actually fought at least 299 times, with at least one source (Nat Fleischer, founder and original editor of Ring Magazine) estimating that he had "over 500 battles" in his career. Greb spent much of his early career "riding the rails," traveling from one small town to another by train, and typically fighting just weeks, if not days apart. In just a single year alone (1919), Greb fought over 40 times and was credited with besting his opponent in every one of them. Many of Greb's fights were so-called "no-decisions" in which no decision was rendered if the fight went the distance, meaning that the fight could only be officially won by KO (this rule was implemented in many states in the hopes of curtailing betting on those fights) - hence the discrepancy between Greb's "official" record and his actual total of fights.
In the ring, Greb was renowned for his speed of hand and foot, his versatility, his high workrate, and an iron chin. Despite being only a middleweight, Greb routinely fought outside of his weight class, and was considered a viable challenger for Jack Dempsey's heavyweight title for much of his career. Although Greb and Dempsey never met in an official capacity, they did engage in a series of public sparring exhibitions together, and eyewitness reports state that Greb repeatedly held his own with his larger and much more powerful adversary. Greb's greatest achievement may be that he is the ONLY fighter to ever officially beat Gene Tunney, who, perhaps fittingly, went on to dethrone Dempsey. Greb also soundly defeated at least three other heavyweight contenders who were good enough to challenge for Dempsey's title.
Greb retired after losing and failing to regain the middleweight title in 1926 (reports are divided as to how serious this retirement really was, with some saying he was considering a comeback while others claim he was looking forward to other plans, like opening a gym). Tragically, he died just a few months after his last fight while undergoing surgery on his nose. After his death, it was discovered that he was blind in his right eye, and likely had been for the last several years of his career (he is believed to have suffered a retinal detachment somewhere around 1921-22, although he kept it secret from all but his closest friends).
Incredibly, despite having around 300 (or 500-plus?) fights in his career, there is NO known footage of any of Greb's fights to exist today. Trying to find footage of a Greb fight has long been like a Holy Grail for boxing enthusiasts. However, there is footage of him in training camp, preparing for his title defense against fellow all-time great Mickey Walker (the older man training alongside Greb is retired former Light-heavyweight champion "Philadelphia" Jack O'Brien, also a Hall of Famer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNE6V_RyBwg
All of Greb's currently confirmed fights are listed here, along with a ton of additional info (not sure if you need to log-in to view it all, though): http://boxrec.com/en/boxer/9019
Speaking of old-time boxing, well... THIS happened:
The fighter on the right, Abe Attell, was on the comeback trail after losing the World Featherweight title earlier that year. His claim to the title began in 1903, making it one of the longest reigns in boxing history, although his claim was disputed at times.
Years after this fight, Attell was implicated in Chicago's notorious Black Sox scandal as an alleged middleman between the players who threw the World Series and the gangsters who paid for it to be thrown.
Here are a few tidbits about the song. 1. It was originally written and recorded by Richard Berry in the 50s before being covered by The Kingsmen (among others) in the 60s. 2. The song was recorded in a single take (which was intended to be just a practice session), and the reason for the garbled vocals is that the studio microphone was raised too high above the singer's head, forcing him to stand on his tiptoes and yell into it. 3. At the 2-minute mark of the video above, the singer came in with his vocal line too soon, and then cut it off after realizing the mistake. The drummer then improvised a quick drum line to "cover" the mistake. 4. The FBI spent nearly THREE YEARS investigating the song to determine whether any profanities were included among the garbled lyrics. The investigation ended without any official determination one way or another. 5. Ironically, the song DOES include a profanity, but not from the singer. At around the 57-second mark of the video, you can hear the drummer yell "Fkk!" after dropping one of his drumsticks. 6. The original lineup of The Kingsmen broke up during the interim between the song's release as a single and actually becoming a hit, although other versions of the band with different members would continue to record and tour under that name.
Born and raised in Indiana, I love the Indianapolis 500. There are a lot of really cool facts about the race and the track; the first race alone could fill a book. But I will offer this:
The first Indianapolis 500 was run in 1911 and won by Ray Harroun in The Marmon Wasp. Marmon was a maker of luxury cars based in Indianapolis, part of Nordyke Marmon & Company. They started before the US Civil War in Richmond, Indiana, as makers of milling equipment for grain mills, etc. They grew quickly, moved to Indianapolis (a major rail center) in 1875, and expanded into many related businesses. They were an international company, shipping to customers all over the Western Hemisphere. When private telephones were first made available (before that you had to go to the exchange to make and take calls), Nordyke Marmon & Co. was one of the first companies in the US to get one.
From that point until the company was bought in 1933, they had the same phone number: 7.
Since the 1970's an industrious group in northern Alberta have been building a structure that is considered the biggest of its kind in the world. It is so huge, that this structure can be seen from the earth's orbit.
Did you know you can't actually see the Great Wall of China from space? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China I mean, ya, with modern satellite imagery where you can see individual people from orbit, of course you can see it. But claims that it could be seen with the naked eye from the moon have been debunked repeatedly.
Most of it was also constructed during the Ming dynasty. The masonry walls we think of only date back a few hundred years. Throughout most of it's history it was just a few forts with some interspersed walls. at times parts of it were just random stone and mortar with rice and lime juice to hold it together.
I've been away from this thread for a while, also it's 4am here, so apologies in advance for the barrage of different history items and lack of supporting evidence....
There's a theory that world war 1 actually began, because the kings of England and Germany (who were related) thought it would distract people from the economic crisis. The Egyptian pyramids were covered in beautiful alabaster, two temples were made from it, one in Turkey, one in Egypt. There's a theory the sphinx is much older than claimed due to rain weathering, when the area was more jungle like. During world war 2, the English bombed German civilians in village locations. There was a brief war with China and India, which actually involved Chinese people, living in India, being rounded up and sent to prison. A lot people think the Vikings were eventually driven out of England, when in fact William the conqueror, who took the throne room in 1066, was descended from Viking settlers in Normandy. The first Emperor of China, went on a quest for immortal life, but was (his advisors claimed) thwarted from reaching the sacred island by fish people, which is the original inspiration behind the Sahuagin.
I've been away from this thread for a while, also it's 4am here, so apologies in advance for the barrage of different history items and lack of supporting evidence....
There's a theory that world war 1 actually began, because the kings of England and Germany (who were related) thought it would distract people from the economic crisis. The Egyptian pyramids were covered in beautiful alabaster, two temples were made from it, one in Turkey, one in Egypt. There's a theory the sphinx is much older than claimed due to rain weathering, when the area was more jungle like. During world war 2, the English bombed German civilians in village locations. There was a brief war with China and India, which actually involved Chinese people, living in India, being rounded up and sent to prison. A lot people think the Vikings were eventually driven out of England, when in fact William the conqueror, who took the throne room in 1066, was descended from Viking settlers in Normandy. The first Emperor of China, went on a quest for immortal life, but was (his advisors claimed) thwarted from reaching the sacred island by fish people, which is the original inspiration behind the Sahuagin.
It's pretty well documented the allies hit civilian targets in WW2. We bombed the hell out of Dresden, a city that had no military industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II Any fan of Kurt Vonnegut can tell you about he Dresden bombing
My Grandpa told me a story the Chinese had about how Japan was founded. The Emperor at the time told some people to find an elixir of immortality, and don't come back if they don't find it. They didn't find it, so they stayed in Japan. It's complete BS, but still interesting.
Well Japan being founded that way might be BS, but there is evidence the first Emperor had generals executed for failing to find the elixir and that subsequent generals learnt to save their necks by not returning. His advisors fed him tablets of Mercury which they claimed would prolong his life, when they actually just made him madder.
The Egyptian pyramids were covered in beautiful alabaster, two temples were made from it, one in Turkey, one in Egypt. There's a theory the sphinx is much older than claimed due to rain weathering, when the area was more jungle like.
The Egyptian pyramids were covered in white limestone.
Originally, the Great Pyramid was covered by limestone casing stones that formed a smooth outer surface
The Post cereal company is directly responsible for the Soviet Space program snapping the first pictures of the far side of the moon.
During World War 2 many civilian companies became involved in manufacturing military equipment by contract. Post, being experts in making bags for breakfast cereal, began producing bags for weather balloons, the program was dubbed Genetrix. However innocuous that may seem, many of these weather balloons were outfitted with special cameras to photograph locations throughout the world, and post-World War 2, one of the primary targets for these weather balloons + cameras was the Soviet Union. In a funny note, these weather balloons also were spitting images of flying saucers (minus the translucent bag on the top of them while in flight) and are likely responsible for a lot of the UFO sightings in this period around the world.
The project was designed to work in this way: the flying-saucer looking balloons would be launched from a US military outpost or the United States itself, and then the thing would be filled with various lighter-than-air gasses and up it would go. Ideally, the balloon would stay high enough in the atmosphere that it couldn't be seen or otherwise detected, and furthermore couldn't be shot down by patrolling air craft (who couldn't reach the device). Whereupon, after completing its mission and taking pictures of various locales, it would deflate and crash in international waters in the Pacific Ocean. A beacon would start going off so that US navy ships in the Pacific could then retrieve the film.
This spy program also had a special engineering concern. When a camera was that high in the atmosphere, the film didn't work properly due to the extreme cold and radiation. So, a special type of film had to be developed that wouldn't allow the increased radiation or the extreme temperature to effect it as much as standard film.
Years prior, the USSR had planned to send a space craft to the moon to photograph it, but all of their tests and prior attempts resulted in photographs that were wholly unintelligible - the extreme temperatures and radiation made it such that the exposure was ruined.
Then enters Post's balloons. Post's weather balloon bags had a design flaw that saw their bags deflate significantly in extremely cold conditions (particularly in winter) dropping the balloons to within range of Soviet fighter air craft and making *some* of them visible to radar. So the Soviet Air Force began shooting down these balloons only to discover the cameras inside of them contained a specialized film that might just work for snapping some hot pics of the moon.
Now armed with this fancy new film, the Soviets designed a camera that could use it, and had the Leningrad Television division develop a scanner, so that the photographs could be taken in space, developed and processed in space, and then scanned and transmitted back to the USSR. This system was strapped to the Luna 3 mission and sent up in 1959. The camera successfully took up to 17 images of the far side of the moon - 6 of them were disseminated publicly:
And that's the story of how Post cereal is responsible for the first photographs of the far side of the moon, as well as *some* of the UFO craze of the 1950s.
The Egyptian pyramids were covered in beautiful alabaster, two temples were made from it, one in Turkey, one in Egypt. There's a theory the sphinx is much older than claimed due to rain weathering, when the area was more jungle like.
The Egyptian pyramids were covered in white limestone.
Originally, the Great Pyramid was covered by limestone casing stones that formed a smooth outer surface
You're right of course, many of the white limestone casing stones were removed from the Great Pyramid by Muhammad Ali Pasha during the early 19th century and reused as material for his Alabaster Mosque, also in Cairo... that's where I got the idea it was Alabaster.
For what seems to have been a very brief period of time, ancient Greeks and Macedonians used a weapon called a kestros. The kestros was a kind of sling that you could throw darts with instead of sling bullets. It seems to have been way too complicated to be used on a large scale. Just using a regular sling without throwing the bullet in the completely wrong direction takes tons of practice.
I once saw someone on youtube who had tried to reconstruct a kestros. He ended up throwing the dart almost 180 degrees in the wrong direction, hitting his own shed with this huge, heavy dart. Nasty thing. Imagine trying to teach a few hundred people how to use one of those for large battle situations.
The last direct descendant of Ghengis Khan (Chinggis Khaan) to rule any territory in the former Mongol Empire was deposed in 1920.
The territory they ruled over was in central Asia, today mostly in the country of Uzbekistan, as the Emirate of Bukhara. The Emirate had a population in excess of 1.2 million persons, and was extremely diverse religiously, including Sunni, Shi'a, and Sufi Muslims, as well as Zoroastrians, a small population of Jewish persons, and Russians. The area was renown as a center for Islamic learning, particular in regards to Sufi Islam - it also featured many ancient structures and forts.
Initially, the Emirate was founded in order to emphasize Islamic authority over Khanite blood, but the ruler was still indeed a Khan. As Russia expanded into Central Asia, the Emirate was attacked and defeated by Russia in 1868, eventually becoming a full protectorate of Russia in 1873. Despite Russian suzerainty, the Emirate was able to mostly govern itself and maintain its own armed forces.
Enter the Emir Mohammad Alim Khan (1880-1944), who was educated in St. Petersburg, and assumed the title of Emir in 1910 upon the death of his father. Initially, Mohammad was a reformer, declaring his desire to fight corruption and bribes, but eventually he turned over to being a much more conservative ruler and changed most of his opinions on the matter.
During the Russian Revolution, reform minded persons (mainly opposed to the Emir and not so much being in favor of Communism) in Bukhara invited the Red Army in declaring that they were ready for revolution. However, the Emirate's own armed forces, still relatively well maintained, repulsed the Red Army and Bukhara became defacto fully independent, with many local Russians, and the Bolshevik delegation to Bukhara being executed in reprisal for the attack.
Despite fears at the top of the Soviet government that deposing the Emir and possibly damaging the famous schools there would ignite a pan-Muslim, anti-Bolshevik backlash, Mikhail Frunze was given the all-clear to attack again, successfully overcoming the forces of the Emir in September of 1920. The Ark of Bukhara, a very large fortress that was also a town of sorts, first built in the 5th century A.D. was destroyed in the assault, and numerous other culturally important places were likewise destroyed in the conflict by both sides.
Mohammad Alim Khan would eventually make his way to Afghanistan where he would live in exile until his death in 1944, the last of Ghengis Khan's bloodline to have ruled in Asia.
Eric XIV was king of Sweden between 1560 and 1568. Today he is mostly remembered for his paranoia and mental instability. This resulted in the Sture murders in 1567. The king was convinced that several nobles, including the influential Sture family, were plotting to take the throne from him and had them imprisoned in Uppsala castle.
Apparently he had a change of heart and visited one of the prisoners to ask for forgiveness. But just a few hours later he changed his mind again. He came back to the castle, killed one of the prisoners and told the guards to kill everyone "except for herr Sten" before he disappeared into the forest. The king's tutor was also killed when he tried to calm down the insane king. The guards did kill the prisoners. But there were two prisoners called Sten, and they didn't know which one of them the king had been talking about. So they spared both of them.
The king was found several days later. He had apparently wandered alone through the forest the entire time. Still very much mentally unstable and now also deeply regretful. No surprise he was deposed the following year.
This is a modern sculpture of him In the 4th century BCE, there was a guy going around flipping the middle finger to the establishment, and it was a very dirty gesture back then.
He was the bum philosopher. He was known for living in a barrel outside of the Academy and living off a diet of onions. His nickname was Diogenes the Dog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes
He could be thought of as the first anarchist, the first troll or even the first punk, and often disrupted Plato's lectures. At one point he went into the Agora of Athens and just started beating off. When asked what the hell he was doing he said "If I could rub my belly and cure my hunger, I would."
He's considered one of the founders of cynicism. He roamed the streets of Athens with a lamp during the day, claiming to be looking for an honest man.
Alexander The Great is supposed to have said, "If I could not be Alexander, than I would want to be Diogenes, the little dog." after meeting him.
When he was dying, he was asked what he'd like done after he died. He replied that he wanted his body tossed outside of the city walls, so the animals could feast upon it.
Sometimes I think the only reason the ancient Greeks are so famous for their philosophy is because, unlike most other cultures of the time, they took the trouble of writing down stories about their local crackpots.
Sometimes I think the only reason the ancient Greeks are so famous for their philosophy is because, unlike most other cultures of the time, they took the trouble of writing down stories about their local crackpots.
The Chinese and the Indians were great philosophers, as well. Hinduism spawned a lot of religions like Buddhism and Jainism. You have the Confucianists and the Toaists in China, as well. It's really just a matter of what records survive today, all those cultures were prolific writers, so we know what went on there. For instance, pretty much all we know about the Persians actually comes to us from the Greeks, despite the fact they were known for culture and poetry. We're really lucky for what Greek and Roman writings actually survived. You even have interesting mergers of cultures in between India and Greece. There was a Greco Buddhist movement in Bactria for awhile, as well Gnosticism, the merger of Greek philosophy with Judeo-Christian ideas of religion. Greco Buddhism pretty much died out as the region converted to Islam, and Gnosticism was condemned as a heresy by Rome.
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By the 17th century, cave-ins were common. There were centuries old tunnels and shafts everywhere and no one hade actually kept track of them. In 1687 the inevitable happened: a huge part of the mine collapsed. It created what is known as the Great pit, which is over a 100 meters deep (check out the photo in the wikipedia article). This could have killed hundreds of workers but no one was actually hurt. That's because it happened on Midsummer's eve, the only day except for Christmas when no one was working in the mine.
I've heard theories that the miners knew that the mine would collapse sooner or later and that someone decided to help it along to avoid a huge catastrophe. Or the Midsummer thing could just be one of the luckiest coincidences in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides
Herodotus seems a bit of a stretch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
I wish I had a picture of this, but when I was a kid in Florida I saw a spider with a silver skull on it's back. Googling images doesn't turn up anything that looks quite like I remember.
Just came across this article at http://www.businessinsider.com/an-island-in-brazil-has-so-many-snakes-that-humans-arent-allowed-on-it-and-its-the-stuff-of-nightmares-2018-6?amp%3Butm_medium=referral
"An island in Brazil has so many snakes that humans aren't allowed on it — and it's the stuff of nightmares
About 25 miles off the coast of Brazil, there is an island where no local would ever dare tread. Legend has it that the last fisherman who strayed too close to its shores was found days later adrift in his own boat, lifeless in a pool of blood.
The mysterious island is known as Ilha da Queimada Grande, and it is in fact so dangerous to set foot there that Brazil has made it illegal for anyone to visit. The danger on the island comes in the form of the golden lancehead snakes - a species of pit viper and one of the deadliest serpents in the world.
The lanceheads can grow to be over a foot-and-a-half long and it's estimated that there are between 2,000 and 4,000 snakes on the island, which unsurprisingly is known as Snake Island. The lanceheads are so venomous that a human bitten by one could be dead within an hour.
Snake Island is uninhabited now, but people used to live there for a short period up to until the late 1920s when, according to legend, the local lighthouse keeper and his family were killed by vipers that slithered in through the windows. Today, the navy periodically visits the lighthouse for upkeep and makes sure no adventurers are wandering too close to the island.
Another local legend claims that the snakes were originally introduced by pirates seeking to protect buried treasure on the island.
In reality, the vipers' presence is the result of rising sea levels - a less exciting origin story than paranoid pirates to be sure, but still interesting.
Snake Island used to be part of Brazil's mainland, but when sea levels rose over 10,000 years ago, it separated the landmass and turned it into an island.
The animals that wound up isolated on Queimada Grande evolved differently from those on the mainland over the course of millennia, the golden lanceheads in particular. Since the island vipers had no prey but birds, mother nature helped them develop extra-potent venom so that they could almost immediately kill any bird. Local birds are too savvy to be caught by the many predators that inhabit the island and the snakes instead rely on birds who visit the island to rest as food.
Lancehead snakes, which are the golden lancheads' mainland cousins, are responsible for 90 percent of all snakebites in Brazil. A bite from their golden relatives, whose venom is up to five times more potent, is less likely to actually happen due to their island isolation. However, such an encounter is far more likely to be lethal if it does happen. There are no fatality statistics of the golden lanceheads (since the only area they inhabit is cut off from the public), however someone bitten by a regular lancehead faces a seven percent chance of death if untreated. Treatment does not even guarantee a lancehead bite victim will be saved: there is still a three percent mortality rate.
It's hard to imagine why anyone would want to visit a place where a painful death lurks every few feet. However, the vipers' deadly venom has shown potential in helping to combat heart problems. This has led to something of a black market demand for the venom. For some lawbreakers, the lure of the money is incentive enough to risk almost certain death on Queimada Grande."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulagu_Khan
One of the more interesting Khans. While he never was Great Khan, he ruled over a big chunk of the middle east. He's the one that was responsible for the sack of Baghdad, and the shift of power in the Islamic world to the Mamluk Turks in Cairo. His wife was a Nestorian Christian, and she convinced him to spare the Christians in Baghdad. He was however a Buddhist. He also is the one that sieged Alamut and destroyed the Assassins.
There's a really cool book I read awhile back called The Empire of the Steppes by Rene Grousset. It covers a lot of central Asian history that gets skipped in most history books. Most of the time you only hear about these regions in passing, as where people like Attilla or Ghengis Khan came from. There's a huge amount of information on the silk road and various peoples like the Xiongnu or the Yuezhi. Some theorize that the Xiongnu might be the original Huns, or their relatives. It gets into a lot detail on how Buddhism, Christianity (mainly Nestorianism), Islam and even Judaism spread to China across the silk road.
I've been reading Vallis by Phillip K Dick, which has caused me to go down the rabbit hole and read more about gnosticism. It's kind of a fascinating view point. There's a supreme God, and what is basically a bunch of minor gods, the creator actually being a malevolent lesser god. Essentially the soul and sacred knowledge holds a spark of the divine from the supreme god, and the material world is evil. It's really weird for a Judeo-Christian based religion, although it's heavily influenced by Greek thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
The Persians even had an early form of air conditioning. They'd use a windcatcher to force air into the Qanats over the cold water. The air would then be forced up into palaces or other buildings of the nobility. They could even use it for refrigeration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher
The man pictured above may be the greatest professional prizefighter, pound-for-pound, that ever lived.
He was born Edward Henry Greb, but famously fought under the name "Harry" Greb. He held the World Middleweight (160-pound) title from 1923 to 1926, but that only scratched the surface of his accomplishments. He is "officially" recognized as having just over 100 wins, 8 losses, and 3 draws in his career, but he actually fought at least 299 times, with at least one source (Nat Fleischer, founder and original editor of Ring Magazine) estimating that he had "over 500 battles" in his career. Greb spent much of his early career "riding the rails," traveling from one small town to another by train, and typically fighting just weeks, if not days apart. In just a single year alone (1919), Greb fought over 40 times and was credited with besting his opponent in every one of them. Many of Greb's fights were so-called "no-decisions" in which no decision was rendered if the fight went the distance, meaning that the fight could only be officially won by KO (this rule was implemented in many states in the hopes of curtailing betting on those fights) - hence the discrepancy between Greb's "official" record and his actual total of fights.
In the ring, Greb was renowned for his speed of hand and foot, his versatility, his high workrate, and an iron chin. Despite being only a middleweight, Greb routinely fought outside of his weight class, and was considered a viable challenger for Jack Dempsey's heavyweight title for much of his career. Although Greb and Dempsey never met in an official capacity, they did engage in a series of public sparring exhibitions together, and eyewitness reports state that Greb repeatedly held his own with his larger and much more powerful adversary. Greb's greatest achievement may be that he is the ONLY fighter to ever officially beat Gene Tunney, who, perhaps fittingly, went on to dethrone Dempsey. Greb also soundly defeated at least three other heavyweight contenders who were good enough to challenge for Dempsey's title.
Greb retired after losing and failing to regain the middleweight title in 1926 (reports are divided as to how serious this retirement really was, with some saying he was considering a comeback while others claim he was looking forward to other plans, like opening a gym). Tragically, he died just a few months after his last fight while undergoing surgery on his nose. After his death, it was discovered that he was blind in his right eye, and likely had been for the last several years of his career (he is believed to have suffered a retinal detachment somewhere around 1921-22, although he kept it secret from all but his closest friends).
Incredibly, despite having around 300 (or 500-plus?) fights in his career, there is NO known footage of any of Greb's fights to exist today. Trying to find footage of a Greb fight has long been like a Holy Grail for boxing enthusiasts. However, there is footage of him in training camp, preparing for his title defense against fellow all-time great Mickey Walker (the older man training alongside Greb is retired former Light-heavyweight champion "Philadelphia" Jack O'Brien, also a Hall of Famer):
All of Greb's currently confirmed fights are listed here, along with a ton of additional info (not sure if you need to log-in to view it all, though):
http://boxrec.com/en/boxer/9019
Speaking of old-time boxing, well... THIS happened:
The fighter on the right, Abe Attell, was on the comeback trail after losing the World Featherweight title earlier that year. His claim to the title began in 1903, making it one of the longest reigns in boxing history, although his claim was disputed at times.
Years after this fight, Attell was implicated in Chicago's notorious Black Sox scandal as an alleged middleman between the players who threw the World Series and the gangsters who paid for it to be thrown.
FACT: This song exists.
You've likely heard The Kingsmen's classic version of "Louie, Louie" and its infamously garbled vocal lines.
Here are a few tidbits about the song.
1. It was originally written and recorded by Richard Berry in the 50s before being covered by The Kingsmen (among others) in the 60s.
2. The song was recorded in a single take (which was intended to be just a practice session), and the reason for the garbled vocals is that the studio microphone was raised too high above the singer's head, forcing him to stand on his tiptoes and yell into it.
3. At the 2-minute mark of the video above, the singer came in with his vocal line too soon, and then cut it off after realizing the mistake. The drummer then improvised a quick drum line to "cover" the mistake.
4. The FBI spent nearly THREE YEARS investigating the song to determine whether any profanities were included among the garbled lyrics. The investigation ended without any official determination one way or another.
5. Ironically, the song DOES include a profanity, but not from the singer. At around the 57-second mark of the video, you can hear the drummer yell "Fkk!" after dropping one of his drumsticks.
6. The original lineup of The Kingsmen broke up during the interim between the song's release as a single and actually becoming a hit, although other versions of the band with different members would continue to record and tour under that name.
The first Indianapolis 500 was run in 1911 and won by Ray Harroun in The Marmon Wasp. Marmon was a maker of luxury cars based in Indianapolis, part of Nordyke Marmon & Company. They started before the US Civil War in Richmond, Indiana, as makers of milling equipment for grain mills, etc. They grew quickly, moved to Indianapolis (a major rail center) in 1875, and expanded into many related businesses. They were an international company, shipping to customers all over the Western Hemisphere. When private telephones were first made available (before that you had to go to the exchange to make and take calls), Nordyke Marmon & Co. was one of the first companies in the US to get one.
From that point until the company was bought in 1933, they had the same phone number: 7.
Since the 1970's an industrious group in northern Alberta have been building a structure that is considered the biggest of its kind in the world. It is so huge, that this structure can be seen from the earth's orbit.
The world's largest beaver dam is 2,790ft (In comparison the Hoover dam is 1,244ft.) and is located in Wood Buffalo Natural Park. Even though experts believe it was started in the 70's, it wasn't discovered until researchers using Google Maps saw it in 2007.
The first perso to visit the site, did so in July 2014 needing to trek through 200 miles of wilderness to get there.
Kinda amazing of what nature can do when it's left alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China
I mean, ya, with modern satellite imagery where you can see individual people from orbit, of course you can see it. But claims that it could be seen with the naked eye from the moon have been debunked repeatedly.
Most of it was also constructed during the Ming dynasty. The masonry walls we think of only date back a few hundred years. Throughout most of it's history it was just a few forts with some interspersed walls. at times parts of it were just random stone and mortar with rice and lime juice to hold it together.
There's a theory that world war 1 actually began, because the kings of England and Germany (who were related) thought it would distract people from the economic crisis.
The Egyptian pyramids were covered in beautiful alabaster, two temples were made from it, one in Turkey, one in Egypt. There's a theory the sphinx is much older than claimed due to rain weathering, when the area was more jungle like.
During world war 2, the English bombed German civilians in village locations.
There was a brief war with China and India, which actually involved Chinese people, living in India, being rounded up and sent to prison.
A lot people think the Vikings were eventually driven out of England, when in fact William the conqueror, who took the throne room in 1066, was descended from Viking settlers in Normandy.
The first Emperor of China, went on a quest for immortal life, but was (his advisors claimed) thwarted from reaching the sacred island by fish people, which is the original inspiration behind the Sahuagin.
My Grandpa told me a story the Chinese had about how Japan was founded. The Emperor at the time told some people to find an elixir of immortality, and don't come back if they don't find it. They didn't find it, so they stayed in Japan. It's complete BS, but still interesting.
During World War 2 many civilian companies became involved in manufacturing military equipment by contract. Post, being experts in making bags for breakfast cereal, began producing bags for weather balloons, the program was dubbed Genetrix. However innocuous that may seem, many of these weather balloons were outfitted with special cameras to photograph locations throughout the world, and post-World War 2, one of the primary targets for these weather balloons + cameras was the Soviet Union. In a funny note, these weather balloons also were spitting images of flying saucers (minus the translucent bag on the top of them while in flight) and are likely responsible for a lot of the UFO sightings in this period around the world.
The project was designed to work in this way: the flying-saucer looking balloons would be launched from a US military outpost or the United States itself, and then the thing would be filled with various lighter-than-air gasses and up it would go. Ideally, the balloon would stay high enough in the atmosphere that it couldn't be seen or otherwise detected, and furthermore couldn't be shot down by patrolling air craft (who couldn't reach the device). Whereupon, after completing its mission and taking pictures of various locales, it would deflate and crash in international waters in the Pacific Ocean. A beacon would start going off so that US navy ships in the Pacific could then retrieve the film.
This spy program also had a special engineering concern. When a camera was that high in the atmosphere, the film didn't work properly due to the extreme cold and radiation. So, a special type of film had to be developed that wouldn't allow the increased radiation or the extreme temperature to effect it as much as standard film.
Years prior, the USSR had planned to send a space craft to the moon to photograph it, but all of their tests and prior attempts resulted in photographs that were wholly unintelligible - the extreme temperatures and radiation made it such that the exposure was ruined.
Then enters Post's balloons. Post's weather balloon bags had a design flaw that saw their bags deflate significantly in extremely cold conditions (particularly in winter) dropping the balloons to within range of Soviet fighter air craft and making *some* of them visible to radar. So the Soviet Air Force began shooting down these balloons only to discover the cameras inside of them contained a specialized film that might just work for snapping some hot pics of the moon.
Now armed with this fancy new film, the Soviets designed a camera that could use it, and had the Leningrad Television division develop a scanner, so that the photographs could be taken in space, developed and processed in space, and then scanned and transmitted back to the USSR. This system was strapped to the Luna 3 mission and sent up in 1959. The camera successfully took up to 17 images of the far side of the moon - 6 of them were disseminated publicly:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Luna_3_moon.jpg
And that's the story of how Post cereal is responsible for the first photographs of the far side of the moon, as well as *some* of the UFO craze of the 1950s.
"Fake news! Fake news!"
And furthermore: "WHO SENT YOU?!?!?!"
I once saw someone on youtube who had tried to reconstruct a kestros. He ended up throwing the dart almost 180 degrees in the wrong direction, hitting his own shed with this huge, heavy dart. Nasty thing. Imagine trying to teach a few hundred people how to use one of those for large battle situations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kestros
The territory they ruled over was in central Asia, today mostly in the country of Uzbekistan, as the Emirate of Bukhara. The Emirate had a population in excess of 1.2 million persons, and was extremely diverse religiously, including Sunni, Shi'a, and Sufi Muslims, as well as Zoroastrians, a small population of Jewish persons, and Russians. The area was renown as a center for Islamic learning, particular in regards to Sufi Islam - it also featured many ancient structures and forts.
Initially, the Emirate was founded in order to emphasize Islamic authority over Khanite blood, but the ruler was still indeed a Khan. As Russia expanded into Central Asia, the Emirate was attacked and defeated by Russia in 1868, eventually becoming a full protectorate of Russia in 1873. Despite Russian suzerainty, the Emirate was able to mostly govern itself and maintain its own armed forces.
Enter the Emir Mohammad Alim Khan (1880-1944), who was educated in St. Petersburg, and assumed the title of Emir in 1910 upon the death of his father. Initially, Mohammad was a reformer, declaring his desire to fight corruption and bribes, but eventually he turned over to being a much more conservative ruler and changed most of his opinions on the matter.
During the Russian Revolution, reform minded persons (mainly opposed to the Emir and not so much being in favor of Communism) in Bukhara invited the Red Army in declaring that they were ready for revolution. However, the Emirate's own armed forces, still relatively well maintained, repulsed the Red Army and Bukhara became defacto fully independent, with many local Russians, and the Bolshevik delegation to Bukhara being executed in reprisal for the attack.
Despite fears at the top of the Soviet government that deposing the Emir and possibly damaging the famous schools there would ignite a pan-Muslim, anti-Bolshevik backlash, Mikhail Frunze was given the all-clear to attack again, successfully overcoming the forces of the Emir in September of 1920. The Ark of Bukhara, a very large fortress that was also a town of sorts, first built in the 5th century A.D. was destroyed in the assault, and numerous other culturally important places were likewise destroyed in the conflict by both sides.
Mohammad Alim Khan would eventually make his way to Afghanistan where he would live in exile until his death in 1944, the last of Ghengis Khan's bloodline to have ruled in Asia.
(photograph of Mohammad Alim Khan taken in 1911)
Apparently he had a change of heart and visited one of the prisoners to ask for forgiveness. But just a few hours later he changed his mind again. He came back to the castle, killed one of the prisoners and told the guards to kill everyone "except for herr Sten" before he disappeared into the forest. The king's tutor was also killed when he tried to calm down the insane king. The guards did kill the prisoners. But there were two prisoners called Sten, and they didn't know which one of them the king had been talking about. So they spared both of them.
The king was found several days later. He had apparently wandered alone through the forest the entire time. Still very much mentally unstable and now also deeply regretful. No surprise he was deposed the following year.
This is a modern sculpture of him
In the 4th century BCE, there was a guy going around flipping the middle finger to the establishment, and it was a very dirty gesture back then.
He was the bum philosopher. He was known for living in a barrel outside of the Academy and living off a diet of onions. His nickname was Diogenes the Dog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes
He could be thought of as the first anarchist, the first troll or even the first punk, and often disrupted Plato's lectures. At one point he went into the Agora of Athens and just started beating off. When asked what the hell he was doing he said "If I could rub my belly and cure my hunger, I would."
He's considered one of the founders of cynicism. He roamed the streets of Athens with a lamp during the day, claiming to be looking for an honest man.
Alexander The Great is supposed to have said, "If I could not be Alexander, than I would want to be Diogenes, the little dog." after meeting him.
When he was dying, he was asked what he'd like done after he died. He replied that he wanted his body tossed outside of the city walls, so the animals could feast upon it.