What flesh eatest thou? A missing child and a suspicious meat pie in 1645 | Hacker News Reader

What flesh eatest thou? A missing child and a suspicious meat pie in 1645

manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com

39 pointspepys15 comments

"Global Crisis" (http://www.amazon.com/Global-Crisis-Climate-Catastrophe-Seve...) is a good history of the world-wide climate-driven castastrophe that occurred in the 1600's, which may have killed as much as 1/3 of the human race.

The Little Ice Age was not a good time to be alive, because human economies are tuned up to be optimal in the current climate, whatever it happens to be, and when things change suddenly it takes a generation or two for people to adjust, and since food and other resources are in short supply the natural "solution" the problem is to take up arms and kill people and destroy things, because there is really no better way to ensure a return to surplus conditions than by obliterating the means of production.

There were fairly widespread reports of cannibalism, and although some--like this one--may have been baseless (because it is based on nothing but a gut feeling, and the epistemic utility of our organs of digestion is limited at best) it's pretty clear that it did happen on multiple occasions in both China and Europe.

According this a recent paper (http://www.voxeu.org/article/myth-europe-s-little-ice-age), Europe's little ice age is a myth.

>The top panel of Figure 1 shows Low Countries’ summer temperatures from 1301, smoothed using a twenty-five year moving average. The Little Ice Age is immediately evident as a declining trend from the mid 15th to the early 19th centuries, with markedly cold episodes in the late 16th, late 17th, and early 19th centuries. But looking at the unsmoothed graph of summer temperatures in the panel below, the impression is one of randomness, without any major trends, cycles, or breaks: something that our statistical tests confirm.

actually the paper exactly confirms the Little Ice Age - given that climate effects are cumulative (drought previous year, rain this year - nice, whereis rain previous 10 years makes your environment a swamp no matter what current year is), the smoothing with 25 years moving average is a very reasonable thing and produces result meaningful for climate and its effects upon, in particular, human civilization.

The existence of the little ice age has become a pawn in the arguments about global warming.

I don't know enough about the topic to say what the truth is, but I can tell you that arguments for and against it have little to do with the little ice age itself, and everything to do with belief for or against global warming.

Here is one conservative report on the subject: http://www.wnd.com/2009/12/119745/

"I don't know enough about the topic to say what the truth is"

Thanks for confirming for those of us that were not sure.

Interestingly enough, the story about the barber who killed strangers to be baked into his neighbor baker's pies also exists in Paris, in the rue Chanoinesse. There's no specific motive to the crimes, but it's clear that the baker sold said pies. What makes this funnier / ironic is that this shop is located near Notre-Dame, in a neighborhood that used to be reserved to members of the clergy. The baker thus made some of them unwitting cannibals.

It is said to have happened in 1387 and is described in a 1612 book.

This proclivity towards cannibalization is a real tragedy of we the human species, and it of course has its effects on software.

Often times one might find a customer of software who simply doesn't understand the way the system works, or is to be constructed, and they become suspicious of what they are being sold.

Other times, its quite possible to 'eat ones own dog-food' and be fed back a refactored version of an asset they already owned, if not controlled properly, albeit slightly cooked up.

From the customers perspective, it is perfectly reasonable to experience a plethora of these kinds of cannibalistic effects. If you get it on your plate, to save the project: invite the customer to the table. Software system implementation and usage, constructed though a meat pie, are key factors in success, its true, but if your customer does not at least have one finger in the tray, they won't know how fine it tastes. Educate your customer on software systems and why things are, not just that they are, take care of the bad smells with thorough enlightenment, and voila .. dinnertime.

Trolling or a sophisticated bot?

There are definitely bots on here trying to blend in. You're right, this feels like a good one. Either that or a somewhat confused person. Or it could just be an amazing analogy. Now I'm confused.

Trolling/confused/off-topic. seems to have other credible non-bot-like comments

Hint: if someone else is being eaten, in reality or as a social-construct/bearing-metaphor, it is cannibalism. True enlightenment means we're both meat. Or, not.

I think it's someone jokingly commenting on the article's relevance to core HN interests. e.g., a better "why is this on HN?!"

Didn't read the article and can't work out how it applies to modern auto-/theo-/techno-cratic notions?

A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, mentioned in the article, is well worth reading.

It is a gruesome and utterly deadpan joke.

It's quite funny. I didn't know what I was reading when I read it, so I didn't catch on until he suggested he should have a statue in his honor lol.

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