sillyquiet

"They made" natives fight each other is a weird way of putting it. Warring tribes were more than happy to use the Europeans against their enemies. And many of those enmities long predated the arrival of Europeans.

yeah, unfortunately (I guess??!) smallpox didn't reach Europe until the Crusades.

Some cultural context, this bowl is probably associated with the Urnfield culture, a wide-spread cultural horizon that was probably associated with Indo-European language speakers (probably late proto-Indo-European or pre-proto-Celtic).

The sun motif is naturally widespread among many unrelated cultures, but in this case is probably associated with a dawn or sun deity (*seh₂u-el, cognate with Sol, Helios, etc). Sometimes female, sometimes male depending on the culture and period, but in this period, probably female.

I played around with the second generation Mindstorms in college, it was pretty fun even for 20 year old me.

I still have the bricks, motors and sensors! (I even still have the RCX and the weird infrared thing you use to program it). This is going to be a fun project for my daughter and me, especially since the Pi is way more flexible than the RCX.

You'd probably be interested in seeing the collaboration he did with Old Norse linguist Dr. Jackson Crawford in which he and Dr. Crawford had a scripted but mutually intelligible conversation in Old English and Old Norse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKzJEIUSWtc

Yep. Have had a Brother HL-2270 (b&w laser printing) for years, and couldn't be happier with it, especially coupled with a PI-based CUPS server for AirPrint capability and the like.

The only thing I miss about not having an inkjet is color printing and at-home photo printing, but there are so many on-demand online print shops nowadays, I can't say it's a big deal.

I am not an astronomer or involved in this project but I am crazily nervous and excited for the launch, orbital placement and deployment of this telescope. It seems sooo epochal and important.

The civil engineering-oriented channel Practical Engineering has a pretty good video on Roman concrete vs. modern. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL0BB2PRY7k

The primary tldw; is the fact modern concrete uses steel rebar for tensile strength, whereas the Romans relied on architectural techniques to minimize tensile forces on their structures.

Steel rebar is the primary route through which concrete deteriorates.

On of the primary indicators when a grave site is examined to determine whether the society it belonged to were agriculturalists was to examine the incidence of dental caries. Low # of caries = non-agricultural society, i.e., one that lived on meats, dairy (in some cases), wild grains such as amaranth, and various greens. Even in tropical regions non-cultivated fruits were eaten haphazardly, as you might imagine - they are seasonal. In northern latitudes, fruit was an even rarer dietary item.

Sorry, but no. Those kind of pithy meaningless comments are great for reddit or twitter, but I think these forums have the room for better expression of our ideas.

There's a point where all nuance and complexity is lost such that the model becomes useless. IOW this is, besides being incorrect, over-simplified. Your assumptions, especially for the future, are completely unjustified in this format.

As far as its incorrectness, this model implies both that this history of work is a progression, which it's not, and that each stage succeeds the previous, which it does not. Many of these stage overlap, sometimes by millennia.

no offense, but this is absurdly reductionist.

I guess its apropos for twitter.

Very very true, but to clarify too, those roles aren't as cut and dry either - it's true hunting was mostly a job for boys and young men, but older less spry men were also crafters and fabricators for their societies. They were also, a lot of the time, the 'elites' I spoke of - spiritual leaders, chieftains, hunting group leaders (which probably formed the kernel of later period dedicated warrior groups), etc. Elderly women also fulfilled spiritual leadership roles occasionally.

I meant that sentence as a follow on to the preceding - I was talking about the work performed by people that don't live in rich privileged agricultural societies.

> You don't reap the benefit of what you create

And your risk is also much lessened and abstracted. If you produce a few bugs in your code, you don't get eaten by a tiger or have your family starve to death.

Those existing hunter gathers, almost invariably, have close economic contact with modern agricultural societies, so unfortunately there's a limit to how much studying them can tell us as far as that goes.

'Gathering food' is not the extent of the 'work' that hunter-gatherer societies performed, which is kind of the basis of that ridiculous pop-anthropology notion of hunter-gathers working some silly low number of hours per week.

Food preparation and preservation, shelter, crafting necessaries like eating implements, food storage vessels, clothing, and weapons - these keep a member of that society (except for some of the 'elites' of those societies, naturally) busy from dusk to dawn.

This persistent myth of the low effort required to subsist as a hunter gather needs to die.

This is the kind of article that can only be written in rich, privileged times by rich, privileged people.

For the majority of history and or for the majority of people even today, 'work' was what you did to fulfill the most bottom of the tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - survival.

IOW, 'work' isn't some activity that exists outside of your 'real' life, it IS your life in a very literal sense.

I realize that kinda dovetails with the article's point, but I think before people get too outraged with the state of modern capitalism, a little perspective is probably in order.

I didn't find his politics, or any politics really, very out of place in the novels, they seemed (to me) a natural part of the story telling.

But, full disclosure, I am a bit libertarian myself, politically so maybe I didn't notice as much or they weren't as grating to me.

On the other hand, I find Terry Goodkind's novels completely unreadable, and the politic-pushing obnoxious, so I don't give libertarian politics a pass when it comes to out-of-place axe-grinding prominence.

yes, agreed, I really listed it because it's a necessary (imo) prologue to the events in `Marooned in Realtime`

See my reply to the other child of this comment, but basically I don't see a solid roadmap anymore from here to there - sure there's a a lot of progress and advances but taken as a whole, the singularity idea doesn't account for anything but technological advances as plotted on a curve. There are a ton of economic, social, and squishy human factors that aren't really taken into consideration. It's a fascinating idea, but I don't find it very realistic or practical, much like A.I., or self-driving cars, or casual human space travel.

If you had asked me 10-15 years ago, I would still be pretty sure it could happen, but the last decade or so of real-world technological advance has convinced me otherwise.

Yeah, this covers it for me. Maybe outdated isn't wrong so much as nothing more than a fun intellectual exercise and what if - there's no road map, there's no solid technological basis for reaching a singularity, imo there's not much theory to it outside speculation and some fairly specious projections.

Some other really thought provoking books by Vinge which often go overlooked is "The Peace Wars" and "Marooned in Realtime"

My personal guilty favorite (I say guilty because he really buys into the outdated concept of the technological singularity) is Rainbow's End, which deals with notions of augmented reality, digitalization of books, and even touches on right-to-repair issues in a way.

Yeah, and this means the regulation of shady activity on the part of the legislature falls to the legislative body itself. And I get the philosophy behind it, but it's the figurative fox guarding the henhouse here. This is why any legislature proposed by the few principled figures in Congress that proposes to curb corrupt practices like this in the legislature is usually dead on arrival.

The best accessible archaeology reference I can recommend is "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language", and that book can guide you to many other resources.(https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691148182/th...)

Though the research is a tad dated since we have more genetic evidence since it was written, and there are many disputes about the author's assertions about the timing of the advent of horse riding, it still stands up very well. AFAIK the genetic research made since the book's publication has only strengthened his archaeological and linguistic arguments.

Ah gotcha, yeah, the notion of the 'Aryans' as the ancestors of Europe was a common misconception of early European archaeology even when it didn't have the racist propaganda connections.

well, possibly, but as they are probably the ancestors of many North Indian, Iranian, and Afghanistani peoples that gene didn't stay dominant for their line. (Though I guess it shows up in that region now and again).

And they certainly weren't the 'Aryan ideal' as pictured in racist propaganda.

> Whether or not these deities were similarly associated with the planet Jupiter is a different question though.

Very doubtful, those names are modern applications to the planet. Although, there is zero doubt they were aware of and cognizant of the visible planets and their motions and no doubt had important names for them, it wasn't what western astronomers called them, almost certainly.

Also Dyaus Pater was a god of the daylight sky for the most part, which in the steppes, as you can imagine, made him pretty important and omnipresent.

The racialists of the late 19th Century and early 20th co-opted the term, but there was a real peoples that really called themselves 'Aryans'. They weren't blue eyed blonde-haired, that's for sure, and the weren't at the root of Europe either. Like I said, they were a central Asian daughter culture. They probably spoke Indo-Iranian and their beliefs were later written down in the Riga Veda as well as being a component of Iranian Zoroastrianism.

('Aryan' is cognate with the proto-Indo-European 'h₂éyos')

Nah, the naming of the planet came much later, I don't think the planet itself was ever worshipped.

And the Proto-Indo-Europeans are not the Aryans - the Aryans were a much later daughter culture in Western Afghanistan, Northern Iran and India, and probably the folks that had the beliefs outlined in the first pages of the Rig Veda.

The steppe people I am referring to are the people of the Yamnaya culture and related peoples within their horizon. The Mongols and Turks were relative late comers to the western steppes.

The sky father was the chief god of the steppe people that lived north of the Black and Caspian Seas during the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, so 'Jupiter' as such was worshiped for 2000 years before the Greek speakers called him that.

As these people (according to all the currently most accepted archaeological and linguistic evidence) are the ancestral culture of most of Europe, Iran, and India (with the exception of the native Dravidians), it makes sense the Greeks as well as most of the religions of Europe and southwest Asia also worshipped him.