Archaeologists investigate what life was like after dark in the ancient world
psmag.com
psmag.com
[1] https://www.amazon.com/At-Days-Close-Night-Times/dp/03933290...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mytravelphotos/14693172893/in/...
It's crazy to me that no so long ago people had to make do with rushlights which were far more primitive than the oil lamps of the ancient world.
But I can now go to bed at ten or so and wake up at three, and so long as I avoid light sources I can get a lot done. I just wish my fridge had a night mode.
So if I'm ever in a situation where I'm not really quite sure what to do, I come up with a rule and do it that way the next time.
I've been optimizing this process for perhaps a year after I got interested in it. Everything in my apartment has a history and a little set of rules. I keep a spray bottle of daily shower cleaner in my bathroom. It lives on the ledge of the sink when I'm not using the sink and moves to the lid of the toilet when I am. I don't feel comfortable yet putting it away because I think if I do that I'll forget to use it after I take a shower. Maybe in another year.
Having to remember to do stuff sucks. I always make a visual reminder. A few times I forgot to put washed clothes in the dryer. Now when I'm washing clothes the hamper gets put in the way of the door so I can't miss it.
Nothing stays in mind, so it's free to imagine and wander. I do this at work too, every task gets routinized. Very rarely am I caught off guard with not knowing how to do something.
About a year in I noticed myself naturally waking up earlier. It helps that I don't set an alarm clock anymore. But I'm routinely the first one on my team into the office anyway.
I live alone, and I've often wondered how my lifestyle would alter if I had to live with somebody. Well, the few times I've had someone over regularly, my routine adapted to accommodate them, I was surprised how easy it was. If things got out of place, I'd just return them to their place when I noticed. The little routines have accumulated their own inertia.
The most fascinating thing about it is, even though I feel like I'm doing a lot less, in reality a lot more gets done than otherwise would be. Routinizing something makes it ten times easier and take ten times less time to accomplish. It's so worth doing that before I even get started I look for ways to optimize.
I think this is how primitive peoples must've lived all the time. Tons of stuff that needed to be done, day in, day out, over and over again. Optimize, optimize, optimize.
The TV Tropes (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/NightCourt) page says that "many legal professionals confide that Night Court is far ''more'' realistic than most straight Law Procedurals." I can't vouch for that, but my father is a lawyer, and it was one of his favourite shows too. His other favourite was Rumpole of the Bailey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumpole_of_the_Bailey.
The common thread here that both shows are both (a) funny, and (b) portray defense lawyers as more-or-less good guys. (My father worked for the Attorney General's department).
I can't think of a law procedural from the last two and a half decades that has either of those features. Why is that?
The scare quotes are silly. It seems to come from the mentality that any technology that Hobbits can understand is "natural" but anything else isn't.
You could fly then drive there, but the costs are going to add up quickly. You're going to have to find them, get someone to communicate with them, and have liabilities covered. This quickly becomes very expensive with even just a few people.
I've never seen so many stars in my life, even in places I thought of as raw wilderness and I've spent quite a bit of time camping in national parks and so on.
Those places seemed like light filled cities in comparison. It was about a 4 hour drive from the nearest major population center.
I suspect there's plenty of these places still left even in relatively developed areas.
Longer answer: the Americas weren't peopled until perhaps 15-20kya (exact date is a matter of some contention). In the intervening time, there's a lot of inventions that happen (such as, say, the bow-and-arrow), which can have severe collateral effects, even for more distant populations. On top of that, there was a massive shift resulting from the European arrival in the New World, which starts by depopulating much of the continent, reducing the population by as much as 90%.
To give an example of how striking the difference can be: by giving guns to some Indians in New York, we turned other Indian farmers in Illinois into the archetypal Indians from westerns living in the Dakotas.
For a people to be living the same way for thousands of years requires them to pretty much be in complete isolation. Even the remaining uncontacted peoples are probably insufficiently isolated for that.