Ancient Egyptian pregnancy test survived millenia because it worked (2018)

> subsequent administration didn't maintain the institution

Also papyrus has a limited shelf life, so even the books need to be maintained (copied) to maintain them in the long run, so if the institution is failing, the books will be lost in the medium/long term, even without direct destruction of the library

To contextualize why "history for atheists by an atheist historian" is a thing...

> After over ten years of seeing supposed “rationalists”, most of them with no background in or even knowledge of history, using patent pseudo history as the basis for arguments against and attacks on religion, I felt someone needed to start correcting the popular misconceptions about history which are rife among many vocal atheist activists. I also felt there needed to be some push-back by a fellow unbeliever against several fringe theories and hopelessly outdated ideas which have no credibility among professional scholars and specialists, but which seem to be accepted almost without question by many or even most anti-theistic atheists.

https://historyforatheists.com/about-the-author-and-a-faq/

It’s surprising to me that the author finds it improbable that we don’t know many ancient writers. It’s always been my default assumption that the vast majority of all works and writers of antiquity were lost. I would expect that, like today, there is a relatively small number of hugely popular works, which had a decent chance of surviving, and a massive long tail of less popular works that were relatively obscure, especially over the time scale, didn’t get copied, and so therefore were lost. Of course we might get a few random selections from the long tail, but not many compared to the number of total works. I would have supposed there was easily a ratio of 100:1, at least.

That's not great. A quick skim says that the number of books were probably (edit typo: overestimated) by a fair bit:

"The actual numbers were probably lower, perhaps by as much as one order of magnitude"

Reference to this says "a library that was a tenth of this size [sc. the 500,000 in Ps.-Aristeas] would still have been very large in antiquity") so it was a large library. I have to say, claims of hundreds of thousand weren't really plausible anyway.

Second it doesn't say it was dwarfed elsewhere at the time. It does say "The Library of Alexandria, however comprehensive for its time, was not on a scale comparable with the great research libraries of the twentieth century[0]". Which is fair, but doesn't support what you say.

finally it doesn't say (that I can see) that it was empty when destroyed. The guy does say there's now way it would have survived a long time due to the humidity and climate it was in, but doesn't suggest (AFAIKS) that it was nearly empty when it was destroyed.

[0] well duh

So I'm going to go with the more common view for now. Thanks anyway.

Incoming ships got searched for books because there was a law in place made by one of the Ptolemies that any ships coming in would be required by law to lend any books on board to the library to make copies. Sometimes, the scribes would keep the original and give the copy back because they would be hard to distinguish.

Galen is the only source for this practice. Most scholars in the relevant areas find his claim dubious.

I can imagine it might be easy to optimize this test a bit...

By repeating the test every few days, and looking at the patterns of grow/no-grow you would probably get a much better result.

And if it doesn’t grow you can repeat the test in a week or two - even modern tests have this issue since early in the pregnancy hormone levels might not be high enough yet.

Regarding false positives - since you’re detecting hormones that are not produced outside of pregnancy time, then the only possible reason for false positive could be some genetic condition, or maybe some serious endocrinologic disease, maybe ovarian cancer.

Is it reversible? And does a MBP also reduce libido?

Or just a plastic-body laptop with the heat vent off to the side.

Linux laptop because real men need higher temperatures? ;)

I switched to some sexy cargo shorts, and my wife was pregnant a month later

Coincidence? I think not

Japanese women are having on average one child. They want two.

> Japan is one such country that discrepancy between intended and observed levels of fertility is relatively large. For example, calculated from a nationally representative survey in 2010 (IPSS 2011), the average number of intended children among women aged 40-44 is 1.84, while their observed cohort total fertility is estimated to be 1.48 . These discrepancies between intended and observed fertility suggest social constraints on meeting intentions.

https://paa2014.princeton.edu/papers/141630

I imagine love

For some people, that might be an easier sell than 18 years of child support.

I've hung out in onsen for about an hour at a time. Sometimes I raise my upper body out if I start feeling dizzy, but it's not completely unbearable. I also took sizzling hot baths all the time as a kid and don't feel the heat, although I'm sure I'm probably being cooked.

This could be why I have no kids.

>I’d be more interested in how this affects sauna cultures.

Sauna works differently than hot bath. In sauna you sweat profusely in order to maintain your body temperature, and your blood vessels expand, and the heart works hard actively pumping the blood thus avoiding local overheat of any specific body part. Plus you take a cold shower or jump into cold water right out of sauna :)

>to sleep in a sauna (jimjilbang) for a couple hours

nobody can sleep in sauna for a couple of hours :) The best i saw some few guys did in the local Korean sauna is about 30-40 minutes at 180F. In Korean jimjilbang there is also usually something like a room with warmed floor where you do go for a nice relaxed sleep after/between sauna room visits. Damn that coronavirus lockdown, i haven't been for the sauna for like 6 weeks already...

If you don’t go blind when you get up, you weren’t in long enough.

oh ok, fun fact ... I never took one and had no idea how warm/hot they'd be.

I was going to suggest this. The Romans for example took a lot of medical interest in urine.

Urination isn't really private in most of the world outside the West.