A sorceress’ kit was discovered in the ashes of Pompeii (2019)
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Memetic crossover?
https://signal.org/blog/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see...
Incredible.
I think that people 2000 years from now will have a lot more information about our time to go on, though. We disseminate and preserve information at a scale that did not exist back then. The sole surviving written record of the Mt. Vesuvius eruption -- and perhaps the earliest written record of any volcanic eruption -- comes from two letters written by Pliny the Younger.[2] Today, news of the event would be spread near-instantaneously (and presumably preserved in multiple locations), like news of the 2020 Beirut explosion. Back then, there was just the dissemination of paper(-like) copies.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/adrie...
[1] https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2020/12/29/22205141/ancien...
[2] https://igppweb.ucsd.edu/~gabi/sio15/lectures/volcanoes/plin...
I recall an hour-long history program on TV where a whole narrative was concocted out of the engraving of a gladiator's name on a stone.
Indeed, and due to complex historical factors, we have much more Roman writing than we have writing from other civilizations. It's important to remember that there are entire swathes of history and entire regions from where we have no actual history, only circumstantial writing by other peoples such as trading partners.
Most other civilizations, yes, but Mesopotamia is beating Rome hands down for availability of writing.
We bought an old tobacco farm in South Indiana almost every building it has these weird metal rings. historians said they were for tying up cattle and horses. But we found out recently that they were actually for farming equipment they would tether steam engines to ropes and then use these steel rings attached to buildings and trees to pull plows around with the steam engines.
Really there were only a few missing big ideas and a few organizational failures in the way of, say, someone landing on the moon a thousand years ago. The fall of the empire set the species back perhaps as much as 1500 years.
At one time this was taken quite seriously, and it's still an important historical source given how little is available on some of the time periods it covers, but it's unclear what it was _supposed to be_. It clearly wasn't intended as a historical text.
At some point I’d like to obtain matching gold and uranium cylinders.
Never forget he looked raggedy as hell, he was wearing crocks, an inside out polo shirt with stains and some fishing shorts...when he took out his wallet it was held together by a rubber band, it was awesome.
People imagine the first mode, but the second one is much closer to reality.
In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Tiffany's represents how Audrey Hepburn thinks about the world of the rich, and is shown in a more positive light.
This wasn’t one of those stores, but staff was more than accommodating, before purchasing the paper clip he made a rather odd request - he wanted to see the largest diamond in the store, they actually brought it out from the back (it wasn’t even in a display case). Maybe that is something the Uber rich do when they walk into a jewelry store to test service or quality of the merchandise or both.
One of the most underwhelming experiences ever: there was hardly any indentation in the moist soil. Bullets go really fast.
(I realize you said "drop from space" which would be a completely different matter of course, so I suspect you have realized this without experiments.)
I mean, there are lots of ways to fake gold. At least one of these has some gold on the outside - which isn't going to simply wash off in the bathtub. And I'm guessing there are ways to make sure it sinks in water, as cheap and mid-grade jewelry tends to sink to the bottom too.
If you’re buying a brick of gold you buy it from someone licensed to sell it (you usually have to be) and the regulations and verifications involved are pretty trustworthy.
Or maybe I just don't see how something really dense could be useful except if you need something heavy but don't have a lot of space available.
There is value to being surprised by things, and keeping things that can reliably surprise you.
Richard Behiel
This Cube Cured my Mortality
"All the people here who bought this wireless tungsten cube to admire its surreal heft have precisely the wrong mindset. I, in my exalted wisdom and unbridled ambition, bought this cube to become fully accustomed to the intensity of its density, to make its weight bearable and in fact normal to me, so that all the world around me may fade into a fluffy arena of gravitational inconsequence. And it has worked, to profound success. I have carried the tungsten with me, have grown attached to the downward pull of its small form, its desire to be one with the floor. This force has become so normal to me that lifting any other object now feels like lifting cotton candy, or a fluffy pillow. Big burly manly men who pump iron now seem to me as little children who raise mere aluminum.
I can hardly remember the days before I became a man of tungsten. How distant those days seem now, how burdened by the apparent heaviness of everyday objects. I laugh at the philistines who still operate in a world devoid of tungsten, their shoulders thin and unempowered by the experience of bearing tungsten. Ha, what fools, blissful in their ignorance, anesthetized by their lack of meaningful struggle, devoid of passion.
Nietzsche once said that a man who has a why can bear almost any how. But a man who has a tungsten cube can bear any object less dense, and all this talk of why and how becomes unnecessary.
Schopenhauer once said that every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Tungsten expands the limits of a man’s field of vision by showing him an example of increased density, in comparison to which the everyday objects to which he was formerly accustomed gain a light and airy quality. Who can lament the tragedy of life, when surrounded by such lightweight objects? Who can cry in a world of styrofoam and cushions?
Have you yet understood? This is no ordinary metal. In this metal is the alchemical potential to transform your world, by transforming your expectations. Those who have not yet held the cube in their hands and mouths will not understand, for they still live in a world of normal density, like Plato’s cave dwellers. Those who have opened their mind to the density of tungsten will shift their expectations of weight and density accordingly.
To give this cube a rating of anything less than five stars would be to condemn life itself. Who am I, as a mere mortal, to judge the most compact of all affordable materials? No. I say gratefully to whichever grand being may have created this universe: good job on the tungsten. It sure is dense.
I sit here with my tungsten cube, transcendent above death itself. For insofar as this tungsten cube will last forever, I am in the presence of immortality. "
A single motel room is discovered underground by future archeologists, who proceed to interpret everything as if entering Tutankhamen’s tomb. The dusty motel room and its “treasures” are illustrated with the same precision that Macaulay brought to his classic works like “City” and “Pyramid” (which this 80s child remembers fondly enough that I bought them used for my kids a few years back, along with “Motel”.)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/304889.The_Way_Things_Wo...
that book really inspired 12yr old me.
[1]: https://macintoshgarden.org/games/the-way-things-work-pinbal...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1120818.Stephen_Biesty_s...
Now I'm wondering if my parents still have either of these.
It's an incredible book in particular if you know London and have been in a black cab and heard the sorts of banter London taxi drivers use, because in the "future" section everyone speaks in a corrupt English dialect based on this. You can also spot various London landmarks in the post-apocalyptic setting (eg the Centerpoint building).
Clearly this was a powerful sorcerer.
If found in a rich estate it might have been an unusual perk of wealthy children to collect these trinkets in their wooden boxes, just like children of the 90s did.
And those real doctors who did exist (Hippocrates did lived before that time), probably used real tools.
“sorcery” is more of a modern pejorative for practices which haven’t or couldn’t be verified with modern methods... before modern methods you had people doing what they could to accomplish things... it wouldn’t occur to you to distinguish (and you couldn’t) between “magic” nonsense and “real” medicine. You got treated with plants and concoctions that had at least some basis in reason and experience, but there weren’t yet philosophies about how to reliably separate what was real and what worked from what was bogus.
Modern medicine still has plenty of nonsense in it which might as well be sorcery.
"Sorcery" isn't a pejorative, any more than or "witchcraft" or "religious ritual." You could say that the ancient Assyrian magi from whom we get the word "magic" were doing a form of science when they kept track of the movements of the stars and the sun and moon, but when they used that knowledge to attempt to predict the future, they were doing sorcery.
Do we? Come election time all sorts of faith is professed - in cringeworthy form.
But if people openly say, they practice magic, they get laughed out of the room.
That and how the whole story of hundreds of years of civilization is sometimes just an embellished projection based on a handful of symbols scratched in stone somewhere.
Either that or they'll shrug and melt them down in the hopes of finding trace metals for bronze/iron age weapons.
Genuinely curious, how do they know the phallic object was a mere amulet?
The phallic objects are a bit too small [0] to pleasure ones self.
Some of these objects also seem to have some holes, perhaps for letting a thread run through and use it as necklace (I am just speculating here).
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[0]: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/Hke75833jwEAYOapl2Gex0dWIew=/...