3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work | Hacker News Reader

3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

openculture.com

560 pointsbryanrasmussen400 comments

The original with ALL of the excuses is at the British Museum here:

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634

Linked both below the image and in the third paragraph of the post, but there aren't many more excuses, just a lot of repeats, and the article gives more context then the curators notes at that link.

Interesting that the dates are "Month 3 of Summer, Day 24" etc. The curious bit to me being the enduring use of 4 distinct seasons, when there are obviously other ways to mark a year.

Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons?

I recently read about the Hindu seasons. Here is an off the cusp search result on the subject.

https://www.learnreligions.com/the-six-seasons-of-india-p2-1...

"Sekki is the traditional way of expressing seasons in Japan. There are 24 sekki, including rikka (立夏, the first day of summer) in early May, shoman (小満, lit. “a little full” as in growing, waxing) in late May and boshu (芒種, lit. bearded grain) in early June.

The 24 sekki can be further divided into three for a total of 72 shijijūni ko (七十二侯) that last for about five days each. These subseasons include mugi no toki itaru (麦秋至), or “the time for wheat has come,” which lasts from May 31 to June 5, and kamakiri shozu (“the mantis is born”) from June 6 to June 10. "

https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/just-how-...

The full list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar#The_24_sekki

There used to be a maintained shared Google Calendar you could use that would display those in your agenda. While the names did not fit exactly with my local weather, it was interesting to give a name to small parts of the year. It felt very natural and intuitive.

I love this. Ever since moving back into the wild from the city, it's been so nice to take notice of all the little "microseasons" you'll see inside a usual season. I took it for granted as a kid, but as an adult, it's nice to name and partake in the various parts of the year as you mention.

From my perspective, anything regularly periodic in nature is used to track time: the Sun (years, seasons, days, day/dusk) and Moon (months, weeks, King tides). Consider even the starfield (astrology: years, decades+).

Four seasons makes sense in all of these contexts, and I hypothesize that there are a lot of patterns in nature that are well bucketed into 4 sequential, equal seasons. This is impossible for me to demonstrate, unfortunately. Also, division by by 4 and 12, a year into four seasons is like a month into four weeks. Weeks seem to me to be among our most subjective fundamental time unit.

I see weeks as being the most arbitrary. I always like to imagine what life would be like if weeks were 3 days long. Or 11. I just love this topic.

  > I always like to imagine what life would be like if weeks were 3 days long. Or 11. I just love this topic.

I especially like that you chose prime numbers. A week composed of a prime number of days will remain the smallest indivisible group of days that a culture will have.

Agreed, glad you called this out! I was thinking about rambling about this, but this is a topic I can go on and on about, and I was already off to a slow start today...

Please ramble! I've actually though much about this as well. It kind of forces a "holy day" because without one nothing fits into one week with any period other than "every day" or "every week" - be that week 5 or 7 or 11 days. I've heard that the seven day week was independently developed at least three times in ancient times across disparate cultures as well.

Well, maybe, except that months are sometimes prime numbers and we subdivide them anyways, right?

I guess weeks don't exactly subdivide months, they're sort of separate systems?

I always wondered what it would feel like to not have weeks, or even years, but to live life in a continuous stream of days looking forward. I'm not sure if we would feel a horrible lack of closure or accomplishment, or if it would make us more productive and forward looking and moving. I wonder how much of my life I waste just trying to close out a week/month/year.

I was talking to a Jamaican primary school teacher once. She told me that the songs (Nursary rhymes) that they teach the kids are often based on old English ones ( like ring-ring-a-roses) but any reference to the four seasons have been mutated. Since in Jamaica they just have two seasons; wet season and dry season.

> Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons?

Ancient Egyptian :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_calendar:

“The ancient Egyptian calendar – a civil calendar – was a solar calendar with a 365-day year. The year consisted of three seasons of 120 days each, plus an intercalary month of five epagomenal days treated as outside of the year proper. Each season was divided into four months of 30 days.”

So, a better calendar than ours :(

The Longest Year in Human History (46 B.C.E.) - https://youtu.be/fD-R35DSSZY gets into the "why the year we have is designed the way it is" ... though it takes 22 minutes to get to that part.

It wasn't really better as the 30 * 12 + 5 approach needed manual application of the + 5... which is what the new calendar was trying to avoid.

I gather +536 felt longer.

"There are just two seasons in the old Icelandic calendar: [...] summer and winter."

https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/10/21/do_you_kn...

The local version of this is: there are only two seasons in Michigan—winter and construction.

There were two in The Bay Area in the early 2000s: wet and dry. Prolonged drought has made us a one-season region, talking about four seasons like other areas.

India (and nearby areas) famously used/uses 6 seasons. The Mayan Haab' isn't precisely a seasonal calendar, but each of the 20 'months' was used to much the same effect.

It's common among many ancient cultures to treat equinoxes and solstices as events of great importance, as those mark the beginning of the season change, but not all regions experience seasons the same.

Ancient Egyptians, while knowledgeable of astronomy, had only three seasons: Akhet (summer/heat), Peret (flooding, of the Nile) and Shemu (harvest). Notice the conspicuous absence of winter.

https://egyptianstreets.com/2022/01/28/a-year-in-three-seaso...

Oh, when it snows in Egypt (which it does do on occasion) they definitely notice the conspicuous absence of winter.

In particular the traditional Persian new year (Nowruz) starts in spring, and is celebrated throughout central asia as far as Kazakhstan.

The roman calendar started the year in spring as well with March (hence the names September/October/November/December are literally the 7th/8th/9th/10th month). The Greek apparently were all over the place with the year starting in summer/fall/winter depending on region/polis.

I'd heard this was because July and August (for Julius and Augustus) were added later to the calendar and originally there were only 10 months that started with January.

I believe those were merely renamed, and the original year was 10 months from March to December, with a nondescript “winter” period between December and March.

Up until 1751 the legal year (fiscal year) in England (and its North American colonies) started at 25 March (Lady Day).

One origin story for April Fool's suggests that it's to do with getting the year wrong.

My understanding was that new years was always January, 1st, but that the year number changed on Lady Day

The UK's tax year still reflects this, starting from April 6, which both accounts (pun intended) for the year changing on Lady Day, and the transition from Julian to Gregorian calendars.

Another phenomenon I’ve found curious is the cross-cultural definition of a week as roughly a quarter moon, and correlated names for days of the week. [1]

  Sunday    Sun     Sōlis    Hēlíou     日曜日
  Monday    Moon    Lūnae    Selḗnēs    月曜日
  Tuesday   Mars    Mārtis   Áreōs      火曜日
  Wednesday Mercury Mercuriī Hermoû     水曜日
  Thursday  Jupiter Iovis    Diós       木曜日
  Friday    Venus   Veneris  Aphrodítēs 金曜日
  Saturday  Saturn  Sāturnī  Krónou     土曜日

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week

There's some ... but I think it misses two really important ones (and this is just off the top of my head):

1. The Romans had an eight day "week"; and,

2. The mesoamericans had a 260 day "week" (or, at best, interlocking 13 and 20 day "weeks").

I think the 7-day week is more of a statement about how effective the Judeo-Christian culture has imposed a modern week on the rest of the world.

>The Romans had an eight day "week"; and,

The Beatles were Romans!

So were the B-52's, but only if you wanted to.

> I think the 7-day week is more of a statement about how effective the Judeo-Christian culture has imposed a modern week on the rest of the world.

The 7-day week originated in Sumerian Babylon culture from 2100 BC and has to do with quartering moon phases. I worry when seeing many things attributed to "Judeo-Christian culture" which actually originated from other cultures, many aspects of what's in "Judeo-Christian culture" including perhaps some of the key stories in the Old Testament like the Flood appear to have been copied or at least inspired by stories from Sumerian culture which was considered the 'high culture' of the region.

They definitely didn’t invent it, but I would say it’s fair to give Christianity itself credit for converting Rome to a 7 day week & then most of the rest of the world after. It takes a religion with certain characteristics to accomplish that.

> it’s fair to give Christianity itself credit for converting Rome to a 7 day week

How so? Constantinus was the one who committed to the change and the day names were after the Roman Gods. Even today, we're using Viking names, like today happens to be Odin's Day, tomorrow's going to be Thor's Day and the day after is going to be Freya's Day. I'm not sure it is reasonable or rational to "credit Christianity itself".

Constantine adopted a 7 day calendar a few years after adopting Christianity. Christians had already adopted that calendar from Jews.

These are more jargon imports that came bundled with the 7-day week after the Romans, and then Europe, popularized it after adopting it. As an analogy, you don't hear many other ways of naming tea and coffee across cultures.

As far as I understand from the Wikipedia article, this practice has spread directly from Judaism (7 days) through Christianity through the Roman Empire (which renamed the days according to the planets/gods) to all of these places. It's not clear from the article if perhaps the Ancient Greeks had a similar system already - but otherwise, the Indians and the Chinese adopted this system from Roman/Hellenistic sources between the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, and other cultures around them adopted it from them slightly later.

Polish doesn't use those names, but a different system:

Poniedziałek (lit. After not working) Wtorek (not sure) Środa (also not sure) Czwartek (lit. the fourth) Piątek (possibly means drinking day?) Sobota (not sure) Niedziela (Not working)

‘Sobota’ resembles ‘sábado’ in Spanish and might refer to the Sabbath?

Those all loosely resemble the Russian names, and as the other commentator noted “Sobota” sounds a lot like “Sabbath”

> Piątek (possibly means drinking day?)

The word means "the fifth day", from piąty (fifth) rather than pić (to drink).

Wtorek (Tuesday) comes from wtóry, meaning "second".

Środa (Wednesday) is from środa, meaning “middle”.

Sobota (Saturday) is from Hebrew שַׁבָּת‎ (šabbāṯ), meaning the Sabbath.

Oh yeah, I guess I was tired and didnt make the connection

Wtorek probably means "the second day", and Środa means "middle". Piątek probably means "fifth".

With some exceptions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawukon_calendar

On Venus, a day is longer than a year.

Babylonians knew 7 planets and named each day of the week as ruled by a planet...

It had also been subdivided into planetary hours...

https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/days/7-days-week.html

I once heard Canadians in Winnipeg joke there were but two seasons, Winter and Construction. I think this was in reference to road maintenance.

In NZ these days I feel like we have two: Drought and Mudslide.

I needed this today, thanks!

That's hilarious. I lived with a really cold winter and it's not only road maintenance. If you have to do some renovations at your place they sometimes also need to happen on "construction" season, even if it's inside a lot of construction workers go to other places in the winter.

L.A. boasts of three seasons: Drought, mudslide, and wildfire.

Actually it's 4: 1)Winter 2)More winter 3)Still winter and 4)Construction.

And also not exclusive to Winterpeg. It's used in many other parts of Canada as well. Construction season alternatively being named "orange cone season" as well as the roads are full of them.

The Noongar of south western Australia denote six seasons: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/nyoongar.shtml

Makuru was much more suitable than “winter” for the climate in Perth: time to rug up and settle in for cosy nights with your loved ones. I wish the Noongar seasons were more often used in the south west of Australia by everybody, so much more suitable than European seasons shifted 6 months!

Astronomically it seems to make the most sense, you have two solstices and two equinoxes dividing the year into four parts.

Apparently the Sami (Lapps) have/had 8 seasons.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/People-Eight-Seasons-story-Lapps/dp...

Indeed: https://www.samisiida.no/en/b/the-eight-sami-seasons

Do they have months as well? Once you get to 8 it seems like you could just as well call them long months than short seasons.

Every place with wet season maybe?

> Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons?

Sub saharan people (and many Asian), have two seasons, rainy and dry.

Can't we use Structured Equation Modeling or ML to cluster seasons based on actual data?

Thailand has 3 seasons. Hot, cold and rainy season. The emerald buddha has three different sets of clothing to match the seasons.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Buddha

Australian indigenous people. Varying numbers of seasons, I'm guessing depending on the climate in which they live.

http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/climate_culture/Indig_seasons.shtm...

I can't think of an ancient Middle Eastern culture with 4 seasons. Hittites had 3, various Mesopotamian cultures had 2. It really only made sense in Europe to divide into 4.

Big day for the guy BURYING THE GOD.

I feel a connection to the guy who missed work "absent with the scribe". I know it was probably something important, but a scribe writing "that guy is excused, he was with me" makes me think of those times my boss took me for lunch and paid with the corporate card.

(Of course, I'm assuming the scribe wrote this)

Bah gawd it's Nietzsche with a steel shovel.

Time off for illness! That's nice. I wonder if one of the HR scribes tracked the days every person took off in an analog ERP system. Scribes seemed important, maybe they outsourced the basics to contractors.

Presumably they did not get paid on those days off.

SAP System/C(lay)

Any idea what "WITH HIS BOSS" means in there? Is that also an excuse of absence, or is that what was marked when not absent?

“… On month 3 of Akhet, days 21-4, it seems that Pennub was off work because he was looking after the ill Aapehti. The most frequently recorded reason for absence is illness (over a hundred times), including 'eye trouble', and 'the scorpion stung him'; the next most frequent is being away with one's superior doing private work for him, a practice that was not forbidden if done in moderation…”

I guess it's like when you're the assistant to a movie studio executive and he/she asks you to wash their car for them.

At the beginning of 'Inscription position: front', it looks like it was not done in moderation

As they say: everything in moderation... including moderation.

The British Museum link has it buried under curator's notes (have to expand it)- it means they worked directly for their boss on the boss' project.

> Year 40 Penduauu: month 1 of Spring, day 14 (DRINKING WITH KHONSU)

"Khonsu, you have any good ideas?"

"I have a bad one."

Suddenly, Moon Knight makes more sense

Later on in the tablet, they refine it into "MAKING REMEDIES WITH KHONSU".

I suppose then Khonsu said "Here, hold my henqet"

That was a perfect joke. Thank you.

Fetching stone for the scribe?

Wrapping the corspe of his mother? Is that like "My grandma died?"

Trouble with his eye - maybe all that stone dust.

Strengthening the door - I wonder what door...

How is "With his boss" an excuse?

From the curator’s comments: “[The] next most frequent [reason for absence] is being away with one’s superior doing private work for him, a practice that was not forbidden if done in moderation.”

BREWING THE BEER is a good excuse, ngl.

Presumably the boss received some of that beer.

Potable water with nutrients, bioflavinoids, and antibiotic content is definitely an excusable reason.

cat excuses | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

67 ILL

49 WITH HIS BOSS

17 BREWING BEER

13 WITH AAPEHTI

8 WITH THE SCRIBE

6 MAKING REMEDIES FOR THE SCRIBE’S WIFE

5 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS MOTHER

5 OFFERING TO THE GOD

5 HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING

5 FETCHING STONE FOR THE SCRIBE

4 WITH KHONS MAKING REMEDIES

4 SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE

4 OFF ABSENT

4 HIS DAUGHTER WAS BLEEDING

3 WITH HOREMWIA

3 WITH HIS BOSS DITTO

3 LIBATING TO HIS FATHER

2 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS SON

2 HIS MOTHER WAS ILL

2 HIS FEAST

2 FETCHING STONE FOR QENHERKHEPSHEF

2 BURYING THE GOD

1 WITH HIS GOD

1 THE SCORPION BIT HIM

1 STRENGTHENING THE DOOR

1 OFFFERING TO THE GOD

1 OFFERING TO HIS GOD

1 OFF ABSENT WITH THE SCRIBE

1 MOURNING HIS SON

1 LIBATING FOR HIS SON

1 LIBATING FOR HIM

1 LIBATING

1 EMBALMING HORMOSE

1 EMBALMING HIS BROTHER

1 DRINKING WITH KHONSU

1 BUILDING HIS HOUSE

> BURYING THE GOD

Thousands of years later and yet who among us hasn't missed work to bury God?

around here it’s an annual day off.

Well, the whole point of the holiday is he didn't stay buried.

Hence the need to do it repeatedly.

“To bury your god once may be regarded as misfortune, to bury them twice looks like carelessness.” - not Oscar Wilde.

Who knew that Egypt was so progressive that guys can take off when their wife or daughter has a period.

Maybe they, like in some Abrahamic religions to come later, considered women "impure" when they had the period, and this somehow translated to the men in the household? Wild speculation, of course.

Calm down. It's just a PMS joke.

No it's not

Did I not seem calm in my reply?

Oh come on, now you're just being hysterical.

That's what I thought as well, though I would expect that'd appear in higher frequency - unless the bosses sent people to check.

I think it's more likely that the men had to take over household tasks while their wives were on the rag.

Hm. Why would they have to take over? Women on their period are not invalids. Though maybe the weren't allowed to do household tasks?

Probably considered unclean -- some religions still believe this (Islam, Judaism). You can't clean and cook if you're unclean? I don't know.

In Islam and Judaism women can still do housework. It's a ritual purity, not an actual physical one.

Some women are completely disabled by their period pains. I can imagine the husband coming home to attend to her, the kids, the animals, and the house

Now imagine women without modern feminine hygiene products. It’s a very different story.

right, a woman with a particularly heavy period might need to be cared for on the worst day.

There are still some cultures where women isolate themselves in separate buildings while they are "unclean".

Yes, this brings us back to my original comment :)

Menstruation, Menstrual Hygiene and Woman's Health in Ancient Egypt http://www.mum.org/germnt5.htm

they really are putting modern day US employers to shame

Wow this really does tell a story. His mom and his son both died.

Everyone he ever met died. Now the story is more sinister!

A lot of those are related to death:

5 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS MOTHER 2 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS SON 1 EMBALMING HORMOSE 1 EMBALMING HIS BROTHER 1 MOURNING HIS SON 3 LIBATING TO HIS FATHER 13

and I suspect most of these:

8 WITH THE SCRIBE 1 OFF ABSENT WITH THE SCRIBE 5 FETCHING STONE FOR THE SCRIBE 2 FETCHING STONE FOR QENHERKHEPSHEF 1 LIBATING FOR HIS SON 1 LIBATING FOR HIM 1 LIBATING 2 BURYING THE GOD 21

and there's a bunch making remedies and/or looking after wives and female relatives:

6 MAKING REMEDIES FOR THE SCRIBE’S WIFE 5 HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING 4 WITH KHONS MAKING REMEDIES 4 HIS DAUGHTER WAS BLEEDING 2 HIS MOTHER WAS ILL 21

Some ones that seem work-related by the use of names:

49 WITH HIS BOSS 3 WITH HIS BOSS DITTO 3 WITH HOREMWIA 13 WITH AAPEHTI 68

Then there's some actual stuff the worker was doing - mostly brewing beer:

17 BREWING BEER 5 OFFERING TO THE GOD 1 WITH HIS GOD 1 STRENGTHENING THE DOOR 1 BUILDING HIS HOUSE 25

A few unknowns:

4 OFF ABSENT

And finally the actual illness and injury, including scorpion guy!

67 ILL 4 SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE 1 THE SCORPION BIT HIM 72

Seems that brewing and DIY were the only hobbies around - unless you count making remedies or embalming!

With his boss:

It's a little buried (on mobile) but:

> ... the next most frequent is being away with one's superior doing private work for him, a practice that was not forbidden if done in moderation.

While definitely a legal grey area in these modern times, foremen borrowing a truck/excavator and a bloke or two to sort out something at the foreman's house still seems to happen.

I imagine this happens often considering the amount of stories I hear of developer companies doing inadequate jobs.

Brewing beer and making remedies may may not be mutually exclusive as ancient beer had natural antibiotics like tetracycline: https://www.wired.com/2010/09/antibiotic-beer/

Many might be missing work because of ritual uncleanliness (wife/daughter bleeding)

Remember this is translated by archaeologists, and most of them go into the profession thinking about mummies.

I suspect whenever they come across a symbol they don't understand to translate, they might just assume it means "ooh, it must mean wrapping my father"!

TL;DR:. Translator bias could be hitting hard...

No. We have a good grasp of how ancient Egypt worked. Archeologists also don't go into the profession "thinking about mummies", archeology is a respectable, evidence-based profession. Do you think the whole field of archeology is a joke?0 There are lots of dual-language pieces that have been used to verify an accurate translation of these very inscriptions.

Not least of which, the Rosetta Stone has three: Hieroglyphics, Demotic, and Greek.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

For a long time archeology was simply known as “digging” and following that “digging for things”

Do you have any authority on the subject of archeological academic misconduct or are you speculating?

No, archeologists do not go into the field "thinking about mummies". This isn't Hollywood.

Yah, exactly, they're not excuses, they're reasons, and apparently allowed and understood.

Whoever wrote that article is really anti-worker and probably a trash person.

The word "excuse" doesn't require the negative connotation you're ascribing to it.

Only a son is worth mourning?

Khonsu must be an important guy

Something that hasn’t changed in 3200 years is inconsistent labelling of data.

Hard to implement a drop down menu on a stone tablet :)

You would think after couple of years they will have blocks for WITH BOSS that can just be pressed on the clay.

Tell that to my toes

This is the kind of dry humor that keeps me reading long HN comment threads. Well done.

Are these for a single person, or for many people?

If the latter, then, seems their parents (mother) died a lot (5) in comparison to how often they themselves were ill (67)

Sorry boss, can’t come in today. My mother died again.

What if this:

"5 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS MOTHER"

took 5 days? If it included other ceremonies?

(Still, that's a bit much I guess.)

Your momma so fat it took you 5 days to wrap her corpse.

Reminds me of the #1 reason for a day off work in Australia: possum attack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ytDTcsuYM

It's really anti-worker to consider reasons to miss work (legit ones, allowed ones, necessary ones) "excuses". As if everyone's supposed to work all the time and any time off is non-legit.

What a poor way to view workers... the article really is casting workers in a bad light when that's the opposite of what we need.

What's it doing in a "British" museum?

I used to live in a scorpion-rich environment and can attest that a sting should disqualify one from manual labor for a day. I found that every time I was stung though the effects were less and less. The last time I was stung was a minor nuisance at most.

I would advise, if you find yourself living with scorpions, to check your shoes, by shaking them out, before putting them on.

My family lived in Texas for a time when my sister was younger and she stepped out of the shower one day and was stung on the head by a scorpion that was in her towel. Hearing that story I was certainly very vigilant, even paranoid perhaps, about checking my shoes and such when we went to visit family there when I was a kid.

A buddy grew up in Mexico. When he was 10 or so, he pissed on a wall and got stung in just about the worst place imaginable. I don't live around scorpions and now I keep an even larger distance between me and peeing-surfaces lol

how often are you peeing on walls on why?

The exact way of getting stung by a scorpion while peeing would be most interesting -- I honestly cannot imagine the exact mechanics. A bee, a wasp, OK, I can imagine. A scorpion cannot fly, so how did it get so close?

I guess the scorpion must have been on the wall.

Who pees that close to a wall though? Yikes

My guess: someone who is attempting to pee on the scorpion. We are talking about a 10 year old, after all.

It would appear that the scorpion was in fact pissed off, not pissed on.

Take your upvote.

Absent (PEED ON SCORPION)

When I was 4, my parents built the house where I grew up. Back then, it was out in the country. For the first year at least, some of the wildlife wasn't ready to admit the space they occupied was no longer theirs. Scorpions were one of the longest hold outs, as they were constantly making their way inside. According to my parents, I was four so don't really remember, but I was very good at chasing them without getting too close to get stung. I'm assuming the parental units told me they would sting and I'd get hurt/ouchy/etc. Guess I actually listened.

The checking shoes by banging them is just muscle memory now.

Now, I like to use blacklights to find them at night.

</pointlessAnecdote>

I second the shoe-shaking ritual. Even if you keep your shoes inside. When I lived in the desert, the neighbor had work done in his yard, and every scorpion from his property moved into mine.

One day I found the cat eating a scorpion in the living room. Rushed him to the emergency cat vet place, and was told that cats aren't bothered by scorpions or their stings. But don't make crunchy, meaty scorpions part of a regular diet.

It makes sense, there are like 100 species of scorpions in the regions where house cats were first domesticated. Cats do hunt scorpions which probably scored them some extra holiness points with the ancient Egyptians.

Dogs also hunt scorpions. Dogs are not immune to scorpion stings, they're just ignorant.

Dogs seem to hunt pretty much anything. I wonder if we've bred out the understanding of what is and isn't edible in dogs, but not cats? Or perhaps its a social thing that wild canids teach their young?

Half the dog owners I know have some story of their dog catching a hedgehog or something equally inedible, but the worst that seems to happen with cats is their prey fights back a bit harder than they expected and they get a rat scratch.

My experience with Labrador Retrievers is that they will eat anything, on the assumption that if it doesn't agree with them, they can always puke it up at 3AM.

Dogs were bred / created to keep their owners safe, not themselves. That seems to track. I've lived several places I'd not live without a dog alarm or three, so I can't say I'm not grateful.

I live a block off the salt marsh here on the coast and mine'll hunt after Fiddler Crabs[0] until they get pinched on the snout.

The mutt learned and the Lab just keeps on going after them... strange creatures, dogs are.

[0] - https://www.dnr.sc.gov/marine/mrri/acechar/speciesgallery/In...

I believe the technical description of a Labrador Retriever is "dumb as a box of rocks."

Still not convinced cats were domesticated. They just sort of...moved in. I never thought about how they did originate there though. Scorpions are basically cat fodder.

I found a small scorpion in my shoe (it moved and caught my eye) that was just inside my air conditioned apartment in Austin, Texas.

the vets here in Arizona say that of course cats are vulnerable to stings, but people claim that cats are "immune" because they heard it from someone else, not a vet.

Anyway, the veterinarian told us that cats are generally so fast to notice and slap the shit out of scorpions that they kill scorpions...without being stung.

One of our feline family members got stung and let out a big OWWWWWW then was licking her paw for quite some time, and this was a bark scorpion. Other times she's slapped them to squish them.

Insert cat-reading-newspaper-thinking-I-need-to-get-myself-a-cat.png meme.

When we had scorpions, we got barncats. They took care of scorpions, snakes, and a few other critters that are pests when mixed with humans.

There was a recent YouTube video on how this process was used in horses to anti venom.

Wrap the opening to your shoes in socks. That let's them get air and keeps critters out.

Source: kept camel spiders, scorpions, and mice out of my boots.

I learned the same lesson after dealing with a black widow infestation. It's a an easy habit that saves a lot of personal suffering.

I lived in the Mojave and the scorpions there aren't really that much of a threat. Scorpion stings are akin to common bee stings and don't really impact your ability to labor or threaten you in any serious way, except if you have allergies.

My nieces grew up in Oklahoma. Mom would come home and sometimes there was a drinking glass somewhere in the house with a scorpion trapped under it. The kids (5 or 6yo!) would casually capture them in this way so Mom could deal later.

Check the clothes you are about to put on as well.

Look on the bright side; now you can go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

Seeing the frequency of the days off and the reasons really humanizes these people that (at least I) just imagine as some alien beings that I had nothing in common with.

Also there’s just some that are funny given cultural norms today - I’m assuming it was more akin to taking bereavement leave, but imagining telling my boss I won’t be working because I’ll be drinking for 3 days is pretty comical to me:

day 24 (LIBATING TO HIS FATHER), day 25 (DITTO), day 26(?) (DITTO)

I think "Brewing Beer" would be a perfectly acceptable excuse in a lot of these new hipstery startups

I have an employee who takes days off because he's developed his own brand of whiskey which is going on sale later this year. We aren't hipstery, or a startup, however.

> imagining telling my boss I won’t be working because I’ll be drinking for 3 days is pretty comical to me:

Isn't that basically weekends? Anyway I think it would be a lot more acceptable these days if you get paid per day and you're replaceable enough to not Need to be at work every day.

I'm thinking that this is a funeral ritual because his father passed away.

>be 1178 BC Egyptian working

>working my ass off on the pyramids every day

>no days off

>my wife has really bad period have to take off work

>goddammit.png

>boss gives me shit for missing work

>embarrassed I tell him reason I missed work

>he writes it down

>MRW 3200 years later people are judging me and my wife

The big pyramids at Giza were built around ~2500bc in the old kingdom of egypt. After that comes the first intermediate period, then the middle kingdom of egypt, then the second intermediate period, and then in the new kingdom of egypt, towards the end this tablet is written. (Not judging, just providing context around how old Egypt is)

As an aside, a lot of people are joking about the pyramids. However, 3200 years ago is 1200 BC which is New Kingdom. The pyramids were built in the Old Kingdom. When these workers were complaining, the Great Pyramid was already 1000 years old.

(The bosses probably talked about how back in the day when their ancestors built the pyramids, workers were much tougher and dedicated)

As I find always interesting, we are as far to the Romans in history as the Romans were from the construction of the pyramids.

Cleopatra was closer to the moon landings them to the building of the pyramids!

She can't have been that far away, didn't she live in Egypt? I'm fairly sure the moon is always further away

I'm pretty sure the poster above you is referring to the differences between the number of letters in the following words: "CLEOPATRA" is closer to "MOON LANDING" than "THE BUILDING OF THE PYRAMIDS".

Actually its the distance in time.

I think the question was sarcastic

As was his answer.

As was this explanation

Lived from 69 to 30 BC according to Wikipedia… definitely closer to th moon landing .. by almost a thousand years..

I will read this comment as being intentionally, and gloriously, deadpan comedy.

What if you compare the coordinates in the galactic frame at their respective times?

Roman Empire ended around 1450, so…

I know people generally consider "Roman history" to be around the time of Julius Caesar, but the empire itself spanned over 1000 years.

What people usually refer to the Roman Empire is the unified empire which was only around for 4 centuries. Heck pretty much past 286 AD is when the Roman Empire is no longer the classical Roman Empire. (Rome was no longer the capital, eastern / western split begins).

Even a bit earlier if you want to consider the shift to the monotheism (not yet Christianity) of Sol as the line of demarcation.

If you want to be utterly pedantic then yes the Eastern Roman Empire survived until 1453 aka the Fall of Constantinople. So more like 1500 years in total.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.h...

Provides a nice representation of such events. Very insightful!

> (The bosses probably talked about how back in the day when their ancestors built the pyramids, workers were much tougher and dedicated)

They likely didn't.

The Egyptians recorded many things, including excuses for missing work, with incredible detail. They never once recorded how they built the pyramids.

Either religious/spiritual/ritualistic reasons prevented them from doing so, or they didn't build them. Either way, they didn't record it and probably didn't speak of it.

Alternately, the records were simply stored in a place that was destroyed or we haven't found yet.

A sibling comment to yours has noted a recently-discovered Papyri that details some scant information about quarrying limestone for Khufu's pyramid.

https://www.history.com/news/egypts-oldest-papyri-detail-gre...

I appreciate the guts to seriously bring up ancient aliens on hackernews.

I don't support that theory at all, and didn't mention it. I even gave a completely reasonable explanation why they might not want to discuss it.

I'm sorry, I thought

>or they didn't build them.

implied somebody else built the pyramids.

That needn't be aliens. Human culture existed prior to the old kingdom.

This is not true. https://www.history.com/news/egypts-oldest-papyri-detail-gre... There are plenty or records about the pyramid constructions, it was also proven that they were built by a paid voluntary workforce rather than slaves like most people believe.

Well hey, that's news to me, and utterly fascinating!

Thank-you.

Just cos they were technically paid don't mean they weren't de facto slaves

Some things never change I guess...

Yeah, that papyrus is bonkers. Imagine what still exists out there in the desert!

We can only hope there's one that details the process of the laying of the stones.

Or the landing of the spacecraft :)

Papyrus describing laying is unlikely unless it somehow related to accounting.

But, do you know the Shabakti stone? That is supposedly a copy of a first dynasty papyrus by the Nubian pharaohs. While likely to be embellished, no reason not to believe. Helps describe the role of Ptah, the god of design.

That describes a project receiving pyramid facing stones quarried from white Tufa limestone.

But I doubt there is any indication whether this was for maintenance work, or original construction.

Pharaohs were always embarking on patch-up and upgrade projects on ancient stuff, and tagging everything they touched with their personal cartouches (often having their predecessors' chiseled out, first). So it is very hard to know who really built what, or when. The Sphinx is officially ascribed to a Pharaoh who leaned a stela on it bragging about maintenance work he had ordered (a thing there are also a lot of).

But they never tagged pyramids.

> or they didn't build them.

What are you implying here, exactly? That humans didn't build them at all?

I was suggesting the possibility that they didn't build them. It wouldn't be the only time that a civilization set roots upon the remains of a preceding civilization.

That said, a sibling content to yours provided recently discovered evidence that the quarrying of stone for the pyramids was recorded.

Of some stone. Not necessarily for original construction.

Maybe the pyramids are the records and the instructions…

Up too late reading Pharoah News

Lines like this always make me think HN needs a laugh reaction.

Heck, in this case, guffaw or snort spit-take.

(I am still chuckling each time I read it, and I've read it 5 times.)

FTFY: "Phake News"

This article just appears to quote most of the content from the original[1]. It'd be better if the original was in the front page instead.

[1] https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/

Excuses, Beer and Wife problems.

3,200 years and we still have the same complaints. :)

The more history I read, the more I realize this is true.

Technology changes but people don't.

Too bad evolution doesn't install basic learning as part of the default system. Humans at this point should just be a new container being launched with a default level of software pre-installed. Would we be more advanced as a species if we didn't have to constantly teach each new instance 1+1=2 so that each new instance already new multiplication tables from 1 to 25 type of thing?

Instead we are booted with old useless drivers like "Recognize snake"

What we really need is a method to boot into extended memory mode. Restricting memory usage to just 10% is a bit restrictive.

we do have collective memory that outlives us. It is called culture

Couldn't get the camel started

Sandals were in the shop

Stone obelisks blocked traffic

Isn’t there also writings from this time describing how “kids don’t listen anymore” and that “society is doomed” or something?

Ahhh, the human condition doesn’t really change. It just restyles itself.

Socrates (469-399BC) is reported to have condemned writing in that kind of way, would that count?

Locusts ?

Nile turned to Blood again ?

The Wrong Type of Fire followed by the Wrong Type of Brimstone ?

Frogs blocked the way ?

Not enough sunlight for 3 days?

Family Bereavement.

Loss of Hebrew assistants

Really is kind of a circuitous solution for an all powerful deity, no?

Moses: um...lord, we're kind of tired of being slaves. Could you look into that?

Lord: Ok! I'll issue 10 plagues of increasing discomfort until Pharaoh breaks!!!

Moses: Couldn't you just teleport us to the promised land or something. These guys are jerks, but do you need to kill their kids?

lightning crashes

Moses: OK OK! Point taken. We'll do the plagues...

Don't forget that the $promisedLand was already inhabited, so you have to kill every man, woman, child before you can have it. What's that? More questioning my authority? Let's see if 40 years in the desert strengthens your faith.

That time we listened to a bush and ended up wandering around the desert without a clear exit strategy..

Sounds like a Nostradamus prediction where it was written in code, so people thought about a literal bush speaking. In reality, we see what was actually foretold panned out, but nobody wants to admit it.

I was about to make a joke about small errors radically changing the meaning of the text, then I saw what you did.

I feel sorry for the poor guys who never missed a day of work and gave their all to building that damn pyramid, 3200 years later nobody even knows who they were.

I hope the parallel of SWEs working for Mega-Billionaires is not lost on the HN crowd.

Build software to ~harass~ track warehouse workers.

"Anyone can learn to code bruh"

170k base + 300k RSU "man I can't afford anything in [high COL area]"

"Therapy is really useful y'all"

- average SWE

So what's the alternative? Move to a LCOL area, get a worse job, and watch as inflation turns it into a HCOL area?

Work remote, move to middle of nowhere, raise livestock, and actually enjoy life.

Don't really think SWEs are being taken advantage of the same way other employees at successful tech companies are. (Coming from the perspective of an SWE)

Didn't mean that in general but there is a strong undercurrent of bootlicking and overworking oneself for little or no reward on HN.

fair enough

Wouldn’t call the typical SW career “little or no reward”

Sure 300K TC seems impressive relative to the Barista you buy your Latte from but it pales in comparison to the amount that people like Zuckerburg, Musk, Bezos, etc have increased their wealth in the past 2 years for example, which is on the order of 10s of Billions. You are far closer to the homeless you guy step over on the way to Twitter HQ than to Jack Dorsey and sure if you deliver a great result this quarter maybe you'll make 400k next year but it's all relative.

It’s not relative. 300k buys you a fantastic life. You’ll never be in the 0.1% with a job vs owning assets, but these jobs are amazing by any measure, and a world away from being poor.

The very rich having astronomical amounts of money has zero negative effect on the day to day of the middle class - we don’t have a limited money supply.

You may say it buys them outsized influence, but media companies will always have owners, whether they be hectomillionaires or billionaires or whatever.

>The very rich having astronomical amounts of money has zero negative effect on the day to day of the middle class - we don’t have a limited money supply.

I think this almost completely false. Elon Musk just bought Twitter and could drastically change a major point of interaction for hundreds of millions of people. The Koch Brothers spend billions to influence, to great effect, the laws that are passed in the US. These examples are not rare. The economy is almost zero sum, certainly since the 70s the top percentiles have been taking a larger portion of the pie even considering the growth of the pie.

But anyway I think the general point is that is that even by working yourself to death you only increase your income or net worth by small numbers while someone like Elon Musk can 10x it over the same time period.

How could you possibly think the economy hasn’t grown in real terms since the 70’s?

Almost every consumer item is vastly better and cheaper. Middle class lives are luxurious in the extreme compared to then.

Who cares if 100 people at the top are getting more rewards faster, does it actually make your life worse? No. Only if you are jealous and mean-spirited does Musk’s quarter trillion dollars bother you.

In fact, these people tend to invest in things that lead to further improvement.

Furthermore, if Twitter bothers you that much, go on Parler.

>How could you possibly think the economy hasn’t grown in real terms since the 70’s?

"The economy is almost zero sum, certainly since the 70s the top percentiles have been taking a larger portion of the pie even considering the growth of the pie."

Pretty clearly stated its obviously growing.

>Almost every consumer item is vastly better and cheaper. Middle class lives are luxurious in the extreme compared to then.

"I can buy an Iphone so therefore it's irrelevant that the Koch brothers own significant portions of the US Congress?" Non sequitur imo.

>Who cares if 100 people at the top are getting more rewards faster, does it actually make your life worse? No. Only if you are jealous and mean-spirited does Musk’s quarter trillion dollars bother you.

Because there is literally less to go around.

https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro....

A huge portion of the productivity gains in the past 50 years have gone straight to those 100 people at the top so yes people should be upset that they are taking more.

>In fact, these people tend to invest in things that lead to further improvement.

I fail to see how Spacex or Blue Origin will improve life on Earth in this century.

>Furthermore, if Twitter bothers you that much, go on Parler.

Pot calling kettle black? You seem to be parroting near word for word arguments from Ayn Rand/Alt Right etc. so Parler seems like a natural fit for you.

speaking from experience 300K buys you a fantastic life most of the time, but there can be problems that would be solved with more money but are unsolvable at the 300K level.

Are you actually comparing regular SW engineers to the wealthiest people on the planet ?

You're only closer to the homeless guy with a completely naive take on the utility of money.

Can you check my math?

0 -> 1M -> 10B

Not sure how far away from 10B 1M is. Maybe you can help

Yes, that is the naive take on the utility of money that I was talking about.

By your logic Sergey Brin is closer to the homeless man you step over on the street than he is to Elon Musk. Which would be a silly thing to say.

As the other response is somewhat condescending — and as the usual utility of money calculation is log($), your example numbers would normally suggest the second difference is greater than the first — I think you may find it more useful to ask yourself what you can do with 10B that you can’t do with 1M.

Sure, there are plenty of nice big houses that cost more than 1M, but you’re not off by much, and the first million makes a massive difference, including being able to talk to the bank rather than being escorted out by security.

But: anything over about 100M, the only difference the number makes is which company you get to own because that’s the only[0] thing people sell at that price… and at that level you get the money as a way to keep track of the score of how well you’re running them.

[0] OK, sure, private islands, and I don’t know how yachts work in law, but you get my drift

My vote for most taken advantage of is the on-call Ops people. Salaries sometimes half that of the SWEs, expected to be woken up at 3am, interrupted all day by "urgent" requests ("I can't connect to the server I need access now" -> "whoops it was my SSH key"), responsible for the product running 24/7, respond immediately to security incidents ("patch this asap"), stay up overnight for maintenance or deploys to legacy systems, act as de-facto architects, expected to be experts on virtually all technology.

Wouldn't be surprised if one dude in Texas working 60+hrs/week is singly responsible for every Tesla in the country continuing to get remote updates.

It's backup day, so i'm pissed off. Being the BOFH however, does have its advantages.

Hits too close to home after I've been on bridges since 10am 10/26 (its now 1am 10/27).

I want to get off this wild ride.

"Billionaire" doesn't need a prefix yet and it'll certainly be a while before we get any megabillionaires, aka quadrillionaires.

Probably not long before we start having megamillionaires, aka kilobillionaires, aka trillionaires though. Elon Musk's around a quarter of the way there.

Not that there's a definite standard but someone worth over $100B feels Mega to me.

I was joking about mega conventionally meaning a million of something [1]. I agree it's certainly "mega" in the informal/Aussie sense.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

Nobody (in English at least) uses SI prefixes for currency though?

£1M (happens to have the same shorthand, but) is never called 'a megapound'.

I sometimes say gigadollars (or gigabucks) when i want my [captive] audience to understand i am talking about an unfathomably large amount of money. I use SI prefixes a lot because i grew up with both computers and simple circuit-building, and still use computers and now radio.

I also prefer to see $1mm to $1M, and i'm not even French!

Megapound sounds like something one of Eric Idle's Monty Python characters would have said. But back then it would have only been possessed by the guy who paid Lennon and McCartney.

Someone does :)

HN discussion (2009): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=921524

https://tarsnap.com

> Tarsnap uses a prepaid model based on actual usage:

> Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data ($0.25 / GB-month)

> Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data ($0.25 / GB)

Y'know.. that direction actually makes a lot of sense! (Just since we don't already have common words for those I suppose.) Do find it annoying sometimes when something's specified as 0.0000025 $currencies per hour or whatever.

Supposedly Putin is there already. Much good it does him.

I hear this claim, but I disbelieve. Wikipedia list of countries by total wealth[0] says Russia’s worth was $3.3 trillion in 2019, and I don’t believe he can really be said to control that fraction of Russia even if he was explicitly given more power than Stalin had over the USSR.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wea...

His assets are not mainly in Russia. He has been sluicing wealth out for decades.

Imagine if his assets outside Russia could be identified. Trump's fascination with Putin is not idle; he has a nose for money.

A trillion dollars is roughly two years of the entire Russian national exports, and I don’t think he has the capacity to pocket 10% of the total exports every year for the last twenty.

The corruption needed to enable that level of loss would imply other people having the opportunity, and I expect competition between different corrupt officials would limit any one person.

Perhaps I’m wrong — I’m not knowledgeable, this is just based on what feels like a plausible upper level to me.

Four oligarchs died under suspicious circumstances in the last, what, a week? Who gets their assets? FSB will gather them up.

Nobody can be sure of the numbers. Most of us can't count that high in one lifetime.

> Nobody can be sure of the numbers.

Naturally, but the other estimates I’ve seen — even recently — put him between 70 and 274 billion. A quarter to a 14th of what you’re suggesting. While anything over about 2 billion is uncountable in a human lifetime, the lower number does not feel entirely unbelievable, in the way a trillion does.

I'm sitting on a comfy chair in a climate controlled apartment eating a cheeseburger that someone else made for me and brought to my house, while a machine washes my clothes and I read some discussion on the Internet during a paid lunch break. I'll take this over manual labor any day, even if someone else is getting richer than me.

I worked for a week manually preparing a lawn for my mum , was dead tired but my mind rehashed the book I was reading, among other things....most of the time though I don't work at all and take a minimal sum of money to live in a cheap country while looking after my kids and occasionally tending a huge garden and watching wondering about the world working itself to death for something they can continuously print more of... at least I contribute minimaly to the problem, I love non forced manual labor it's very Zen , you should try it someday, like making your own vegetarian cheesburgers I'm sure it'll seem all the tastier for not having used some underpaid soul to perpetuate the destructive fast food industry....

Maybe we don't know them individually, but we're still thinking and talking about them after all this time, because of what they've built.

Said nobody on their death cot ever, “I wish I’d spent more time carving hieroglyphs down at the Pharoah’s tomb!”

You can translate this to modern world. "I wish I'd spent more time arguing with strangers on internet"

Suddenly carving feels like quality time

Or, "I wish I'd spent more time soaking up scorpion stings so the tomb got built on time and under budget."

My time-travelling archeologist self in another reality would prefer watching this in action rather than the Jira ticket/corporate values/KPI grind, given a choice. Though as a worker, I'm sure I'd prefer being a cubicle slave to being a pyramid day laborer.

"I wish I had closed more Jira tickets and had a bigger impact on my org's KPIs"

I wish I had espoused the values that my company announced on their social media (after their 3rd rebrand).

> Said nobody on their death cot ever, “I wish I’d spent more time carving hieroglyphs down at the Pharoah’s tomb!”

That actually may not be true. Pharaoh was a religious figure, considered to be god on earth. He was also the embodiment of Osiris, the god of the afterlife, and Egyptians' conception of the afterlife was linked to Pharaoh, and their prospects for the afterlife were linked to how close they were to Pharaoh. Thus just like it would not be unheard of to hear someone say on their deathbed that they wished they had gone to church more, etc, there were probably people on their deathbed who wished they did more for Pharaoh (including spending more time carving hieroglyphs for his tomb).

Such ridiculous, delusional devotion is for the clergy. The whip is for the slaves.

I figure the carving hieroglyphs might be a pretty middle class job.

Right. When I read that my first thought was that there had to be a pretty big bunch who rolled their eyes and muttered under their breath but sighed and did what they were supposed to do just to get along.

The workers were skilled artisans who were paid for their labor. I imagine using your skills to honor the embodiment of god on Earth while being paid would be a pretty good gig.

Notably, none of the pyramids have hieroglyphs in them. Or any evidence anybody was ever interred in them. And none of the trash always left behind by grave robbers.

Except one: They found a skeleton of a woman inside (one that is assumed to be) one of the older ones, with none of what they call "grave goods". Much more is still unknown about the pyramids than is known.

The pyramid won't love you back.

> But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity... Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it... Who knows whether the best of men be known? Or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time?

~ Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia (1658)

Irony is, Herostratus didn't even burn it.

At least those pyramids are still standing, but most software projects that are not open sourced end up completely wiped out of history in probably less than 20 years.

Data retention of carving limestone > charging silicone.

If I learned anything from the tablet, is that I should let my friends use me as excuse for getting out of work.

> DRINKING WITH KHONSU

Legend

Huh? They were clearly not of terrestrial origins

> But how well would it fly if you were to plead the need to feast, to embalm your brother, or to make an offering to a god?

Vacation, funerals, religious holy-days?

True but it would be funny to actually use those terms in your time-off request.

Me a few months ago: "I need to take a PTO day tomorrow."

Boss: "What for?"

Me: "It's P."

She never asked again.

"P."?

Personal as in PTO is personal time off

Where I work the P in PTO means "paid"

Pretty sure it's Paid Time Off at least here in the US

No, it is "Personal." To differentiate from other types of paid days off that we get. (Bereavement, religious holidays, etc...)

And I'm also in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paid_time_off?wprov=sfla1

Citing Wikipedia doesn't negate the fact that my company calls it "Personal." And since I wrote the original comment, I'm probably more familiar with my company's terminology than Wikipedia.

Ah, just making sure you meant your company and not the US. Glad we reached an agreement.

Both terms are used with identical meaning referring to shared leave pool instead of separate vacation and sick leave (“annual leave” is sometimes used for this purpose, but sometimes, e.g. federal service, equivalent to “vacation”); IME (which may not be representative) paid is somewhat more common than personal for the shared leave pool.

Confusingly, paid time off (with the same abbreviation) is also sometimes used in the more obvious sense encompassing all or most paid leave (including some or all of things like bereavement, company/public holidays, paid time for administrative shutdowns, etc.)

(All of this is in the U.S.)

I read that as "period". My female coworkers always have to make excuses when they're having cramps - outright saying "i have period cramps" is still a little awkward when you're talking to a male manager

I assume it's the Pi day.

Please Turn Over?

(I'm guessing you mean Private Time Off?)

It means Personal Time Off, essentially any time an employee has a paid day off work. (There's also unpaid PTO)

Basically paternity / maternity leave, sick leave, vacation, jury duty, bank holiday, or whatever else is in the company's PTO policy...

I do this. Recently took some time off for Pascha (Russian Easter), and made a portion of the request in Old Church Slavonic

>> Pascha (Russian Easter)

Feels funny to read this. Always thought that Pascha was a Jewish holiday, which was later eclipsed by Easter (The Last Supper that Jesus had with his disciples was them celebrating the Pascha)

Jews call it Passover now. I could call it воскрешение if you like.

There's a wonderful collection of similar (and older) tablets in San Jose:

https://egyptianmuseum.org/

They have lots of receipts + contracts. One of my favorites confirms a goat (sheep?) was eaten by wolves, and is therefore not taxable.

We really are the same people. No measurable difference in IQ (as well as that can be "measured"). Only knowledge (some gained for us; some lost, too) and context are different. The tablet is a cool reminder of this.

> We really are the same people. No measurable difference in IQ (as well as that can be "measured").

There is definitely IQ variation in the same society on a short timescale and between societies and the same time, during the time when we have been able to measure it; given what we know about the wide variety of environmental influences on IQ, it stands to reason that Egypt 3,200 years ago would have significantly different IQ average and distribution than a society from today, even if the genetic factors were exactly the same as in some modern society being compared. Sure, we can't directly measure that for a past society, but that doesn't mean it is roughly the same.

If people lived and thought and partied and slept, had friends, raised family, and weren’t too miserable, I’m not sure how variations in IQ distribution really matter much?

Maybe the metric captures something arbitrary about modernity — and a community’s conformance to it — and not much meaningful about the people in other times and places.

> If people lived and thought and partied and slept, had friends, raised family, and weren’t too miserable, I’m not sure how variations in IQ distribution really matter much?

I was addressing a claim about the absence of differences in IQ, not a claim about whether differences in IQ are or are not important in the first place.

Fair!

This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily with improvements in nutrition, public health, and medical science. It's mostly plateaued over the last 50 years, but it's evident that pre-industrial / pre-rnlightenment humans had a much harder life, including things that suppressed potential at an almost global scale.

We may see additional gains if there are globally adopted pedagogical improvements in both childhood education and standard parenting.

Our genetics are the same, but our quality of life is radically better, and that allows us greater potential.

That's probably closer to the truth but doesn't seem like the whole story. Modern environments are very different but it seems a stretch to claim they're always (or even often) better.

We're usually comparing modern populations to industrialized populations that lived nothing like ancient populations.

It seems plausible that some ancient populations might've had sufficient nutrition (particularly Egypt at various times) and lower pollutants (less lead, for example), and maybe come out net ahead in terms of average general intelligence.

Would be fun to know if anyone has come close to answering these questions, but it seems like a challenging problem.

> This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily

In particular, we recently invented this peculiar notion that one can boil intelligence down to a number :b

... and somewhat more recently, we are able to apply Goodhart's law.

I am pretty sure people used to call others stupid or intelligent even in Ancient Egypt. Quantifying that measure is not really such a huge leap.

True, the village idiot had iconic status and the donkey was legendary. I always wondered (thoughtfully) what the anti-IQ crowd was all about, was it that IQ tests are imperfect or was it that IQ as a fundamental concept is flawed.

So, the grandparent post is hopefully not betraying my actual thoughts on the matter too much, but I am indeed in the anti-IQ crowd. My thoughts on the matter:

- IQ scores are not a standard measure. There are several different internationally recognized IQ tests, but people who talk about their IQ scores tend to pick the one they do best on and declare that "their IQ."

- IQ scores measure performance on standardized tests. However, they are frequently misinterpreted as a measure of intelligence in general.

- As a result, certain people are motivated to practice for an IQ test, which seems counterproductive.

- Depending on the particular IQ test in question, one's performance on an IQ test stems from their present state of mind, and this is unavoidable. IQ tests, by design, are not concerned with this detail (although, historically, they did account for some crude concept of "metal age" compared to physical age. Which is itself problematic: what is this supposed to measure, again?).

- It is worth noting that IQ scores were originally propped up by the eugenics movement. For example, the most widely used test in the United States was based on the work of Lewis Terman, who at some point wrote "high-grade or border-line deficiency... is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come." Based on that information, there is a likely answer for the question I asked a moment ago.

- Obvious conjecture, but, IQ scores are not really useful in today's society? I have a few years still to go, but so far in my life, I have not once seen an IQ score trumpeted somewhere and thought "that is a useful measure for the discussion at hand." Not in a resume. Not in a debate. Not in a biography. Not in an advertisement. Not in a legal defence.

- So what motivation could we have? People in general gravitate toward answers that make it easier to distinguish the Self from the Other. For example, it took millennia for us to collectively agree the Earth orbits around the Sun. And long before IQ was an idea, René Descartes was a pioneer in trying to explain consciousness through science. To make this work, he was desperate to prove that humans are unique in having free will and intelligence. That animals are machines, over which we have free reign; that humans are special. Because we must be special. So, one of his ideas was that humans have an animal spirit, but we have the ability to control it. That we must control it. But, it is important to note, not all humans do.

- Tests, in general, are a problematic measure of intelligence. A better measure of intelligence will always be performance in regular day to day activity, analyzed by someone with no bias and an understanding of the context. Obviously this can't be standardized, which is unfortunate, but it does not follow that the next-best thing is actually a meaningful measure. Sometimes we humans must simply accept our limitations.

Hey, thanks for the detailed response, your last point is a very insightful one (not to me, though). What I have a problem with, is that generally the anti-IQ crowd (not you, since you do understand the nuances) tend to take the stand that IQ tests are imperfect or even wrong hence they also extend that to concluding that intelligence itself as a concept is flawed, basically the blank slate concept.

Now the last point that you mentioned is a very important. Most average people who make decisions (eg employers) are average themselves so that they fall back on what they know best ( sometime it's IQ tests, in the software world it's leetcode) and what they know best is not necessarily the best. So why blame the normies? (And I'm not denying that a lot of harm comes off it.) What is the alternative for a normie? As a general concept similar methods of gauging people (by normies) on other aspects (like trust) is also flawed, but that is the best they can manage.

All that complaints look similar to the idea that veganism is bad because vegans are annoying or that quantum mechanics is nonsense because some people believe in quantum healing.

I can name one field that justifies all IQ research that was and will be done: education. It has immense value there and can help guide policy on the issues of education and all related concerns such as discrimination.

We know we can quantify intelligence as in IQ because it is what we call aptitude in several tasks (e.g. pattern recognition, short-term recall), and we've found that they are correlated, and aptitude in those tasks is measurable (e.g. ability to recognize pattern and time taken, ability to recall and time taken). If intelligence as in IQ wasn't as transferable as it is we would be calling them different things. For example, intelligence as in IQ and being knowledgeable are different aspects of the popular notion of being intelligent or smart.

It might've actually dipped for everyone born during the decades leaded fuel was used. But that's on a base/general level - education would outweigh that.

IQ is a pretty arbitrary measurement, but I think a modern yankee in egypt would indeed have problem solving skills beyond their peers. Our education, formal and social, is quite a rapid process in the modern world and we basically give kids a free ride until around 18 so that they can focus on education rather than being forced to do menial labour.

I think that as physical beings we're pretty similar to our ancient selves (though maybe a bit worse off with all the PFAS and similar pollutants in our systems and the lack of immunity tuned to the environment) but our problem solving skills are tuned to a much more complex level of problem.

Whether that level of problem solving is materially useful is a whole different topic.

I don’t know the historical record for ancient Egypt, but I imagine we are way bigger and way smarter on average because of childhood nutrition and lack of parasites - see also, North Korea.

Smarter feels like a bad word to use - I specifically dialed into problem solving because I think that's one place we can accurately differentiate but "smarts" is an incredibly broad concept. We're better at certain things because of specialization and long education but worse at other things because we're obviously not training our motor skills to do different things from birth - it's like folks who can skin mangos in a single cut, it can be learned but most of us aren't going to learn it.

Ancient Egypt did have public schools and a semi-meritocratic scribe class so formal education was a thing which makes it easier to compare in contrast to areas that revolved entirely around apprenticeship like the more nomadic contemporaries would be.

Also, we do have a much more balanced diet growing up but if we did travel back to ancient Egypt there might be dietary issues trying to maintain our extra mass - the lack of access to diverse fruits and vegetables might wreck havoc on our bodies... you can look to extreme contemporary diets for any evidence of that you'd like to see.

Indeed. I find Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" to be a particularly vivid proof of this. (Although I don't know what it's like to be Emperor of Rome, a lot of his concerns seem entirely commonplace today.)

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.

Stellar everyday advice still today.

> a lot of his concerns seem entirely commonplace today

Because a lot of his concerns dealt with the human condition. That will never change.

Other things that were commonplace in roman times - graffiti and dick jokes...

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-lewd-graffiti-of...

Nihil novum sub sole.

  > The tablet is a cool reminder of this.

I'm sure that some folks happen to be browsing HN on a tablet.

Well, IQ tests given in the 1930's and 40's(?) had the results re-scaled today, and the average IQ was 70.

Note, that we're all trained today in taking IQ tests. E.g. one question asked "There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How many Elephants are in Munich?" with possible answers of 0, 1, 2, 12.

Back then a layman might think "Munich is a big city; I bet there's one or two in the zoo there!" and answer 1 or 2. Because they didn't understand it was a logic question and there is an expectation when taking IQ tests that common sense is not being tested.

IQ tests measure something, but it sure isn't intelligence it is measuring

The IQ test can only measure things dumber than it.

Alien: Hey.

HNer: Hey.

Alien: Our mutual research shows that we have roughly the same IQ.

HNer: My brother!

Well, lead poisoning levels have varied by region and time, and IQ definitely does vary with lead poisoning levels.

We're effectively looking at somebody's notebook from 3200 years ago. Makes me wonder what our descendants would think if they were looking at our old notebooks and random text files in the next 3200 years.

"Apparently the people of the 21st century had a short attention span as they could only focus on 10 things that would change their <something>.."

They won't see anything because we store everything digitally. They will assume civilization suddenly lost the ability to write anything down.

In all seriousness, I think digital archaeology will be a huge field.

This is pleasantly surprising how ancient times valued women. Atleast they acknowledged the value women brought day to day lives. Looks likes only during the 600's A.D women were more oppressed.

It seems like the devaluing of women is an oft-exaggerated historical trope. Women have always been valuable to society, after all, the men don't have babies.

We'd see a lot of it as sexist today, but when manual labor was pretty much the only option, you could take a look at any couple and have a pretty good idea which one would be better for working in the fields.

In many parts of the world women carry babies to the fields and make a cradle in the trees near to fields and during work breaks(there is no strict schedule ofcourse) they feed the baby.

My crocodile ate my papyrus

Tiger took my family : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPpuEgAZ2rQ

The great thing about being a senior is that you can use hungover as an excuse for missing meetings. I wouldn’t have dared that at the beginning of my career

You should probably avoid using that too often, or being pretty apologetic about it. Especially if you forbid your juniors from using it as an excuse.

This really just depends on where you work

My OP is obviously a bit of a joke, but if an employer expect their employees to be perfect and never ever screw up, I’d contend that they’re not worth working for.

Just show up and say you were testing solutions late :)

Talk about going on your permanent record...

I guess these guys were not contingent workers for big pyramid. They actually get PTO lol.

Pop-up Blocked by OpenCulture’s own Pop-Up JavaScript.

Running Firefox on iOS in portrait mode.

Turning phone around to landscape still rendered me unable to press any button much less read the pop up. Only got words like “ad-blocker”.

Nope, not running any ad-blocker.

I had similar behavior. I think sites assume that if any of their 20+ trackers and load-ins don’t load then the user is ad blocking.

At least they let me close out of the pop up and read the page.

Doesn't mobile Firefox have built-in adblocking?

If you can call the built-in SafeBrowsing,an ad blocker, yeah.

> to embalm your brother

If I'd used that excuse at my old work it would probably have triggered a 'difficult conversation' with my line manager.

I dunno, you probably get some sort of bereavement time off. Also, personal death care involving families seems to be creeping back somewhat.

When my mother passed away, I had just moved across country to start a new job just 6 months earlier. Even though I was still such a new employee, they allowed for paid time off to handle things for much longer than I would have expected. I was shocked and very appreciative of that. My previous employer would never have considered something like that which was one of the many reasons I left.

Indeed, that's a good sign. I had a client much like your former employer, when my father was terminally ill. That engagement got completed, but there would not be another with them.

It would probably be a difficult conversation for anyone today if they're the one doing the embalming.

You could have explained that embalming is one of your hobbies and you just finished an embalming course at one of the MOOCs. Companies should support personal development.

Oh, excuses, not reasons? So any reason to miss work is an excuse, huh? "My baby's being born!"... EXCUSE! "I'm sick and I don't want to infect others" - EXCUSE! "My leg broke when someone's camel ran into mine" - EXCUSE!

Maybe working for a living is an excuse too and not a reason?

Anubis ate my homework!

It seems to me like the concept of emploee/employer is way to modern in our civilization to apply to ancient egypt. Are we too triggered to call these people masters and slaves or were there some legit emploee/employer relationships there?

I love that the men take a day off because their daughters or wives are having their period.

I wonder if that's because they were unclean by association, or did they just have to do practical stuff like cook / go to the market / make hot water bottles?

Why embalming your brother won't fly well as an excuse?

Original: https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/

My first thought was what work? Weren't nearly all people farmers for most of history? At least after hunter gathering ceased. But maybe pyramid building was their job and it took so long to build just one it was a career.

Half the year there was no farming to do.

If they built them that way, that means laying one 2-ton block each minute of every daylight hour for half of each of 20 years. Plus extra for the special features.

Not quite half but June to September the flood season.

it's sad how the framing of these as "excuses" rather than "reasons" for missing work has been pushed by the blog post (the original article did not use the word), and blithely accepted.

Not surprising.

How many people have stressful jobs and overbearing bosses who would kill them if things weren't done just right? And when they come home, all they want is to eat dinner, watch TV, and sleep. Should any problem happen to interrupt that, they explode.

Go read the story of Potiphar and Joseph in the Bible.[0] Say what you will about it being real or not, that story is thousands of years old, and there are still people just like Potiphar today. You think bosses demanding perfection each time is a modern innovation? We have so much knowledge and rights, surely we must be so much better than people who lived thousands of years ago? We have better toys and are more prosperous, but we're still the same.

[0] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+39&vers...

We're very much the same animals. If you need a testament, just go drive on any major east coast highway in the morning. People rage, go get ahead maybe 5 feet. Saving what, fractions of a second?

We are animals, the same animals we were 3,200 years ago. Just fancier toys this time around. Serfdom is still largely intact, just a different flavoring this time around.

There's probably another one talking about how this generation has had it harder than any other generation and its just too hard to get ahead.

I had a back spasm episode a couple weeks ago. It led me to think about laborers taking off work throughout the ages. Interesting to see this now.

Wage slavery: 3200 years old and still running

(only thing worse is the actual slavery of course which thankfully is now not all that prevalent)

I shared this with my 11 year old daughter. She says these people are very lazy, and missing work for bad reasons.

The things that modern education does...

My daughter is very harsh on people she considers lazy.

We were watching interviews with people in Ukraine whose towns have become war zones.

The first person worked at the local steel plant. He had to dodge bullets on the way to work.

His next door neighbor was a lawyer for the local airport. The Russians took over the airport, and she doesn’t have a job. She said there’s no work for anybody.

My daughter shouts, “There is work! The guys next door works at a steel plant! You could work at the steel plant! You just think because you’re a lawyer you’re too good to work at a factory!”

And I’m sitting there going like … wow that’s freaking harsh.

3200 years later... it would be nice if I could take time off to help when my wife is menstruating

She can probably manage it herself.

One in four women suffer pain severe enough to result in absenteeism from regular activities.

> Menstrual pain is a very common problem, but the need for medication and the inability to function normally occurs less frequently. Nevertheless, at least one in four women experiences distressing menstrual pain characterized by a need for medication and absenteeism from study or social activities

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3392715/

A common tongue-in-cheek joke among some women I know is that if men suffered from intense monthly pain this probably would have been cured 50 years ago. I suspect most men still minimize how debilitating mensuration is for many women.

If it helps, the richest of men suffer from baldness, cancer etc and haven't "solved" it yet, but I agree with the take in that it might have made things better if not cured.

Look at before/after photos of Elon Musk and tell me rich men haven't cured baldness. The man was aggressively balding 20 years ago.

Then once a month won't be enough...

why not link to the original source: https://mymodernmet.com/ancient-egyptians-attendance-record/

@dang?

Brah.

All the same. Almost exact excuses from my modern day employees.

Today: “I shouldn’t have to work”

This is all very Dwarf Fortress.

I don't get why some missed work for "wife bleeding"?

Because they cared?

Could be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysmenorrhea, who knows.

Some cultures consider(ed?) the women unclean or cursed during this 'period' of time, and all in their vicinity. Some cultures had the women go live in separate huts for the duration[1]. It could very well be that custom dictated that he not show up to work during this time because he was also considered unclean. Note that he also missed time when his daughter was bleeding. Only speculation, but it's not a stretch to assume that there was social norms dictating how women interacted with society during menstruation, and by extension members of their household.

sauce:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_and_menstruation#By_re...

I had a fever so my Mummy made me stay home.

Inscription translation:

Huynefer: month 2 of Winter, day 7 (ILL), month 2 of Winter, day 8 (ILL), month 3 of Summer, day 3 (SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE), month 3 of Summer, day 5 (SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE), day 7 (ILL), day 8 (ILL)

Amenemwia: month 1 of Winter, day 15 (EMBALMING HORMOSE), month 2 of Winter, day 7 (OFF ABSENT), month 2 of Winter, day 8 (BREWING BEER), month 2 of Winter, day 16 (STRENGTHENING THE DOOR), day 23 (ILL), day 24 (ILL), month 3 of Winter, day 6 (WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS MOTHER)

Inhurkhawy: month 4 of Spring, day 17 (HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING)

Neferabu: month 4 of Spring, day 15 (HIS DAUGHTER WAS BLEEDING), day 17 (BURYING THE GOD), month 2 of Summer, day 7 (EMBALMING HIS BROTHER), day 8 (LIBATING FOR HIM), month 4 of Summer, day 26 (HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING).

Paser: month 1 of Winter, day 25 (LIBATING FOR HIS SON), month 1 of Summer, day 27 (BREWING BEER), month 2 of Summer, day 14 (ILL), day 15 (ILL)

Pakhuru: month 4 of Summer, day 4, day 5, day 6, day 7 (ILL), day 8

Seba: month 4 of Spring, day 17 (THE SCORPION BIT HIM), month 1 of Winter, day 25 (ILL), month 4 of Winter, day 8 (HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING), month 1 of Summer, day 25, 26, 27 (ILL), month 2 of Summer, day 2, day 3 (ILL), month 2 of Summer, day 4, day 5, day 6, day 7 (ILL: erased),

Neferemsenut: month 2 of Winter, day 7 (ILL)

Simut: month 1 of Winter, day 18 (OFF ABSENT), month 1 of Winter, day 25 (HIS WIFE WAS … AND BLEEDING), month 4 of Winter, day 23 (HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING)

Khons: month 4 of Spring, day 7 (ILL), month 3 of Winter, day 25 (ILL), month 3 of Winter, day 26 (ILL), day 27, day 28 (ILL), month 4 of Winter, day 8 (WITH HIS GOD), month 4 of Summer, day 26 (ILL), month 1 of Spring, day 14 (HIS FEAST), day 15 (HIS FEAST)

Inuy: month 1 of Winter, day 24 (FETCHING STONE FOR QENHERKHEPSHEF), month 2 of Winter day 8 (DITTO), month 2 of Winter, day 17 (OFF ABSENT WITH THE SCRIBE), month 2 of Winter, day 24

Sunero: month 2 of Winter, day 8 (BREWING BEER), month 2 of Summer, day 2 (ILL), day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6, day 7, day 8 (ILL)

Nebenmaat: month 3 of Summer, day 21 (ILL), day 22 (DITTO), month 4 of Summer, day 4 (DITTO), day 5, day 6 (DITTO), day 7, day 8 (DITTO), month 4 of Summer, day 24 (ILL), day 25 (ILL), day 26 (ILL)

Merwaset: month 2 of Winter, day 17 (BREWING BEER), month 3 of Summer, day 5 (ILL), day 7, day 8 (ILL), month 3 of Summer, day 17 (ILL), day 18 (WITH HIS BOSS)

Ramose: month 2 of Winter, day 14 (ILL), day 15 (ILL), month 2 of Summer, day 2 (MOURNING HIS SON), day 3 (ILL)

Bakenmut: month 2 of Winter, day 7 (FETCHING STONE FOR THE SCRIBE)

Rahotep: month 1 of Winter, day 14 (OFFFERING TO THE GOD), month 4 of Winter, day 25 (HIS DAUGHTER WAS BLEEDING), month 2 of Summer, day 5 (WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS SON), day 6, day 7, day 8 (DITTO), month 4 of Summer, day 7 (WITH THE SCRIBE), day 8 (WITH THE SCRIBE)

Iierniutef: month 2 of Winter, day 8 (OFF ABSENT), month 2 of Winter, day 17 (WITH THE SCRIBE), month 2 of Winter, day 23 (ILL), month 3 of Winter, day 27 (WITH THE SCRIBE), day 28 (OFF ABSENT), month 4 of Winter, day 8 (WITH THE SCRIBE), month 1 of Spring, day 14

Nakhtamun: month 1 of Winter, day 18 (BREWING BEER), month 1 of Winter, day 25 (WITH HIS BOSS), month 2 of Winter, day 13 (WITH HIS BOSS), month 2 of Winter, day 14 (WITH HIS BOSS), month 2 of Winter, day 15 (WITH HIS BOSS), month 2 of Winter, day 16 (WITH HIS BOSS), day 17, day 18 (WITH HIS BOSS), month 2 of Winter, day 24 (WITH HIS BOSS), month 3 of Winter, day 25 (WITH HIS BOSS), month 3 of Winter, day 26 (WITH HIS BOSS), month 3 of Winter, day 27 (WITH HIS BOSS), day 28 (WITH HIS BOSS), day … (WITH HIS BOSS), month 4 of Winter, day 8 (WITH THE SCRIBE), month 1 of Summer, day 16 (SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE), day 17 (SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE), month 1 of Summer, day 25 (ILL), day 26, day 27 (ILL) month 3 of Summer, day 21 Nakhtamun (WITH HIS BOSS)

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