Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.
Okay, so it was actually unmanned, and it was a hydrogen balloon, but it does seem to be a pretty widely repeated story from a contemporary newspaper. This was shortly after the first hot air balloon flight and might have had less fanfare, so it seems a bit more reasonable that peasants 21 km away wouldn’t have heard anything about it until the large levitating blob was coming at them.
Nah, green Sahara ended pretty early in the bronze age. The old kingdom Egyptians were really just getting the tail end of it. It was definitely natural, I don’t think that’s in question; the (non-mini) ice age was simply ending, about on schedule. It would have been a much slower change than what’s happening now.
There were a few trees that managed to hang on in one area, though, with the last being “accidentally” run over by the colonial-era French.
Okay, so I see someone else already did an effortpost, so I’ll just add on.
Benjamin Franklin assumed logically that electricity obviously must flow from positive to negative (since it’s the logical choice), but alas, he was wrong as far as history sees it.
Well, I’m sure he knew it was a guess. He was a smart man. He picked glass as the thing that picks up “electric fluid” in static electricity experiments, becoming “positively charged”, in other words a positive excess of fluid, when in fact it loses electrons. Until someone invented vacuum tubes a century or so later nobody could tell the difference.
Positive-to-negative is called “conventional current”, and circuit diagrams are still drawn that way. Unfortunately, the charge and direction of the particles moving (rather than just that they are moving) can become important if you want to understand electrochemistry, for example. Metal ions are positively charged (missing an electron), and so they’re going to come off of the electrode where electrons being removed, and plate on to the electrode where they’re being added. You have to remember the conventional current is opposite to the actual current to picture a battery running a circuit, and if it’s connected to a bunch of digital chips in a complicated way, I, at least, can get lost.
If that’s still unclear, any further questions are welcome.
So, when Ben Franklin named them, it was in terms of something like “excess of electricity”. A positive excess of charge, like in the glass he used to define the term, is actually a deficit (negative excess) of electrons, which are the real fluid.
Later on Crooks (I think?) figured out that if he cleared all the air out of a tube with mercury, he could force electrons out of the metal into open space, at the negative cathode end, and at that point they realised it was backwards.
I mean, they didn’t have zero role in it.
Fair turnaround.
It’s a stupid political label as long as our nastiest friends are worse than our nicest enemies. Nobody’s about to declare Saudi anything terroristic regardless of how many get chopped up, for example.
The American message is designed to get the Lebanese-based Shiite militia to back down and de-escalate the brewing crisis along the Israeli-Lebanese border, a person familiar with the discussions said.
I’m not quite sure that’s the right approach. It discourages brinkmanship, but also encourages them and Iran to go all-in since broader Israeli action is coming either way. Y’know, the way Iran didn’t with that rocket exchange, because the US seemed present and reasonable enough to negotiate with.
I’m skeptical. Can I bother you for a source?
TIL. Did the Greeks get less patriarchal over time? In the classical era they were Taliban-tier and complained they even had to see women.
And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn’t fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.
The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we’d all be speaking an Australian language or something.
Yep. It was 50/50 given that he only knew it was moving from between two points somehow. Tough luck, Benny. (Specifically, he was the one that figured out charge is conserved)
Now we all have to deal with circuit diagrams that don’t match what’s actually happening inside the components, which confuses at least me when I have to think about electrochemical reactions, semiconductors and/or induction.
Edit: He actually didn’t have complete circuits at that time, it was all static experiments where charges were moved manually. Fixed.
Oxford University is older than Harvard University.
Edit: Which isn’t really surprising, but I posted anyway for the sake of completeness. Oxford is so old it’s not super clear when in the middle ages it started.
True!
There’s a lot to choose from, but it’s early so I’ll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.
Per that study, anyway. I expect it differs quite a bit across industries, for one thing.
Do tapes last longer than (unused) hard drives? I figured it’s the same medium in a different shape.
Paper can rot away too, although it varies in stability and it can sometimes be read anyway (like with the Herculaneum scrolls) because it’s so low-density it acts as a form or redundancy. Optical disks will last a long time, and you can get archival ones that should still be like new after millennia.
It feels a bit suspect to conveniently cut ourselves out of that period.
Hmm, wouldn’t that go for a lot of the digital mediums of the 90’s, too? Magnetic drives and tapes were the big deal back then just as now.
Spooks (including the domestic FBI-type ones) definitely pick locks. They also have things like spray-on dust to hide the fact they’ve been in a place.
I have someone like this. Glad to hear it’s common-ish. She’s “getting help” but the doctors can’t do much more than we can.