Super interesting video. https://youtu.be/OndXawgRAeo

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new Fall of Civilizations dropped recommended listening for your weekend gn https://open.spotify.com/episode/6AeHi8T4D6zgQqzzRkroUw

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skr%C3%A6ling

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A few days ago, I stumbled upon this place and have been desperately wanting to share it, but it's too important not to dive into its history first. Dionysos marble. Mount Pentelikon - arguably the most significant marble quarry in history. Its active exploitation began in the 5th century BC, during the golden age of Athens. The quarry's marble was renowned for its dazzling whiteness with a subtle warm hue and a uniform, fine-grained structure, making it a favorite among architects. Pentelic marble was used for many structures on the Acropolis, as well as for the Temple of Olympian Zeus. The quarry operated until the mid-20th century. Today, it stands as a historical landscape - the cradle of classical architecture and a unique venue for events. Its natural amphitheater shape makes it perfect for hosting concerts, theatrical performances, film screenings, and devilishly aesthetic exhibitions

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what inspired Tetris? Tetris, created in 1984 by Soviet computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, drew heavily from Western mathematical and technological innovations, reflecting the indirect flow of ideas across the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Pajitnov, working on speech recognition and artificial intelligence, programmed the game on the Elektronika 60, a Soviet minicomputer cloned from the U.S.-designed DEC PDP-11. The core concept stemmed from Pajitnov's childhood fascination with puzzles, specifically pentominoes—a tiling puzzle involving 12 shapes made of five equal squares, which players arrange into a rectangle or other figures. Pentominoes were popularized in the West by American mathematician Solomon W. Golomb, who coined the term in 1953 and explored their properties in his 1965 book Polyominoes, turning an older geometric idea (with roots in ancient puzzles) into a modern recreational math challenge sold as wooden sets in the U.S. and Europe. before Tetris, there were arcades. Arcades as entertainment venues evolved from 19th-century dime museums, exposition midways, and amusement parlors in the West, where coin-operated novelties like phonographs, kinetoscopes (early moving-picture viewers), and mutoscopes drew crowds for a penny or nickel. Hence the term "penny arcade". The shift to video arcades began in 1971 with Computer Space, the first commercial arcade video game, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (future founders of Atari); it was a single-player space combat simulator based on the 1962 mainframe game Spacewar! but struggled due to its complexity. likewise in the 19th century, there were the precursors of pinball, based on the parlor game of bagatelle. In 1871, British inventor Montague Redgrave, who had emigrated to the United States, patented an improved version of bagatelle, introducing a spring-loaded plunger to launch the ball and marble balls for smoother play. The modern coin-operated pinball machine emerged during the Great Depression in 1931, with David Gottlieb's Baffle Ball becoming a hit as affordable entertainment; players inserted a coin to release balls onto a playfield filled with pins and holes for scoring. Just like the penny arcade. These early machines lacked flippers, relying on chance and nudging, which led to associations with gambling and bans in cities like New York until the 1970s. The game transformed in 1947 with Gottlieb's Humpty Dumpty, introducing player-controlled flippers, shifting pinball toward skill-based play and sparking its post-war boom. so if you don't know, now you know. https://farcaster.xyz/jvaleska.eth/0xe487b368

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How Nazi Germany was stopped with fake coal https://youtu.be/xdkkR4SCXL4?si=L6ArPw3RzQq3LXRz

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gn history enjoyooors

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Big

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Itiner-e – The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads Itiner-e aims to host the most detailed open digital dataset of roads in the entire Roman Empire. The data creation is a collaborative ongoing project edited by a scholarly community. Itiner-e allows you to view, query and download roads. https://itiner-e.org/

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every time I see "in the arena trying things" it reminds me that the Romans viewed taking part in the Colosseum's games as extremely low class you didn't build your reputation in the arena, you did it through public/military service (where actions had consequences)

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Long before steel, turbines, and machines, early Asian civilisations were already designing hydraulic masterpieces. These 5 oldest ancient dams reveal how the earliest societies understood water, flood control, agriculture, and urban growth with surprising sophistication.

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the first time I visited Italy, I was 13 and my dad wanted to make a stop in Padua before heading south to his hometown in Frosinone just so we could see the jawbone of Saint Anthony, on display in his Basilica. and my parents wonder why I ended up obsessed with creepy and morbid stuff

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Fantastic bit of insight on life and the human experience from John Green’s “Everything is Tuberculosis”: History is often imagined as a series of events, unfolding one after the other like a sequence of falling dominoes. But most human experiences are processes, not events. Divorce may be an event, but it almost always results from a lengthy process—and the same could be said for birth, or battle, or infection. Similarly, much of what some imagine as dichotomous turns out to be spectral, from neurodivergence to sexuality, and much of what appears to be the work of individuals turns out to be the work of broad collaborations. We love a narrative of the great individual whose life is shot through with major events and who turns out to be either a villain or a hero, but the world is inherently more complex than the narratives we impose upon it, just as the reality of experience is inherently more complex than the language we use to describe reality.

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learned a lot about Nelson these last few weeks one of my favorite nuances is that he was extremely focused on preparation, specifically when it came to keeping his men healthy at sea for example, even though they didn't really know the science behind it, he obsessed over having enough citrus fruit to prevent scurvy

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