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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Kailasa Temple: 8th century CE Carved from a single rock the entire temple wasn’t built…It was excavated from the top down, as if someone literally scooped a temple out of a mountain. 200,000 Tons of stone removed and all of it done without machines, cranes, drills, or explosives. Just chisels, hammers, and unbelievable precision.

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i don’t understand how the norse made it all the way to newfoundland, traded with the dorset culture, and then the rest of europe never really heard about / cared about the norse discovery of the new world AI says the knowledge wasn’t secret, and the euros could have heard about it, but that the euros were too obsessed with spices and that discoveries of icey barren lands wasn’t interesting to them,,,, but that seems kinda dumb and unrealistic to me?

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Watched episode 1 of Ken Burns’ The American Revolution and liking it so far. I’ve been waiting forever for this one, the period of history I find most interesting. First episode really focused on Massachusetts so giving me all the feels. I grew up in a town about 30 minutes from Boston that was founded 51 years before the Declaration of Independence. We always celebrated Patriots Day and had all of these revolutionary battlefields close by. While in law school on Beacon Hill, I worked in the courthouse in the law library which was also the Supreme Judicial Court Historical Society. One of my favorite exhibits we assisted with was about the Boston Massacre, which was exhibited close by at the Old State House (site of the massacre). I always appreciated that John Adams defended the British soldiers out of respect for the rule of law and the concept that everyone should have defense counsel, a right later enshrined in the bill of rights. Evacuation Day — the day the British left — is still a holiday in the City of Boston. (Yes, coincidentally also St Patrick’s Day) Grateful to have all this context as I watch this. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-revolution

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I saw the Hindu deity/monster word “naga” and thought I wonder if that’s related to a proto Indo-European word for snake This is apparently contested, with more etymologists considering it NOT to be cognate, although sarpa (Sanskrit) and serpent are cognate

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gm interesting phenomenon

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one of my favorite segments from Hardcore History (and I've listened to a lot of Hardcore History) is Dan talking about the way that the German government transported Lenin into Russia via a high-security train like he was a nuclear weapon

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“Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.”

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Many of Hampi’s temples, walls, and gateways were built using interlocking granite blocks no cement or binding material at all. The stones fit together so precisely that they’ve survived over 700 years of weather and earthquakes. # Hampi was capital of mighty Vijayanagara empire in south India

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Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt, fren? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGl-8Vf0koE

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Babylonian Clay Tablets, c. 1800–1600 BC Yale Babylonian Collection YBC 7290 A student scribe’s exercise recording the area of a designated trapezoid YBC 7290 (reverse) A diagram of a trapezoid devoid of numerical text YBC 11120 A diagram of a circle and the computation of its area

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