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pauldrye Paul Drye @lemm.ee

@pauldrye@spacey.space : Unbuilt crewed space projects, phantom islands, alternate history, Muppets, Atomic Age design, weird-looking galaxies, temporary moons of Earth, languages, cartography, the Ediacaran biota, old cutaway diagrams. Canadian with malice aforethought. Baggage Books on DriveThruRPG.

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Comments 31
Are there historical examples of countries or kingdoms that did a complete 180 on their old allies - not counting vassals or similars changing one master for another?
  • Though the split happened because the Soviets thought they should be master of all Communist countries and the Chinese had different ideas on the topic.

  • Pierbattista Pizzaballa
  • This sounds like something they'd name an Italian character in an old Bugs Bunny cartoon.

  • Revolutionary Paris Apartment is the Ultimate Experiment in Eco City Living! - YouTube
  • "Revolutionary Paris" had me thinking about this entirely the wrong way.

  • China Reports New Coronavirus 'With Pandemic Potential' Discovered
  • It's the Daily Mail, so it's not likely to be, you know...at all like this.

  • From 2000 to 2024: China surpassed the US as the larger trading partner of most of the world's countries
  • Import statistics from all the countries you're interested in.

  • [Weekly thread] Which communities have you discovered lately?
  • !Traveller@ttrpg.network is about the venerable Traveller TTRPG, and is new in the last couple of weeks. It's seeing some activity every few days right now so it might not take much more to get it off the ground.

  • Question: how do we know where (what direction, orientation, velocity) neutrinos come from?
  • In the case of velocity, all neutrinos move at essentially the speed of light (they have the slightest amount of mass which slows them down, each of the three types of neutrino a different mass compared to the other two but still very, very, extremely low masses). Only neutrinos less than 2 eV are noticeably slower than light, and that's quite a low energy. The almost-exactly-light-speed has been confirmed by, among other methods, comparing bursts of neutrinos from supernovas and other intense sources to the photons coming from the same sources.

    The photons move at the speed of light by definition and MeV and GeV energy neutrinos show up in detectors at the exact same time down to as close as we've been able to measure it (roughly one part in a billion, I think it is).

  • What's the tallest pyramid we'd be able to build? Can we reach space?
  • Yes, but it doesn't matter enough. The square-cube law means that the mass being supported goes up faster than the area of the layer doing the supporting does. So each additional brick on the bottom still ends up carrying more weight as the pyramid gets taller.

  • What's the tallest pyramid we'd be able to build? Can we reach space?
  • Depends on the compressive strength of the material. Sooner or later the weight of the pyramid above the base exceeds the base's ability to support it. Considering that a mountain is basically a stone pyramid, Everest has to be in the neighbourhood of how tall you could go -- call it 10-12 kilometers high. Other materials would do better.

  • I watched Arrival (2016), there was a lot more to it than I was expecting
  • I had a quick re-read I think you might be right! I'm wondering if I picked it up from the movie instead.

  • I watched Arrival (2016), there was a lot more to it than I was expecting
  • spoiler

    Yes, Gary is the father. He's ended up leaving her (in the future) because he found out she had the future knowledge of their daughter's early death but went ahead with having her anyway.

  • I watched Arrival (2016), there was a lot more to it than I was expecting
  • Oh, I've read all of his stuff! It's a red letter day for me when a new story is published. None since 2019, though.

    My odd choice of his would be Seventy-Two Letters. I find him most interesting when he follows through in the consequences of an old disproven scientific theory or theological explanation of the universe, and he manages to fit two of them in here.

  • I watched Arrival (2016), there was a lot more to it than I was expecting
  • He's written some "Notes" on the story when it was printed in his first short story collection and said that it has the same theme but that he wasn't inspired by it directly. The roots were Paul Linke's play "Time Flies When You’re Alive" and the principle of least time in optics -- if you treat light as a ray, it has to know its future destination in order to know the path with the shortest time it will take to get there (though not if it's a wave). Then there's a bunch of diagrams and discussions about the principle's implications for free will that will stretch your brain. It's pretty fun.

  • I watched Arrival (2016), there was a lot more to it than I was expecting
  • It's based on a short story called "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. He's published only eighteen stories in his career (starting in 1990), nothing longer than a novella and mostly short stories. Despite that they've won him four Hugos, four Nebulas, and six Locus Awards. He's worth reading, is what I'm trying to say.

  • The English word "four" has 4 letters. Are there any other numbers where the English name for them has that many letters?
  • It's the only one in English unless you allow things like "The absolute value of -20".

  • PC Games to Play with my Five-Year-Old
  • She might like Little Kitty, Big City. You're a cat, it's an open world, you explore, make friends, and wear hats.

  • What is one thing that people don't know about your country/state?
  • There's a part of Canada that's south of Crescent City, California.

  • Your favourite historical country?
  • I'm fond of the Imperial County of Reuss, which was semi-independent in the Holy Roman Empire. The madlads named all their rulers "Heinrich", resulting such personages as Heinrich LXXII ("Heinrich the 72nd").

    More recently there's the Saar Protectorate, which the French encouraged to become a fully independent country after WWII. But the inhabitants wanted nothing to do with it and rejoined West Germany.

  • TIL Alan Moore, the author of V for Vendetta, has a negative view of the revolutionary cultures/movements he helped inspire
  • It would probably be faster to list the things he doesn't have a negative view about.

  • Acheulean Handaxe knapped around a fossil shell, c.300,000-500,000 BC

    This flint axe was found in 1912 in West Tofts, a now-abandoned village in the UK between Cambridge and Norwich, It was made by a Homo heidelbergensis or possibly a Neanderthal, somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago.

    This kind of tool is fairly common throughout western Europe and Africa, but this specimen is unique for having a Cretaceous-era fossil of a spiny oyster in the centre that suggests the axe's maker wanted the shell on it as an adornment.

    It's kept in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and you can see more details on their web site.

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    Mourning bloodletter, Hawai'i, 18th century

    Made of barracuda jawbone(*) and wrapped in red-dyed barkcloth, this scarifier was used by mourners to draw blood from themselves in honour of a dead chief. You can see the original here along with a second picture and some curator's notes.

    (*) The source contradicts itself by saying both barracuda and porpoise -- googling for images suggests it's a barracuda, but I could be wrong.

    This image is used under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license and requires this attribution: © The Trustees of the British Museum

    Originally posted to Reddit by me in 2023.

    4
    news.yahoo.com ‘Panda bandits’ arrested for Superior smash and grab burglaries

    Three juveniles, known as the "panda bandits," were arrested in connection to several burglaries, including one where a suspect was wearing a panda suit.

    ‘Panda bandits’ arrested for Superior smash and grab burglaries
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    "Drinking Vessel Depicting Otherworldly Toad, Jaguar, and Serpent", Mayan, c.650-800 CE

    A painted ceramic vessel in the Codex Style. It depicts a wayob', the companion spirit of a Mayan ruler. This one is a toad which is wearing a jade bead necklace (there are two different animals, not visible, located around the back of the cup). There is also writing in Mayan glyphs, some of which declare the vessels purpose: drinking cacao.

    The painter is also known by style from other pieces of work, and in the absence of an actual name is referred to as "The Metropolitan Master". You can see the original image and some other details here.

    (Originally posted to Reddit by me in 2023)

    2

    Abammuo (gold-dust weight), Copper Alloy, Ghana (18th-19th century)

    The area of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire is one of the great gold-producing regions of the world, and from roughly 1400 CE it was a primary producer of gold dust for much of Africa and Europe -- Europeans called the region the Gold Coast and the British guinea coin was minted from gold obtained there. The Akan peoples who lived there made weights called abammuo or mrammou (among others, depending on which Akan language) for use when trading the dust. Originally geometric in form, by about 1700 they started to be cast in the shape of many different animals and objects.

    Whale-like appearance notwithstanding this is a sankofa bird perched on a stepped pyramid. The sankofa is a symbol for learning from the past in Akan culture, which is why the bird has its head turned backwards as if looking behind it. Abammuo are generally small, and this one is 3.8 by 2.2 by 2.2 cm.

    This image is copyright to the Smithsonian Institution, and used with permission. You can see the original on their website.

    (Originally posted by me to Reddit a couple years ago)

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    Solid Gold NY Giants Baseball Season Ticket given to FDR in 1931

    This is a season's ticket for the 1931 New York Giants baseball club made out of 14 carat gold. It was given to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his capacity as Governor of New York. The picture on the front is a reproduction of a 1909 image by Charles Dana Gibson (more famous as creator of the "Gibson Girl"), while the back has Roosevelt's name and "one party" as those covered by presenting the ticket at the Giants' home field, the Polo Grounds. The reverse also shows a 14K gold stamp from Lambert Brothers, the jewellers once located at 58th Street and 3rd Avenue in New York City which produced the ticket for the Giants.

    The original image can be seen here on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum's website.

    (Originally posted by me to Reddit here but I thought I'd revisit some of my favourites since I switched to Lemmy)

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