From the Costanza Collection:
Posted on 11/16/2018 6:12:12 AM PST by artichokegrower
Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
L. Sprague DeCamp wrote an alternate history novel in 1939, “Lest Darkness Fall”, the classic of the genre, which begins when historian Martin Padway is hurled back to the Rome of 535 AD by an errant lightningbolt.....
I like history. Civil War. Maybe I could be a professor, or something.
“The End”
Doors
I Like Pie,,
I like current events, I would like to be a marine biologist and save all human kind. :)
Well, yes, the flush toilet was important.
More important was the sewage treatment system BETWEEN the flush toilets and the river!
And then, next important, is the water treatment system BETWEEN the river and the flush toilets. And sinks.
I dont know. My first house had a privy, not so bad.
I totally agree. I have a modest standard of living, yet I have conveniences the greats of the past could scarcely conceive of. It would border on magic to them.
Ice core data from Greenland has been used to date eruptions, but not all of those eruptions have been attributed to any known volcano. The supposed signal for the supposed Theran eruption turned out to be no such thing, when someone finally bothered to look into it.
A big volcanic kaboom can have serious localized consequences, but in all of recorded history, only Tambora has scattered its effects over most of the world.
Also, the crater diameter is 6km, not 5 miles. It's really cool looking though. There are people who climb down into it, that's a good bucket list item, especially if it's right at the last item.
If he'd have banned chariot racing *before* the Nika Riots, his reigh would look a lot better to me. He had very able generals and a good army, and managed to reconquer a good bit of the lost portions of the Roman Empire, but he overtaxed and overspent and didn't come up with any innovations to revolutionize the economy. And as Sean Connery might say to Trebec, his wife was a whore.
There's a new find of terracotta figures in a Han Chinese tomb -- but they're miniatures. Pretty neat looking the photo I saw. And the article noted that the ruler had died shortly after a comet (making it possible to date the sighting). They kept good records in China of eclipses, comets, and such, and as their interest was astrological, the records tended to survive.
The *actual* flush toilet is modern. Earlier commodes used continuous flows of water to whisk away the waste. Still not bad. Of course, in Rome (for example) it all went into the cloaca maxima, then into the Tiber, then into the sea.
That all makes 21st century America look boring.
I didn’t know that!
I will have to do some more reading.
Thank You Very Much!
Well, I understand that the Mother Earth types have designed some nice ones.
But the ones I’ve had to use were no piece of cake. Plus, they had spiders and maybe snakes in them.
All privies have spiders and snakes.
The best ones are in the far end of the shed, on the barn end, away from the main house. So you dont have to walk outside.
If only I could go back to the year 536 and know what I no now.
From the Costanza Collection:
The local news gal says this is “puffy coat weather”
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