Do Nothing In Your Life That Will Cause You To Fear If It Is Discovered By Your Neighbor.

Leonardo Da Vinci May Have Drawn The First Landscape In European Art

On August 5th, 1473, in his notebook with pen and ink, Leonardo da Vinci tried to depict a panorama of the rocky hills and lush, green valley surrounding the Arno River near Vinci. The aerial view was nothing he could have seen naturally. It was rather a fantasy of what birds might see, flying overhead – but with some imaginative additions courtesy of Leonardo.

Other artists had drawn and painted landscapes as backdrops, but with the Arno River drawing, Leonardo was doing something different. He was drawing a landscape by itself, for its own beauty. This makes it a contender to be the first landscape in European art.

What's Up With Anglo-Saxon Names?

Anglo-Saxon names tended to be made up of two elements, combined to have a particular meaning. For instance, Æthelstan (considered the first King of England united) is formed from Æthel, meaning “noble” and Stan, meaning “stone.”

Within families the first part of a name might be reused many times. It was a sort of marker that people were related – each would get a unique second half, of course. Sharing a name’s first part appeared especially common in aristocratic families. But it seems to have been widespread among Anglo-Saxons.

In the 1000s, when England was conquered by the Danes and then the Normans, new naming practices were introduced and the two-part naming structure fell out of usage.

Taxidermy

I know that “stuffed my face” is an idiom because you can’t really stuff anyone’s face, unless you are a taxidermist. 

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

What Was The First Available Antibiotic?

To my surprise, it is not penicillin! Instead it was an antibiotic named Prontosil. Developed in the 1930s in Nazi Germany, by Bayer, it was a clever impostor that mimicked bacteria’s food: they ate prontosil and starved to death. Prontosil and drugs derived from it saved millions of lives up till the 1960’s. Its creator, Gerhard Domagk, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts.

Perfino a me, si direbbe...

Franco Scandurra, “Il medico della mutua” (Luigi Zampa, 1968).

Two Baby Girls, Who Lived and Died in the Last Ice Age, Reveal Lost American Ancestor Group

The two infants were ceremonially buried by a previously unknown population of ancient humans around 11,500 years ago. Their remains were found at Upward Sun River, a site in Alaska. DNA analyses show that the two girls were likely cousins, and descend from people separated from a population in eastern Asia, which remained isolated for thousands of years before migrating into Alaska, sometime after 15,000 years ago.

Named the Ancient Beringians — for the Bering Land Bridge that once connected North America to Asia — they were a “sister” population, or clade, that shared recent common ancestors with modern Indigenous North and South Americans. Their tool technology also appears to descend from Asian tools. Both the human remains at Upward Sun River and modern Native Americans were descended from the same ancestral source, which carried a mixture of East Asian and Mal’ta-related ancestry (the Mal’ta were an ancient population near Lake Baikal in modern Siberia, known largely from the remains of a four year old boy who died around 24,000 years ago).

Of course, all this latest find shows is that the Ancient Beringians existed about 11,500 years ago, and that they descended from the same group as modern Native Americans. We do not know what happened to this population after these two little girls died. This find does not tell us if the Ancient Beringians persisted, intermarrying with what would become modern North and South Americans. It does not tell us if they died out, perhaps because of climate change at the end of the Ice Age making their way of life untenable, or even because of conflict with other indigenous groups. These two young relatives raise many questions, and answer only a few.

“You want to talk history, be prepared to be schooled.” (via)

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Sì, sto cercando disperatamente di non pensare alle elezioni

Sogno un giorno di scrivere un romanzo famoso. Ma famoso in tutto il mondo, famoso che lo leggono pure in Tibet, famoso che ci scrivono le fanfiction.

E lo voglio rendere così dolorosamente e realmente italiano da far soffrire chiunque fuori da qui perché “HO TROPPE COSE DA IMPARARE PER POTERCI SCRIVERE FANFICTION!!1!!1”

Li voglio vedere dannarsi per capire come viaggiare per la penisola, capire come funziona la scuola, capire come funziona la burocrazia, capire come funziona la nostra vita e basta.

Mi sono rotta di questo mondo fandomico fatto al 90% da stereotipi anglo-americani.

Voglio gli americani che vanno sul sito della Sapienza per capire come funziona la nostra università, scandagliare la rete per sapere come si chiama la marca più famosa di gel per capelli, studiare cosa sono le merendine del Mulino Bianco, spulciare la programmazione RAI per sapere cosa vediamo la sera.

E poi voglio gli italiani che li prendono a vergate virtuali urlando NON AVETE CAPITO NIENTE ogni volta che scrivono qualche cazzata.

Vojo er panico.

Questa non me l’aspettavo...

Medieval Japan Was A Great Place To Be Gay

By the 1300s, Japanese samurai had started taking their proteges as lovers. Usually, this was an older man with a younger boy. It was so common that one samurai said, “A young man without a pledged, elder he-lover is likened to a young girl without a fiance.”

Same-age male love was normal, too. A pair of aging male lovers, they said, were like “two old cherry trees still in bloom.”