History Remembering The Telegraph I vaguely remember learning about a defunct medium of communication called the telegraph when I was in school. Recently it struck me that I knew almost nothing about this technology that had been the fastest medium of communication available for almost a hundred years
food Productivity Growth And Olive Oil Production I was wondering how olive oil made recently, and curiosity led me to contrast methods of production over the past two thousand years: An olive press from Biblical times: An old-fashioned olive oil mill (unclear how old it really is though): Large scale modern
History The Antikythera Mechanism The Antikythera mechanism was a primitive computer, created in Greece over two thousand years ago to predict the positions of planets. Researchers at UCL made this fascinating video that covers some recent discoveries they made about the machine: Besides the fact that Greek astronomers
Dailies Street Food, 2000 Years Ago A well preserved street food stall was found in Pompeii recently (photos). It must have been in active use before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (79 AD). It's interesting how some things have changed little in two thousand years. You can still find very
Dailies Chauvet Cave Virtual Tour Probably the best way to view the 30,000 year old cave paintings at the Chauvet Cave is using the virtual tour created by the French government.
Dailies Columbia Ice Age Paintings Remarkable find: ice age (> 12,500 years old) rock paintings in Columbia show now extinct animals like Mastodons.
Dailies Beethoven The Businessman Luis Dias on Beethoven's business life: Once Beethoven had poured his creative energy to the fullest into a composition, he regarded it as commercial property, deserving the best possible price on the most favourable terms. Of the hundreds of his letters that have survived,
Dailies Flood Myths Mark Isaak has collected a large number of flood myths from across the world here. Here's one from Papua New Guinea, notice the resemblance to the Noah story: The wife of a very good man saw a very big fish. She called her husband,
Dailies Why Was Stonehenge Built? The AskHistorians subreddit on what the best accepted explanation for Stonehenge is: They believe that Stonehenge is a domain of the dead; there are no signs of habitation there, there have been many high-status graves found, they suspect that the stone material is associated
Dailies The Future of Reading Depends on the Future of Learning Difficult to Learn Things My takeaway from Alan Kay's 2013 article was that in the future it will be important to invest time into learning deep, complex skills that help us navigate a more complex world. A great example of such a skill that people learnt relatively recently
Dailies How The Ancients Shaved A few days ago, I found myself wondering when people started shaving and how. Sculptures of Roman emperors depict most of them as clean shaven. How did people shave back then? Bust of Roman emperor Augustus / Source: Sailko / CC BY-SA 3.0Well it turns
Dailies A Long History of a Short Block A Long History of a Short Block: Four Centuries of Development Surprises on a Single Stretch of a New York City Street is a paper that studies the land use of a ~500 feet long city block in Manhattan from the 1600s to today.
Dailies Edison's Diary The diary of Thomas Edison, covering the short period from 12 - 21 July 1885. Not much of scientific interest here, just some amusing bits: It has just occurred to me that the brain may digest certain portions of food, say the ethereal part,
Dailies What Ancient Egyptian Sounded Like How researchers figured out what Ancient Egyptian sounded like:
Dailies The Tabula Peutingeriana The Tabula Peutingeriana was an ancient map believed to have first been constructed by the ancient Romans, although the copy we have today was drawn in 1265. While reading Charles' Allen Coromandel: A Personal History of South India, I learnt about this map, and
Dailies The Tiny Roman Empire The Roman Empire was huge: 5 million sq. km at its peak, larger than India (3.2 million sq. km), about half the size of the United States (9.8 million sq. km). And yet by population it was tiny: ~60 million, 5x smaller
Dailies The Dream Machine The Dream Machine is part biography of early computing pioneer J. C. R. Licklider, and part history of the computing revolution that started in the 1960's that eventually led to the internet, the personal computer, and interactive computing. Here's a short list of things
Dailies The Dispilio Tablet In 1992 there was a remarkable archaeological finding in Greece: writing on a wooden tablet that turned out to be 7000 years old. From Wikipedia: The Dispilio tablet is a wooden tablet bearing inscribed markings, unearthed during George Hourmouziadis's excavations of Dispilio in Greece,
Dailies Online Museums One silver lining I hope we see from the pandemic is more museums creating virtual experiences. Google Arts & Culture already has a good collection of virtual exhibits from museums around the world. Here's one I've been enjoying recently: The Getty Book of the
Dailies Milling Grain Food historian Rachel Ludan has a really interesting article on how tedious milling grain (especially maize) used to be, particularly for women. To me this again goes to show how laborious life was in the past, and how thankful we should be for the
Dailies What Happened To Easter Island? By Aurbina - Own work, Public DomainI'd always been curious about the origins of the giant statues of Easter Island. Why, and how were they made? Then I found that Jared Diamond had written eloquently not only about the origins of the statues, but
Dailies Barber-Surgeons Physicians who were university trained during the Renaissance considered surgery beneath them. They relegated operations—which consisted mainly of bloodletting and amputations—to the barbers; although they were merely apprenticeship trained, they had the sharpest knives. Paré was among this guild of barber-surgeons.
Dailies How Medievals Built Bridges What a reminder of how ridiculously hard engineering is: It still baffles me that we somehow figured out how to do such incredibly complex things.
Dailies Origins Of The Wheel How the wheel came to be. In a nutshell, someone realized rolling heavy objects on logs made them easier to transport. Incremental improvements from there eventually led to the invention of the wheeled cart.
Dailies A Snowball Fight From 1896 Via Reddit, this amazing colorized video of a snowball fight from Lyon, 1896:
