One of Sir Issac Newton’s famous phrases is
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!
The fact that they dug up Oliver Cromwell’s body for a posthumous execution. It’s just insane on so many levels
Did they not just dig it up so they could put his head on a spike for all to see?
Ask anyone from Ireland or Scotland at that time if it was justified and your head would be on a feckin spike for even questioning it 😂
No it was by trial and meant as punishment. Quite common even, but I first heard of it in relation to Cromwell c.s.
The fact they passed on legit information on d day, is still mind blowing. They relied on delays on the German side to make the information out of date by the time it would arrive. The German radio operator not being on station to receive it just made it funnier.
There are lots of great answers here so I want to post something entirely silly and much much more recent:
About 8-9 years ago someone on Reddit transcribed and revised the entirety of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven to instead be about an Emu.
For the life of me I have never been able to find it again.
Oh great. First, the Emus won a war against Australia, greatly boosting their egos. And later on, they started censoring their mention online.
In other news… there seems to be a bird in my backyard that keeps taping on my backdoor window.
Upvoted bc i want someone to find and share it.
Good luck. It wasn’t a post, it was a top level comment and I have a dim memory of it only being slightly related to the post topic.
This is a great thread
The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her
I had to look that up, it’s just too good to pass.
(Cassius Dio, contemporary historian) tells us that the empress teased her companion (the wife of Argentocoxos, a Caledonian chief) by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:
“We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”
A bit further below, however
The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above.
Sauce - https://senchus.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/julia-and-the-caledonian-women/
That checks out for Scotland.
TIL Rome once had an empress.
Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I’m afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control
That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there’s no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses
TIL. Did the Greeks get less patriarchal over time? In the classical era they were Taliban-tier and complained they even had to see women.
I’m afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene’s reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her
We have proof that kids have never paid attention in school. For example, in Novgorod around 1250 A.D. a six year old boy named Onfim (later called Anthemius of Novgorod) was supposedly practicing his writing and basic arithmetic. Much of what archeologists have found were doodles of him being a heroic knight
who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster 
. These were buried in a waste pile, where they were rediscovered by archeologists. They are a treasured part of Slavic history and there is now a statue of him in his hometown.Teacher has threw it on the trash. 😂
Imagine how his teacher feels. The little shit doodles all through his class, and who do we build a statue of? The kid‽
These don’t look too dissimilar to things I’d doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.
It’s fascinating the stages children through in drawing. It says a lot about how the young mind develops. The “head with arms and legs” stage seems universal, and amusing.
I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
A dude had heard about some other kind of god, and so he randomly looked up at the sky and basically said “if you let me win this battle, I will convert my entire country”…
…and he won, and so Roman Catholicism was born cause he said so.
Later, some dude was like “screw your catholicism, I don’t like my wife any more, I’ll go make my own church with hookers and blow and divorce my wife,” and so the Church of England was made cause he said so.
I may have oversimplified these stories but pretty sure that’s about it.
I doubted the blow, but it could be true; turns out the Columbian Exchange started around 50 years before the Church of England broke from Catholicism
Your version makes more sense 😃
Oxford University Is older than the Aztec civilization.
And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn’t fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.
The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we’d all be speaking an Australian language or something.
I read about it once. I think it was up to medieval times where sahara had lots of green batches and oasis? Though thats in the range of natural climate change.
Btw. most Alpine passes were unpassable from 900 to 1300, we had a mini ice age then.
Nah, green Sahara ended pretty early in the bronze age. The old kingdom Egyptians were really just getting the tail end of it. It was definitely natural, I don’t think that’s in question; the (non-mini) ice age was simply ending, about on schedule. It would have been a much slower change than what’s happening now.
There were a few trees that managed to hang on in one area, though, with the last being “accidentally” run over by the colonial-era French.
Harvard University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than Harvard University.
Edit: Which isn’t really surprising, but I posted anyway for the sake of completeness. Oxford is so old it’s not super clear when in the middle ages it started.
There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was “As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge.”
The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.
He even tried it a second time
Dinosaurs existed on the other side of the galaxy!
As in, it was so long ago that Earth has done half of a great cycle since then.
Was finding the number odd (expecting a longer orbit) but looks like the solar system has already orbited the center of the milky way 18 to 20 times. Imagine that much change in earth in 20 years.
That North and South Korea maintain a fax line between their countries… which they use almost exclusively to send threats and insults to each other.
Also related to North Korea, the hilarious fact that Dennis Rodman, former NBA player, is so well liked by the Kim family that he’s basically a diplomat to North Korea, or at least the one they turn to when things really start going badly.
Proof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/12/20/north-and-south-korea-exchange-faxes-threatening-to-attack-each-other/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-sends-fax-threatening-strike-south-korea-without-notice-flna2d11781034 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-KRTB-4721
Another fun fact about North Korea: They have their own Linux Distro by the name Red Star OS, which has its 3.0 version leaked to the Internet, while the newest known version is 4.0.
My observations while trying out the leaked 3.0 are:
*It is a fedora derivative,its package manager made me think it’s something close to CentOS 6.3.
*It’s visuals are really similar to Mac OS. Perhaps the state official behind this project really liked Mac?
*Every piece of software installed has its credits removed, they have help prompts that refer to them being made in some sort of university.
*It leaves strange markings to created files. I couldn’t understand what they do exactly, but I assume it could be used to track the computer that made the files.
*Their browser does not support https, and does not have English support at all.
*Packages intended for developers aren’t installed by default, doesn’t have a remote repository but instead was intended to be installed with a physical media drive.
*Just for fun, I tried to request the Linux kernel’s source code that the developers behind used, as it’s licensed by GPL. I was unsuccessful; which means this is the first time a state sponsored software is violating GPL.
Report to the FSF so they can help you sue North Korea.
Wow that’s interesting! Gotta be at least in the running for the rarest Linux distro ever
There exists state sponsored Linux distros for various reasons. As far as i can recall China, India and Turkey has their distros available publically. I also remember reading about a distro Russia was working on, but I don’t remember what happened to it. Could be a project to use internally by Russian govt.
“Mad” Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.
The only confirmed bow and arrow kill of WW2!
And after the war he went on to become an early pioneer in surfing!
And still survived. Legend
Allegedly German soldiers said that they didn’t shoot him because they assumed he’d lost his mind, and took pity on him
You’d think it’d make them do the opposite, idk about you but I’d be more scared of that guy than regular troops and I’d be gunning for him. “He’s clearly crazy, lord knows what he’ll do.”
The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn’t understand it and was “beaten to death” by a French mob after it descended to the ground.
Wasn’t he also on death row? He was offered a pardon, if he survived.
Yes, they did that for all those experiments back then.
I’m skeptical. Can I bother you for a source?
Okay, so it was actually unmanned, and it was a hydrogen balloon, but it does seem to be a pretty widely repeated story from a contemporary newspaper. This was shortly after the first hot air balloon flight and might have had less fanfare, so it seems a bit more reasonable that peasants 21 km away wouldn’t have heard anything about it until the large levitating blob was coming at them.
Wait, I said manned? D’Oh!
(He even “decreed” the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)
Hey, that dude was in West of Loathing. Now I know he was a real dude.
And the city just humored him.
