againsmiletothelife

Latest Posts by againsmiletothelife

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.

Researchers are constantly iterating and expanding on ideas that came before, which is why replication and reproducibility are so important.

Apparently, Spain and France Are Great at Keeping Treaties

In 1659, when Louis XIV of France and Philip IV of Spain met to sign the Treaty of the Pyrenees following the Thirty Years’ War, they did so on Pheasant Island, an uninhabited island in the Bidasoa river between their two nations.

Ever since, the island has remained under joint sovereignty. But only one country has sovereignty at any given time. The island is governed alternately by Spain and France, changing hands every six months.

The Lakshmi of Pompeii

But wait, you’re thinking – Lakshmi is a Hindu goddess, right? She is, the goddess of wealth, fortune and prosperity and the wife of Vishnu.

But this particular Lakshmi figurine was found in the ruins of Pompeii. It is beautiful proof of the trade links between the Roman Empire and the other great civilizations of their day.

Twitter requests of ships~ Part 1

Todoroki keeps getting portrayed as someone who’s quite aloof and detached when he’s about 5 seconds away from serious violence at any given moment

Throwback to the time when he froze the entire stadium cause he was just “upset is all”

deadass created a whole new ecosystem and a second ice age (not to mention poor, poor Sero) cause he was just UpSEt iS aLL

Also when he called the Chief of Police a “mangy mutt” and was an inch away from squaring up with him even though he just entered the room. Literally had to be restrained by Midoriya cause he was about to throw hands

but also like GODDAMN he really called the CHIEF OF POLICE a “MANGY MUTT” like the NERVE

Passive aggressively slurped soba in front of his abusive father

Slurp, slurp, bitch 

“ThATs A nAStY ScAR YoU gOt ThEre” 

SNARKS his teacher when he gets captured during the final exam “You think you’ve caught me? This is nothing. I could burn or freeze these restraints in an instant” like WOWOWOW way to give away that strategy Todoroki and undermine the intelligence of the person who assigns your grades 

 And then when Aizawa reveals the caltrops under Todoroki he goes “You’re pretending to be some kind of ninja?” DID NO ONE TELL THIS KID TO RESPECT HIS ELDERS?? WHO ALLOWED this ROASTMASTER to go unchecked for so long 

Todoroki was put in the back of the class cause he would obviously throw his pencils at Aizawa when he says something Todoroki disagrees with 

Even bakugou doesn’t talk back to his teachers but Todoroki clearly has no fucks left to give

Im just…shook

Todoroki would fight all of us in the UA parking lot and he’d probably win too cause he’s an overdramatic BITCH 

Taxidermy

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

Underground Resistance Groups during World War 2 Were Often Antisemitic

During World War II, partisan groups arose in the forests of eastern Europe. Often small bands, they were desperate people who hoped that by retreating to the forests and keeping their numbers small, they could survive Nazi occupation and potentially use guerrilla warfare to help weaken the Nazis in their area. Most were not Jewish. Most were locals who wanted to resist the occupation of their homelands.

Some number of the groups were Jewish, however. There were many reasons separate Jewish partisan groups arose, but one notable reason was anti-semitism. Jews in non-Jewish partisan groups often hid their religion for fear of their countrymen turning on them.

Norman Salsitz, for example, used seven non-Jewish identities while fighting the Nazis in two partisan groups. At the second and larger one, the AK Polish Underground, a command was given to seek out and kill Jews being hidden on a farm. The AK Polish Underground took time from fighting Nazis to kill Jews hiding from the Nazis. Let that sink in.

Norman Salsitz volunteered for the mission. He killed the Poles who had been sent with him, and rescued the Jews in hiding. He then returned to his first partisan group. It was smaller and less effective, but they did not ask him to murder innocents, for the crime of being Jewish.

Fun fact: At my university (Sapienza, Roma, Italy) we are more women then men studying math.

Come on, BYU. You can do better.

(1+9^(-4^(7*6)) )^(3^(2^85))

Contains all digits from 1-9, which is trivial, but kinda cool.

It’s also a good approximation to e, which is pretty exciting.

If I told you it was correct to four billion, sixty seven million and thirty five decimal digits, would you believe me?

Well you shouldn’t, because it’s actually correct to 18,457,734,525,360,901,453,873,570 decimal digits, which is way more than it ever should be.

Source

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.

All right, since nobody is reading this except me, I decided to use this Tumblr in the most random way ever:

I’ll go through the whole alphabet, choosing a food for every letter and writing facts, factoids and so on about it.

And I’ll do it simply ‘cause I can.

I’m ridiculously proud about this project, even if I’ll probably be the only person knowing about it.

P.S.: the food names will be in Italian, since I’m Italian XD (I’m writing in English to practise it)

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.”

taylormorley Kiss, Marry, Kill with @WildpipM and @RichardSHarmon ✨ #SW3 #The100

Hetalia World ☆ Stars - Chapter 359 Original Translation: spaghettifelice // donamoeba Scanlation: jammerlea Please link back to our Tumblr when using translated images on other sites.

Perfino a me, si direbbe...

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

He passed away at the age of 76.

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.

Winston Churchill died on the morning of January 24th, 1965. That was 70 years to the day after his own father’s death.

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.

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.

The Dinosaur That Wasn't A Hoax

In 2017, a new dinosaur was discovered – but many thought it was just a fake. You see, the dinosaur’s remains made it appear the species lived both on land and in water, a very rare thing. Also it was originally found and sold to the black market in Mongolia. Not exactly the history to inspire confidence in an upstanding scientist. But eventually it was all sorted out, the new dinosaur was named, and so here’s what we know so far about this new species.

The animal was closely related to the Velociraptor and lived around 75 million years ago. Its name was Halszkaraptor escuilliei, named after paleontologist Halszka Osmolska and fossil collector Francois Escuillie. The dinosaur’s physical characteristics were weird. It was about the size of a mallard, had razor-sharp claws, a duck-billed snout, and a long swan-like neck. Although it could run on land, it displayed many traits typical of amphibious creatures that are found today in modern birds and reptiles.

Despite its appearance and amphibious lifestyle, Halszkaraptor escuilliei is not a distant descendent of modern birds. Paleontologists therefore believe that a Halszkaraptor escuilliei is the start of a previously unknown subfamily! Pretty neat for a species that started its journey to discovery on the black market.

Do nothing in your life that will cause you to fear if it is discovered by your neighbor.

Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher, circa 300 BCE. (via historical-nonfiction)

A Bank? A Pub? The Irish Don't See The Difference

In 1970, the entire banking system in Ireland went on strike. But the country was not crippled. Pubs stepped up – after all, pub owners were very familiar with whether a patron could pay up or not. The strike ended six months later, and everything went on, the Irish economy basically unhurt.

Fun Fact 76

Even though Belarusian is the official first language of Belarus, only around 12% of the population actually speak it while 72% of the population speaks Russian. In 2014 following the annexation of Crimea, their president gave his first speech in Belarusian after 20 years in power over fears of Russian dominance in the country.

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

follow @the-future-now

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.

some really beautiful african architecture because honestly this site is so western-centric

mako

unknown

cameroon

burkina faso

mali

Ndebele

burkina faso

please add more if you can!