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submitted 3 days ago by TehBamski@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[-] cynar@lemmy.world 37 points 2 days ago

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!

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 The mighty horseman Onfim on his steed. who hunted down his teacher, who was a horrible monster Onfim and several other horsemen chase down the evil Writing Teacher. 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.

[-] SilentStorms@lemmy.dbzer0.com 33 points 3 days ago

These don't look too dissimilar to things I'd doodle when I was 6. Interesting how kids always kinda draw the same.

[-] cynar@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes

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[-] Martin@lemmy.ml 35 points 3 days ago

The fact that they dug up Oliver Cromwell's body for a posthumous execution. It's just insane on so many levels

[-] Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee 7 points 2 days ago

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 😂

[-] Martin@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

No it was by trial and meant as punishment. Quite common even, but I first heard of it in relation to Cromwell c.s.

[-] TIN@feddit.uk 62 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] AdNecrias@lemmy.pt 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Xanis@lemmy.world 28 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] tamal3@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

Upvoted bc i want someone to find and share it.

[-] Xanis@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] TehBamski@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] callouscomic@lemm.ee 86 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

[-] Revan343@lemmy.ca 1 points 14 hours ago

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

[-] nis@feddit.dk 19 points 3 days ago

Your version makes more sense 😃

[-] RandomVideos@programming.dev 33 points 3 days ago
[-] cynar@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago

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.

[-] Skua@kbin.earth 95 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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

[-] ICastFist@programming.dev 10 points 2 days ago

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/

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[-] Yearly1845@reddthat.com 75 points 3 days ago

Oxford University Is older than the Aztec civilization.

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 32 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

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[-] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 30 points 3 days ago

Harvard University is older than calculus.

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[-] Thavron@lemmy.ca 40 points 3 days ago

"Mad" Jack Churchill, who fought in the Second World War with a longbow, a basket-hilted Scottish broadsword, and a set of bagpipes.

And after the war he went on to become an early pioneer in surfing!

[-] CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 days ago

The only confirmed bow and arrow kill of WW2!

[-] AFC1886VCC@reddthat.com 18 points 3 days ago

And still survived. Legend

[-] FippleStone@aussie.zone 19 points 3 days ago

Allegedly German soldiers said that they didn't shoot him because they assumed he'd lost his mind, and took pity on him

[-] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 22 hours ago

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."

[-] ShaunaTheDead@fedia.io 54 points 3 days ago

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

[-] CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml 46 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] theshatterstone54@feddit.uk 16 points 3 days ago

Report to the FSF so they can help you sue North Korea.

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[-] shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee 38 points 3 days ago

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.

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[-] CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml 64 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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."

[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 33 points 3 days ago

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.

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[-] VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 30 points 3 days ago

There was a roman emperor named Pupienus which is pronounced poopy anus

[-] 01101000_01101001@mander.xyz 8 points 2 days ago

Biggus Dickus

[-] Macaroni_ninja@lemmy.world 19 points 3 days ago

What is all this insolence? You will find yourself in gladiator school vewy quickly with wotten behavior like that.

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[-] Fargeol@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 days ago

"Well it's a joke name sir!"

[-] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 37 points 3 days ago

Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.

[-] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yep. It was 50/50 given that he only knew it was moving from between two points somehow. Tough luck, Benny. (Specifically, he was the one that figured out charge is conserved)

Now we all have to deal with circuit diagrams that don't match what's actually happening inside the components, which confuses at least me when I have to think about electrochemical reactions, semiconductors and/or induction.

Edit: He actually didn't have complete circuits at that time, it was all static experiments where charges were moved manually. Fixed.

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[-] kbin_space_program@kbin.run 37 points 3 days ago

End of the bronze age. Have a set of letters between citystate rulers, one writing that help is urgently needed as seaborne invaders have been spotted nearby and his military is off with the hittite empire.

The response back, in modern slang amounts to "lol ur fucked."

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[-] call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 39 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

San Francisco had an emperor.

(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!)

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[-] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 27 points 3 days ago
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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
150 points (98.7% liked)

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