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Judging by how certain American cities smell these days, you’d think cannabis was invented last week. But that spike in enthusiasm, as well as in public indulgence, comes as only a recent chapter in that substance’s very long history. In fact, says the presenter of the PBS Eons video above, humanity began cultivating it “in […]

More than thirty years after the formal dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, few around the world have a clear understanding of how life actually worked there. That holds less for the larger political and economic questions than it does for the routine mechanics of day-to-day existence. These had a way of being […]

Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and wake up in the distant future. But as often seems to have been the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French got there first. Almost 50 years before Washington Irving’s short story, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s utopian novel L’An […]

Palaeontologists have described 3 new species of extinct megafauna kangaroos which lived from about 5 million to 40,000 years ago. The megafaunal macropodids in the genus Protemnodon would have looked something like a grey kangaroo but were generally squatter and more muscular. One new species named as part of the study, Protemnodon viator, weighed up […]

Our primary concern in this chapter will be Iran, though toward the end we will shift the focus to Central Asia.  We can best begin with a first-order approximation of the pattern of Iranian history across the whole period.  It has four major features.  The first is the survival of something called Iran, as both […] The post Michael Cook on Iran appeared first...

The author is Alex Fernandes, and the subtitle is The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell.  A very good and well-written book, here is one short excerpt: The First Republic is sixteen years of unrelenting chaos, one that sets the scene for the fascist state that follows it. Between 1910 and 1926 Portugal goes through eight presidents […] The post *The Carnation Revolution* appeared first on...

In Don DeLillo’s 1982 novel “The Names,” an American businessman living in Athens can’t quite bring himself to visit its most iconic monument. “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” he says. “It daunted me, that somber rock.” He prefers “to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring”; when he catches...

These topics seem underexplored to me: Montesquieu Economics in the Talmud Rise of econometrics in the 19th century The Irish economists, including Cairnes and Longfield The last 50 years of economics are in general very poorly covered Works in any foreign language you might read Chinese economic thought Economic thought in India The funding of […] The post History of economic thought paper ideas...

Geolffrey Mena is a 35-year-old software engineer currently based in Nicaragua. He is passionate about understanding the principles, methodologies, and patterns of this field. He excels in development with Python, Golang, and JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.

Published at LXer: Atuin is a modern shell history CLI utility that stores data in the SQLite database and offers a public server to sync data across multiple machines. Read More......

Research has shown that Neanderthal and modern humans organised their living spaces similarly. “Like Homo sapiens, Neanderthals organized their living space in a structured way, according to the different tasks that took place there and to their needs,” says lead author of new research, Amélie Vallerand from the University of Montreal, Canada. “So, this is […]

An excellent piece, here is one excerpt I enjoyed in particular: Cowen reads the John Maynard Keynes of The General Theory “as writing about an economy where uncertainty was much higher than usual, investment was highly unstable, fiscal policy was unable to fill in the gap, there was a risk or even reality of a downward spiral […] The post Robert Whaples reviews *GOAT* appeared first...

"The invention of the dunk tank clown shows just how far the line of what is considered appropriate for a society has moved over the decades." 'The Last of the Dunk Tank Clowns.'. (archiveorg) "This attraction is now virtually obsolete. Outdoor Amusement Business Association president Greg Chiecko was quoted as claiming he polled his members about dunk tank clowns and that "most say they...

At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t […] The post The $20 bill gets picked up,...

A new analysis of the fossil record shows that dinosaurs bucked an ecological trend known as Bergmann’s rule. The rule was put forward by German biologist Carl Bergmann in 1847. It suggests that larger animals are found in colder environments. It is most often applied to birds and mammals. For example, the largest penguins are […]

It’s long been argued that the means of production influence social, cultural and psychological processes. Rice farming, for example, requires complex irrigation systems under communal management and intense, coordinated labor. Thus, it has been argued that successful rice farming communities tend to develop people with collectivist orientations, and cultural ways of thinking that emphasize group […] The post Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of...

What did ancient Egyptians sound like? What did they eat and drink? What ancient Egyptian medicine and tools do we still use in modern times? Why did they practice mummification? Above, Laurel Bestock, a professor from Brown University, discusses everything you ever wanted to know about Ancient Egypt. Not a stranger to popular media productions—Bestock […]

From University of Sydney news Unwrapped ancient Egyptian mummified body parts will be returned to the University of Sydney’s Museum store while it works to implement better practices with Egyptian communities and authorities.  The University of Sydney’s museum is home to Australia’s largest permanent collection of Egyptian antiquities, a holding of more than 5,000 items, […]

If we want to know the precise geographical location of, say, a particular church in Madrid, video arcade in Tokyo or coffee shop in Addis Ababa, we can figure it out in a matter of seconds. This is, in historical terms, a recent development indeed: many of us remember when the most detailed cartographical information […]

New privacy-preserving robotic cameras Appliances with in-built cameras are becoming increasingly common in homes and workplaces. But these internet-connected devices come with the real risk of private images and videos being accessed by third parties. Researchers at the Australian Centre for Robotics have created a new approach to restoring this privacy by designing cameras that […]

One does not need to be a scholar of late antiquity to notice how often Jesus speaks of trials, of officers dragging the insolvent to jail. The Lord's Prayer, quite explicitly, requests — in order — adequate nourishment, debt relief, avoidance of arraignment before the courts, and rescue from the depredations of powerful but unprincipled men. [Note: The first 3 paragraphs are rather opaque...

Source Control Management (SCM) Systems, have a long and rich history. As the systems evolved, so have their concepts, use cases and adoption over time. While SCMs are ubiquitous in modern software development, they have been fairly novel in the 80s and 90s, and arguable it took the rise of Git and Github for them t...

The Hat Historian provides short histories of various hats in English (et en français,) from the Top Hat (le Haut-de-Forme) to the Bowler (le chapeau melon,) from the Tricorn (le Tricorne) to the Picklehaube (le Casque à pointe,) from the Custodian Helmet (le Casque de Bobby) to the Hard Hat (le Casque de Chantier,) and, of course, the Beret (le béret.)