“Not a single century passed in which this spot was not being used and transformed, and every transformation is still here. And all that time, from the first sacred spring, to the Mithraism, to today’s Irish Dominicans, this spot has been sacred.”
“Not a single century passed in which this spot was not being used and transformed, and every transformation is still here. And all that time, from the first sacred spring, to the Mithraism, to today’s Irish Dominicans, this spot has been sacred.”
“Astell studied astronomy with John Flamsteed between 1697 and 1698, and her notes in Les Principes demonstrate that she had already attained a high level of understanding in the sciences prior to her formal studies with the Astronomer Royal.”
“In a famous anecdote in the Confessions, Augustine describes seeing Ambrose of Milan reading on his own without making a sound. Ambrose was not the first person in history to read silently, but his quiet, private reading was unusual enough to make an impression.”
“Using the neural-net tool Artbreeder, Photoshop and historical references, I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors.”
“The Okmok II eruption lasted from 43 BCE to 41 BCE, but its effects on the other side of the world lasted more than a decade. Ancient writers describe crop failures and famine in northern Italy and northern Greece from April 43 BCE through 36 BCE.”
“Roosevelt and his advisers never had a master plan. Rather, in the administration’s first 100 days, they implemented a flurry of laws and regulations. If those programs worked, they remained. If they didn’t, they were dropped, to be replaced by others.”
“The sharp turns and the difference in floor levels at the junction prove conclusively that the tunnel was excavated from both ends. At the junction itself, the floor level drops 60 centimeters from north to south, a discrepancy of less than one-eighth of a percent of the distance excavated.”
“The innovation that Johannes Gutenberg is said to have created was small metal pieces with raised backwards letters, arranged in a frame, coated with ink, and pressed to a piece of paper, which allowed books to be printed more quickly. But Choe Yun-ui did that—and he did it 150 years before Gutenberg was even born.”
“A client would come in to work out a billing procedure, and after Jackson had put the relevant numbers on a sheet — in light pencil, so erasures could be easily made — various questions would come up. For example, if the billing procedure was based on a 15 percent interest rate, what would happen if the rate went up to 18 percent? To find out, the whole sheet would have to be redone. Each figure would have to be punched into a hand calculator and then checked by one of Jackson’s employees.”
“The Nazis were dedicated trolls who weaponized their insincerity to take advantage of liberal societies ill-equipped to confront them. This was not done just for political advantage—rather, the insincerity itself was a moral act, an expression of contempt for the weak.”
“In [Edward Baptist’s] 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism … he rejects ‘plantations’ (a term pregnant with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of ‘labor camps’; instead of ‘slave-owners’ (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human beings), he uses ‘enslavers.’ Small changes with big implications.”
“Before California was West, it was North and it was East: the uppermost periphery of the Mexican Empire, and the arrival point for Chinese immigrants making the perilous journey from Guangdong.”