The Emu War
looking forward to the movie!
The Alberta Rat Wars
Uh oh I’ve not heard about those!
Tell ya what, you go fight a herd of dinosaurs and see who wins
~Everyone thinks it’s funny until they face off on an emu~
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.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.
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‽
I bet this was the medieval version of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes
This is a great thread
and the movie just came out.
Probably the one about tin cans and can openers. IIRC, can opener was invented decades after the tin
How did they open cans before then?
Originally tin cans were large things meant for military campaigns, so they used a chisel or similar large stabby thing.
I actually don’t know. Presumably with a knife
To be fair that makes a lot more sense than it happening the other way around
For a few years you just had to find a sharp rock
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.
Your version makes more sense 😃
Rasputin having such a massive cock that Boney M had to made a song about it.
But the ladies begged, “Don’t you try to do it, please!”
(He even suggested 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.
In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.
“A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon, the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys, and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness.”[26]
During the sign-off theme, the phone began ringing. Houseman picked it up and the furious caller announced he was mayor of a Midwestern town, where mobs were in the streets. Houseman hung up quickly, “[f]or we were off the air now and the studio door had burst open.”[4]: 404
How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven’t you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?)
This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.
Wasn’t that just one newspaper reporting it which was more or less just and advert for the play?
No. In fact, I quoted the first-hand accounts of the people in charge of the broadcast.
Yes, there may have been less of a panic than as advertised, but it wasn’t a gross (or intentional) distortion. The drama was also only broadcast once.
The offices of the city of Trenton, New Jersey, a location within the dramatization, had its communications paralyzed for 3 hours due to the calls made to ask the city well.
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
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
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/
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.
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.
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.
The US newspaper billionaire William Randolph Hearst owned enough of congress that he started a war with Spain.
“You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war”
Benjamin Franklin got the flow of electricity wrong.
Yep. It was 50/50 given that he only knew it was going in a circle. 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.
Can you eli5? Or like I’m a dumb dumb idiot? Please.
Electricity is one of those things I so badly want to understand and just seem to not be able to.
On diagrams you’d use + as the “source” of elecricity, i.e. you assume electricity flows from + to - (poaitive to negative). Electricity as far as physics goes is an effect created by electrons, which are defined as negative in charge.
DC is electricity where the literal flow of electrons from point A to point B make the current (so it flows from negative to positive, since it’s the flow of “negative” electrons that carries electricity). Benjamin Franklin assumed logically that electricity obviously must flow from positive to negative (since it’s the logical choice), but alas, he was wrong as far as history sees it. So today, whenever you’re dealing with electrical diagrams current/electricity is assumed to flow from + to - while in the physical domain it’s the negatively charged electrons that create what we call electricity.
AC is a bit different - here electrons aren’t flowing directly from point A to point B, but rather wiggling about or “alternating” in place and it’s this alternating movement that carries the (still negative) charge. But even for AC it still holds true that electrical charge is the “negative” charge of electrons and that this movement of electrons alternating in place enables them to move this “negative” charge of theirs from one place to another.
I assume you know about the saying “opposites attract” - for electricity and charge it’s literally true, so you can view power consumption as the “positive” charge of protons (which is immovable because protons are bound to the cores of their atom), while it’s the “negative” charge of electrons which are located in the outer shells of metal atoms that can leave their atoms and move their charge that are viewed as the source/carrier of electricsl energy.
I put negative and positive in quotes because to get back to your question about defining why Franklin was wrong:
As it stands, there are two conventions on electricity. One is used in diagrams and often attributed to Franklin, the one that says that electricity flows from the positive (+) to the negative (-) pole. The other is the physics convention that protons hold positive charge while electrons hold negative charge, and this is where the disparity comes from. I don’t know which convention was chronologically earlier, but I assume it’s the physics one since Franklin is the one cited as “wrong”.
Obligatory I’m not an electrical engineer - this is only what I remember from my physics classes. Please assume it mostly correct but maybe not technically for every minute detail (the only use of “power” is technically very wrong among other things, but that’s the gist of it).
Okay, so I see someone else already did an effortpost, so I’ll just add on.
Benjamin Franklin assumed logically that electricity obviously must flow from positive to negative (since it’s the logical choice), but alas, he was wrong as far as history sees it.
Well, I’m sure he knew it was a guess. He was a smart man. He picked glass as the thing that picks up “electric fluid” in static electricity experiments, becoming “positively charged”, in other words a positive excess of fluid, when in fact it loses electrons. Until someone invented vacuum tubes a century or so later nobody could tell the difference.
Positive-to-negative is called “conventional current”, and circuit diagrams are still drawn that way. Unfortunately, the charge and direction of the particles moving (rather than just that they are moving) can become important if you want to understand electrochemistry, for example. Metal ions are positively charged (missing an electron), and so they’re going to come off of the electrode where electrons being removed, and plate on to the electrode where they’re being added. You have to remember the conventional current is opposite to the actual current to picture a battery running a circuit, and if it’s connected to a bunch of digital chips in a complicated way, I, at least, can get lost.
If that’s still unclear, any further questions are welcome.
Electricity is the flow of electrons, who move from negative to positive, the opposite of what you would normally expect.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m a welder, but it always made more sense to me that electricity flows from the negative. Like , if the positive moved, wouldn’t you change the element of the wire after a while? It also helps that you can tell the difference if an arc is positive or negative relative to the stinger depending on how the metal reacts, at least to a welder. I know that doesn’t make any sense at all but it does to another welder lol
So, when Ben Franklin named them, it was in terms of something like “excess of electricity”. A positive excess of charge, like in the glass he used to define the term, is actually a deficit (negative excess) of electrons, which are the real fluid.
Later on Crooks (I think?) figured out that if he cleared all the air out of a tube with mercury, he could force electrons out of the metal into open space, at the negative cathode end, and at that point they realised it was backwards.
I find it fascinating that electricity is fast enough that this is a thing. You would never get this wrong with water, and if you did things wouldn’t work right, but electricity is basically instant.
Interestingly, electron flow is only a few mm/minute, on average. The field propagation travels at around 2/3 the speed of light (200,000,000m/s).
… Whyyyyy?!
W H A T
Risky click but worth it.
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.
