Hi, I’m Infrapink! I used to be @infrapink, but that instance is down. I’m also @infrapink and @infrapink
The Irish view Cromwell the way Palestinians view Netanyahu. The English treatment of Ireland under Cromwell is a lot like the modern treatment of Palestine by Israel, which is why Irish people are so pro-Palestine.
One thing that often surprises English people who move here is just how much we hate Cromwell.
Choosing the university near my home village.
If you’re still in secondary school, only apply to units far enough away that your parents will have no choice but to let you move out.
Workin’ 8 to 5 What a way to make a livin’
Where do you work and are they hiring?
You have it backwards. Analogue clocks are the way they are because of the 12-hour convention.
In ancient times, people did not have the concept of a “civil day”; they viewed day and night as separate things which alternated.
The Assyrians divided the day into six equal parts, and the night into six equal parts, called ush. But because sunrise and sunset move around over the course of the year, the lengths of day and night vary, and thus one ush during the day would not be the same length as an ush at night except around the equinoxes.
The Babylonians divided ushes in two to make hours, because it was easier to do astronomy in 12s than 6es. This resulted in 12 hours in a day and 12 hours at night, but daytime hours were still different lengths to nighttime hours, and the lengths of hours still varied over the course of the year.
The Greeks partially adopted the Babylonian system; they divided the day into 12 hours but the night was divided into four watches. The Romans copied the Greek system, but later went full Babylonian with 12 hours at night as well. (I feel like this coïncided with the rise of Christianity, but I have no evidence). The Romans introduced the concept of the civil day beginning at midnight (which the Chinese independently came up with), and over time, this led to the idea of 12 hours from midnight to noon, and 12 hours from noon to midnight. That idea postdates Rome, however; Roman hours were reckoned from sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise.
Assyrian astronomical knowledge seems to have reached China via India, as traditional Chinese timekeeping divides the civil day into 12 shi. Ancient shi were like Assyrian ushes; they were either 1/6 of a day or 1/6 of a night. Originally, midnight and noon fell in the middle of a shi, but this was changed to shi starting at midnight to make administration and astronomy easier. This system of variable-length shi continued to be used in Japan until about the Meiji Restoration.
Fixed-length hours are the result of analogue clocks, which are impractical to design to change the lengths of hours with the seasons (but not impossible; the wskusei clock is an ingenious Japanese clock from the 17th century that does exactly that). China had reliable, accurate water clocks by the Tang dynasty, while Europeans developed circular mechsnical clocks in the late Middle Ages. In neither case was it practical to make something as clever as the wakusei clock, so analogue clocks were marked the mean length of a shi or an hour as a reasonable approximation. Since there are 12 hours from midnight to noon and 12 from noon to midnight, that led to the 12-hour time system we know today.
Oh it gets better.
The statue — which rises 15 feet atop a 7-foot base — was commissioned and bankrolled by a collective of crypto investors seeking to boost visibility for their memecoin, $PATRIOT, according to The Daily Beast.
Sculptor Alan Cottrill told The Times in February that he agreed to create the bronze figure for $300,000 but complained that the investors were slow in paying. In November he proposed coating it in gold leaf.
His suggestion went down like an offering of water “to a person dying of thirst,” he said. “Immediately everybody jumped on board.”
Relevant Mini Fantasy Theater
There is a British comic strip called Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles. It is an absurd, immature joke about a man with ridiculously enormous spasmojesticles whose titanic sperm factories keep causing him trouble. It’s fun when Star Trek predicts the future; when Viz does so, it makes me want to start liking alcohol.
Because Brits as a rule do not have or use credit cards
Why does a Brit have a credit card?
Surely they could do them same thing for way less money and electricity with a couple of scripts
Their slogan nowadays is “Be Neutral Evil”
I’m reading The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs by Marc David Baer. One of the numerous things he talks about is attitudes to wine in the Ottoman court, which set the time for all of contemporary Türkiye. Baer compares Turkish attitudes toward wine with similarly positive attitudes in Iran and the Arab nations, also noting that the Ottomans and Safavids both condemned each other as being drunk as good Muslims must never be. (The Ottomans and Safabids were constantly calling each other blasphemous for indulging in the very things they themselves loved doing).
Dawkins was a grumpy old man long before Covid. He hasn’t had anything worthwhile to say since The Selfish Gene, and since at least 2010 he’s been largely pissed that people no longer acknowledge him as Pope of Atheism.
Richard Dawkins: Men have penises and make sperm, women have wombs and make ova. That is objective truth. If you lack a vagina you cannot be referred to as she/her, and if you lack a penis you cannot be referred to as he/him.\ Also Richard Dawkins: This network of silicon and fibre optic cables running a fractal Markov chain is clearly a woman who one should obviously refer to as she/her.
(Paraphrasing a quip by @2something@transfem.social)
It’s well-known that TS Eliot is an anagram of toilets.
More fun s that his full name, Thomas Stearns Eliot, is an anagram of I am a lesson to the arts (and also loathsome train sets)
Common history, so we know conquest and colonialism when we see it.