King of France: and why the fuck would we send money and assistance to those resisting their sovereign??
Advisor: well it would be a big ‘fuck you’ to England
King of France: send funds to America
nice gender did your mom pick it out for you
No, my dad did.
I literally scrolled past this and then scrolled back up real quick to reblog because I finally understood the joke.
I STILL DONT UNDERSTAND
i’M LAUGHING SO HARD
ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World
ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World
Spanning one-ninth of the earth’s circumference across three continents, the Roman Empire ruled a quarter of humanity through complex networks of political power, military domination and economic exchange. These extensive connections were sustained by premodern transportation and communication technologies that relied on energy generated by human and animal bodies, winds, and currents.
Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.
For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.
Taking account of seasonal variation and accommodating a wide range of modes and means of transport, ORBIS reveals the true shape of the Roman world and provides a unique resource for our understanding of premodern history.
Not gonna lie, this is kind of amazing.
Basically, you can plan a trip from Rome to Alexandria, and get an estimate of journey time, expense of trip, the supplies you’ll need….let’s just say it’s better than Oregon Trail:
Does this mean that we could plan our pilgrimage via amphibious kayak?!?
As long as you plan to do it two thousand years ago.
Which apparently might be possible since some of my readers found a Medieval TARDIS:
Although…. the dress code for Medieval TARDIS travel might be slightly problematic.
[X]
Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)
Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (via thedragoninmygarage)
