Jump to content
UNRV Ancient Roman Empire Forums

caesar novus

Equites
  • Content Count

    739
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    37

caesar novus last won the day on February 3

caesar novus had the most liked content!

Community Reputation

51 Excellent

About caesar novus

  • Rank
    Senator

Contact Methods

  • Website URL
    http://
  • ICQ
    0

Profile Information

  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    honolulium

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

  1. caesar novus

    Plagues of Ancient Egypt

    Here is a malaria map of Italy 1882 but the hotspot returned in the 1940s when Germans sabotaged drainage canals from the Roman thru Mussolini era in deliberate biological warfare. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontine_Marshes for this swamp shaping the location of Via Appia, and how pre Mussolini: So for south of Rome it was solved in the 1930s, backfired cruelly in the 1940s, and: After benefiting from DDT tough love, the first world scaremongered third world countries out of even one time eradications.
  2. caesar novus

    Snacks at the Colloseum

    I already had posted that video several days ago at https://www.unrv.com/forum/topic/19852-notable-videos-of-roman-misc/?page=3&tab=comments#comment-133696 . I also had put in the effort to go thru his catalog of videos which has countless Roman related ones, and featured 4 additional ones most likely interesting to this forum.
  3. caesar novus

    U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances, 1989 - 2022

    Granted, much of the age categories are uninteresting but that is just one of 10 ways to break it down, like whether self employed. Even aside of timeframes and breakdowns, I am amazed at some of the overall wealth levels in spite of housing or wuflu cycles. How representative are these survey responders? The main thing is the 25 or so types of financial issues, and secondarily to map across time. The tertiary age details do let'you examine for instance how are the recently retired faring or the middle aged. The 75+ group seems to be doing surprising well as in not running out of money. The young are struggling in various ways sensitive to interest rates, which the fed is setting. Other gov't may use these numbers to adjust social security. More example chart variations: Debt by current work status of reference person Net worth by current work status of reference person Debt by age of reference person
  4. How are your neighbors doing? The US Federal Reserve offers interactive charts of income, net worth, debt, vehicles, real estate, etc from surveys the last 33 years. I about fell off my chair at the numbers, altho not so much the change over time. Best to leave it showing median rather than mean or else the crazy outliers will dominate. You can slice it many ways, like to see if folks were house-rich but cash-poor at a certain year and age group. I will show examples by age breakdown, but keep in mind that it's not the same people over time but the same age group at each year. One distortion is that a pension really means the custodian has to have a hidden million or so to fund it, while someone who retires only on their own savings looks deceptively well off especially when they will have to pay cap gains taxes on liquidation. Play with the charts as you like: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Before_Tax_Income;demographic:agecl;population:1,2,3,4,5,6;units:median https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart/#series:Assets;demographic:agecl;population:1,2,3,4,5,6;units:median
  5. caesar novus

    Notable videos of Roman misc

    Really good depiction of Roman cooking and historical context:
  6. caesar novus

    Servus--> Ciao!...???

    Retirees may find an arbitrage opportunity for mainland vs Honolulu real estate. The former high vs the latter maybe impacted by China's real estate crash. I know someone who did this during Japan's crash a couple decades ago. Wealthy Chinese invested in various Honolulu luxury towers just for asset hiding; rarely actually occupied I believe. Desperation sales may arise, but often for units intended for transient time shares with the associated fees. But U.S. mainlanders rarely last more than a few years in Hawaii, which has unique flavors of dysfunction yet strives to adopt California type dysfunction.
  7. I understood that they first used conventional approach to virtually unwrap and examine, as done for the dead sea scrolls. Then let the contestants try to find still elusive words: That was from skimming the Nature article; maybe I missed something from the videos which are too linear for my patience. The news article may have oversold/clickbaited the AI angle.
  8. I wonder if they can make an estimate of how accurate their AI results are. Pattern matching approaches may be biased to find known stereotypes. Maybe they can calibrate by running against remains of an old Torah vs. modern, which I gather doesn't change even punctuation marks for ages. I had involvement in early AI approaches, which were quite elegant in tracking degree of certainty and could even explain it's reasoning. But sometimes this approach hits a wall, and fuzzy pattern matching approaches became popular, which I didn't respect much. An example of the difference is innocence vs reasonable doubt of guilt (= not guilty). An exact AI system may flail forever trying to determine innocence with uncertainty of alibis etc. A pattern matcher can step back and rule not guilty if the perp looks anywhere from 0 to 98% guilty (with 99-100% being guilty). BTW I hate those "innocence projects" that crow about tiny adjustments of reasonable doubt. Wikipedia unexpectedly has a very lucid description of various current AI approaches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence which puts me more at ease that more than just pattern matching is used. The sloppy AI narrations common on youtube probably shouldn't blacken the reputation of AI in general.
  9. caesar novus

    Servus--> Ciao!...???

    I'm still clinging to the hard c approach, as claimed in wiki: Italian: [bruˈsketta]. Once an effete waitress on Oxford campus condescendingly corrected me with the sh sound, and regardless of her Nobel prizes I want to think my way was closer to correct. Otherwise my only claim to worldly distinction was once being asked directions by a UPS man in my first few minutes in London. I may have been helpful since I memorize maps of new places rather than use anything digital. We were one magnitude short of looting in the streets, which happens with extended power outages even among gentle acculturated people. The issue of structural safety is more slow-burn, with tension cables stealthily snapping within concrete. Takes a few years to catastrophically fail... or be found and fixed. Tension cables seem a nasty invention less forgiving than rebar.
  10. caesar novus

    Servus--> Ciao!...???

    Ciao is supposed to retain it's intimate origin by not being used with strangers by Italians according to https://italyexplained.com/the-history-of-the-word-ciao-why-you-shouldnt-say-it-in-italy/ . Sort of like another hello/goodbye word aloha. But the foreign enthusiasm for the word detached from it's origin may seep into Italy. I am surprised foreigners properly pronounce the Italian i as h (ciao=chow) and (lasagna=lazonya) and (pizza=peetsa). But they don't remain true to phonetic rules to harden the ch in bruschetta or silence the first i in Gianni. Word origins may sometimes carry almost no meaning except as a random seed for a utilitarian word or phrase. The most annoying of such is to reward a sloppy malignant sneezer with a blessing which happens in several languages as a vacuous placeholder according to video below. I propose the sneeze response instead to demand accountability, as in "can't you spare a penny for your allergy with an antihistamine?" or "don't you ever wash your hands?" or "wear a dustmask when you vacuum, knucklehead!". P.S. this post was composed during a 5.7 magnitude earthquake, but power is still up...
  11. caesar novus

    Notable videos of Roman misc

    Roman Philadelphia, now with historical captions defaulted to "on" based on my urging. This one is a little spread out so you may want to increase the playback speed. Have you neglected to use captions on Prowalk's umpteen other Roman site walkthrus? No, the below isn't another diversity rant on how princess Snow White was in reality a Kalahari Bushwomen:
  12. caesar novus

    British Museum: Life in the Roman Army

    Roman marines and maritime aspects of that special exhibit:
  13. caesar novus

    Notable videos of Roman misc

    The Historian's Craft is a high quality channel often dipping into late Roman times. The graphics are excellent and most notable are the high quality comments, such as wisdom of Rome representing fractions in base 12 rather than 10.
  14. caesar novus

    Midlife Crisis Purchase

    I almost forgot about this blog section due to not seeing entries flagged in the activity section. Anyway, aren't we allowed one over-the-top-purchase to assuage a mid life crisis? I was proud of myself for not being tempted by motorcycles which are not only stylized nowadays to juvenile tastes, but I've already tasted asphalt from a car ramming me on a motorbike. I may have dodged a bullet due to not having parking space for a speedy stripped down Alfa Romeo sportscar which was almost affordable. So I did make a decision or three, but I beg the privilege to revise. First I bought a series small sailing dinghies. Most had high tech twists that weren't really practical, so I sold them. Next I ordered something so edgy that I am embarrassed to admit what. While waiting months for supply chain or whatever issues, I had buyers remorse but assumed I couldn't cancel it due to extensive customization. Unexpectedly I finally managed to negotiate a cancellation refund. My next candidate was urgent rebuild of home plumbing, the extravagant cost of which was about covered by the credit card refund for above. For a while I tried to call this my midlife diversion, but of course it was too practical. So now I have been unleashing bigger budgets for cooking ingredients. I've been austerely frugal in the past (vegan), but now most food is pricey so why not apply those past savings to carefree eating? We will see if I can stick to this plan addressing my problematic lifetime milestone - yum!.
  15. caesar novus

    What Song Are You Listening to Now?

    Guy sayeth: How about ancient egyptian in name only? Actually Sam below retired from "rock" to be a motivational speaker and has a sweet eccentric philosophical vlog series on https://www.youtube.com/@samtheshamvideos.
×