guidoLaMoto

Nasty and effective defense tool still in use in modern times The VC in Viet Nam rigged booby traps with spikes of bamboo that produced wounds causing Staph abscesses. Roman legionnaires each carried two sudes- 6 ft long wooden stakes-- to be used in constructing valles or used as defensive spikes. When Cincinnatus was recruited while plowing his field just across the Tiber and the Campus Martius to be dictator, he ordered his new conscriptees to each carry bring along 12 sudes-.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudis_(stake)#:~:text=The sudis ( pl. %3A sudes,were carried by each soldies. The metal spikes found represent a technological advance 500 years after Cinncinatus.

Guillan Barre is an ascending neuropathy that starts with weakness in the feet and works its way up progressively, usually over the course of weeks. It usually stops progressing before reaching the muscles of breathing, then recedes with muscle strength returning progressively in reverse order over the same time course at which it progressed. Death is due to the respiratory insufficiency it produces should it advance that far...I,m not sure why anyone would suggest it was a factor in Alex,s demise. Ancient texts are often the source of conjecture by modern diagnosticians. Eg- Sarah gave birth to Isaac in her90s-- an estrogen secreting ovarian tumor?...or Samson having a cromegally from a pituitary adenoam-- big guy with great strength and dying suddenly of apoplexy.... ...and of course it,s easy to reduce that the universe was created during a baseball game...Genesis 1: 1...."In the Big Inning, God created the heavens and earth.... It has been suggested that acute pancreatitis after a bought of serious drinking is most in keeping with the course described-- severe abdominal pain & fever leading to death over the course a week or so. Sorry...I,m still trying to figure out this tablet. I added the bible stuff and it got stuck before the comment about Alex and pancreatitis.

Congenital syphylis dental abnormalities do not include triangular/conical teeth, but rather, multicrowned teeth. You,re correct that there are over 100 known genotypes included under the rubric of ED, and the phenomena of expressivity & penetrance affecting the observable phenotypes make it even more difficult to cram the described round peg into the theoretically expected square hole. Hair like a lion-- dry & frizzy due to dysfunctional follicular sebaceous glands? Sweet smeling-- dysfunctional appocrine sweat glands? Beardless-- another example of poorly developed skin architecture?...as is... Fair skin (rare among Macedonians?)-- poorly developed. dermal melanocytes? On one ocassion, Alex felt over heated and plunged himself into a freezing cold river, subsequently developing pneumonia. An example of hypohidrosis? Of course trying to make a diagnosis based on short descriptions written centuries after the fact and usually just repetitions of earlier descriptions is little more than an amusing exercise in fantasy. But it is interesting that Alex had several unusual physical traits that line up nicely with a dx of ED. It,s much more likely to have one condition accounting for multiple symptoms than to have multiple conditions.

Alexander the Great was described as having fair skin, hair like a lion, an oddly sweet scent and conical teeth-- all things having to do with development of the ectoderm and abnormal in those with one of several possible genetic mutations grouped together as Ectodermal Dysplasia. His brother was also described as being mentally impaired-- another symptom sometimes seen in this syndrome, which is often inherited as an X-linked recessive.....These people are known to suffer from digestive problems and easily develop hyperthermia. Alex died young of some unspecified fever & abdominal problem- usually attributed to food poisoning- but maybe just a common complication of this genetic disorder? The key is the conical teeth. Ectodermal dysplasia is the only condition I know in which his appears.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, publishing just a few years before Livy, gives a much more detailed, academic version of the founding of Rome than does Livy. He states variations of the story presented by various authors, and gives a thoughtful analysis of them, admitting the difficulty in separating facts from myths about such remote times. One gets the impression from Livy that the famous wolf cared for the babies for quite a while before Faustulus discovered them, but Dion- makes it sound like Faust- & the wolf came upon them at almost the same time.... Both authors admit the story of The Wolf (Lupa in Latin) probably is more of a reference to the social behavior of Faustulus' wife Laurentia, who wound up raising the kids as her own...Cf- our use of the "B" word or more recently the term "Cougar" to describe certain women. But it does make for a nice story and a good excuse to sell cheap trinkets as souvenirs. I wonder if that brooch was made in China?

Leave it to The Feds...How does one stay in the, say, 45-54 y/o category for 32 yrs (Jack Benny excluded, of course)?..Kind of a meaningless presentation of data. If statisticians torture the numbers long enough, they can get them to confess to anything.

As I mentioned on another thread here recently, I regret never having learned Latin in an audiolingual way, so I'm getting a kick out of watching and listening to this series of videos done with a good sense of humor in slow, fairly simple Latin (with English subtitles). They provide insight into facts of daily living in ancient Rome and about some of the back-story to famous Roman ruins.

Right, Guy. Solar installations require extensive concrete foundations, access roads and continuing traffic for cleaning & maintenance. They essentially "pave over" acres & acres of natural habitat, irreparably disrupting the ecosystem. The mining & processing of the raw materials are done in countries without environmental regulations and devastate the countryside & ecosystems in those countries. Wind & solar installations have only a 20 yr useful lifespan and disposal of the materials is an environmental nightmare....The wind mills chop up birds & insects while the solar panels fry them.... We will politely ignore the social concerns of using poorly paid children and slaves to do the mining of the raw materials in China & The Congo. ..To make it worse, they do nothing at all good for the environment. Co2 is a minor factor in the planet's energy balance at the concentrations we see now- and getting less important as levels go up-- please educate yourself as to the concept of "Extinction of Absorption" and the exponential effects of absorption.... We should want to raise co2 levels. Higher co2 levels are a factor in the greening of the planet, serving as "air fertilizer." Greenhouse growers add co2 (to a level of 2000ppm vs 420ppm in the ambient atmosphere) to increase photosynthetic productivity. BTW- to get his back to Roman history-- Around 250 BC, Hannibal lost half his men and all but one of his elephants thanks to the cold weather in The Alps. Two hundred years later, Caesar, an astute observer & describer of natural history in his Commentaries, never once mentions ice or snow despite having crossed back & forth from Cisalpine Gaul to Transalpine Gaul several times during that period....With Alpine glaciers now receding, they are leaving uncovered trees dating from Caesar's time. These obviously grew in much warmer times than the present climate conditions. It's all natural and there's nothing we can do about it. Ask King Canute.

Do you remember the TV commercial for butter that criticized margarine ~40 y/a where the punch line was 'It's not nice to fool Mother Nature?? The same govt bureaucrats who brought us the CoViD disaster advise us now to kill ALL our chickens so that the new virus doesn't kill SOME of them. No epidemic is over until a certain characteristic ratio of Susceptible to Infected to Recovered (S-I-R Model) is reached. That math (a Laplacian diffusion function) that describes epidemics also describes, among other things, the coat patterns on leopards and zebras, the wing patterns on butterflies and the way your car bounces along when it has a bad shock absorber. Every century or so an existing viral genome mutates spontaneously to a form that has increased virulence. Determined by the natural consequences of mathematical probabilities (the driving force behind Natural Selection) the natural course of a pathogenic virus is for the gene pool to become dominated by less virulent (ie- less damaging) and more infections (ie- easier to spread) alleles....Things like "Social Distancing" and "Lock Downs" do not limit the deaths of susceptible individuals. They only affect the time course of reaching that magic ratio in S-I-R...The politicians turned what should have been a 6 month pandemic into a two year nightmare.

Maybe we could justify mutilating this valuable archeological site if it would lead to a cure for cancer, perpetual world peace or a guarantee that we'd never have to see another shot of Taylor Swift cheering at a football game...but to do so to satisfy the political agenda of The One World types is criminal.

Amazingly clever use of technology. Maybe I don't know the definition of "AI," but his is no more intelligent than a vending machine used to get a candy bar, just more complicated. The video in the Nature article cited shows that they did a CT scan from end to end of a scroll, then used a program to transform the scan into flattened 2D images, layer by layer along the axis of the scan. That program included a proportionality factor to exaggerate differences in x-ray transmissibility, giving the image of dark letters on a lighter background. ...Basically the same principle used in medical CT scans. No "thinking" involved. Ma, che furbi, 'sti studenti!

I stand corrected (You learn something new everyday.) https://duckduckgo.com/?t=avast&q=pronunciation+of+bruschetta+audio&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DUZqrUrJXhd8 My Sicilian grandmother would be surprised to hear this too. Cicero, IL is a suburb of Chicago. Al Capone made it his home, and to this day there are still a sizeable number of Italian immigrants living there....It always brings a smile when they pronounce it Chee-cher-o. ___ __ __ I didn't know that about the cable vs rebar...I guess they prefer the inspections to relying on faith alone after sacrificing a virgin...or is that just for volcanoes? I'm getting a little long in the tooth to be homesteading here in WI-- a lot of manual labor involved. The wife wants us to move to Honolulu where she lived for several yrs in the '70s...I think she may be reminiscing about her days as a lifeguard there and thinks she'll still look the same as she did then in her bikini. I don't have the heart to burst her bubble.

I hope everything is alright by you... In regards responses to sneezing, IIRC, in past ages they thought your heart stopped during a sneeze, hence the call for God to bless you...I always thought it ironic that a little bitty sneeze rates a "God bless you," but if someone is coughing a lung out with TB, we just wait patiently and pick up the conversation as if nothing happened when he's finally done... JFK's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech at The Wall in '63 was given in English and translated simultaneously in German over a loudspeaker to the crowd. He ended the speech with "...and may God bless you."...The crowd then stood in dumbfounded silence instead of an enthusiastic round of applause because the translator was a bit confused and ended the speech with "...und Gesundheit." You're right about the use of "Ciao" in Italy. here's a short piece about that and other faux pas to be best avoided by tourists. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=avast&q=easy+italian&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DFrMVRGuYxXw In regards the pronunciation of bruschetta-- I think the rules are different when -sch-i or -e is involved. Without the H, it would be broos-chetta, and if you follow the rule about h between c and i or e, it would be broos- ketta. Neither is right....Not that I'm anywhere near fluent in Italian, but I can't think of any example of the -sh combination in an Italian word.

There's the story of the city slicker who was hopelessly lost driving thru the hills of rural America. He stopped to ask a local sitting on his porch how to get to a certain desired destination?... The rube answered "I don't think you can get there from here." So it is with this analysis of how the Latin greeting "Servus humilimus sum." (I am your humble servant) gets convolutedly morphed thru the ages into the nearly universal slang greeting of "Ciao!" https://duckduckgo.com/?t=avast&q=luke+ranieri+latin&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DZAsNO9eXLgM

Henbane is a plant in the Solanaceae family-- nightshade-- which also includes tomato, potato and eggplant, among others....As they say- There are no poisons, only poisonous doses. The alkaloids made by plants in that family have medicinal uses and can also be used for hallucinogenic purposes in religious or magical activities. Very interesting that this supply was stored in a bone with tar plug-- waterproof.

Part of the problem in making an accurate diagnosis after centuries have elapsed is that the descriptions of the signs & symptoms are lacking.....Livy uses the word pestilentia and its effect on the course of things once in each of his first ten books of Ab Urbis Condita without mentioning even one symptom, so we have no way of guessing what the disease(s) actually was (were). There's a difference between a plague and The Plague. I don't think anyone described the black, necrotic skin lesion (bubo) of The Black Death prior to the episodes in 1347 in Messina & Kaffa (the famous catapulting of corpses over the walls of the besieged city), so this new genetic confirmation of Y.pestis in Europe as early as the 7th century is an indisputable revelation. I remember reading that one Al Gore of his day noticed that the towns in his area with the most stray dogs & cats also had the biggest problem with Bubonic Plague, so he talked the town elders into killing off all the dogs & cats... Bubonic Plague then got even worse there, the dogs & cats no longer available to keep the rat populations in check...A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Hadrian's Wall may have provided some mild psychological deterrence to those nasty barbarians, as a statement of "we don't want you on our side" but not much of a physical deterrent . It's not so high or wide in most places to be more than a mild amusement to anyone accustomed to living outside 24 hrs day, sleeping on rocks or doing without a nearby KwikTrip for an afternoon snack of a strawberry slushy & order of fries...But it did provide a good line of sight for sentries posted in camps or guard towers very 2 miles along its route (one mile of visibility in either direction) to serve as an early warning system for the Romans.

How wonderful it is that we have those Vindolanda tablets to give us insight into the life of common folk. That's a great site you've given us. Thanks for posting. I have it on good authority that Hadrian didn't really have anything against the Scotts. He ordered the wall to be built just to keep those @#$% bag pipes out of The Empire.

Is it just my imagination, or is that really the theme from Twilight Zone (do-do-doo-do, do-do-doo-do) playing as I scan this thread? My only recollection about studying philosophy was from my first year of college. We all took a required History of Western Civilization course. A neighbor in the dorm came into my room and asked if I had a copy of that Sophocles book (he pronounced it Sof-o-kulz, rhymes with popsicles) we were supposed to read? "Yea," I replied, "On the shelf there next to the copy of Testicles (I pronounced it "Test-i-kleez)......He didn't catch on.

Crucifixion is, of course, mentioned on multiple occasions in the ancient literature, but nowhere is it described in any detail nor pictured in contemporary works of art. There are some anatomical and physical objections to crucifixion having been performed as we are accustomed to seeing it pictured in Christian art. IIRC, there are two other ankle bones, found in Israel, with nails thru them-- one traversing the calcaneus from outside to inside, and the other the opposite. The one pictured above from Britain has the nail coursing from front to back (top to bottom) as in the religious depictions. (The picture is "upside down"-- that bulge near the top margin of the picture is the weight bearing surface of the heel bone. Irritation there is the classic "heel spur." Hangmen in those days were apparently not held to strict federal guidelines for crucifixions and were free to improvise.....Probably the easiest way to crucify a victim would have been to attach him to an X shaped cross, spread eagle like we always see the troopers being tortured tied to a wagon wheel in cowboy movies....no need to dig a deep hole to plant an upright T shaped rig. "Crucify" is from "Crux"- which is really translated as "gallows." English "cross" is really an incorrect derivation in that sense. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=crux&la=la&can=crux0

I like the multiple hypotheses suggested in the video. As he said, they've found several of these so it must have been something in common usage. The rounded protrusions caught my eye immediately and reminded me of the "jacks" kids use to play Ball & Jacks. Maybe some high-end variation of "Knucklebones" commonly played by the ancients?

Thank you for posting on all these interesting topics... My question was rhetorical. Of course they didn't design the vessels with fluid circulation patterns in mind. They designed them for ease of construction and durability. The hemispherical bottom was sturdier than a vessel with straight sides and a right angle at a flat bottom....The amphora was designed to stack snuggly in such a way as to form stable piles in the hold of a bobbing sailing ship....and in later days, the wooden barrel was designed to lay on its side to roll in loading and unloading-- the wider middle section allowed a rolled barrel to turn around corners easily.

On viniculture, wine making and wines: Pliny The Natural History Ch 14, 17 & 23 https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0137 --also on wine & drinking styles (Chapter 8-- Johnston's The Private Lives of the Romans http://www.forumromanum.org/life/johnston_8.html I like the technical detail in your second reference in regards clay vessel design and circulation patterns as the wine ferments. Do you really think they put any thought into designing things this way, or is just a fortuitous accident that it worked out so well?

Amazing accomplishment restoring that...As the film says, it was no doubt part of a "dress uniform" to distinguish an officer from an ordinary legionnaire. Brass would never stand up to a heavy iron sword in combat....The French swordsmen used to call the thick bicipital tendon that crosses the crook of the elbow, protecting the large brachial artery as it goes from the upper arm to the forearm, "The Grace of God Tendon." As nice as it would be to have God on your side, a little extra protection from an arm guard would be well worth the investment when battling barbarians.

Exactly... Here in The States, for instance, the homes of the well to do are still often built in the Ante Bellum style- cf- Tara in Gone With The Wind. That doesn't mean all those homeowners are direct descendants of Scarlet O'Hara...It merely shows that people become accustomed to the style of the wealthy and the desirability & symbolism of that can persist. ...Here, the Ante Bellum period was only 70 years long. Imagine the affect of centuries of Roman influence on style & taste.