guidoLaMoto

It's a bit of a stretch to equate charcoal found against a wall as proof that the Roman culture persisted for a long time. That sounds more like squatters seeking refuge in an abandoned building....Maybe if the fire was in a fireplace? OTOH-- logical deduction can bring us to the outline of plausible scenarios in the second half of the film. After all, when the govt fell, there was no "last helicopter out of Saigon." The Romans were left behind to fend for themselves. There is strength in numbers, so they would have organized themselves in smaller, local groups. They would not have immediately abandoned walled, better protected towns (where would they go?)...Outlying villas were selfsustaining, so lack of central govt would not effect their day to day functioning-- better for the peons to stay on with steady room &board than to venture out on their own to what?

You re on the right track, Guy, but you forget Agenda 21 and 2030 Agenda.......Why do you think they want to take away the private ownership of guns? Even the Americans, once so proud and jealous of their freedom, have fallen victim to the "frog in luke warm water" phenomenon. It irritates me when the news readers refer to the American president as "the leader of the free world."...I have to wonder what free world they are referring to? Culturally, America has a Roman Empire effect on the whole world. English has become, thanks originally to The Brits, the universal tongue, as was Latin, and Hollywood and Rock & Roll have had the same effect as CJ Caesar in spreading and homogenizing our world culture.

Welcome! In case you hadn't noticed, Aeneas' rejection of Dido in Africa sets the stage for the eventual animosity between Rome and Carthage, poetically speaking. I too would ike to see more discussion of the Latin language here myself.

Allele frequencies are subject to the "use it or lose it" phenomenon, so persistence of the HbS trait in high numbers suggests endemicity of SSD in subSaharan populations, and it's much lower frequency in Egyptians suggests any malaria seen there was more sporatic, maybe epidemic in certain years under more favorable but unusual conditions. Egypt was a major source of grain because the annual spring floods were so consistent & dependable. While the strip of fertile Nile farmland was quite narrow, it was also quite long providing more arable acres than any other region around the Mare Nostrum. Malaria was quite common in the LA Bayou area, I didn't realize it posed such a problem during The Rebellion. Thanks for that info.

Malaria = mala aria = bad air The ancients were very close to a germ theory of disease. Pliny wrote in some detail about it. The classic example of genetic adaptation to disease is the malaria/sickle cell trait so very common in the sub-Saharan population. HbS (sickle cell trait) is not very common in modern Egyptians, so it's a stretch to claim it was common among their ancients forefathers. Malaria is spread only by the Anopheles mosquito which is adapted to life in the rain forests of central Africa, not temporary wet land seen only during the seasonal floods of the Nile Valley. The Roman forum was a swampy area at The Founding. The Lacus Curtius was big & deep enough to get a horse and rider (Curtius) bogged down in the first Sabine war. It no longer exists having been drained by the Cloaca maxima. The conditions were ripe, no doubt, for any number of mosquito borne infections to be prevalent-- yellow fever, the equine encephalopathies, West Nile Virus etc etc....but viral illnesses, as we saw with the 1918 influenza and 2020 CoViD epidemics, are prone to pop up suddenly and then rapidly mutate/evolve to less devastating forms rapidly, so again, it-s a stretch to claim our modern viral diseases were common in ancient times.,. Malaria and TB are not viral. Tuberculous bone lesions are not rare among Neandertal fossils, and the prevalence of the HbS allele suggests an ancient origin. It's also a stretch to equate a club foot, usually seen as a congenital problem, with polio. Other forms of acquired neuropathy that allow for long term survival in order for bony aabnormalities to mature would be more likely than polio.

A) Correlation does not prove cause & effect. 2) Romanization, including both linguistic and social/political tendencies, exhibited a dilution/diffusion effect with distance from the center. Catholicism came relatively late to outlying areas, so, less ingrained/more easily lost. c) The obviously very successful organization of the Roman govt (emperor-senate-govenors-legionaires) translated readily to Pope/king-college of cardinals/privy council-bishops/dukes etc-priests/army. It's easier to modify/adapt an existing engine to a new application than it is to design a whole new engine from scratch. 4) The European countries that went on to build colonial empires were the ones that were organized and consolidated earlier. Italy and Germany were still fragmented along feudal lines until late in the 19th century.

Good post. I think you two have re-invented the wheel by trial and error. One of the reasons for the Romans great military success was their use of the combination of the large scutum plus the short gladius. It would pretty difficult for Errol Flynn to go swashbuckling away with grace and finesse while holding a long rapier if he also had to lug around a 30 lb scutum....In order to deliver a long thrust, the scutum would have to be moved out of the way, taking away your defense, whereas an "upper cut" short thrust of a gladius could be delivered from under a scutum tipped strategically....and as pointed out in the video, the upper cut with hammer grip is more ergonomically/anatomically efficient. We might also analyse Rocky Marciano's boxing style. He had short arms, and would concentrate on giving body blows tiring his opponent and wearing him out...as opposed to long armed M. Ali who kept his distance and danced about looking for openings to attack. That might work well in one on one combat, but not when positioned shoulder to shoulder with your comrades in acies formation.

Good article. With water plentiful and running constantly, wealthy Romans could also pipe it to flow over the roofs of their houses to keep them cool. Getting out of the city to villas in the nearby hills is a tradition started by the ancients (Cf- Nero,s giant barge on lake Nemi SE of Rome along the Appian Way) and continued to this day (Cf- the Pope s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo near lake Nemi in the Alban Hills.)

Thank you for continuing to post all these excellent topics for further study and thought. My comments were merely to point out the many pressures to change styles over the course of 1200 years. Of course the regional differences in style as the military came to rely more heavily on non-Italian personnel was a heavy pressure. Even today, it ,s pretty easy to sit in a cafe in Rome and pick out the American tourists from the European or Asian by their clothes.

Tempus fidgets, as they say. Styles change. Technology changes. Romulus, Remus et al built huts and lived a stone age lifestyle very similar to that of pre-Columbian American Indians. Over the course of the next 1200 years they adopted bronze then iron and then steel....Over the course of that same 1200 years, Europe also saw average weather change from warm to cold (Hannibal lost half his men to cold weather in the Alps) to warm (Caesar never mentioned snow or ice in the Alps) to cold again ,(poor crops contributed a great deal to the fall of the western empire). Styles no doubt changed according to weather. Methods in warfare also changed. War at The Founding was probably little more than skirmishes between small raiding parties, again, more like Indians than Grand Armies maneuvering on battle fields. Accounts often claim 1000s og casualties, but the Palatine Hill is only 63acres, and most of that was pasture for the sheep--how many men of military age could have lived there?...Early battles were disorganized clashes of gangs. Later, the Greek phalanx style was adopted, and then the Roman acies style. Each had its own best style of weapons.

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.