Quotulatiousness

June 21, 2022

History of Rome in 15 Buildings 14. Sant’Andrea al Quirinale

Filed under: Architecture, History, Italy, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

toldinstone
Published 2 Oct 2018

Coke vs. Pepsi. Kramer vs. Kramer. Alien vs. Predator. Everyone loves a rivalry – and so, discussions of art and architecture in Baroque Rome never fail to mention the antagonism between the ebullient Gianlorenzo Bernini and grim Francesco Borromini. This fourteenth episode in our History of Rome follows suit.

To see the story and photo essay associated with this video, go to:
https://toldinstone.com/santandrea-al…

June 20, 2022

Japan – Liberators of India? – WAH 065 – June 19, 1943

World War Two
Published 19 Jun 2022

As the people of Bengal and Iran continue to be tormented by hunger, so are the people of Germany and Yugoslavia by bombs. In Eastern Europe, the Germans continue to kill anyone they deem an enemy.
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Claude Chappe and the Napoleon Telegraph

Filed under: France, History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 2 Mar 2022

The development of technology for speedy long-distance communication dates back to antiquity, and reached its pre-electronic peak in the telegraph before Samuel Morse’s telegraph. Before wires crossed the world, Napoleonic France could send a message from Paris to Lille, a distance of some 250 kilometers, in ten minutes.

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This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

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June 19, 2022

Kursk: Soviets Dig-In for Blitzkrieg – WW2 – 199 – June 18, 1943

World War Two
Published 18 Jun 2022

The Soviets have put civilians to work by the hundreds of thousands, building line after line of defenses in the Kursk salient, where they are sure the Germans are soon to attack. Meanwhile the Allies are making moves in preparations for two big upcoming offensives of their own — in Sicily and the Central Solomon Islands.
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QotD: “Aristos à la Lanterne!

Filed under: Books, France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When the rage of downtrodden French peasants, living-on-the-edge city dwellers and frustrated bourgeois towards the ruling nobles and royalty final exploded into a kind of civic wildfire, there was no appeasing their collective anger. A handful of wary and fleet-footed aristocrats, or those who had made a good living out of serving the royals and the nobility fled from France in all directions. The slow and unwary made a humiliating appointment with Madame Guillotine before a contemptuous and jeering crowd, if they had not already run afoul of a mob with pikes and knives, and ropes at the foot of civic lampposts. (The fury of the French Revolution flamed so furiously that it that eventually it burned a good few leading revolutionaries themselves. As the Royalist pamphleteer Jacques Mallet Du Pan remarked pithily, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”) For a long time, my sympathies as regards parties in the French Revolution tended to be with those who fell out with it, sympathies formed by popular literature and music: The Scarlett Pimpernel, A Tale of Two Cities, Dialogues of the Carmelites, and other tales which basically tut-tutted the madness which overcame all reason and discretion, and championed those who had the brunt of it fall on them, either justly or not. How fortunate that our own very dear revolution had been able to escape such conflagrations: Loyalists in the colonies might have suffered being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town or having to leave in an undignified rush when Yankee Doodle went to town and made their independence stick. But the jailhouse regrets of those who called up and inflamed that conflagration, even inadvertently is not my concern here.

Sgt. Mom, “Aristos a la Lanterne!”, Chicago Boyz, 2022-03-17.

June 18, 2022

“Fusion is 30 years away and always will be” … how much progress have we made toward practical fusion energy?

Filed under: Books, History, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

Fusion is the power which lights the stars. It is the source of all elements heavier than hydrogen in the universe. Wouldn’t it be great if we could use and control this power here on Earth?

I predict that we will get fusion before 2035 (80%) or 2040 (90%). I am a professional plasma physicist, a fusioneer if you will, so I probably know more about this subject than you, but am likely to overemphasize its importance.

The Future of Fusion Energy is the best introduction to fusion that I know. I can confirm that the information it contains is common knowledge among plasma physicists. My parents, who are not physicists, can confirm that it is accessible and interesting to read.

Things are changing fast in fusion right now, and The Future of Fusion Energy is already out of date in some important ways. I will summarize our quest for fusion as it is portrayed in the book, describe what has happened in the field since 2018, and make some predictions about where we go from here. The predictions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of Parisi or Ball.

 
 

Why Don’t We Have Fusion Already?

There is an old joke:

    Fusion is 30 years away and always will be.

What happened? Why has fusion failed to deliver on its promise in the past?

By the 1970s, it was apparent that making fusion power work is possible, but very hard. Fusion would require Big Science with Significant Support. The total cost would be less than the Apollo Program, similar to the International Space Station, and more than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Department of Energy put together a request for funding. They proposed several different plans. Depending on how much funding was available, we could get fusion in 15-30 years.

How did that work out?

Along with the plans for fusion in 15-30 years, there was also a reference: “fusion never”. This plan would maintain America’s plasma physics facilities, but not try to build anything new.

Actual funding for fusion in the US has been less than the “fusion never” plan.

The reason we don’t have fusion already is because we, as a civilization, never decided that it was a priority. Fusion funding is literally peanuts: In 2016, the US spent twice as much on peanut subsidies as on fusion research.

The Early Emperors – Part 3: Tiberius, A Safe Pair of Hands

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 22 Oct 2021

The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from the Western Roman Empire. It is the political entity within which the Christian faith was born, and the growth of the Church within the Empire, and its eventual establishment as the sole faith of the Empire, have left an indelible impression on all modern denominations. Its history, together with that of the ancient Greeks and the Jews, is our history. To understand how the Empire emerged from a great though finally dysfunctional republic, and how it was consolidated by its early rulers, is partly how we understand ourselves.

Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the achievement of the early Emperors. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.

More by Sean Gabb on the Ancient World: https://www.classicstuition.co.uk/

Learn Latin or Greek or both with him: https://www.udemy.com/user/sean-gabb/

His historical novels (under the pen name “Richard Blake”): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Richard-Blak…

M60: Its Purpose, Mechanics, and Development

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Feb 2022

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June 17, 2022

Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow – Why He Failed in Russia

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 16 Jun 2022

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Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and from Russia as a whole is one of the most dramatic scenes in history. Starving and freezing, the French Grande Armée is desperately trying to reach the Berezina River. The revitalized Russian Army is on their heels and almost catches their prey in the 2nd Battle of Krasny. But it wasn’t just “General Winter” that defeated Napoleon in Russia.

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» SOURCES
Boudon, Jacques-Olivier. Napoléon et la campagne de Russie en 1812 (2021).
Chandler, David. The Campaigns of Napoleon, Volume 1 (New York 1966).
Lieven, Dominic. Russia Against Napoleon (2010).
Mikaberidze A. The Battle of the Berezina: Napoleon’s Great Escape (Pen&Sword Military, 2010)
Rey, Marie-Pierre. L’effroyable tragédie: une nouvelle histoire de la campagne de Russie. (2012).
Zamoyski, Adam. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. (2005).
Отечественная война 1812 года. Энциклопедия (Москва: РОССПЭН, 2004)
Безотосный В. М. Россия в наполеоновских войнах 1805–1815 гг. (Москва: Политическая энциклопедия, 2014)
Троицкий Н.А. 1812. Великий год России (Москва: Омега, 2007)
(Прибавление к «Санкт-Петербургским ведомостям» №87 от 29 октября 1812 / http://www.museum.ru/museum/1812/War/…)

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Tank Chat #149 Cut in Half Centurion | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 25 Feb 2022

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QotD: The work of the blacksmith

Filed under: History, Quotations, Technology, Tools — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are a few basic behaviors of iron that fundamentally control what blacksmiths are going to do with it in this stage. To begin with, we need to introduce some terminology to avoid this coming confusing: a given piece of metal can be hard (resistant to deformation) or soft; it can also be ductile (able to deform significantly before breaking) or brittle (likely to break without deformation). This is easiest to understand at the extremes: a soft, brittle material (like a thin wooden dowel) takes very little energy and breaks immediately without bending, while a hard, ductile material (the same dowel, made of spring-steel) bends more easily under stress but resists breaking. But it is also possible to have hard brittle materials (pottery being a classic example) which fiercely resist deforming but break catastrophically the moment they exceed their tolerances or a soft, ductile material (think wet-noodle) which bends very easily.

(I should note that all of these factors are, in fact, very complex – far more complex than we are going to discuss. In particular, as I understand it, some of what I am using “hardness” to describe also falls under the related category of yield strength. Hopefully you will all pardon the necessary simplification; if it makes you feel any better, ancient blacksmiths didn’t understand how any of this worked either, only that it worked.)

Of course these are not binaries but a spectrum. Materials have a degree of hardness or ductility; as we’ll see, these are not quite opposed, but changing one does change the other – increasing hardness often reduces ductility.

The sort of things that pre-modern people are going to want to be made in iron are going to have fairly tight tolerances for these sorts of things. Objects that had wide tolerances (that is, things which could be weak or a little bendy or didn’t have to take much force) got made out of other cheaper, easier materials like ceramics, stone or wood; metals were really only used for things that had to be both strong and relatively light for precisely the reasons we’ve seen: they were too expensive for anything else. That means that a blacksmith doesn’t merely need to bring the metal to the right shape but also to the right characteristics. Some tools would need to finish up being quite hard (like the tip of a pick, or the edge of a blade), while others needed to be able to bend to absorb strain (like the core of a blade or the back of a saw).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-time”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-10-02.

June 16, 2022

Mussolini’s Pope? – The Geopolitics of the Vatican

Filed under: History, Italy, Religion, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Jun 2022

Pope Pius XI is the first Pope to guide the Catholic Church through the age of fascism. How has his Vatican responded to Fascists Italy and Nazi Germany, and what is the geopolitical position of the Papacy on the eve of war of World War Two?
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Secret Foods of the Spanish Inquisition

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 15 Feb 2022

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RECIPE
1 cup (160g) dried fava beans
1 cup (180g) dried chickpeas
2 1/2 lbs or 1kg beef
¼ cup (60ml) Olive oil
1 tablespoon salt
1 large onion diced
1 quart (1L) beef broth or water
2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
2 teaspoon ground caraway
2 teaspoon fresh ground pepper
2 Eggplant, peeled and chopped
A large handful of chard leaves

1. Coat the eggplant in salt, cover, and set aside for several hours.
2. Boil the fava beans and chickpeas in a large pot for 2 minutes, then drain and set aside. In the same pot, heat half of the olive oil over medium heat then, add the onions and half of the salt and cook until lightly brown, about 8 minutes. Remove the onions and add the beef to the empty pot with the rest of the oil and salt. Cook until lightly brown, about 5 minutes. Add the onions back in as well as the beef broth/water. Bring to a simmer and cover, letting the stew simmer for 1 hour.
3. Drain and rinse the eggplant, then add it into the pot along with the fava bean, chickpeas, and spices. Cover and let cook for another 2 hours.
4. Chop the chard, then pound it flat with a rolling pin, and add it into the pot. Set the pot into the oven at 200°F and cook overnight (or at least 6 hours). Alternately, you can transfer the adafina to a slow cooker overnight. Serve alone or over rice.

**Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Tasting History will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Each purchase made from these links will help to support this channel with no additional cost to you. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available.

Subtitles: Jose Mendoza | IG @ worldagainstjose

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June 15, 2022

Istanbul: City of Spies – WW2 – Spies & Ties 18

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Jun 2022

Neutral Turkey appears to be an island of peace in a sea of war. But if you look a little closer though and there’s another story. Assassins ply their deadly trade. Spies slip in and out of occupied Europe. The Allies and Axis battle for influence. The secret war is in full swing.
(more…)

Model 1892 Berthier Artillery Musketoon

Filed under: France, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Jul 2017

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

The original 1890 Berthier carbine was designed for cavalry, but a slightly modified version was produced (in small numbers) with a bayonet lug, for use by the Gendarmerie. In 1892, the French military would adopt that same carbine for use by an assortment of troops who were better suited with a carbine than a full size Lebel rifle. These included primarily artillery crews, but also engineers, messengers, drivers, and others.

The Modele 1892 Mousqueton d’Artillerie was basically identical to the 1890 cavalry carbine, including the same 3-round Mannlicher-type clip. It was put into production at both the St Etienne and Chatellerault factories, and by August of 1914 384,000 were in French inventory. By the time the improved 1916 model was put into production, a total of 675,000 of these carbines would be built.

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

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