RugerFirearms
Published on 10 Dec 2009The “History of the Gun” online video series produced by Ruger is a unique look at the progression of firearms technology throughout the years, hosted by Senior Editor of Guns & Ammo Garry James. Part 2 examines the Matchlock.
November 30, 2017
History of the Gun – Part 2: The Matchlock
Comments Off on History of the Gun – Part 2: The Matchlock
November 29, 2017
Frankenstein: Paradise Lost – Extra Sci Fi – #5
Extra Credits
Published on 28 Nov 2017Paradise Lost told the story of Satan, a creation who rejected his creator just like Frankenstein’s monster did. But even Satan had a loving creator, beauty, and friends. The monster had nothing, and his life in Mary Shelley’s eyes was not a horror story, but a tragedy.
Comments Off on Frankenstein: Paradise Lost – Extra Sci Fi – #5
History of the Gun – Part 1: The Hand Cannon
RugerFirearms
Published on 10 Dec 2009The “History of the Gun” online video series produced by Ruger is a unique look at the progression of firearms technology throughout the years, hosted by Senior Editor of Guns & Ammo Garry James. Part 1 examines the Hand Cannon.
Comments Off on History of the Gun – Part 1: The Hand Cannon
November 28, 2017
Invasions, Naval Battles and German Raiders – WW1 in the Pacific I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 27 Nov 2017New Zealand: A Society At War: http://amzn.to/2A7Ojz0
One of the theatres of war that’s often overlooked, the Pacific saw some of the earliest military actions of the Great War. On top of this, there were many naval engagements in this particular ocean, including some famous German merchant raiders. We cover all this and more in today’s special episode.
Comments Off on Invasions, Naval Battles and German Raiders – WW1 in the Pacific I THE GREAT WAR Special
November 27, 2017
Sea Peoples: The 1200 BC System Collapse
Space And Intelligence
Published on 7 May 2017In the 12th century B.C., after centuries of brilliance, the civilized and globalized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians. The thriving economies and cultures of the late second millennium B.C., which had stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, suddenly ceased to exist, along with writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture. Could it happen again?
Comments Off on Sea Peoples: The 1200 BC System Collapse
November 26, 2017
Dropping Bombs on Germany – WW1 in Heavy Metal I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 25 Nov 2017Indy’s back in his Chair of Wisdom, and ready to answer more of your questions. This week we discuss Allied bombings on Germany and the influence of WW1 on Metal, including on the power-metal band Sabaton.
Comments Off on Dropping Bombs on Germany – WW1 in Heavy Metal I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The “fall” of the Roman Empire
If you haven’t read much history, you may be aware that the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD. If you have read a bit more history, you’ll be fully aware that the Western Roman Empire fell then … the rest of it lasted nearly another thousand years. Richard Blake, who has a very readable series of novels set in the “blind spot” of history between the collapse of the West and the revival of the Eastern Empire, offers a quick thumbnail sketch of the historical background to his fiction:
In 395 AD, following a century of experiment, the Roman Empire was divided into Eastern and Western administrative zones, with joint Emperors in Rome and in Constantinople. The purpose was to let each Emperor deal with the pressure on his own critical frontiers – the barbarians along the Rhine and Danube frontiers in the West, and the Persians along the Euphrates and desert frontiers in the East.
In theory, each Emperor was equal. In practice, the Eastern Emperor, ruling from Constantinople, was soon the senior partner. During the next two hundred years, becoming increasingly Greek in language in culture, the Eastern Empire flourished, and Constantinople became one of the largest and most opulent cities in the world.
The Western Empire went into immediate and rapid decline. In 406 AD, barbarians crossed the Rhine in large numbers, and broke into Italy. In 410 AD, they sacked Rome. By then, the Western Capital had been moved to Ravenna, a city in North Eastern Italy, impregnable behind marshes, and within easier reach of the frontiers – and within easier reach of Constantinople.
During the next seventy years, the Barbarians took France and Spain and North Africa from the Empire. Britain remained in the Empire, but its people were told to look to their own defence. In 476 AD, the last Western Emperor was deposed. By 500 AD, the whole of the Western Empire had been replaced by a patchwork of barbarian kingdoms.
After 527 AD, the Emperor Justinian began to reach out from Constantinople to reconquer the lost Western provinces. He recovered North Africa and Italy and part of Spain. However, the effort was exhausting. After his death in 568, the Empire lost much of Italy to the Lombard barbarians, and Rome itself fell under papal domination. Slavic and Avar barbarians crossed the Danube and conquered and burned all the way to Athens and the walls of Constantinople. After 602, the Persians began a war of destruction against the Empire. Though they ultimately lost, they did briefly take Egypt and Syria.
Comments Off on The “fall” of the Roman Empire
Fire-arrows!
Lindybeige
Published on 10 Jun 2016Fire-arrows – did archers really use them in battles? We see them in the movies, so presumably not.
This is the most-anticipated video of all for this channel, which naturally makes me a bit nervous. Will people be hideously disappointed? I mentioned two and a half years ago that I would make a video on this topic, and this video shows that I am as good as my word, and not over-hasty either.
My thanks to the three people who pointed out quite correctly that when I said ‘Francis Bacon’ (1561-1626) I meant Roger Bacon (1219-1292).
Comments Off on Fire-arrows!
November 25, 2017
Cambrai Tank Chats Special: The Mark IV Tank
Tank Museum
Published on 24 Nov 2017The Mark IV tank was the most numerous of the First World War and went in to battle en masse at the Battle of Cambrai, 20 November 1917. In this special edition of Tank Chats, Curator David Willey explains how the Mark IV tank functions and how it was used to break through the World War One German defences.
Comments Off on Cambrai Tank Chats Special: The Mark IV Tank
November 24, 2017
Tank Corps Unleashed – The Battle of Cambrai I THE GREAT WAR Week 174
The Great War
Published on 23 Nov 2017After stopping the offensive at Passchendaele, the British Army launches another, albeit more limited, offensive. Almost 500 tanks are put into place and the initial success is remarkable. But the Germans had been training in anti-tank warfare and are supported by fresh troops from the Eastern Front.
Comments Off on Tank Corps Unleashed – The Battle of Cambrai I THE GREAT WAR Week 174
Not Guided by Policy: Hunter S. Thompson and the Birth of Gonzo Journalism
Today I Found Out
Published on 6 Nov 2017In this video:
“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” This is the opening line from the highly acclaimed roman à clef Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream written by Hunter S. Thompson, one of America’s most countercultural and anti-authoritarian writers. The untamed master of his own self-titled genre, “gonzo journalism,” Thompson set ablaze the American standards for journalism during the 1960s and 70s with a cornucopia of drugs, alcohol, gun toting, and most notably, his exemplary writing.
Want the text version?: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/07/not-guided-policy-act-gonzo/
Comments Off on Not Guided by Policy: Hunter S. Thompson and the Birth of Gonzo Journalism
QotD: Religion in the Classical world
The Jewish law perfectly preserves what any right-thinking Israelite in 1000 BC would have considered obvious, natural, and not-even-needing-justification (much as any right-thinking American today considers not eating insects obvious). By the time the Bible was being written this was no longer true – foreign customs and inevitable social change were making the old law seem less and less relevant, and I think modern scholarship thinks the Bible was written by a conservative faction of priests making their case for adherence to the old ways. The act of writing it down in a book, declaring this book the sort of thing that people might doubt but shouldn’t, and then passing that book to their children – that made it a modern religion, in the sense of something potentially separable from culture that required justification. I think that emphasizing the role of God and the gods provided that justification.
The Hebrew Bible never says other gods don’t exist; indeed, it often says the opposite. It constantly praises God as stronger and better than other gods. God proves his superiority over the gods of the Egyptians when the serpent he sends Moses eats the serpents the Egyptian gods send Pharaoh’s sorcerers. The Israelites are constantly warned against worshipping other gods, not because those gods don’t exist but because God is better and also jealous. This is not the worldview of somebody who has very strong ideas about the nature of reality and how supernatural beings fit into that nature. It’s the worldview of people who want to say “Our culture is better than your culture”. The Bible uses “worshipping foreign gods” as synonymous with “turning to foreign ways”. But God has a covenant with Israel, therefore both are forbidden.
This seems to match religion in the classical world – I’m especially thinking of Augustus’ conception here, but he wasn’t drawing it out of a vacuum. Performing the proper rites to the Roman gods was how you showed you were on board with Roman culture was how you showed you were loyal to Rome. The Roman view of religion seems pretty ridiculous to us – constant influx of new gods and mystery cults that were believed kind of indiscriminately, plus occasional deification of leading political figures followed by their undeification once they fell from power. But throughout it all, this idea that following the rites as Romulus prescribed them showed loyalty, but doing otherwise would result in decadence and defeat, stuck around.
Scott Alexander, “A Theory About Religion”, Slate Star Codex, 2016-04-07.
Comments Off on QotD: Religion in the Classical world
November 23, 2017
Transport regression
ESR linked to this article, saying “This is hands-down the most interesting article on history of technology I’ve read in a very long time. It seems the Middle East, the cradle of the wheeled cart, completely gave up on wheeled transport for 1500 years – it was displaced by, of all things, camels. Among other things, this explains the mazelike layout of old Arab cities – they’re like that because they’re optimized for walking and animal-riding, not wheeled transport.”:
When the first motor car chugged defiantly off the road and into the desert an entire epoch in world history began to pass away, the epoch of the camel. After centuries of supremacy as a transport animal, centuries that had seen it become for millions of people the romantic symbol of the entire Middle East, the stalwart camel was at last facing unbeatable competition.
Yet once before this homely drama of competition between the camel and the wheel had been played out in nearly identical fashion, only in reverse. Once, in ancient times, the Middle East teemed with carts and wagons and chariots, but they were totally driven out by the coming of the camel.
For all the discussion there has been among archeologists about why advanced societies such as those in pre-Colombian Central and South America never invented wheeled transport, there has been little notice taken of the amazing fact that Middle Eastern society wilfully abandoned the use of the wheel, one of mankind’s greatest inventions.
It did not, of course, abandon the wheel in all of its many forms. The potter’s wheel remained, and so did the huge, picturesque norias, or waterwheels of Syria. But gradually over the course of the first four or five centuries of the Christian era, and perhaps even earlier, all wheeled transport in the area, from the grandest chariot to the humblest farm wagon, passed out of existence.
As late as the 1780’s the French traveler Volney could still note, “It is remarkable that in all of Syria one does not see a single cart or wagon.” Moreover, in the Arabic and Persian languages one is hard pressed to find any vocabulary proper to either the use or construction of carts and wagons.
The most common explanation of this phenomenon is lack of, or deterioration of, roads in the Middle East, and to be sure the old Royal Road of the Persians and the whole network of Roman roads at some time fell out of repair and then passed out of use. However, roads are built for wheels and not vice versa. Their decline paralleled that of the wheel; it did not cause it.
Comments Off on Transport regression
Tank Chats #20 Mark IV
Tank Museum
Published on 13 May 2016Mechanically the Mark IV tank was the same as the Mark I but it had thicker armour, improved fuel supply and modified sponsons with slightly shorter guns in the Male version.
Mark IV tanks went into action for the first time in the summer of 1917, they were the mainstay of the Tank Corps at Cambrai in November and fought through to the end of the war with 7th and 12th Battalions of the Tank Corps. It was a male Mark IV tank which won the very first ‘Tank versus Tank’ action in April 1918 by knocking out the German A7V tank Nixe.
Comments Off on Tank Chats #20 Mark IV
November 21, 2017
Jagdkommandos – Austria-Hungary’s Special Forces in WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 20 Nov 2017The Jagdkommandos were Austria-Hungary’s special assault troops during WWI. From their pre-war origins, these troops had to adapt to modern war, and did so with some success. However, towards the end of the war their successes turned to failures and the Jagdkommandos faded into relative obscurity compared to their German and Italian counterparts.
Comments Off on Jagdkommandos – Austria-Hungary’s Special Forces in WW1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
