Lindybeige
Published 5 Dec 2019I make the pommel and the grip, assemble the hilt, and polish it to a shine. Behold: ARNANDER!
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Many thanks to The Cut And Thrust Collective for inviting me to Glastonbury to have a go at forging a sword.
My tutor: Thom Leworthy.
Music used in this video: “Siegfried’s Funeral March” by Wagner.
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September 3, 2020
September 2, 2020
August 31, 2020
“The ‘Scots’ that wis uised in this airticle wis written bi a body that’s mither tongue isna Scots. Please impruive this airticle gin ye can.”
Natalie Solent has some sympathy for the recently revealed teen who is the main “author” of the Scots version of Wikipedia:
If you are wondering how a nineteen year old managed to be responsible for creating or editing tens of thousands of articles, the answer is simple:
He wrote: “I was only a 12-year-old kid when I started, and sometimes when you start something young, you can’t see that the habit you’ve developed is unhealthy and unhelpful as you get older.”
Naming no names except my own, that sounds like a few of us here. Ten edits a day, most days, for two and a half thousand days. The work of half his life. The thing that made him special. And now they revile him for it. Believe me, I am not laughing when I call this a sad story.
Believe me, too, when I say I do not want to mock Scots. The Samizdata “Languages” category includes many other posts by me about endangered tongues. I want them to survive and grow. A world where everyone spoke only one language would be a grey place, and one more likely to fall to tyranny. For many a soul living under oppression their knowledge of something other than the majority language has been the one window to freer times or places that the censors could not brick up. Less portentously, I like the vigorous style of Scots. The fact that it is mostly mutually intelligible with English English has been the source of endless arguments about whether it is a dialect of English or a language in its own right. It is a pity that this question has been politicised. My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that although Scots was a separate language in the Middle Ages, enough linguistic convergence has occurred to say that nowadays it is a dialect of English. There is nothing wrong with that. It would be equally valid to say Standard English and Scots are both dialects on the continuum of English (and that the group as a whole is called “English” is just a matter of historically familiar terminology, not an attribution of superiority. Brits should remember that if numbers of speakers were the criterion that decided the name of this language we would be speaking American.)
It is a sad reflection on the state of Scots that nobody stopped “AmaryllisGardner” for five years. Scarcely anyone seems to have questioned him. I cannot help thinking this fiasco would never have happened if linguists and the penumbra of people who are “into” languages had not been so down on prescriptivism. After all, if there truly is no correct or incorrect way to use language, our laddie’s version of Scots has as much claim to be right as the one they speak in Glasgow.
August 28, 2020
National “cheater density” for popular online games
Richard Currie summarizes the findings of Ruby Fortune’s cheater research (note that there’s no data on China because reasons):
Ever torn your keyboard from the desk and flung it across the room, vowing to find the “scrub cheater” who ended your run of video-gaming success? Uh, yeah, us neither, but a study into the crooked practice might help narrow down the hypothetical search.
The research, carried out by casino games outfit Ruby Fortune, has produced a global heatmap of supposed cheater density.
According to the website, this was done by analysing “search trend and search volume data to reveal where in the world is most likely to cheat while playing online multiplayer video games”. The report looks at the frequency of search engine queries for the most-played video games and measures them against searches for related cheat codes, hacks and bots, to show which country has the highest density of cheaters, and which cheat categories are the most popular in each location.
[…]
There is a massive hole in the data, however, thanks to the Great Firewall of China, which has a terrible reputation for ruining the experience of online games.
If there was any doubt that the Middle Kingdom would otherwise take Brazil’s crown, consider that Dell once advertised a laptop for the market by saying it was especially good for running PUBG plugins to “win more at Chicken Dinner”, a reference to the “Winner winner chicken dinner” message that comes up on a victory screen.
Data from the Battle Royale granddad’s anti-cheat tech provider, BattlEye, has also suggested that at one point 99 per cent of banned cheaters were from China.
August 27, 2020
Scots wa huh?
An amusing story in The Register from Kieren McCarthy:
In an extraordinary and somewhat devastating discovery, it turns out virtually the entire Scots version of Wikipedia, comprising more than 57,000 articles, was written, edited or overseen by a netizen who clearly had nae the slightest idea about the language.
The user is not only a prolific contributor, they are an administrator of sco.wikipedia.org, having created, modified or guided the vast majority of its pages in more than 200,000 edits. The result is tens of thousands of articles in English with occasional, and often ridiculous, letter changes – such as replacing a “y” with “ee.”
That’s right, someone doing a bad impression of a Scottish accent and then writing it down phonetically is the chief maintainer of the online encyclopedia’s Scots edition. And although this has been carrying on for the best part of a decade, the world was mostly oblivious to it all – until today, when one Redditor finally had enough of reading terrible Scots and decided to look behind the curtain.
“People embroiled in linguistic debates about Scots often use it as evidence that Scots isn’t a language, and if it was an accurate representation, they’d probably be right,” noted the Reddit sleuth, Ultach. “It uses almost no Scots vocabulary, what little it does use is usually incorrect, and the grammar always conforms to standard English, not Scots.”
While very nearly all Scottish people speak English, the Scots language was apparently still spoken, read, or otherwise understood by nearly 30 per cent of Scotland’s population according to those responding to a 2011 census. The language got a memorable boost, too, when Scots-writing novelist Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting became a silver-screen sensation.
August 25, 2020
The Bronze Age Changes with Archeological Evidence
The Cynical Historian
Published 22 Feb 2019Check out the full collaboration playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Up until the 19th century, the Bronze Age was merely a time of legends, where the Bible and Iliad told fantastic tales of brutality and triumph. But archeology changed that, and that’s what I want to talk about today, how the Bronze Age was rescued from legend.
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references:
Stephen L. Dyson, “Archaeology and Ancient History,” in A Companion to Ancient History, edited by Andrew Erskine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 59-66. https://amzn.to/2PCf04XMarie-Henriette Gates, “Archeology and the Ancient Near East: Methods and Limits,” in A Companion to the Ancient Near East, edited by Daniel C. Snell (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), 65-79. https://amzn.to/2BrsBqO
Alan B. Lloyd, “Chronology,” in A Companion to Ancient Egypt, vol. 1, edited by Alan B. Lloyd (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2010), xxxii-xliii. https://amzn.to/2LqGZnM
John Marincola, “Historiography,” in A Companion to Ancient History, edited by Andrew Erskine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 13-22. https://amzn.to/2PCf04X
John Van Seters, “Historiography in Ancient Israel,” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 15-34. https://amzn.to/2PAC5Vz
Tim Whitmarsh, “Ancient History through Ancient Literature,” in A Companion to Ancient History, edited by Andrew Erskine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 77-86. https://amzn.to/2PCf04X
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Wiki: The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, and in some areas proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, for classifying and studying ancient societies.An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by producing bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Bronze itself is harder and more durable than other metals available at the time, allowing Bronze Age civilizations to gain a technological advantage.
Copper-tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact that there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before trading in bronze began in the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, with the Chalcolithic serving as a transition. Although the Iron Age generally followed the Bronze Age, in some areas (such as Sub-Saharan Africa), the Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic.
Bronze Age cultures differed in their development of the first writing. According to archaeological evidence, cultures in Mesopotamia (cuneiform script) and Egypt (hieroglyphs) developed the earliest viable writing systems
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Hashtags: #history #TheBronzeAge #archeology #BronzeBonanza
August 22, 2020
August 19, 2020
He calls it “unintended consequences”. I disagree … these consequences are very much intended
Brad Polumbo is being far too generous to Californian politicians by saying the impending collapse of the state’s entire gig economy was not the intended result of passing “worker protection” laws that penalized success:

UBER 4U by afagen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
This Friday, Uber and Lyft are set to entirely shut down ride-sharing operations in California. The businesses’ exit from the Golden State will leave hundreds of thousands of drivers unemployed and millions of Californians chasing an expensive cab. Sadly, this was preventable.
Here’s how we got to this point.
In September of 2019, the California state legislature passed AB 5, a now-infamous bill harshly restricting independent contracting and freelancing across many industries. By requiring ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft to reclassify their drivers as full employees, the law mandated that the companies provide healthcare and benefits to all the drivers in their system and pay additional taxes.
Legislators didn’t realize the drastic implications their legislation would have; they were simply hoping to improve working conditions in the gig economy. The unintended consequences may end up destroying it instead.
Here’s why.
AB 5 went into effect in January, and now, a judge has ordered Uber and Lyft to comply with the regulation and make the drastic transformation by August 20. Since compliance is simply unaffordable, the companies are going to have to shut down operations in California.
Their entire business model was based upon independent contracting, so providing full employee benefits is prohibitively expensive. Neither Uber nor Lyft actually make a profit, and converting their workforce to full-time employees would cost approximately $3,625 per driver in California. As reported by Quartz, “that’s enough to boost Uber’s annual operating loss by more than $500 million and Lyft’s by $290 million.”
Essentially, California legislators put these companies in an impossible position. It makes perfect sense that they’d leave the state in response. It’s clear that despite the good intentions behind the ride-sharing regulation, this outcome will leave all Californians worse off.
August 13, 2020
Hitler’s screen idol – Leni Riefenstahl – WW2 Biography Special
World War Two
Published 12 Aug 2020Leni Riefenstal’s film techniques were groundbreaking and are still influential today. She did, though, create her most famous works in the service of Adolf Hitler.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @World_war_two_realtime https://www.instagram.com/world_war_two_realtime
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesWritten and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Madeline Johnson
Edited by: Monika Worona
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/Sources:
– BundesarchivArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
4 hours ago
Thanks to Madeline Johnson for the research for this episode. In many ways it’s our community who keep TimeGhost going. If you want to be part of this then join the TimeGhost Army on www.patreon.com/timeghosthistory or https://timeghost.tv.Please let us know what other Bios you’d like to see. And if you have a question about the war you’re dying to have answered, submit it for our Q&A series, Out of the Foxholes at: https://community.timeghost.tv/c/Out-of-the-Foxholes-Qs.
August 7, 2020
From Medieval Letters Patent to our modern patents, by way of Venice
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes traces the lines of descent from the Letters patent of the Middle Ages, through Venetian legal innovations, to what began to resemble our modern patent system:

Letters Patent Issued by Queen Victoria, 1839
On 15 June 1839 Captain William Hobson was officially appointed by Queen Victoria to be Lieutenant Governor General of New Zealand. Hobson (1792 – 1842) was thus the first Governor of New Zealand. This position was renamed in 1907 as “Governor General”. Hobson arrived in New Zealand in late January 1840, and oversaw the signing of te Tiriti o Waitangi only a few days later. By the end of 1840, New Zealand became a colony in its own right and Hobson moved the capital of the colony from the Bay of Islands to Auckland. He served as Governor until his death in 1842 after he suffered a stroke at the age of 49.
Constitutional Records group of Archives NZ via Wikimedia Commons.
Patents for invention — temporary monopolies on the use of new technologies — are frequently cited as a key contributor to the British Industrial Revolution. But where did they come from? We typically talk about them as formal institutions, imposed from above by supposedly wise rulers. But their origins, or at least their introduction to England, tell a very different story.
England’s monarchs had long used their prerogative powers to grant special dispensations by letters patent — that is, orders from the monarch that were open for all the public to see (think of the word patently, from the same root, which means openly or clearly). For the most part, such public proclamations had been used to grant titles of nobility, or to appoint people to positions in various official hierarchies — legal, religious, and governmental. And, of course, letters patent could be used to promote the introduction of new technologies.
[…]
Monopolies in general, of course, over particular trades or industries had been granted for centuries, by rulers all across Europe. They granted such privileges to groups of merchants, artisans, and city-dwellers, giving them rights to organise and regulate their own activities as guilds or as city corporations. Inherent to all such charters was the ability of the in-group to restrict competition from outsiders, at least within the confines of their city. And the ruler, in exchange for granting such privileges, typically received a share of the guild’s or corporation’s revenues. But such monopolies were very rarely given to individuals. When they were, it was often so unpopular as to be almost immediately overturned. And they were rarely used to encourage innovation.
With one exception: Italy. Throughout the fifteenth century, some Italian city guilds had begun to forbid their members from copying newly-invented patterns for silk and woollen cloth, effectively granting a monopoly over those patterns to the individual inventors. In Venice, a 50-year monopoly was granted in 1416 to one Franciscus Petri, of Rhodes, to introduce superior fulling mills. In Florence, the famous architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi was granted a monopoly in 1421 for a vessel he designed for transporting heavy loads of marble, in exchange for revealing the secrets of his design. The printing press was also introduced to Venice using such a privilege, with a 5-year monopoly granted in 1469 to Johannes of Speyer, though he died only a few months after receiving it. And these ad hoc grants were made with increasing frequency, such that in 1474 Venice legislated to make them more systematic, declaring that 10-year monopolies could be obtained for all new technologies, either invented or imported (though it continued to also grant ad hoc patents, with the terms and durations decided on a case-by-case basis as before). Under the 1474 law, Venice was soon granting patent monopolies to the introducers of various mills, pumps, dredges, textile machines, printing techniques, and even special kinds of lasagna. It granted over a hundred patents in the first half of the sixteenth century, with many more thereafter.
From Venice, the use of patent monopolies as an instrument of policy spread abroad, with the initiative coming from the would-be introducers of novelties themselves. In the mid-fifteenth century, for example, a French inventor who had acquired patents in Venice was also successfully lobbying for similar privileges from the archbishop of Salzburg, the duke of Ferrara, and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor. The use of patent monopolies thus soon diffused to the rest of Italy, to Germany, and to the various dominions of the Spanish emperor — including Spain itself, its American colonies, and the Low Countries.
And, eventually, to England. But not in the way we might expect. In 1496, the Venetian explorer Zuan Chabotto (aka John Cabot) acquired a patent monopoly from Henry VII over the trade and products of any lands he was to discover — a legal procedure unlike anything that earlier English explorers had attempted (they had merely been granted licenses). Cabot’s grant even differed from the agreements made by Christopher Columbus with the Spanish crown, or by earlier explorers for the Portuguese. Columbus, for example, was effectively granted a patent of nobility — the hereditary titles of viceroy, admiral, and governor. He and the Portuguese explorers were direct agents of the crown, with military and justice-dispensing responsibilities over any newly conquered lands — a model derived from the Christian conquests of Muslim Iberia. Columbus effectively became a marcher lord, a custodian and defender of Spain’s new borderlands.
August 6, 2020
Congress legislating on high tech is like your Grampa telling you how to play your favourite online game
Brad Polumbo on the notion that the politicians in Washington (or Ottawa, or London, or Canberra, …) are in any way capable of sensibly regulating the high tech sector:
While many principled small-government conservatives, such as Sen. Rand Paul, still back a free-market approach to tech policy issues, Hawley is not an outlier by any means.
Indeed, President Trump has also backed the regulation of social media companies to combat perceived anti-conservative bias. And the most popular conservative media personality in the country, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, regularly rails against Big Tech — even agreeing with progressive proposals to use the heavy hand of government antitrust regulation to break up companies such as Facebook and Google.
So, if major figures from both parties can agree on regulating Big Tech, it must be a good idea, right? Not so fast.
From left to right, the intentions behind these regulatory proposals are often good. After all, most reasonable people would likely share Democrats’ desire to see Big Tech better handle misinformation, “fake news,” and foreign election interference, while conservative Republicans’ calls for political neutrality online are no doubt appealing in the abstract.
Unfortunately, in their haphazard rush to score political points through government action, would-be regulators from both parties are forgetting the inevitable “knowledge problem” that plagues any central planners who try to dictate the minutiae of complicated industries from the halls of Washington, DC.
Economic philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek diagnosed this fatal flaw of government control in his seminal work “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”
“If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place,” Hayek wrote. “It would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.”
“We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders,” he continued. “We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used.“
August 4, 2020
Ontario’s COVID Alert app
Michael Geist explains why he has installed the Canadian government’s COVID App on his phone, despite the privacy concerns such government tracking apps present:
The Canadian COVID Alert app is ultimately as notable for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. The voluntary app does not collect personal information nor provide the government (or anyone else) with location information. The app merely runs in the background on an Apple or Android phone using bluetooth technology to identify other devices that come within 2 metres for a period of 15 minutes or more. Obviously, the distance and timing are viewed as the minimum for a potential transmission risk. If this occurs, a unique, random identifier is stored on each person’s device for a period of 14 days. After the 14 day period, the identifier is deleted from the device.
The identifier does not identify a specific person or location information, and is not sent to any centralized database. If a person tests positive for the virus, they are given a key code to input into the app. Once the key code is inputted, anyone that was identified as being potentially exposed over the prior 14 days receives a notification that this has occurred and they should consider testing and/or self-isolating.
From a privacy perspective, this is very low risk. Indeed, the government’s position – confirmed in the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s analysis – is that there is no collection of any personal information and therefore the Privacy Act does not apply. The Privacy Commissioner rightly points out this raises some concerns about the state of the law (arguing it should be sufficiently robust to allow for reviews of this kind), however, the use of random identifiers ensures that identification of individual is very unlikely. Moreover, the Privacy Commissioner’s review concludes that “there are very strong safeguards in place” with security of the data, commitments limiting use, independent oversight, and a pledge to de-commission the app (including deletion of all data) within 30 days of the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada declaring the pandemic over.
The Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner was also engaged in the review process. Her recommendation letter points to commitments for potential ongoing issues, including ensuring that the app is effective, that there is monitoring of third party components such as the Google-Apple Exposure Notification System, and public transparency associated with the app and its use.
While the app passes legal muster, its introduction reinforces the problems with social inequities that COVID-19 has laid clear. Much like the connection between socio-economic status and infection risk, the app itself is only accessible to those who can afford newer Apple and Android devices. That obviously means that those with older phones or no wireless access at all are unable to use it. While I don’t think that is reason to abandon the initiative, the government should be exploring alternatives to allow all citizens to implement these safeguards.















