Some Really Beautiful African Architecture Because Honestly This Site Is So Western-centric

The Lakshmi of Pompeii

But wait, you’re thinking – Lakshmi is a Hindu goddess, right? She is, the goddess of wealth, fortune and prosperity and the wife of Vishnu.

But this particular Lakshmi figurine was found in the ruins of Pompeii. It is beautiful proof of the trade links between the Roman Empire and the other great civilizations of their day.

Fun fact: At my university (Sapienza, Roma, Italy) we are more women then men studying math.

Come on, BYU. You can do better.

Do nothing in your life that will cause you to fear if it is discovered by your neighbor.

Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher, circa 300 BCE. (via historical-nonfiction)

Underground Resistance Groups during World War 2 Were Often Antisemitic

During World War II, partisan groups arose in the forests of eastern Europe. Often small bands, they were desperate people who hoped that by retreating to the forests and keeping their numbers small, they could survive Nazi occupation and potentially use guerrilla warfare to help weaken the Nazis in their area. Most were not Jewish. Most were locals who wanted to resist the occupation of their homelands.

Some number of the groups were Jewish, however. There were many reasons separate Jewish partisan groups arose, but one notable reason was anti-semitism. Jews in non-Jewish partisan groups often hid their religion for fear of their countrymen turning on them.

Norman Salsitz, for example, used seven non-Jewish identities while fighting the Nazis in two partisan groups. At the second and larger one, the AK Polish Underground, a command was given to seek out and kill Jews being hidden on a farm. The AK Polish Underground took time from fighting Nazis to kill Jews hiding from the Nazis. Let that sink in.

Norman Salsitz volunteered for the mission. He killed the Poles who had been sent with him, and rescued the Jews in hiding. He then returned to his first partisan group. It was smaller and less effective, but they did not ask him to murder innocents, for the crime of being Jewish.

Researchers are constantly iterating and expanding on ideas that came before, which is why replication and reproducibility are so important.

Winston Churchill died on the morning of January 24th, 1965. That was 70 years to the day after his own father’s death.

(1+9^(-4^(7*6)) )^(3^(2^85))

Contains all digits from 1-9, which is trivial, but kinda cool.

It’s also a good approximation to e, which is pretty exciting.

If I told you it was correct to four billion, sixty seven million and thirty five decimal digits, would you believe me?

Well you shouldn’t, because it’s actually correct to 18,457,734,525,360,901,453,873,570 decimal digits, which is way more than it ever should be.

Source

Two Baby Girls, Who Lived and Died in the Last Ice Age, Reveal Lost American Ancestor Group

The two infants were ceremonially buried by a previously unknown population of ancient humans around 11,500 years ago. Their remains were found at Upward Sun River, a site in Alaska. DNA analyses show that the two girls were likely cousins, and descend from people separated from a population in eastern Asia, which remained isolated for thousands of years before migrating into Alaska, sometime after 15,000 years ago.

Named the Ancient Beringians — for the Bering Land Bridge that once connected North America to Asia — they were a “sister” population, or clade, that shared recent common ancestors with modern Indigenous North and South Americans. Their tool technology also appears to descend from Asian tools. Both the human remains at Upward Sun River and modern Native Americans were descended from the same ancestral source, which carried a mixture of East Asian and Mal’ta-related ancestry (the Mal’ta were an ancient population near Lake Baikal in modern Siberia, known largely from the remains of a four year old boy who died around 24,000 years ago).

Of course, all this latest find shows is that the Ancient Beringians existed about 11,500 years ago, and that they descended from the same group as modern Native Americans. We do not know what happened to this population after these two little girls died. This find does not tell us if the Ancient Beringians persisted, intermarrying with what would become modern North and South Americans. It does not tell us if they died out, perhaps because of climate change at the end of the Ice Age making their way of life untenable, or even because of conflict with other indigenous groups. These two young relatives raise many questions, and answer only a few.

Taxidermy

I know that “stuffed my face” is an idiom because you can’t really stuff anyone’s face, unless you are a taxidermist.