To ask you to post the most intellectual thing you have learned recently?

[ethelfleda]

I dont care what subject it is about or how specific or random it may seem. I'm just in the mood to soak up some knowledge! I've been doing a lot of free course on the openlearn website and some of them are fascinating and I feel my self esteem is increasing just through learning. I didn't get the chance to study past GCSE level when I was younger and I have always regretted it.

I will start:

That I think in art history, it can almost be considered a hindrance to try and relate the artist's work with details of their life. This can discount many other factors influencing their work such as patronage or available materials and can cause you to read a painting 'incorrectly' - that is not in the manner in which it was intended'

[BringOnTheScience]

Hungarian has different words for red depening on whether the red is is/was living or not. So a red flower uses a different word to red paint. www.hungarianreference.com/colours-colors.aspx

[Brawsome]

You can buy Karl Marx cookie cutters in Trier, Germany and that 2018 is the bicentennial of his birth.

[Whereismumhiding2]

What's the smallest country in the world?

Vatican city

...How many pope's per square metre are there in that country?

1.4 ( yes really!!)

(These facts come to you thanks to my 15 DS's usual over dinner chat tonight! )

[FermatsTheorem]

IfyouseeRitaMoreno Thank you for the explanation of tennis scoring - I had always wondered where that came from.

[LtGreggs]

That there are more people in the world in slavery now than at the height of the black/transatlantic slave trade.

[Firesuit]

That banks don't first have money then lend it. The truth is the exact opposite, the act of lending creates the money that is lent. In the instant that the bank computer increases a deposit account balance by the loan amount, that amount of new money has been created "out of thin air".

97% of the money in the economy is of this type. 97% of the money we use was magicked into existence when a commercial bank made a loan.

If you don't believe me, take it up with the source of my information, the Bank of England.

www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy

(A while ago I composed and save a lengthy potential AIBU describing in detail how all this worked, but I never posted it, due to not having the energy for ensuing discussion.)

[MrStarkIDontFeelSoGood]

I wheel this history fact out a bit because I like it. Edward IV brother, George, Duke Of Clarence was executed for treason and allowed as a Prince to choose his manner of death.

He elected to be drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine because it was his sister in law the Queens favourite and he hated her.

We have had two gay kings, William II and Edward The II were both gay.

Alfred The Great is considered England's first real King but he was only King of Wessex (the Southwest) and trying to conquer smaller tribal groups for control of other areas of England

[Whereismumhiding2]

@whereismumhiding2
Whoops. The pope thing was meant to be how many pope's per square kilometre ? Not metre. And answer is 2.7 not 1.4! (my son says I don't fully listen!)

[EthelSpandex]

@karyatide
I'm interested in what you say about blue. I don't quite follow - The ancients Egyptians prized lapis lazuli which was later used to make the colour ultramarine. Azur/azure (the word comes from lapis lazuli) was used in heraldry and the term came over with the Normans. And we're all familiar with our ancestors use of woad!

The first modern synthetic dye (a purple) wasn't discovered until the second half of the 19th century, although the Ancient Egyptians did have artificial blue pigment to colour things. But c four millennia ago is still a long time!

[Firesuit]

According to Gladstone, I think, the reason Homer wrote about "the wine-dark sea" is that he didn't have a word for the colour blue.

There is an infinity of different "colours" in the spectrum, but the limited number of words describing colours are cultural constructs, so "blue" can exist in one culture but not in another.

[Pebbles16]

This is probably anti-intellectual but I really can't bear to read another Iris Murdoch book. It's the Thomas Hardy descriptions without the plot momentum. I've tried. I've failed. Iris is not for me (loved the film though)

[bakingdemon]

The UK's law of treason comes from an Act passed in 1351. Except for a brief interlude during WW2 when the Treachery Act made helping Nazi Germany a crime, it hasn't been updated since.

I love this fact.

[ErrolTheDragon]

Whereismumhiding2 might like to ask her DS the question which supposedly has a blatantly obvious answer 'is the Pope a Catholic' .... well, not necessarily:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PopeofftheCopticcOrthodoxChurchhofAlexandria

[WickedLazy]

EthelSpandex

www.iflscience.com/brain/when-did-humans-start-see-color-blue/

There's a theory humans have only been able to percieve the colour blue, as seperate from green, from around 4,500 years ago. Interesting as humans would have had blue eyes by then. Humans may evolve the ability to see colours we currently can't, in the future.

[EthelSpandex]

Thanks WickedLazy so it may have been the great new thing when Ancient Egyptians were loving their lapis lazuli and grinding blue pigments to adorn the dead.

But 4.5k years ago is a long time in human development.

[kooshbin]

Errol - I have loads of Great Courses DVDs that I’ve bought, mostly science and history. Probably going on for 80 so far. I always buy them when they’re on sale. I tell my offspring that that’s what I’m spending their inheritance on.

I also watch a lot of documentaries on TV, well, at least those that focus on information rather than pretty pictures and mood music.

[kooshbin]

From a documentary I recently watched: The Ottoman Empire at its height was huge – stretching from the Balkans all through the Middle East to Egypt. It lasted for 600 years, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

It conquered Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) for a couple of reasons: Constantinople was the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but it got ransacked by the Western Christian Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. The population dwindled, as did its wealth. Then the Ottomans bombarded it with heavy cannon, which it could afford because it was very rich.

The Ottoman Sultan was the Caliph of all of the known Muslim world, including their most holiest sites. When the Ottoman Empire went into decline, very recently in historical terms, the Caliphate splintered, partly/mostly because of the challenge from the Shi’a Safavids in present-day Iran - the Ottomans followed the Sunni tradition. (Iranians are Persians, not Arabs.)

The further splintering of the Islamic world wasn’t helped by the arbitrary carving up of their lands by the Great Powers after WWI, which took little or no notice of ethnic or geographical delineations of the area.

[BillywigSting]

I've been binge watching pbs eons on YouTube and learned an enormous amount about paleontology and prehistory, in no small part thanks to ds.

He's right though, dinosaurs are really properly cool.

[hairyscarey]

Timefortea. Southend Pier does go in to the sea. Check the definition of estuary.

[ErrolTheDragon]

Interesting... I've been trying to dig into this and from what I've found, the dna evidence is that humans developed the ability to actually see blue light around 30 million years ago (a shift from being able to see UV light).
'But 4.5k years ago is a long time in human development.'...I'd have said it was very, very short.

But our perception - the mental model we build from external stimuli- may have simply not found blue worth noticing.

https://thedoctorweighsin.com/evolution-of-the-color-blue/

[ErrolTheDragon]

Kooshbin - the ottoman doc. was good, and recently also there was a Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul trio which worked over some of the same ground. And today we started on the same geographical area with another Great Courses series - www.thegreatcourses.co.uk/courses/great-ancient-civilizations-of-asia-minor.html (on sale, DH follows the same buying policy mostly).

[elephantoverthehill]

From another thread and another Mnetter. Ants farm blackfly.

[notapizzaeater]

The playground game TAG - tag stands for touch and go

[badtime]

notapizza, it doesn't. That's a backronym, like when people say 'news' means 'north east west south' (it means new things) or 'fuck' means 'fornication under consent of the king' (it means 'fuck').

[ethelfleda]

The further splintering of the Islamic world wasn’t helped by the arbitrary carving up of their lands by the Great Powers after WWI, which took little or no notice of ethnic or geographical delineations of the area

This is exactly what the Europeans dis to sub-saharan Africa too when it was 'colonised (which as we know is very different to 'invaded')
Many of the continent's issues are attributed to this!

I love this thread! I so enjoy learning new things!