alexander wynne

Buddhist scholar

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

The best bond film ever, from the very first shot

[Tom Harris 🇬🇧 @MrTCHarris]

You can never have too many trampoline bounces in a Bond title sequence.

[Tom Harris 🇬🇧 @MrTCHarris]

You can never have too many trampoline bounces in a Bond title sequence.

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

@ThaiTrainGuide That is so wise. Aum

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

@liamgallagher There's only one shitcunt mate, look in the mirror you woollyback retard

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

@joshglancy The point is to 'other' Jews and so make it easier for readers to have racist thoughts. They sort of know what they're doing but in an unstated, implicit kind of way

[Samuel Hughes @SCP_Hughes]

The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.

https://t.co/TvbuWtaPRJ

The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:

- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.

- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.

- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.

- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.

- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.

This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.

Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

@thomasknox It's no.2 which shows that the whole woke thing is part of a much more profound change, an actual civilizational breakdown going on right in front of us

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

@thomasknox Can a robot fell pain? Have an itch in its big toe? Get a hard on?

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

It's over for you mancunians, slaphead

[Liam Gallagher @liamgallagher]

Listen most my mates are Man utd fans and a few Liverpool fans and they can all FUCKOFF as well MCFC CTID LG x

[Matthew Syed @matthewsyed]

Cheating on an industrial scale is not okay just because you invest in some community projects…

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

@liamgallagher @ErlingRoIe Lucky it won't happen then, ever. You're team is done, woollyback

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

@liamgallagher Pipe down you retard woollyback, your team is going to jail

[Keyfi Paylaşımlar @keyfipyIasimIar]

En yakın arkadaşı olan kediden biraz daha fazla ilgi isteyen sevimli köpek, isteğini nazikçe belli ediyor.

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

I bet it's not as nice as my mum's

[Hiroshi Suzuki @AmbJapanUK]

That's boss scran!!!😋

[Hiroshi Suzuki @AmbJapanUK]

That's boss scran!!!😋

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

@thomasknox Shame it isn't an actual opium den

[alexander wynne @buddhismintro]

There's no going back from the reformation. A culture of impiety cannot regain its old faith

[Tim Stanley @timothy_stanley]

How can we revive the spirit of England, cut off from its root by the Reformation?

Start again, from the beginning. Spread the Gospels, live authentically as Catholics and work to restore the intellectual & exotic culture that flourished before the altars were stripped.

[Thomas Sullivan @Yfz84]

Norm Macdonald was Conan’s favorite guest. So here is the greatest joke in late night

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

I had not realised before that the Bronze Age Collapse was literally *caused* by iron.

Bronze age powers like the Egyptians, Hittites and Babylonians used bronze weapons, made by combining copper and tin. Tin was so scarce that only the richest and most powerful groups could access it and the bronze weapons it allowed. (Tin was so rare that it was being transported from Cornwall to the Middle East more than 1000 years BC.) The scarcity of tin gave these empires a near-monopoly on violence.

Iron weapons are not actually any better than bronze ones – they're not stronger or easier to work with, as I'd assumed. They're just much, much easier to mass produce once you have bloomeries, which are the first furnaces that were hot enough to melt iron in a way that made them useable for weapons.

Bloomeries meant that iron ore, which was widespread, could be used to make weapons anywhere. That led to warlords, bandits and city-states rising in a massive decentralization of military power, which the Bronze Age empires were unable to resist.

After the invention of the bloomery, skeletons show a measurable increase in weapon-inflicted injuries. 'Destruction layers' with bones and signs of burning have been found from this time at archaeological sites including Troy. Ancient writers – including Herodotus, Ovid, and the writers of the Old Testament – believed the invention of iron had unleashed a new age of violence.

New at Works in Progress, WEAPONS OF MASS DECENTRALIZATION: how iron itself brought about the Bronze Age Collapse. And what technologies could do the same today?

https://t.co/Ni4DfPYBhr

[ArchaeoHistories @histories_arch]

In 2013, two cavers squeezed through a crack barely seven inches wide in South Africa's Rising Star cave system and emerged into a chamber littered with bones. What they found would become one of the strangest discoveries in human evolution: a new species, Homo naledi — small-brained, slender, and utterly mysterious.

Homo naledi stood about five feet tall and weighed under a hundred pounds. Its brain was the size of an orange — roughly 500 cubic centimeters, a third the size of ours. By every old rule of paleoanthropology, a creature with a brain that small should have lived millions of years ago and behaved like an ape. Homo naledi broke every rule.

The first shock was the date. When the fossils were finally dated in 2017, they turned out to be only 335,000 to 241,000 years old. That means this small-brained species was alive at the same time as early Homo sapiens — our own ancestors were walking the same African landscapes while naledi still climbed and foraged.

The second shock was the cave itself. The Dinaledi Chamber, where over 1,500 bones from at least fifteen individuals were found, is accessible only through a brutal vertical chute. There is no evidence of water flow carrying the bodies in, and no predator damage. The simplest explanation is also the most astonishing: the bodies were placed there deliberately, carried through the darkness by their own kind.

If true, that means a creature with an orange-sized brain was disposing of its dead — behavior once thought to require a large, modern human brain. In 2023, the research team went further, claiming evidence of engraved markings on the cave walls and deliberately dug shallow graves, though these claims remain hotly debated among scientists.

The debate is fierce and fascinating. Critics argue the "engravings" could be natural, the "graves" could be natural depressions, and the dating needs more confirmation. Supporters counter that no natural process explains fifteen bodies deep in an inaccessible chamber. Science at its best is an argument, and Homo naledi is one of its liveliest.

What is not debated is how naledi forces us to rethink the story. Brain size clearly did not dictate behavior as simply as we assumed. Complex actions — navigating darkness with fire, caring for the dead — may have roots far deeper and stranger than the "big brain" narrative allows.

The Rising Star cave still holds secrets; new chambers are being explored even now. Whatever Homo naledi turns out to have been, it has already done something remarkable: reminded us that the human story is weirder, richer, and far less finished than we ever imagined.

#archaeohistories