“One who would defend the constitutional rights must share his foxhole with scoundrels of every sort, but to abandon the post because of the poor company is to sell freedom cheap.”
- Kopf v. Skyrm, 4th Circuit Court of Appeals
Reading is so powerful now because, in a culture of doing so many things at once, it's stubbornly singular, when you're doing it you can't do anything else, you can't think about anything else, it demands all of you
I was told this story in the 1990s by an army colleague of mine who was adjacent to the more shadowy parts of the US Govt:
A bird was flying in the winter. It was so cold that it froze and fell to the ground. While it was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some shit on him. As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of shit, he began to warm up. Happy that he was now warm, he started singing.
A cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate. The cat discovered the bird in the pile of shit, dug him out, and ate him.
There are 3 lessons in this story:
1) Not everyone who shits on you is your enemy.
2) Not everyone who gets you out of the shit is your friend.
3) When you’re in the shit, keep your mouth shut.
"There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world."
- Sherlock Holmes in "A Case of Identity"
#ConanDoyle#multiculturalism
Examining claims about colonialism and famines.
Many critics argue that British colonial policies made famines in India more frequent and deadly, or even drained the country of food and resources. In his article, Tirthankar Roy reviews these claims and the evidence behind them.
Read more here: https://t.co/hlw3UDlM5S
#Colonailism #IndianFamines #BritishColonialism #BritishRuleinIndia #HistoryReclaimed #TirthankarRoy
"The history of the British Empire has become an ideological battleground."
Some writers now reduce it to slogans, portraying the Empire as “violent looting on a global scale.”
But slogans are not evidence.This article examines where these claims come from, and whether they stand up to scrutiny.
Read the full article here: https://t.co/JozxJA66kM
#BritishEmpire #India #Colonialism #UtsaPatnaik #HistoricDebate #Bengal #HistoryReclaimed #TirthankarRoy
🚨 Hansi Flick, set to sign new deal at Barcelona valid until June 2028. 💙❤️
“We will announce the renewal for Flick soon, it will be for one more season — until 2028”, says Joan Laporta ✍🏼🔐
“Hansi has already agreed, he’s very happy here”, the president has told RAC1.
Went down the rabbit hole on this one. The answer is actually wild.
5,000 years ago, Sumerian merchants in modern-day Iraq needed a number that's easy to divide. They picked 60. It has 12 divisors (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60). Base-10 only has four. That's 3x as many ways to split something evenly, which matters when you're dividing grain and wages and can't handle repeating decimals.
The counting method is the best part. They used their thumb as a pointer on the three bone segments of each finger. Four fingers, three segments, that's 12 per hand. Track multiples of 12, on the other hand, and you hit 60. No pen needed. Merchants in parts of Asia still count this way today.
The system spread from Sumer to the Babylonians, then eastward to Persia, India, and China, and westward to Egypt and Rome. By 1800 BC, Babylonian students were using base-60 to calculate the square root of 2 to six decimal places on clay tablets. One student's homework from 4,000 years ago, now at Yale, holds the most accurate computation found anywhere in the ancient world. The Greeks adopted it for astronomy, which locked it into navigation, cartography, and eventually clocks in the 14th century.
People have tried to kill it. During the French Revolution in 1793, France mandated decimal time: 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. New clocks, new laws, the whole thing. Lasted 17 months. Workers hated getting one day off every ten days instead of one every seven. They tried again in 1897. Scrapped by 1900. The metric system replaced feet and pounds across most of the world. But 60 minutes in an hour? Untouchable.
60 is just too good at being divided. You can split an hour into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, twelfths, or twentieths and land on a whole number every time. Try that with 100, and you get ugly decimals for thirds, sixths, and most common splits. 5,000 years of civilizations looked at that math and came to the same conclusion: 60 wins.
Lionel Messi is demonic 😭
I just saw a conversation between some guys on KDB & Messi’s creativity. Man pulled a KDB video & dared the other to reply with a Messi video like that. He didn’t respond but in the comments, someone pulled a 13–min video of Messi feeding only Mbappe. 13 freaking minutes 😂😂 do you know what is 13 minutes of passing to just one person? Given that you played for just 2 years?
Ok someone else commented that KDB only edges Messi on long range shots & that was countered; another guy queried Grok to reveal that Messi has the most goals from outside the box 😂😂
There’s no way to win against Messi, it’s impossible.