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I bet you didnt know that
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In 1518, a dancing plague hit Strasbourg. Roughly 400 people took to dancing for days on end with some collapsing from exhaustion, heart attacks and strokes while a small number died. The dancers were mostly women, and lasted roughly around 6 days with numbers of dancers estimated at roughly around 400. Authorities did not know what to do, but they had ruled out supernatural causes. Instead, they encouraged more dancing and opened two town halls so dancers could keep going.
Nobody knows why they danced and to this day remains unsolved.
Theories include that participants unwittingly consumed ergot fungi which is a hallucinogen that has also been linked with the Salem witch trials. Although this is not proven. Strasbourg was not a totally isolated incident, there were seven others in the region during the medieval period.
There are many instances of mass hysteria and individual hysteria of this fashion over time. It is a reasonable assumption that ergot was responsible as there were no preservatives (as we know them today) that would have inhibited mould spoilage in the Dark Rye bread, a staple in the middle ages, never minding kitchen hygiene.
Fungi at it again
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There was a dog born in Japan in 1923 called Hachikō. His master Hidesaburō Ueno was a professor in the University of Tokyo. Each day Hachikō would walk to the train station at the end of the day to greet his master on his return from work until one day in May 1925, Ueno didn’t return from work. He had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage at work and died. The dog continued to return to the train station at the time his masters train was due ever day for the next 9 years, 9 months and 15 days until his death in 1935, when he was cremated and buried with his master.
The University of Tokyo has since installed a statue of the pair.
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One of the most progressive and iconic sounds of all time in music was created, literally, by accident. The guitarist from Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi lost the tips of two of his fretting fingers in an industrial accident. After healing, he had to used thimbles on his injured fingers, began using super light strings and detuning the guitar to reduce tension on the strings, all of which resulted in a mournful droning sound that more or less created heavy metal music.
Maybe you did know that but it's still a cool story.
Skip to 3.30 if you want to hear Iommi at his best.0 -
Squall Leonhart wrote: »There was a dog born in Japan in 1923 called Hachikō.
The basis for the Richard Gere film Hachi. God, I wasn't right for a week after watching that one
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All Drum and Bass (and jungle) originated out of one song 'Amen Brother' by The Winstons . The sample is at 1:26. It's now called the Amen break.
Спасибо Comrades0 -
evolving_doors wrote: »All Drum and Bass (and jungle) originated out of one song 'Amen Brother' by The Winstons . The sample is at 1:26. It's now called the Amen break.
Спасибо Comrades
There's a documentary about the history of the Amen break and its role in the evolution of various different types of music, well worth a listen
Interesting fact is that GC Coleman, the drummer who performed on the track, never received any royalties despite the almost ubiquitous sampling of his performance across many genres of music over four decades. Coleman died homeless and destitute in 2006.0 -
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evolving_doors wrote: »All Drum and Bass (and jungle) originated out of one song 'Amen Brother' by The Winstons . The sample is at 1:26. It's now called the Amen break.
Спасибо Comrades
Jungle and Drum and Bass had many splinter subgenre. Techstep is one. The first tune in this subgenre was DJ Trace's remix of T-Power's "Mutant Jazz" which appeared on S.O.U.R. Recordings in 1995. It featured stepping beats and much more a distorted bass. I still have the white label 12'.
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Following on... (I make no promises this will make sense, also it is long)
Black Hole Radiation:For the day that's in it, just a couple of posts about Hawking's work.
Singularity theorems:
These were the focus of his thesis and his early papers.
There has long been a conflict between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Quantum Mechanics describes matter has fundamentally random, jumping between properties and values with seemingly no causal link between the events.
General Relativity assumes matter is as it was in older physics, deterministic with fixed properties, for shorthand "Classical". From that Classical description of matter, you get a description of the shape of spacetime as I mentioned above.
Nobody knew how to make a theory were spacetime interacted with the random matter from Quantum Mechanics, so called Quantum Gravity.
Hawking was the first to manage to get answers out of a halfway attempt.
What he did was focus on the most extreme object predicted by General Relativity, a black hole. He assumed the black hole and the star that formed it were governed purely by Classical physics (a reasonable approximation for something as large as a star). However other matter near the black hole was treated with Quantum Mechanics.
To prevent any interaction between spacetime and quantum matter, he did not allow this matter to cause gravity, although it could respond to it.
This is what nobody had done before, picked the correct combination of approximations so that the equations became solvable and didn't need a full on new theory of physics, i.e. didn't need a full theory of Quantum Gravity.
What he actually found is very bizarre and wildly misreported in popular books. It currently cannot be tested directly, but there are hopes it will be in the next thirty or so years. There has been some indirect confirmation.
Essentially, the quantum matter, in response to the gravity of the black hole, begins to increase. More particles, of any type present near the hole, come into existence, moving in the direction away from the hole. This basically takes the form of a constant flow of these particles, radiation.
Now is the part that will make your head hurt, it certainly is bizarre to me.
In popular accounts they say this is because the black hole swallows one of pair of particles that pop out of the vacuum and the other escapes. Others say it is the black hole's energy making the particles. It is actually neither of these.
What Hawking found is that a black hole changes the definition of a particle. So:
1. I can't go into the full details without the mathematics, but in essence a particle is a bundle of energy and momentum arranged in a certain way that makes your measuring equipment click. What that "arrangement" is depends on the shape of spacetime.
2. In Quantum Mechanics "empty space" is simply when the probability of seeing a particle is zero.
3. Near a black hole, spacetime is so distorted, the arrangement required for energy and momentum to manifest as a particle is very different from flat spacetime.
4. Even though the space might have been empty originally, that just means 0% chance of seeing flat spacetime particles. That doesn't mean there 0% chance of seeing the new type of particles, the type defined near a black hole. Once the black hole grants access to these new types of particles, then viola, they begin to appear, even from space that was previously empty, because it has always had the probability to manifest them, they just weren't in the right arrangement to be detected. Now that they are, they begin to appear and affect you and your equipment.
Short version: Black Hole permits "hidden" definitions of particles to interact with you.
The indirect confirmation is that early in the universe, some of these hidden definitions would have manifested briefly and affected the smooth soup of matter present after the Big Bang and caused small regions to collapse.
Modelling on supercomputers show these collapsed regions go on to become Galaxies, with the correct properties we see from Galaxies today. So this is possibly the origin of Galaxies.0 -
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Well, it's taken a few hours over the last few days, but I've finally read this whole thread! It's excellent, so informative, though I hate it when you read a great 'fact', and then find out a few posts or pages later that it's not true. Special mention goes to Fourier, Candie, Srameen and Wibbs for their excellent contributions.
Here are two of my own favourite pieces of trivia:
1. The theme song for the classic 70s sitcom "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em." (which started future Broadway and West End Star Michael Crawford doing a lot of his own stunts) is basically a musical version of morse code spelling out the title of the show, not including the apostrophes in the last two words. If you listen to it online you'll notice it immediately...
2. In 1985 Feargal Sharkey, ex-singer of The Undertones, brought out his first solo album. The first single from it was his biggest hit, 'A Good Heart'. It was written by 19 year old Maria McKee (who had her own big hit with 'Show Me Heaven' in 1990) about her failed relationship with Benmont Tench, the keyboardist with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
The second single from Feargal's album was 'You Little Thief', which was written by Benmont Tench and is about the same failed relationship.
Edit: Bugger, the second one might not be true. Apparently Benmont Tench has denied it on Twitter in 2014 (not writing the song, but it being about Maria McKee). I hold out hope that he was just being polite and covering that it was about her...
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On ancient clothing.. The purple pigment used by very rich romans to dye their clothes was worth its weight in gold. It took thousands of a particular shelled mollusc to extract the dye. The colour apparently became better with age and exposure to light and was extremely colour fast so could take years of wear and washing. It was one of the ultimate fashion and status statements. Only one problem... it stank to high heaven of fish.
Following on from this.
How many people know that the colourant used for red smarties is derived from crushed insects, or at least it was until recently.
The bright red colourant is processed from scale insects, in particular the dried body of the female cochineal insect, collected in central America.
The colorant is called cochineal, also known as carmine or E120.
It is really from the carminic acid that the insects produce to deter predators.
Also relating to food and beverages using weird animal stuff.
Guinness amongst most other brewers use a product called isinglass to help in the clarification or fining of beers.
It is a collagen that was originally sourced from the the dried swim bladders of sturgeons, especially beluga.
In later years a cheaper alternative was derived from cod.
So technically if you are a vegan you should not drink beer.
In the Massachusetts Shaker community of the early 1800's, a weaver called Miss Babbitt watched two men work a two-handed saw to cut wood and noted that the cutting action was limited to the forward motion and that the energy expended in pulling the saw back into position doubled the effort involved for half the output. Using her spinning wheel as inspiration, she developed an early prototype of the circular saw and it is that same basic design that is still used in lumber mills across the USA today. In the industrial North of England similar saws were being developed and have been patented, but in accordance with the teaching of the Shakers, Ms Babbitt never patented her invention. She's also credited with inventing a particular kind of timber nail and with improving the design of the spinning wheel, and possibly with an early version of a belt-driven washing machine.
Ah so that was why they got into the furniture business. I am not allowed discuss …
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