I bet you didn't know that this thread would have a part 2

humberklog

partyguinness wrote: »

But there is no historical evidence disproving it either...:D

Other than that getting paid in salt would be pants whatever era you lived in. Especially if you were a Roman soldier (that's who the myth lies with and not sure if they were paid at all) but having spent the week chopping off barbarian heads the last thing you'd want to be doing is popping off to the local market and bartering for grog with a bag of salt.

Professor Moriarty

humberklog wrote: »

I think that's just something that got said once and repeated as fact but has no historical evidence to back it up.



The first female to male transgender operation was on an Irish woman-man. Michael Dillon was born Laura Maud Dillon in Lismullen in 1915. After studying sciences in Oxford he worked in a research lab. While there he sought hormone treatment but the doctor he was seeing started gossiping and she left Oxford for Bristol to work in a mechanic's garage.

He returned to Ireland and studied medicine in Trinity and while there he wrote a book (Self:A study in ethics and endocrinology) this lead to being put in contact with a doctor in London willing and able to do the op.
Dr. Gillies, a Kiwi, a Spitfire pilot in WW2 (captured) and a brilliant golfer had been making his name in plastic surgery reconstructing injured veterans.

By 1949 Michael Dillon had completed the 13+operations to transition and by '51 he'd qualified in medicine and signed up to the merchant navy as a surgeon and spent 6 years at sea.

Wanting to live a normal and anonymous life a fairly innocuous reveal in Debrettes Peerage caused a storm that Michael wanted to escape from.
He headed to India and wished to become a buddhist monk. He changed his name to Sramamera Jivaka. Things didnt pan out the way he hoped as his past caught up with him and that branch of Buddhism were unwilling to ordain him full monk status. He decided to hoof it to Tibet where they were more broadminded and he restarted his studies and changed his name to Lobzang Jivaka.
Under his Buddhist names he published a number of books on that religion.

Eventually his visa ran out and in 1962 aged 47 he dies. In India. In penury.

Laura Maud Dillon-Laurence Michael Dillon-Sramamera Jivaka-Lobzang Jivaka.

Navan man.

Perhaps, but it's in alignment with Oxford University's online dictionary's definition of it's entymology:

Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French salarie, from Latin salarium, originally denoting a Roman soldier's allowance to buy salt, from sal ‘salt’

ohnonotgmail

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

Perhaps, but it's in alignment with Oxford University's online dictionary's definition of it's entymology:

Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French salarie, from Latin salarium, originally denoting a Roman soldier's allowance to buy salt, from sal ‘salt’

receiving an allowance to buy salt is not the same as being paid in salt.

partyguinness

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

Perhaps, but it's in alignment with Oxford University's online dictionary's definition of it's entymology:

Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French salarie, from Latin salarium, originally denoting a Roman soldier's allowance to buy salt, from sal ‘salt’

A quick search online shows that it does seem to provoke unusually strong reactions.

Wibbs

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

Perhaps, but it's in alignment with Oxford University's online dictionary's definition of it's entymology:

Middle English: from Anglo-Norman French salarie, from Latin salarium, originally denoting a Roman soldier's allowance to buy salt, from sal ‘salt’

Which itself is a mistranslation. If you look to Roman sources on the matter nowhere does anyone mention soldiers being paid in salt. They do note the word salt and earnings in relation to taxes levied by the state. That brought a fair few quid into Roman coffers as it was a valuable item. So salarium was conflated with something valuable earned(salarius(sp?)), but by the state, not soldiers(or citizens). I seem to recall that "salt" or a similar word was related to political duties? But again nada to do with wages.

In the early part of Rome they were a citizen army so not paid as such, but got bed and board. Later on as a professional standing army they did get paid, but in coin of the realm. 100 denarii a week or whatever and bed and board(and a pension and land after 20 years service IIRC).

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Wibbs wrote: »

Which itself is a mistranslation. If you look to Roman sources on the matter nowhere does anyone mention soldiers being paid in salt. They do note the word salt and earnings in relation to taxes levied by the state. That brought a fair few quid into Roman coffers as it was a valuable item. So salarium was conflated with something valuable earned(salarius(sp?)), but by the state, not soldiers(or citizens). I seem to recall that "salt" or a similar word was related to political duties? But again nada to do with wages.

In the early part of Rome they were a citizen army so not paid as such, but got bed and board. Later on as a professional standing army they did get paid, but in coin of the realm. 100 denarii a week or whatever and bed and board(and a pension and land after 20 years service IIRC).

This fits with my understanding, there are not ancient records referring to soldiers being paid in salt,

partyguinness

Jesus I'm sorry. What have I done..

Realt Dearg Sec

Nevaeh Shaggy Destroyer wrote: »

This fits with my understanding, there are not ancient records referring to soldiers being paid in salt,

It seems to be an example of the myth of barter that is so all-pervasive that we tend to just assume it's true.

This is the belief that at one point in our history, people didn't use money to carry out exchange, but instead had to barter what they had for what someone else had. This is obviously completely cumbersome, so gradually we switched to a system where everyone was trading in a particular commodity universally agreed to be valuable, like gold or salt or whatever. The myth then states that goldsmiths would hold on to your valuable gold and issue a note saying you had it in their place (the first banks!) and these notes then came to stand for the gold and were exchanged freely.

Adam Smith perpetuated this myth as well, but there is zero evidence for it being true, certainly no evidence for a pre-money barter economy exists. As folks have pointed out above, it is often ludicrous on its face: were soldiers wandering around with a bag of salt buying things? To show how ahistorical it all is, Aristotle believed in the existence of a pre-money barter economy, while the myth about Roman soldiers still basically engaging in it obviously comes many centuries after Aristotle. In fact, we've never observed a barter economy at work in any "primitive" culture we've encountered either.

But if like me you took Leaving Cert economics, you read that stuff about the barter economy as fact in the textbook.

David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 years takes on the myth, and argues that it is a product of a trade-based world view, where we find it impossible to imagine any society where people do not exchange things solely on the basis of calculations of perceived personal advantage, so therefore assume it could never have existed. But he provides lots of evidence of the existence of "gift economies" in which people gave one another things only in the expectation that when you had a need it would be similarly fulfilled, but not with any specific value being attached to the gift received, and therefore no debt being incurred that can be transferred. He uses the Iriquois native Americans as an example, but such gifting, provided solely because that is what a cohesive community does to maintain itself, appears to be very common historically.

Skylinehead

partyguinness wrote: »

Jesus I'm sorry. What have I done..

Sparked conversation and knowledge about the Romans!

ArnoldJRimmer

partyguinness wrote: »

Jesus I'm sorry. What have I done..

Sometimes people make mistakes, my advice would be to take it with a pinch of..., ah never mind

Wibbs

Nixonbot wrote: »

Sparked conversation and knowledge about the Romans!

On that score; in Rome there is a hill called Monte Testaccio that's today 120 feet/35m tall and covers a few acres. It's made up almost entirely of broken pottery from discarded amphora that were used to carry olive oil.



The ancient Romans consumed billions of litres of the stuff and used it in cooking and oil lamps and perfumery and cleaning the body(cover yourself in the stuff and then scrape it off and it carries the dirt with it). It was a massive business back then. It was shipped from across the empire in amphora which were the classical world's bottles, cans, wrapping for all sorts of stuff.



They each contained between 50-80 litres of oil.

So when they were empty they decided to make an area where people could discard them. A city dump for amphora as it were. Particularly olive oil amphora. They reused and repurposed amphora that carried wine, grains, dates and the like. Used them for making drains, flower pots, cooking vessels, foundation material etc. The olive oil ones weren't of use because of the rancid oil residue.

They didn't just drop them though, it was organised. They built up terraces held back by intact amphora walls where you'd bring yours in and smash them up behind the walls. They would then scatter ash and lime over things to neutralise the whiff of rotten olive oil. It would have been much higher back then and would have been more like a pyramid.



Because of the thermal peculiarities of the site many centuries later it was used as a cool house for storing wines and cheeses by cutting shafts into the bottom.

Realt Dearg Sec

partyguinness wrote: »

Jesus I'm sorry. What have I done..

A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

-James Joyce

New Home

Back to "Salary" for a second.

Soldiers, like previosly mentioned, but magistrates, too, were paid in kind with grains, wine, oil, and especially salt. As time went on, "Salary" (i.e. salarium) was the name given to the coin used to pay them.

Wibbs

New Home wrote: »

Back to "Salary" for a second.

Soldiers, like previosly mentioned, but magistrates, too, were paid in kind with grains, wine, oil, and especially salt. As time went on, "Salary" (i.e. salarium) was the name given to the coin used to pay them.

Later on NH, but not in classical Rome. There's also no record from Rome of soldiers being paid in salt as a thing. They do mention coinage after they became professional soldiers and of course spoils of war and how they were divvied up.

New Home

Wibbs wrote: »

Later on NH, but not in classical Rome. There's also no record from Rome of soldiers being paid in salt as a thing. They do mention coinage after they became professional soldiers and of course spoils of war and how they were divvied up.

See, when I read that first, I thought they were ONLY paid in salt which they then had to barter, but it seems that the salt was only part of their benefits in kind. I don't have any dates/periods for that, though.

JupiterKid

Leaving Dromoland Castle this evening after a bite to eat, my OH and I passed Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey of The Who who walked in with two ladies.

Place must be popular with the rock star set. Maybe next time I'll see Bono...

Realt Dearg Sec

JupiterKid wrote: »

Leaving Dromoland Castle this evening after a bite to eat, my OH and I passed Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey of The Who walked in with two ladies.

Place must be popular with the rock star set. Maybe next time I'll see Bono...

You can get the guy with him to take your picture and he'll turn out to be Bruce Springsteen

partyguinness

JupiterKid wrote: »

Leaving Dromoland Castle this evening after a bite to eat, my OH and I passed Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey of The Who who walked in with two ladies.

Place must be popular with the rock star set. Maybe next time I'll see Bono...

Did they ask for your pic or autograph?

quickbeam

Wibbs wrote: »

On that score; in Rome there is a hill called Monte Testaccio that's today 120 feet/35m tall and covers a few acres. It's made up almost entirely of broken pottery from discarded amphora that were used to carry olive oil.

A Roman bottle bank. I love it!

SimonTemplar

Youtube has a unque ID for each of its videos, which you can see at the end of the URL, such as:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

This is an 11 character Base64 value.

Firstly, I'll explain what Base64 means in case you don't know it already. People generally count using Base10. That means each character in a number has 10 possible values, from 0 to 9. So the maximum value a 2 character number can hold is 99, the maximum a 3 character number can hold is 999 and so on.

So sticking with Youtube's 11 character length for its ID, if it just used a bog standard Base10 number, the maximum quantity of videos that ID system could handle is 99,999,999,999. Still a huge number. I think Youtube currently has somewhere between 7 to 8 billion videos so the fact that a Base10 ID could handle over 99 Billion seems high enough.

But Youtube actually uses Base64. This means each character in the ID has 64 possible values. These are all the numbers from 0 - 9, all 26 uppercase letters, all 26 lowercase letters, and then two symbols. Youtube uses a hyphen and underscore.

So using this system, you can count up to 64 items using a single character.
Using just two characters, you can count up to 4,096 items (64 x 64).
Using just three characters, you can count up to 262,144 items (64 x 64 x 64).

So you can see that the Base64 allows you to cram a large number into a smaller quantity of characters than normal Base10. You can also see each time we add a character to the Base64 number, there is a significant jump in the maximum value it can hold.

So, using Youtube's 11 character length for its ID, what quantity of videos can a Base64 ID system handle. Well, that 64 to the power of 11 which is,

73,786,976,294,838,206,464

or 73.7 quintillion

That means that everyone currently on earth could upload a video every minute for well over 18,000 years and Youtube still wouldn't run out of IDs.

So when a user uploads a video, Youtube just generates a random 11 character Base64 number, checks to make sure it isn't already being used, and then assigns that to the video.

Also, as I said, there is currently about 7 - 8 billion videos on Youtube. With 73.7 quintillion possible IDs, if you type in a random 11 character Base64 number, you have a one in 10 billion chance of actually typing a number that is currently being used by a video. The odds of winning the euromillions jackpot is just one in 139,838,160 by comparison.

Two things to note:

Youtube probably maintains a list of character combinations that it won't allow in its IDs so to avoid any rude or vulgar phrases, but those disallows IDs are likely to be a tiny portion of the overall figure of 73.7 Quintilian so as to not make any real difference.

You might wonder why Youtube doesn't just allow a 20 character ID and count sequentially using a normal Base10 number. This presents loads of challenges for a site like Youtube. They'd have to sync this number across all their upload servers which would be a major issue as 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!

Nuno

Very interesting video from Tom Scott on the same topic. This guy has an amazing memory. 5min video, no cuts, first take.
Will YouTube Ever Run Out Of Video IDs?

its_steve116

Indian classical pianist Utsav Lal was in the original line up of Irish band Little Green Cars.

lan

SimonTemplar wrote: »

But Youtube actually uses Base64. This means each character in the ID has 64 possible values. These are all the numbers from 0 - 9, all 26 uppercase letters, all 26 lowercase letters, and then two symbols. Youtube uses a hyphen and underscore.

So using this system, you can count up to 64 items using a single character.
Using just two characters, you can count up to 4,096 items (64 x 64).
Using just three characters, you can count up to 262,144 items (64 x 64 x 64).

Another common use for Base64 is email attachments. To explain why, I need to give a little background.

All data on modern computers is stored in bytes. A byte is made up of 8 bits, which are each just a 1 or a 0. A byte can store any number from 0 to 255 (that’s 256 different values, or 2 to the power of 8).

Everything is stored as numbers internally. To store text then, there needs to be a way to convert between numbers and characters. The most common standard for this is called ASCII. In ASCII, every character takes up one byte, the letter “A” is defined to be 65, “B” is 66, and so on. ASCII also defines the lowercase letters, numerals and some symbols. It only defined the first 127 numbers though, and the first 32 are unprintable (non displayable) “control” characters, like Carraige Return, Tab and NULL.

Originally when email was first invented, it only supported ASCII, and the message body was mostly restricted to just the printable characters. This meant that you couldn’t embed raw binary files, e.g. images or programs, as they could contain bytes outside that 32 - 127 range. To get around that limitation, attached binary files first have to be encoded in Base64, so they’re still within the printable ASCII range (all modern mail programs do this automatically). Storing raw byte data in Base64 is somewhat inefficient though, as each each Base64 digit can only store 6 bits, not 8. That means for every 3 bytes (or 24 bits) you need 4 Base64 encoded bytes.

Have you ever noticed that your email attachments are larger than the files themselves? That’s why, it takes 33% more space to encode a binary file in Base64. If your email provider has a limit of 10 MB, for example, you actually won’t be able to send a file much over 7 MB.

Liam28

Candie wrote: »

Even more interestingly, unexploded WW2 bombs are still being found all over Germany, weighing in at over 20,000 tons a year. Which everyone else might know, but I didn't!

Yup. I, and hundreds of Irish football fans, experienced this in Dusseldorf airport in 2014.
https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=97600159

valoren

I bet you didn't know that there is a public golf course that is so tough that a warning sign is required.

The PGA Championship major is currently underway at the Black course (one of five courses) at Bethpage State Park in New York. It has this ominously foreboding sign on the first tee.

Liam28

Carton House in Maynooth, Montgomery course, has this sign on the first tee:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BNne_E5CQAAESV2.jpg:large

RiderOnTheStorm

Just finished watching Upstart Crow. Very funny series about Will Shakespeare. Several laugh out loud moments. But the last 5 mins of last episode broke my heart.....

So, did you know, there are no direct heirs of Shakespeare. His 2 daughters (Judith and Susanna) did get married. Susanna child Elizabeth did marry, but didn't have any children. Judith had 3 children, all boys, who remained unmarried and without progeny. Shakespeare sister, (not the band!) Joan, is the only member of the family whose known descendants continue down to the present day.

Shakespeare son, Hamnet, dies age 11. Cause of death....plague.

"Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then have I reason to be fond of grief?"
King John, A3/S4/L95

Slippin Jimmy

JupiterKid wrote: »

Leaving Dromoland Castle this evening after a bite to eat, my OH and I passed Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey of The Who who walked in with two ladies.

Place must be popular with the rock star set. Maybe next time I'll see Bono...

Funny that they were in NYC that night.

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/the-who/2019/madison-square-garden-new-york-ny-6390d253.html

Buford T. Justice XIX

Just in time for the anniversary of Shackleton, Worsely and Creans arrival to safety after their odyssey.
https://twitter.com/SouthPoleTom/status/1130382218919075841?s=19

dxhound2005

Someone on TV tonight said that China has manufactured more steel in the last two years than Britain has in all of history. It may or may not be true.