I don't know where else to put this, so I made a thread!
Anyway, this came up on my YouTube recommendations and the first comment on the video really stuck me.
Quote:
It's crazy to me that in 2019 I can see a man who witnessed a presidential assassination that occurred 155 years ago. It's mind-blowing.
To me Lincoln isn't quite ancient history, but still something from another world, a primitive time, yet the civil war vets died off in the 1950's, a time that doesn't seem so long ago. This man in the video witnessed the assassination, an event so famous and so impossibly far away in my mind.
Or, in another vein, William the Conqueror has ~5 million decedents simply because of how populations work vs time.
Then there is the typical discussion about how the Ancient Romans viewed the Pyramids as Ancient as we view the Romans, given Julius Caesar lived about halfway between when the Pyramids were built and our time.
Some random musings for my work procrastination break.
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I would argue that wikipedia is on par with youtube, especially since it is not as influenced by corporate pressure.
Wanna learn how to get a key that’s broken off in a lock out of the lock?
YouTube.
Wanna take advanced calculus courses for free?
YouTube.
Wanna learn how to assemble a Subaru boxer engine piece by piece?
YouTube.
The finer points of positional defence in hockey?
Coach Jeremy, on YouTube.
Any specific scene from most movies/television produced in the last seventy years?
Build a thorium nuclear reactor?
You see where I’m going.
You can change a Wikipedia entry. You can’t change a YouTube video. You can delete it, but you can’t change it.
And the comments, in a way, offer a sort of natural peer review that Wikipedia can’t match.
It’s not to say that there aren’t lots of awful qualities about YouTube, but I don’t think the kids who built this platform in their garage 15 years ago thought they were creating the digital Library of Alexandria.
__________________ ”All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to you.”
Wanna learn how to get a key that’s broken off in a lock out of the lock?
YouTube.
Wanna take advanced calculus courses for free?
YouTube.
Wanna learn how to assemble a Subaru boxer engine piece by piece?
YouTube.
The finer points of positional defence in hockey?
Coach Jeremy, on YouTube.
Any specific scene from most movies/television produced in the last seventy years?
Build a thorium nuclear reactor?
You see where I’m going.
You can change a Wikipedia entry. You can’t change a YouTube video. You can delete it, but you can’t change it.
And the comments, in a way, offer a sort of natural peer review that Wikipedia can’t match.
It’s not to say that there aren’t lots of awful qualities about YouTube, but I don’t think the kids who built this platform in their garage 15 years ago thought they were creating the digital Library of Alexandria.
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Wanna learn how to get a key that’s broken off in a lock out of the lock?
YouTube.
Wanna take advanced calculus courses for free?
YouTube.
Wanna learn how to assemble a Subaru boxer engine piece by piece?
YouTube.
The finer points of positional defence in hockey?
Coach Jeremy, on YouTube.
Any specific scene from most movies/television produced in the last seventy years?
Build a thorium nuclear reactor?
You see where I’m going.
You can change a Wikipedia entry. You can’t change a YouTube video. You can delete it, but you can’t change it.
And the comments, in a way, offer a sort of natural peer review that Wikipedia can’t match.
It’s not to say that there aren’t lots of awful qualities about YouTube, but I don’t think the kids who built this platform in their garage 15 years ago thought they were creating the digital Library of Alexandria.
I don't want to get into a pissing match, since I believe that both are very valuable, but this point contradicts itself.
edit: likewise wikipedia requires footnotes and bibliography, which are often times more valuable than the article itself.
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I love these pieces of trivia that really make you think about time and historical events.
One that blows my mind a little is that Cleopatra lived closer to the time period that the U.S. put a man on the moon than the time period when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.
Here's a hockey related one...
There are still active players today (Thornton and Marleau for example) who, during their careers, played on the team as guys who played against players like Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Mahovlich, and several other players that are now over 75 years old.
__________________
"A pessimist thinks things can't get any worse. An optimist knows they can."
Like, a WWI army would absolutely annihilate a civil war or 1871 European army. A WWII army with radar, radio, air power and such would wipe the floor with a WWI army. A Korean War Army would absolutely smash a WWII army, and so on.
Yet, when you think about it, the tech from WWII is pretty amazing. A battleship for instance, is an engineering and design marvel. Submarines, airplanes, the Enigma machine, etc. I guess nothing drives tech as much as the need to kill each other for efficiently.
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I would argue that wikipedia is on par with youtube, especially since it is not as influenced by corporate pressure.
I think Wikipedia actually gets a pretty bad wrap among the professorial class.
The have a better review and citation system than the majority of academic journals. I think there are two complaints is more properly leveled at conclusion shopping, and the credulity of people who take anything at face value without consideration of alternative evidence or their own priors. Those problems is probably something you could look to educators (like professors) to correct.
not as cool as some of the above, but a few years ago my daughter sat in the same highchair that my grandma sat in over a hundred years ago as a baby. that was pretty cool
__________________
GO FLAMES, STAMPEDERS, ROUGHNECKS, CALVARY, DAWGS and SURGE!
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John Tyler, who was born in 1790, and President of the US in 1841-1845, has a grandson that is still alive.
I was going to post this one. Nowhere near as long obviously but I did this with my own grandparents. The earliest (paternal grandfather) was born in 1892 (and died in 1948, 30+ years before I was born) If I live another 40 years, the three generation stretch would go from 1892-2061. That feels like a long time (170 years) but I have no idea if that's uncommon or about average.
Time is Funny
