How to Create a Golden Age
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Tag Archives: history
Roman Emperors, Up To AD 476 And Not Including Usurpers, …
… In Order Of How Hardcore Their Deaths Were
Not surprisingly, the Five Good Emperors all died of natural causes. But they are definitely in the minority.
From
The death of Vladimir Komarov — Another look
I posted about this before.
Yuri Gagarin was one of the good guys in this story. Another was a KGB officer. The villains were Leonid Brezhnev and Dmitry Ustinov.
I can remember when Brezhnev and Ustinov were names known to everybody. However, younger readers may not recognize them, so I included the Wikipedia links. In the grand scheme of human history, they deserve to fall into obscurity.
From black holes to bombs, and back again
Physicists, like the ancient Greeks, like to gossip about the gods. A few days ago, three physicists* were talking on Twitter** about a review by a fourth physicist, Freeman Dyson, of a biography of one of these gods, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and about his war with another one, John Archibald Wheeler.
Imperium sine fine
I sometimes see this license plate on a sports car in the parking lot at my bus stop.
SF Quote
I first read L. Sprague de Camp’s SF classic Lest Darkness Fall (written in 1939) more than 40 years ago. It still has not grown old. Tonight I ran across this passage:
How Gaul-ing!
Celebrating France’s First Resistance Fighter
Of course, they are celebrating him now in a Romance rather than a Celtic language.
From Explorator
Female Pharoahs
Actual Queens Regnant. There were six before Cleopatra.
Unlike Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII in the Ptolemaic dynasty), the others seem to have been actual Egyptians.
From Explorator
Dinner with Attila the Hun – A contemporary account
While for the other barbarians and for us there were lavishly prepared dishes served on silver platters, for Attila there was only meat on a wooden plate . . . Gold and silver goblets were handed to the men at the feast, whereas his cup was of wood. His clothing was plain and differed not at all from that of the rest, except that it was clean. Neither the sword that hung at his side nor the fastenings of his barbarian boots nor his horse’s bridle was adorned, like those of the other Scythians, with gold or precious stones.
Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Oxford University Press, p. 320
CSI: Bosworth Field, and related matters
… the final moments of Richard III’s life…
On a related note, Richard III’s body becomes subject of rival claims from Leicester and York
In case you were wondering: Why the princes in the tower are staying six feet under.
“The recent discovery of Richard III does not change the abbey’s position, which is that the mortal remains of two young children, widely believed since the 17th century to be the princes in tower, should not be disturbed.”
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 