Donward

Yeah. When you need something the size of Grand Coulee to produce the electricity needed in the enrichment process needed to build an Atom Bomb (I prefer calling it an "Atom Bomb" as opposed to "Atomic" or "Nuclear" cause it sounds old timey), the Allies will eventually notice.

As always, there are consequences to these things. Grand Coulee pretty much put paid to any Upper Columbia River salmon run. On the plus side you got free electricity for the Hanford nuclear reservation, for aluminum plants that produced the raw material for Boeing planes and enough irrigation water to turn Eastern Washington from a desert to an agricultural bread basket.

No hydro projects on the Columbia River and Tennessee Valley. No Manhattan Project.

How many of y'all have seen Grand Coulee Dam? THAT is a mega-project worthy of all of the Woody Guthrie songs sang about it. Now days we try to dig a total under the Seattle waterfront through fill in a seismically unstable earthquake zone. http://mynorthwest.com/11/2503465/A-Bertha-timeline-From-conception-to-today For the record, they dug a railroad tunnel under Seattle 100 years ago using picks and shovels and these jamokes can't get it right with 21st Century technology.

I think he admits that the medieval archers were more fit and used more powerful bows. Being no expert, I highly suspect there were different techniques between - say - an Egyptian chariot archer, a Mongol rider, a Japanese samurai and a bluff English yoeman, owing to different tactics, bow shape, composition and draw weight. I doubt you'd be able to do all of those fancy tricks with an English longbow of 75-100 pound draw weight. And considering that the English DID in fact target shoot at butts, it's no wonder that it is the stationary, upright archery practice handed down to us from Agincourt, fighting heavily armored, steel-clad knights, which is the technique that survived and was handed down to our very Eurocentric, Anglophile country. How the arrow is knocked and aimed is plausible though.

The thing that's usually missing is that in any sort of battle there were a line of archers. Perhaps behind some sort of fortification or a shield wall or whatever. And if enemy ever got that close, I'd wager they were running or going for their cudgels, short swords or even using an arrow. Neat video. I'd wager back in the olden days, you had archers that were experimenting with all sorts of - shall we say - tactical shooting stances and whatnot. But when the time came for actual killing, everyone probably resorted to the tried and true stance.

Our pedantry will only makes us STRONGER! Also Colt 1911 will... *Gasp... Choke... Tugs at collar*

Oh. And as I pointed out at WoT. I'm an Alaska fisherman. We do some hairy stuff. I've been through some interesting adventures. I'll tell y'all about them sometime. But what I do every summer is nowhere close to what my little brother went through in his one tour in Iraq back in 03-04 with his Stryker unit.

Yeah. When Zinegata gets it wrong, he really gets it wrong. Like cartoon baseball player swinging at a Bugs Bunny change-up wrong. To call the guys and gals who volunteer for America's armed services "dregs" is not just insulting but wrong if you look at the actual demographics of folks who join. Yeah. There are a lot of fucktards who shouldn't be allowed near a sharp plastic fork, let alone grenade launchers and automatic weaponry. But most of the guys are pretty alright, they join for altruistic purposes and they go on to lead productive lives outside of the service. It's the same lazy prejudice that generalizes all sports athletes as spend-thrift, gang-banging, rapey, wife-beaters because a handful of individuals in the league are idjits. So bullshit, I call. And respectfully so.

M2 Browning doesn't count? Also we have another 30 years to go. Who knows what excitement might occur after Russia's economy fully collapses.

Yeah. Some of those ancients knew their stuff. And even though their diagnosis was wrong, they were trying to come up with solutions. I wonder if the cleansing ceremony described would work - even as a placebo - today?

I learned today not to try even the simplest of car repair projects after being woken up out of a dead sleep when you're dreaming that you're a star of a 1980s John Hughes movie which then morphed into a "Creature Feature" with some anomaly that warped individuals into terrifying killers that resembled the ensemble in Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" video. Looking back, I think this can be chalked up to my wife making me watch the first Doctor Who reboot episode with Christopher Eccleston and eating copious amounts of homemade cinnamon rolls that she had just baked for that purpose. Yes, I'm a lucky man. I do distinctly remember in the dream saying "Oh, boy, I'm in a John Hughes film. I know all the tricks on how to be popular. I sure hope this doesn't turn into a Creature Feature later on." If you have ever been around me in person, I have a tendency of saying stuff like that in real life... So with that as a back story, you can imagine the state I was in as I stagger down to look at her Ford Escape that had a dead battery. No problem, I'll just push it out of the garage and give it a jump start with my Toyota truck. Out come the jumper cables. Red and black on the red and black terminals on the Escape. Red and black on the black and red terminals on the Toyota. "Don. The cables are beginning to smoke." Boom. I'm instantly awake, quickly switch the now rather hot cables and I begin to survey the damage, all while kicking myself for screwing up on a simple jump start that I have performed dozens and dozens of times. Fortunately, I think the only thing wrong is the 120 amp mega fuse on the Escape which did its job of protecting all the electronic innards from people who do something idiotic like I just did. Although I'll be spending this evening going over the car's electrical system when it gets home. So that concludes my episode of "I Learned Something Today".

I suppose I could have chosen my words more carefully when I was pounding out that paragraph. You are correct. On the other side of the coin, if 99 percent of humanity got wiped out and archaeologists from the future sifted through the ashes of a prepper's house and found their library of Tom Clancy novels, Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage books, they'd get a different perspective of the history of today.

This isn't at all surprising but some researchers have discovered incidences of PTSD in the Bronze and early Iron Age including examples in Ancient Greece and the Assyrian Empire. Except back then the disorders were blamed on the spirits of the dead. http://ww2.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/news/research_detects-ptsd_3000_years_ago.html http://www.nepft.nhs.uk/_uploads/documents/esm_019_06_549-557_abdul-hamid_hughes_off.pdf The second link details rituals used to ease the distress of individuals afflicted.

Yeah. Although the horror stories with the lead poisoning via the shoddy HVAC system has scared me off.

None of the gun stores have .22 LR and you have to wait in line once a week and hope you get you daily allotment of two 50 round boxes. Or I can go to Wades Eastside Guns and get all I care to buy for $8.99-12.99 a box and suffer through the sales guy's bullshit about how the rounds I'm buying are "more accurate" than the old .22 that used to get sold. The percussion caps just flabbergast me but that was just at a couple of the rinkydink places I went to at the last minute on New Years.

Not to be Mister Grumpy McSoggypants here, but we can't even get decent amounts of .22 Long Rifle ammunition or percussion caps for black powder shooters in this country let alone DU rounds.

Yes. But I just can't come out and say that. I must allude to it in a circular way and round-about way.

It varies I suppose. If the seal pulls the whole fish out and eats it, I wouldn't know because it's gone (other than the suspicious hole ripped in the net). But they do seem to prefer the heads because that's where all the crunchy nutrition is, Omega oils and what not. If you watch a bear on the beach eat a dead salmon, they'll crunch off the head, then eat the guts and eggs, then they'll strip off the skin and fat. Only then will they eat the meat. Whereas humans cut off the head, chuck the guts, get rid of the skin and eat the meat.

Reading it now. In Alaska, a certain number of fish are partially eaten out of our nets, usually the heads are just crunched off. During the peak of the run when their are hundreds of nets and hundreds of thousands of fish, this isn't a worry. It does get a bit disheartening when you're one of the few scratch fishing at the start or end of the season and you see a half-dozen black heads bobbing around your net. We never saw anything wrong with grabbing a "seal hit" fish, cutting off the part that was gnawed on an eating the rest. But we came to learn that the natives would never eat that fish because of the germs that live in the mouth of a seal and the diseases that can get transferred. Which is kind of funny since they do eat rendered seal meat and seal oil. So I imagine the TB getting transferred this way from stuff that the seals partially eat to that of the Peruvian fishermen. Or from eating the seal itself. Assuming this theory is correct. Little do we know that George R.R. Martin just found some Roman manuscripts and changed the names to get "Game of Thrones". That's probably the aggravating thing for classicists knowing that there is so much work out there, knowing the names of the work and knowing that you'll never get to read it because it's lost. Also we know that a lot of our favorite classical historians were every bit as biased as we are today. It would be nice to get some second and third sources about historical events and people rather than assuming that a scribe is exaggerating the flaws of Nero, Caesar, Augustus, etc.

It wouldn't be the worst bet on the Internet. But I'm hoping that old Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (or whoever the actual owner of the library was) had a taste in literature and ancient (contemporary?) history. Curious about the seal/sea lion theory. Particularly since I interact with seals every summer. I'm a believer that the ancient and medieval world was more interconnected than we give them credit for. (No, the Lost Tribe of Israel didn't journey to America and hang out with the Cherokee).

And to get the topic rolling, I read last week that technology called "X-ray phase-contrast imaging" is being used and might someday enable scientists to read the contents of the Herculaneum papyri scrolls. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150122114405.htm http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25106956 These scrolls are sort of a "lost ark" of classical literature which were buried and carbonized during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD and its hoped that they might contain new works or more faithful translations of original classical literature and history. On the other hand, the library could be the equivalent of a Daniel Steele/Tom Clancy/Stephen King collection. Ever the optimist, I'm hoping for the former.

Since we don't have a general, all purpose archaeology topic, let this be a repository for all matters involving the science which has been made cool by whip-cracking, mummy-fighting, big-breasted, relic-hunting adventurers. And the real life stuff that is far more interesting.

This didn't happen today, but I learned that the precursors to the famous British SMLE rifles - or at least the bolt and magazine - were originally chambered in 45-70 "Government". Now if only I can remember where I heard that from...

I have to be the one to say it. But Frank Zappa is kind of overrated.