Give me a mind-blowing history fact

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KentK93
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10:00p, 3/28/26
AG
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KentK93
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7:25a, 4/4/26
AG
A very cool discovery:

Quote:
What they found was a ship over 98 feet long and 23 feet widelikely a 16th century merchant vessel with a load of ceramics on board. The color images show at least 200 earthenware pitchers now trapped under sediment. The globular pitcherswith pinched spouts and ribbon handlesinclude the monogram "IHS" (a Greek symbol representing Jesus Christ) and geographic pattern that may be inspired by plant life.



Deepest French water shipwreck
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nortex97
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8:13a, 4/4/26
AG

Of course, this is a disputed historical item, as Napoleon planned to defend Louisiana in the war with Britain, but the Haitians held up his forces so, ironically Louisiana was undefended and selling it made a lot of sense, likely. Ultimately, he just needed the money, imho.
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nortex97
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10:11a, 4/6/26
AG
Quote:
The story behind the rise of USB-A is wild.

In 1990, an Intel engineer named Ajay Bhatt couldn't get his wife's printer to work for their daughter's school project. A printer. In his own house. He was a senior architect at the world's biggest chip company, and he couldn't make a printer talk to a PC without rebooting three times and opening the case.

He pitched the idea of a universal connector to his managers. They didn't just pass. They told him nobody would want it.

Bhatt switched teams, found a manager who said yes, and spent the next four years convincing Compaq, IBM, Microsoft, NEC, and Nortel to sit in the same room and agree on a single plug. Seven companies that competed on everything else agreed to share one connector. The USB 1.0 standard shipped in January 1996. Almost nobody used it. Windows 95 barely supported it. USB was basically dead on arrival.

Then Steve Jobs did something nobody expected. He shipped the 1998 iMac as USB-only. No serial port, no parallel port, no floppy drive. Just USB. Apple, the company that fought standards harder than anyone, single-handedly forced an entire industry onto Bhatt's connector.

Intel owned the patents. They made the entire thing royalty-free. Any manufacturer on earth could build a USB-A port for pennies. By 2009, 6 billion USB products were in the market, with 2 billion more shipping every year.

Making the connector reversible would have doubled the cost, so Bhatt kept it one-sided to keep adoption cheap. "In hindsight, we blew it," he said years later. The most cursed design decision in consumer electronics, and it was a deliberate trade.

USB-A killed serial ports, parallel ports, PS/2 connectors, game ports, and eventually the floppy disk. One rectangle replaced an entire generation of cables. The connector is 30 years old and as of 2024, Type-A still accounted for 46% of all USB device shipments. Billions of ports in airplane seatbacks, hotel nightstands, hospital beds, and office walls.

The EU mandated USB-C on all new devices in December 2024. The installed base of USB-A will take 20 years to turn over. One guy's printer problem became the most successful connector standard in computing history. And now the rest of us carry a bag of dongles everywhere we go because of it.



Ajay Bhatt wiki.
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nortex97
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6:37a, 4/10/26
AG
Sumerian sexagesimal system is why we have 60 seconds/minute, 360 degrees to a circle etc.


The Sumerian system, and maps of the universe etc. they claim was not developed but transmitted to them. Most modern religions derive from their creation narrative/mythologies.
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KentK93
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10:44p, 4/10/26
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“If you think you can do it better, go ahead. We will step aside.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio
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nortex97
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9:16a, 4/11/26
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The bronze Reich chancellery eagle is housed in the Royal War Museum, though how it wound up there vs. with the soviets is a bit of a mystery (the russians do have another of them).
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nortex97
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8:46a, 4/21/26
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How Tobacco saved Virginia, and why they developed the plantation.

Slavery aside (yes, I know), it's a fascinating history.
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nortex97
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3:56a, 4/30/26
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8000 years ago a massive 40 meter wave at 35meters/second flooded 'doggerland' and Britain, Scotland, Ireland etc.

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KentK93
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3:59p, 5/6/26
AG
WOW! This is full of mind blowing history:

“If you think you can do it better, go ahead. We will step aside.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio
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nortex97
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7:55a
AG

Quote:
The Anabaptist Kingdom of Mnster stands as history's most vivid demonstration that collectivism breeds tyranny and starvation centuries before Marx penned a single word about class struggle.

In 1534, radical Anabaptist preachers seized control of this German city and immediately declared their "New Jerusalem" built on complete communal ownership. Private property vanished overnight. The new regime confiscated all money and demanded citizens pool every resource for the collective good. Sound familiar?

The self-proclaimed "Tailor-King" Jan van Leiden ruled this proto-socialist paradise with absolute authority, enforcing his vision of equality through systematic terror. Dissenters faced immediate execution. The state mandated polygamy as official policy while abolishing individual economic choice entirely.

When you destroy price signals and property rights, you destroy the coordination mechanism that feeds cities. Mnster's collectivist experiment delivered exactly what economic theory predicts: rapid collapse into famine and chaos. Within months, residents ate rats and boiled leather to survive. Reports of cannibalism emerged as the egalitarian dream transformed into a living nightmare.

The most predictable element? Elite hypocrisy. While ordinary citizens starved in their enforced equality, van Leiden and his inner circle lived in luxury, enjoying the finest food and accommodations the collective could provide. Centralized power inevitably corrupts those who wield it.

The economic logic remains bulletproof: without private property, individuals lose incentive to produce efficiently. Without market prices, planners cannot calculate resource allocation. Without voluntary exchange, coercion becomes the only tool for organizing complex society. Mnster's rulers discovered these iron laws the hard way.

The starving city collapsed from within as its communist economy proved incapable of sustaining basic human life. When Catholic armies finally retook Mnster in 1535, they found a wasteland of economic destruction and human misery.

The victors tortured the surviving Anabaptist leaders and displayed their bodies in iron cages hung from the city's main church. Those cages remained there for centuries as a warning about utopian schemes that promise equality but deliver only death.

Modern advocates of wealth redistribution and collective ownership prefer to ignore Mnster's lessons. They insist their version of centralized control will somehow escape the economic laws that doomed every previous attempt. But human nature and market forces operate independently of ideological wishes.

The Anabaptist experiment reveals the fatal flaw in all collectivist thinking: the assumption that abolishing property rights creates abundance rather than scarcity. In reality, property rights exist because they solve the fundamental problem of resource allocation in a world of competing needs and limited goods.

Mnster's collapse took just sixteen months to complete. The city's descent from Protestant reform to communist tyranny to economic wasteland offers a perfect case study in how quickly good intentions can destroy functioning societies when they ignore basic economic principles.

You can find those iron cages in Mnster today, still hanging from St. Lambert's Church after nearly five centuries. They serve as permanent reminders that collectivism's promises always end the same way: in starvation, tyranny, and death.

Proto-marxist, LOL.
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KentK93
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In reply to nortex97 • 8:13a
AG
WOW! That was a mind blowing history.
“If you think you can do it better, go ahead. We will step aside.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio
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BQ78
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In reply to nortex97 • 8:14a
AG
Why is it always the Germans?
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BQ78
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12:01p
AG
The winter of 1777-78 is often cited by historians as the turning point of the American Revolution, with the Continental Army encamped at Valley Forge being drilled into a professional army that could stand up to the British regulars in future engagements. The timing of the turning point is probably accurate but the biggest cause for the turn may be mislaid.

The Americans suffered and drilled six miles east of William Howe's British Army in Philadelphia. The British were snuck as a bug in North America's most elegant and well-appointed city, attending the theater, balls, whoring, drinking and above all other activities-- GAMBLING! Howe himself spent most of his nights in the public rooms of the City of Brotherly Love. Historians think there may have been as much as $50,000.00 lost in the public rooms that winter and with most gambling, there were more losers than winners.

By winter's end more British and German company officers were lost in the public rooms than on the battlefields of the previous campaign. Keep in mind British and German officers purchased their commissions and to resolve money problems, they could re-sell their commission. After victory on the battlefield in 1777, defeat at the gaming tables cost the British Army many of their most experienced officers, veterans of the battles of Brandywine, Paoli, Germantown and Ft. Mercer.

It may be that going into battle with new and inexperienced junior officers in 1778 did more to hurt the King's cause, than the coaching of the Continentals by a Prussian captain claiming to be a baron and general.
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