Since Know Your Meme doesn't give the reference for why it's a lake, maybe not everybody is familiar with british lore:
The mythical Lady of the Lake:
Probably best known via Monthy Python:
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
In short: She teaches Lancelot arts and writing, infusing him with wisdom and courage, and overseeing his training to become an unsurpassed warrior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_the_Lake
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnigmaticEmpower...
This reminds me that Monty Python and the Holy Grail contributed actual historical knowledge about Arthurian legends to my knowledge base while growing up. Other examples of Python unintentional education include knowing the names of a myriad of obscure cheeses (the cheese shop skit), a shocking number of anachronistic synonyms for death (the parrot skit) and notable contributions of the Roman Empire (Life of Brian 'What have the Romans ever done for us?' skit).
While it didn't contribute to my GPA at the time, I'm sure I could name more notable philosophers than any other 8th grader in my school (philosopher's song skit). However, in high school it did spark the interest to look up and read about each of the philosophers in the song.
The problem is that comedy is frequently not factually accurate.
Roman Imperial contributions? Was Roman wine better than pre-Roman wine in that region? Did they improve sanitation, irrigation, medicine etc.? Rome was an oppressive slavery based society.
Then what about the Spanish Inquisition sketch? It keeps repeating "fanatically devoted to the Pope"" The Spanish inquisition was an arm of the Spanish monarchy, at least two Popes tried to shut it down, and some historians have suggested one of its aims was to reduce the power of the Papacy.
I do like the Philosopher's Song, the Dead Parrot and Cheese Shop.
Other comedies are no better. Black Adder has a witchfinder (an early modorn innovation) in a Medieval setting.
Pop culture is not historically accurate!
>Did they improve sanitation, irrigation, medicine etc.?
They built a network of aqueducts that was the largest in the world for a thousand years. The plumbing and sewage systems they installed in their cities were so effective that some are not just intact, but in use, right now. There are plenty of negative points you can raise about the Roman Empire, but water systems aren't one of them.
The "what have the Romans done for us" sketch is partly about Rome, but largely a disguised defense of the British Empire.
In a pre-industrial agricultural society, slavery or something similar (serfdom etc.) tends to be widespread, as human and animal muscles are the only reliable and ubiquitous source of energy. Humanity only really started getting rid of unfree backbreaking work by adopting steam engines. 300-400 years ago, most of us forists here would be unfree people working the fields in unfavorable conditions, with maybe 5 per cent being burghers and 1 per cent nobility.
> Was Roman wine better than pre-Roman wine in that region?
If I were to guess, I would say that Roman wine was made from grapes, Levantine wine was made from dates, the vast majority of wine in the Levant continued to be made from dates during Roman rule, and imported Roman wine probably cost a lot more than local wine did, making it "better" by definition.
Note that, at least in Thomas Malory’s telling, the arm holding Excalibur out of the lake is not the Lady Of The Lake, who is nearby on the lake. The arm holding Excalibur is neither named nor explained.
There's also Father Thames, the River God of London https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1140390
Upright Citizens Brigade also has a few nice bits about the Lady of the Lake
This feels like a ghost of the internet of the 1990s.
This writeup deserves its own website, something with minimal CSS, where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
That's an aesthetic / scene preference (that I happen to agree with). The content is the most important part -- you can find this kind of curiosity and knowledge seeking all over the place. It'll probably even stay readable on stackexchange longer than the average handmade site from the 90s.
Where the url root is /~username, and if there is an error it is an Apache one not Nginx and certainly not a 404 page that cost $10k to design.
It could form an entire Lucas Pope game.
> where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
Yes, lovely. The sort of site where private moments might be kindly shared by an individual. To be distinguished from the forcible asset stripping and loss of ownership (theft, really) that form the terms and conditions of a large corporate's ToS today.
I still think wikipedia hit those "this is my passion" sites harder than social media did. What's the point of building a site about widgets, when 90% of people are just going to hit the Widget page on wikipedia?
Plus Wikipedia offers arguing about widgets with other widget enthusiasts/detractors as a first-class feature via the Talk page.
This entire deep dive is great. I feel compelled to call out this heroism:
> 1st Lieutenant de Wispelaere had prepared the bridge for demolition ... De Wispelaere immediately pushed the electrical ignition, but there was no explosion... Wispelaere now left his shelter and worked the manual ignition device. Trying to get back to his bunker, he was hit by a burst from a German machine gun and fell to the ground, mortally wounded. At the same time, the explosive charge went off.
This is also mentioned in the ConeOfArc video linked on stackexchange. However, at 4:17 in the video, the speaker shows a sign describing two versions of the event. In the first version, Wispelaere died due to a German shell (not a machine gun). In the second version, he was killed by the explosion of the detonating device after shortening the fuse (“l’explosion du dispositif de mise à feu”; not sure how to translate this exactly).
I haven't seen the lake tank image being used as a meme anywhere, except now or maybe I have to explore the world of memes some more.
Hats off to all who helped each other find this once lost story from history.
Went there for the first time and found out it's banned in my country.
Cant allow all the normies to view cool stuff on the internet
which country?
Another point is the fact that i saw more "anime version" of this meme than the original foto
i'm aware of the "senpai of the pool" version, but probably i'm biased... I'm a huge WW2 nerd.
You're not getting your BM degree, not with that attitude.
The fact that this extraordinarily obscure question had such a thoroughly researched and intricately detailed answer almost restores my faith in Internet forums.
Helps that it tickles a few things that people in subcultures get very nerdy about: military topics, WWII, etc.
> The photo was taken about coordinates 50.29092467073664, 4.893099128823844 near modern Wallonia, Belgium on the Meuse River.
Great writeup, but I did have a little chuckle reading "it was taken about near here", followed by coordinates precise enough to identify a single atom. https://xkcd.com/2170/
Going to be a different atom once you walk near. Or temperature changes, the wind blows, and so on.
We’ll need to give each atom a unique ID. That would solve the problem.
Let's start with electrons. I've got SN001 here with me, but I haven't been able to find any others...
IPv8 is accepting RFCs
Earth has about 2^170 atoms. If we ignore the core and mantle, focusing on the crust, surface and atmosphere, we should be able to cram it into IPv6. Even if we add a couple planets and moons in the future. At least if we stop giving each person 18 quintillion IPs just because we once thought encoding MAC addresses in the lower 64 bits was a good idea.
There are 10^80 atoms in the universe, therefore 266 bits are enough to give each a unique identifier. Due to how computers work maybe we can do two numbers: a 32-bit type or area code and a 256-bit counter. Or perhaps we just combine them into a single 272 or 288 or 320-bit number.
No man steps into the same 14-digit-precision geocoördinate twice.
When I toured Jacques Littlefield's Tank Ranch they had, what I believe to be, this exact tank. They told the story of how it had been lost in the river and sat there and they went to see if it was still there and arranged to get it removed and returned to California where they restored it.
If someone was so motivated, they could probably go back to the internet archives of the auction that happened after Jacques died to find a picture of both the restored tank and its providence.
The stack exchange link and the article about the search say it was recovered in 1941
Cannot wait for the day that question will be a ChatGPT prompt and the answer will be its response.
A very different ChatGPT of course, but what a dream would that be.
I’m so scarred by LLMs that I wonder if I’d ever be able to trust it.
How would that be very different? I sent that prompt now and got a similar response, not as detailed, but the summary is correct and the same.
Are they training on StackOverflow?
StackOverflow and Wikipedia are the main things they trained on. These days they have more custom content written for them.
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