heja2009

The article kind of misses the forest for the trees: just as today, diet was associated with various conflicting theories and advice - some reasonable, some pure fabrication. In absence of much hard evidence food becomes a playing field for "systems" that assign values to foodstuffs. Also, obviously, sugar played a different role in societies in which the calorie requirements of physical labour were a much bigger challenge than obesity.

Also: "beans, which were thought to cause flatulence"? I'm pretty sure that bit is factual.

Around 1990 I had the fortune to learn Parallel-C - a language that was designed during the Transputer hype and was essentially C extended by a few features to support easy parallel programming.

My favourite feature was

  par(<start expression>; <end expression>; <loop expression>)

essentially a for loop that will be auto-parallelized by the compiler - some boundary conditions apply.

AND no dust, grime, etc. These tiny wheels get dirty and clog up pretty fast in human environments and then stop to work and need a good cleaning. Nice for demos but unsuitable for even normal research lab work. I hate them.

Hmm, Kalkar, the only nuclear power plant I ever protested - in the late 70s when I was still in school and construction had just begun. It was finished in 85 but never even fueled due to safety concerns (liquid natrium is nasty, state government did not authorize operation), protests and significant doubts about its purpose (breeders are most suitable to produce bomb material and nuclear fuel).

Chernobyl happened 1986 and probably put the last nail in the coffin, when its radioactive material spilled over Germany and people were recommended to stop eating mushrooms, game animals and homegrown salad. I was doing my nuclear physics practical at the Uni at the time and our lab offered food measurements as a public service, so people brought their homegrown vegetables, fruits and milk. Highest measurements were always the grass in front of the institute though. Much higher than in the "neutron lab" I was working in at the time.

1991 Kalkar was finally officially abandoned and later sold to a private investor.

> Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.

I'd argue that point. Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) comes to my mind first. Art contains and conveys truth.

Nietzsche's work is also a good example about why it's foolish to argue too much about what an author meant. He wasn't always clear in his thoughts - just like us all - and his thinking changed considerably anyway.

Erm, no, I don't think so. Can you give a source for that claim?

Medieval wars were in general shorter, more regional, used much smaller forces and affected the civilian population less than in later ages. Of course it is very difficult to give any numbers, but various infection diseases, childbirth and infant death were major causes of death. (E.g. women life expectancy overtook that of men only in the 19th century.) Also at least in the 13th and 14th century in Europe main reasons for a significant temporary population decline - during a time of general population growth - were black death and hunger, the latter being partially caused by limitations to agriculture technology and available land.

Athens-Sparta would be the Peloponnesian War, Punic wars were between Rome and Carthage. Sorry for the nitpick.

Hmm, but this is a very common problem particularly in history and archaeology and one that requires highly specialized expertise. Therefore almost always a modern unified calendar is used in new publications and the problem of dealing with historical dates as written is left to specialists. I don't think every article about per-modern events and events outside Gregorian-based calendar usage should mention that.

Interesting. I didn't notice the side notes at all because I immediately zoomed my view to only see the main text as I do with all web pages in this day and age.

best OS I ever had the pleasure to work with

To the contrary there is very good evidence that we pull arbitrary explanations whenever needed. See Gazzaniga's split brain experiments where people gave all sorts of reasons when asked why they did something and just could not know.

Actually Apple had to find solutions to some of the problems you mention when they transitioned to OS X:

* multiple resource forks can be presented as files in a directory, the directory having the name of the multi-stream file and the files in it named after the stream, e.g. "resources"

* for transfering data to other mediums/computers etc you can use container formats such as zip or tar, but with the unpacker having the ability to unpack them properly to a multi-stream file

* since on modern systems such as windows you can seamlessly file-browse into container formats such as zip so this is even less of a problem

* actually OS X to this day uses something like this for "Apps" as they are a special container/directory that you can browse into when you know the magic incantation