ivanhoe

Hey, remember what Larry said, there's more than one way to do things ;P

Perhaps she just had a good sense of humor? It's a great movie after all..

I'm confused that, speaking of origins, they don't mention at all Spanish "hola", having literally the same meaning as hello?

It'd be impossible to limit the use of drones to just recovery, some people would use them for tracking down the animals which is a horrible idea to allow.

In ex-Yugoslavia countries using gr (usually without a dot) for grams used to be a fairly common thing. Last few decades as EU standardization takes place it's a lot rarer to see. Also in Croatia in everyday life people will far more often use decagrams (10g), shorten colloquially as 'deka', than grams - which leads to even more confusion because the SI abbreviation for decagrams is dag, not dg (which is decigram, 0.1g), and it's often mixed - even some primary school books had these typos.

Also makes UNIQUE indices much harder to use. You can't just delete and later re-insert the same data, you need to "undelete" it instead, but that can actually mess up the chronology of the data, so then you need a separate table to track dates... and things just get over-engineered quickly...

> For example, you don't soft-delete a customer row, you "deactivate" a customer

I'm all for naming things more precise, but functionally speaking at that point it's really just semantics, you still end up with some DB column acting as a flag, and from then on you need to take it into account in every single query that touches that table in the whole app. Since most modern ORMs know how to handle soft-delete internally, it's far easier to just stick to the defaults and use `deleted_at` if you really need a way to keep the records around. And you often need, for the referential integrity of the historical data.

Yes, but I believe it was Latin, not Greek (Constantinople was a capitol of Easter Roman Empire, and they used both Latin and Greek). Latin term Sclavi that meant Slavs started to be used for slave servants, because there was so many of them.

Well, they were basically a highly-mobile light cavalry/archers combination, so while they progressed very fast they were not spending much time sieging heavily fortified cities or going into mountains and other hard to cross terrains. Also it took Europeans a while to learn how to fight them efficiently, but eventually they did figure out that European heavy cavalry is a good match for them. So it's not they were "unstoppable", they simply avoided hard targets, and pillaged the villages and other less defended areas, and moved quickly through disorganized European kingdoms fighting each other.

> these poor people served as a "buffer" against the Mongols, saving Europe from the slaughter ...

You mean saving Western Europe :)

Mongols ran over (and did a lot of slaughter in) the most of Eastern and Central Europe, including Poland, Czechia, parts of todays Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia and Austria. There was no "buffer" that stopped them, they've stopped eventually because their Great Khan died. As the leadership broke down and fights for power arose, they've been forced to return back home.

You reversed the timeline a bit.

Varangians came primarily from todays Sweden, and were initially going inland into the today's Estonia, Belarus and Russia from north, from the Gulf of Finland, using rivers. The group of them called Rus under the leadership of Rurik created Novgorod in 862. About 20 years later they've also conquered Kiev (some 900km more to the south). They were initially raiders, but over time they've conquered the local Slavs, established their rule and became very important traders, as they've created the trading (and also slave) routes all across the continent from the Baltic in the North down to the Black Sea - using huge rivers like Volga and Dneper - trading in south with Byzantin empire and Abbaside Caliphate. It was one of the main trading routes between West/North Europe and Arab world of that age.

And as their presence grown stronger, the Rus started more frequently raiding the Byzantin Empire, sacking even the big Constantinople a few times. To stop these attacks, in 10th century the Byzantines did the same move as king Charles the Simple did in Francia with Normans, they gave Varangian leaders some titles and employed them all as a royal guard. Problem solved.

And then, as you've said, the viking era was over, and they assimilated into the Slavic population (just like Bulgars and others did).

Another interesting note, the Rus ethnonym also got into many Slavic languages as a word for fair blonde or reddish-blonde hair ("русая" in Russian, "rusa" in Serbian/Croatian, etc.). In Serbian 'rus' was historically used in folk language with a meaning 'red', for instance for skin rush, names of some herbs, etc.

Thank you for this, had no idea :)

How do you remotely detect if car stinks or not?

I love this part: One of the other pilots on the mission was reported to have radioed Foust during his descent by parachute that "you'd better get back in it!"

Yeah, that one confused me too. Visiting Chernobyl was mostly a walk in a park, as no other people around and forrest slowly taking over everything. Honestly, it felt way safer than big cities in Ukraine to me - hell, even safer than big cities in my own country :)