The more common version of this, which I do remember hearing in history courses in college, was that people in the Middle Ages frequently mixed beer or wine with water. Whether that was done purely for taste, or in the belief that it would make potentially unsafe water safe, and what the details of making water safe to drink by mixing beer or wine with it actually are, I don't know. The author himself makes this point repeatedly, that water was frequently mixed with wine (at which point people are drinking watered wine).
It's like there are two parallel arguments:
"Medieval Europeans exclusively drank alcoholic beverages, because the water was so bad." And,
"We currently over-estimate the degree to which people in the Medieval-era consumed alcohol, and under-estimate the degree to which they drank pure water."
The author seems to conflate the two willy-nilly, claims the first to be widely held, and that he has disproved it (while, among others, citing Classical rather than Medieval sources).
also, recalling from memory, standedge argues that the early perspective on wine was that it was simply a higher order of beer. it makes sense because there earliest beers were not hopped and would probably profile similarly to wine.
however, grape cultivation was more difficult/technical than grain cultivation which elevated the class of wine. it was also prized for its relative stability when diluted, with some maintaining the same (or better) flavor profile when diluted 1:2 water:wine. it was a true show of wealth to serve wine that was less than 1:1. (a history of the world in 6 glasses)
i’ve tried this with a few wine varietals and i can see what he’s saying in some regard, but it definitely alters the profile in ways.
No, the ancients tended to be very exact with their beer/wine distinctions. There's separate English words for beer, wine, mead, herbed beer, herbed mead, fruited mead, cider, fruited cider, and so one.
that's really good information. do you have sources on that? i was just citing the one i'd read but i'm happy to learn more - i'm fascinated by these sorts of things.
> ... when diluted 1:2 water:wine. it was a true show of wealth to serve wine that was less than 1:1.
Did you mean 2:1 water:wine? If you meant 1:2 water:wine, then 1:1 would be weaker and I'm not sure how that would show wealth more than stronger wine.
i definitely phrased it awkwardly (and incorrectly, upon the 3rd read) and, upon re-reading it, it is confusing to me as well
i was trying to say that i read that it was a show of wealth to serve wine that was less than 50% diluted, but that the norm was to serve 1 part wine to 2 parts water. thank you for the clarification.
While I am not familiar with this particular instance, universities will often have a permanent professorship, or chair, with a specific focus that is named either after a renown expert in the field who taught at that institution, or after the person or organization who funded (endowed) the establishment of that position.
As for Loeb himself, I'm only passingly familiar with him in passing because of coverage since ‘Oumuamua, but it seems like he is a fairly typical asgtrophysicist who decided for some reason that he would launch a crusade declaring anything entering the Solar System from interstellar space must be an alien probe or spaceship.
We need AI because everyone is using AI, and without AI we won't have AI! Security is a small price to pay for AI, right? And besides, we can just have AI do the security.
It's been a while but I can't get past the first image. I keep wanting to kill the orcs and grab all those spellbooks and gems, while keeping a wary eye on the elemental. (Although since this is obviously the Elemental Plane of Air, my ascension kit should let me handle it easily enough.)
How universal are roguelike character mappings? Is there some central bit of knowledge that all the developers refer to to decide whether 'b' should be a bear or a beholder?
Punctuation characters tend to be pretty consistent; there's a few lineages of roguelikes that copy them from each other, and only a handful of things a given mark can mean. ! means potion
Letters are almost always monsters, but which monsters are in which game is anyone's guess.
Disclosure would likely sooner or later compare actual users to people paying for the service, and while a discrepancy of orders of magnitude more of the latter probably wasn't illegal (unless some enterprising AG decides to make it a crime) it would be very bad press. No point in risking that when they can just stay mum.
Is there a way to truly do due diligence on that front? Some independent authority that will guarantee available connectivity with a bond or something? You certainly cannot trust the ISPs. Even if their salespeople don't lie to you out of greed, poor tooling, or incompetence, unless there's a working connection already, you run the risk of "sure, you're in our footprint, but we can't physically connect you because reasons" at installation time.
The closest I can think of off the top of my head is requiring a working (and testable) fiber connection before signing, and refuse to close if there isn't one. I have no idea how that would impact trying to buy a home today.
A qualified surveyor should be able to tell you if a fibre line is connected to your home.
Here in the UK at least companies are not allowed to lie about which houses can and cant get service, and there is a regulatory body (ofcom) that regulates this and other telecommunications service aspects.
Just to add (cant edit). They also regulate speed and can receive fines for over promising and under delivering. As a consumer i can raise this with the ombudsman to force action or remediation.
Mobile phones & social media, tobacco, opium, gin... it seems like every century or so there's an epidemic of "this readily available thing creates addictive stimulation" and a lot of people get lost to it until society wises up about that particular thing. And then a generation or three later, the pattern repeats.
And the GPUs are being maxed out because money seeking a high return is being thrown at LLMs in the hope that they turn into AGI, because there's no other market segment promising such high returns... and being believed.
I suspect the bubble is self-sustaining, because everyone making investment decisions is confident that they won't be blamed if (IMHO, when) the bubble collapses, because "everyone was investing in AI" while simultaneously, even those who might be skeptical are terrified of missing the boat if LLMs really do live up to their hype, or at least convinced they can ride the bubble and find a greater fool before it pops.
I was born in the early 70s, and growing up in America's Mountain West had the reverse experience until personal computers and the internet arrived in the early 90s.
From the perspective of my childhood, technology (cars, planes, phones & faxes, rockets, computers, refrigerators and other household appliances, rock music, radio, movies, television, science fiction & fantasy, the machinery of war, factories, farming, medicine, etc) were all elements of society that had advanced in technological progress, but had "always been there". I, of course, knew that there was a world before all that - my great-grandfather, who lived into his 90s and whom I got to know well, had driven a stagecoach as a teenager - but all of those had entered something like their modern form during or in the immediate aftermath of WWII, and to me it seemed like there had been progress, but not systemic change, in all the time since. It helped that all the adults around me largely saw WWII as the defining event of modern history. There was "before the War" and there was "now" (which came after the war).
Partly that was result of being born at the right time - the space program was in full swing, computers were a staple of fiction and large business but no more, the counterculture had come and gone, etc. The world really seemed like a timeless place to me as a child, and then about the time I reached adulthood, the Cold War ended, and the Internet Era arrived, and the world changed (and continued to change).
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