Neatorama

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• The New, Nicer Nero
• The Best Opening Theme Songs In Television History, Ranked
• Hiding a Ship with Smoke
• Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism?
• Cooking Meat Without Fire
• The Internet Archive Can Now Prevent Research Papers From Vanishing
• This Kitten Sweetly Sleeps With A Chicken
• Wikipedia Apparently Has A Massive Impact On Tourism!
• The Source Of All Sexual Energy

The New, Nicer Nero Posted: 20 Sep 2020 09:35 AM PDT The popular view of Roman Emperor Nero is that of Peter Ustinov's performance in Quo Vadis. People who know nothing else of Nero know that he fiddled while Rome burned. While that might be true, it doesn't tell the entire story. We think of Nero as a cruel sociopathic tyrant because of the stories that followed him all these centuries. Most of them are quite embellished, if not totally made up. But what if Nero wasn't such a monster? What if he didn't invent the spectator sport of throwing Christians to the lions in the Colosseum? What if he wasn't the tyrant who murdered upstanding Roman senators and debauched their wives? Indeed, what if the whole lurid rap sheet has been an elaborate set-up, with Nero as history's patsy? After all, we have no eyewitness testimony from Nero's reign. Any contemporaneous writings have been lost. The ancient Roman sources we do have date from considerably after Nero's suicide in A.D. 68. The case against Nero, then, is largely hearsay, amplified and distorted over two millennia in history's longest game of telephone. Besides, no one really wants to straighten out the record. Who wants another version of Nero? He's the perfect evil tyrant just the way he is. John Drinkwater is the author of a new Nero biography, in which the Roman emperor appears to be a run-of-the-mill ruler, a young man who preferred to write poetry and sing than deal with politics. He did have his mother killed, but the story of Nero obliviously letting Rome burn was nonsense. Nero was no angel, but neither was he the despot he's been portrayed to be. Read what the historians say about Emperor Nero at Smithsonian.

The Best Opening Theme Songs In Television History, Ranked Posted: 20 Sep 2020 09:05 AM PDT What makes a good TV theme song? Is one good because it's memorable, because it's a repurposed classic, because it illustrates the show well, or because the creative department made awesome graphics for the intro? Using all these criteria, Vince Mancini ranked the 25 best TV theme songs. The list includes old classics, awful shows with good theme songs, shows you didn't watch, and shows you've never heard of. The comments are full of differing opinions, and theme songs the author "forgot" or was unaware of. Yeah, sure, this is all opinion, but it also gives us an opportunity to relive those shows because the theme song videos are embedded. -via Digg

Hiding a Ship with Smoke Posted: 20 Sep 2020 09:05 AM PDT This footage of a smoke screen was taken around 1923. A plane dropped a curtain of titanium tetrachloride to obscure the ship's exact location and movement from the enemy. In World War II, this was used to protect Allied ships from enemy fire, as Japanese naval radar technology was only in its infancy. Meanwhile, American ships were more likely to employ radar to locate target ships that were out of sight. -via reddit

Do We Have Victorians to Thank for Consumerism? Posted: 20 Sep 2020 09:05 AM PDT The Victorian era was when colonialism and the Industrial Revolution collided, and the fashion was to collect interesting objects, or any objects at all, to stuff one's home with. Disposable income led to rampant consumerism, and an obsession with "things." The Sambournes were an example, if not the epitome of this consumerism. One of Punch's best-known cartoonists and illustrators, Edward Linley Sambourne, and his wife, Marion, occupied a house at 18 Stafford Terrace in London's Kensington and Chelsea Borough. They moved in as newlyweds in the 1870s and lived there until their deaths four decades later. Preserved as a museum, 18 Stafford Terrace stands as a temple of well-appointed late-Victorian comfort, most of its original objects still in situ. Marion's diaries chronicle the life of the house and keep a running list of its contents, including more than 550 pieces of furniture. Her art- and furniture-loving husband spent a lifetime adding to the domestic load. The museum website suggests his acquisitive tendencies caused his spouse agitation: The master of the house attended auctions and sales until he died, a habit that added "ever more objects to the interiors, often to Marion's despair." One detail, plucked from Marion Sambourne's diaries by Shirley Nicholson for her book A Victorian Household, staggers me: The family owned 66 upright chairs. Many were used in the dining room and drawing room, as one would expect, but ten found their way to the master bedroom and another ten more occupied the day-nursery. This apparently wasn't considered over the top for the time. While Britain was the prime example of consumerism at the time, and the reason we call it the Victorian Era at all, examples of runaway acquisition could be found all over the world. Read about the rise of "things" at Literary Hub.-via Strange Company

Cooking Meat Without Fire Posted: 20 Sep 2020 09:05 AM PDT Today, we have self-heating cans of soup, that use a chemical reaction to produce heat. It's not a new idea. In fact, a recipe from 13th-century tells us how to do it. To cook meat without fire.... Take a small earthenware pot with earthenware lid of the right size. Then take another pot, also earthenware, also with a suitable lid that fits well. This should be five fingers deeper than the first, and three fingers bigger round. Then take pork and chicken, cut them into nice pieces, get good spices and put them in, and some salt. Take the little pot with the meat in and put it inside the big pot. Set it upright, cover it with the lid and seal with damp, sticky soil, so nothing can come out. Then take lime that has not been slaked [quicklime], put it in the big pot full of water, but take care that no water gets into the small pot. Leave it alone for as long as it takes to go five to seven leagues. Then open your pots, and you will find your meat well and truly cooked. The part about timing the cooking hints that this method might be used while traveling, in a wagon or boat, when no fire would be possible. The same technique, with differences in technology, has been used in the centuries since, which you can read about at Old & Interesting. -via Metafilter (Image source: Google patents)

The Internet Archive Can Now Prevent Research Papers From Vanishing Posted: 20 Sep 2020 09:05 AM PDT Most institutions are now investing in online journals or platforms for accessibility. Sure, it's easier to find research papers and academic journals that can aid us in our studies, but what happens when institutions stop paying for web hosting or the platform's service? There's a high risk that the research stored within those services or platforms will disappear. Archivists at the Internet Archive are hard at work preserving open-access journals permanently, as Vice details:  Between 2000 and 2019, nearly 200 open-access journals and the research papers they published have vanished from the internet, according to a new study published on arxiv preprint server. Nine-hundred more inactive, open-access journals are also at high risk of vanishing in the near future, the researchers found.  Of the 176 journals they identified, around one-third vanished from the web within one year of the last publication, taking their articles and research down with them.  Since 2017, archivists at the Internet Archive have worked to preserve open-access journals permanently. "Of the 14.8 million known open access articles published since 1996, the Internet Archive has archived, identified, and made available through the Wayback Machine 9.1 million of them," Brian Newbold at the Internet Archive wrote on Tuesday.  To expand those efforts, IA launched the Fatcat editable catalog with an open API for anyone to contribute open-access scholarly works, as well as a new platform for searching through those archives Image via Vice

This Kitten Sweetly Sleeps With A Chicken Posted: 20 Sep 2020 06:06 AM PDT Warning for major amounts of cuteness! Watch as a British Shorthair kitten sweetly sleeps with a tiny chicken. You might think it's a waste of almost two minutes of your time, but no, it won't be. Watching two different animals getting along and becoming cuddly with each other is totally not a waste of time.

Wikipedia Apparently Has A Massive Impact On Tourism! Posted: 20 Sep 2020 06:06 AM PDT Tourism chiefs can drive business to their towns or cities by simply updating or editing their Wikipedia page. Who could have known that that method is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote tourism? Economists at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and ZEW in Mannheim, Germany, found that a few simple edits to a Wikipedia page could lead to an extra £100,000 a year in tourism revenue, as the Guardian detailed:  The researchers randomly selected cities across Spain to receive targeted improvements to their Wikipedia pages, adding a few paragraphs of information on their history and local attractions, as well as high-quality photos of the local area. It didn't take an expert, either. Most of the content added was simply translated over from the Spanish Wikipedia into either French, German, Italian or Dutch. Doing so had an immediate and remarkable effect: adding just two paragraphs of text and a single photo to the article increased the number of nights spent in the city by about 9% during the tourist season. In some instances, the increase was even larger. For cities with barely anything on their Wikipedia pages, a minor edit could raise visits by a third. "If we extend this to the entire tourism industry, the impact is large," write the authors, Marit Hinnosaar, Toomas Hinnosaar, Michael Kummer and Olga Slivko. "Its impact could be in billions of euros." Image via the Guardian

The Source Of All Sexual Energy Posted: 20 Sep 2020 06:06 AM PDT Well, that's what Wilhelm Reich thought. The psychoanalyst believed he had discovered "orgone" energy, what he believed was the cosmic source of all sexual energy. Reich even went as far as building and selling "orgone accumulators," items that he claimed could concentrate a person's energy when they sat inside them. Would you believe such a thing if it was presented today? I wouldn't, and neither did the psychoanalytic community during the time he released his outlandish claims. Check out Popular Science's podcast, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, to hear more about this cosmic sex source!  Image via Popular Science

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