I recently listed to Albion's Seed which discusses the origins of some US cultures that came from England. Almost 30 hours but very interesting.

It was. He had it sliding along, and noticed that the falling sand/water didn't keep moving horizontally, but eventually moved vertically (because of gravity).

I think it means the water was being poured out whilst it was being moved parallel to the ground, he probably observed that the water that fell out would stop moving horizontally and instead only move downwards.

Yah, I've seen that - I'm happy if it happens but not holding my breath.

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But how is the container moving? It sounds like its on a flat plane

Apologies, starts in 2026

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/us-government-to-make-all-research-it-funds-open-access-on-publication/

He also wrote how birds flew, pretty much writing down one of Newton’s Laws hundreds of years before Isaac Newton was born.

it's alll relative, baby!

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It depends. Is the item in question being translated for fun or for academic, scientific, or historical value? If it's for more than just fun then it can't be "crowd source" or helped with AI (though that one may shift as time goes on) because it needs pedigree, credibility, and someone to claim it is accurate to the source. You set 100 people loose on translating old language and you will get 150 different interpretations. We need consensus to preserve, and that takes organization, and that takes manpower, oversight, and regulation.

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I wish I was alive back then. Obviously this dude did some amazing stuff but all it took to be famous was writing a paper about stuff falling down because no one had ever done it before.

It was a joke. I should have added the /s.

In terms of culture and religion it was pretty much the same. There may have been different names for particular gods and different modes of worship but overall it was the Etruscan pantheon that was venerated.

There were language differences, most of the rebellious Italians spoke one or another sabellian language and the Etruscans (who did not rebel) spoke Etruscan. Most everyone probably spoke Latin or enough of it to get by. The elites were certainly fluent in it as well as Greek.

There was significant intermarriage among the elites of all the various tribes and romans. Culturally if a samnite married a Roman, etruscan, lucanian, bruttian they probably would not have any more surprised by anything they did than a Californian marrying a New Yorker.

The main problem was that romans had started getting particular about who they were letting become citizens. A hundred or so years before and non romans absorbed into the Roman state would have gotten citizenship with relative easy (look at the families of Marius, Pompey and Cicero) but by the social war it was a very guarded. The Italians felt, quite rightly, that they were being taxed equally to romans, served in the army equally to romans and suffered equally to romans (look at Jugurtha and Mithridates massacres of Italians) they should get equality under the law.

Some Romans agreed with this, there was ongoing debate in the senate but Optimate VS Populares partisanship bogged everything down to the point where the Italians felt they had no other options.

In the war itself Rome's greatest weapon was citizenship, its how they prevented certain tribes from joining the Italians and how they brought rebellious allies back in the fold. The Italians just wanted the full benefit of the empire they helped conquer.

Would they have gone full independent? If the romans had been unwilling to compromise quite probably. But It would have been an Italic state or a Roman one, Italy wasn't big enough for two states by that point. If the Italians had won they quite probably would have absorbed the empire as it was and used the same system of governance, just swapping out the romans at the top with Italians and the provinces probably wouldn't have noticed a difference. If the province's rebelled the Italians would have acted just like the romans would have, they would have considered that territory just as much theirs as the Roman Republic did.

Edit for typos

If it's a University that's doing the study, that is funded with tax payer dollars.

Do you happen to have da Vinci's email? I would love to see the original study.

I’d recommend A Brave and Cunning Prince by James Horn. It is a very well written narrative history on an often underappreciated figure in American history. He believes that Paquiquineo and Opechancanough are the same person and tells their life using evidence to support that claim

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I think you used the wrong word at some point but I find a lot of this mindset to prevent people from accessing information - while the internet was invented to share information with as little boundaries as possible. If it wasn’t for all the costs you mentioned, medical research could make giant leaps and lots of medical conditions would find cures faster - but somehow information paywalling gets in the way for such idealism… DaVinci lived 500 years ago - if we translate his work now the translator, although they deserve retribution (could it be crowd sourced? Helped by AI ?…) could also register it in his name and sell it instead of putting it back in the public domain. Maybe selling physical copies of things was a better answer than the impossible “everything should be free” internet dream. I’m all for physical copies personally.

It's "free" in that those things are free for hosting but only up until the donations dry up. A funding line supported by law would ensure it. Also hosting it is the last step in costs. You still have the work retrieving and preserving the original, translating it (no small feat), then finally digitizing and formating that translation for readability. All that is labor people have to do.

It's a lot of work and awesome people do it out of the goodness of their heart and personal passion but we should, as a society, be funding and ensuring it for the future.

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