I see your Bison
and raise you 50million+ Native Americans.
Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster, 105000 dead.
After Henry VII (Lancaster) triumphed at Bosworth, he married Elizabeth of York and united the two houses. Did nobody think of doing this earlier?
Can't we get Bozza to boff Ursula von der Leyen and perhaps all this Brexit stuff could be consigned to history......or Truss and Sefcovic
Once in the dark ages, the UK was a key member of the European Union helping to draft much of the policy for the single market and customs union
Can’t we get Bozza to boff Ursula von der Leyen and perhaps all this Brexit stuff could be consigned to history
Go on Ursula, take one for the team!
🤢
Belgium was the first country to achieve a life expectancy of 40. That was achieved in 1800.
Glad someone mentioned smoking. I’m 45 and when I was at Uni you could smoke most places. Not shops or cinemas but pretty much everywhere else.
You pretty much knew you’d have to wash your clothes after going into a pub for anything more than a brief visit. Most workplaces had smoking rooms.
It seems like a completely different age now, i don’t think I would have started smoking if I was a teen now compared to the 80’s and early 90’s. It’s even slightly unusual to pass someone on the street smoking too.
Not all the Catholic population of Northern Ireland had the right to vote until the early 1970's.
My teenage libido.
My teenage lido
My teenage Ludo
Another; at some point in the early 18thC nearly everybody in the UK went from living “Down there, past the tree, next to the beehive and if you go past the bridge you’ve gone too far”, to 11B Walpole Avenue, and almost no-one commentated on it at all.
I think the forum was down for maintenance that day....
The 10th US president, John Tyler, (born 1790, when George Washington was the OG POTUS), still has a living grandchild.
After Henry VII (Lancaster) triumphed at Bosworth, he married Elizabeth of York and united the two houses. Did nobody think of doing this earlier?
I'm envisaging someone trying to fix this in a time machine in a Blackadder style and it all kicking off again because someone's slept with someone's sister.
Not all the Catholic population of Northern Ireland had the right to vote until the early 1970’s.
This is slightly misleading. In general elections they had the same rights as everyone else, but for council elections voting was limited to one vote per household. By restricting the housing available to the catholic population, the Unionist authorities were, in effect, able to reduce the number of Catholic votes, to allow them to stay in power. It's called gerrymandering.
The T-Rex was closer in history to the iPod than it was to the Triceratops
This one isn’t actually true.
That the world population has doubled since I was born in 1973.
Incredible, and scary.
It’s called gerrymandering.
Call it what they like, not everyone could vote for their elected official's.
Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster,
...... had nothing to do with any fancied traditional rivalry between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, which have a red rose and a white rose respectively as their emblem.
Henry fought under a dragon banner and richard under a boar banner, the roses malarkey came along afterwards
EDIT: wrong thread
on the Tube(!)
When I first moved to that there London you could smoke on the tube but only in the 2nd and 2nd last carriage...if it was really busy you sometimes ended up in one of those cos they were the only ones with space.
The "Groom of the Stool" was the most sought after political appointment to the king as whilst wiping his arse you could chat business with no-one else interfering. This was an active office until 1901!
The T-Rex was closer in history to the iPod than it was to the Triceratops
This one isn’t actually true
Stegosaurus, rather than triceratops is the correct mind blower innit
Henry fought under a dragon banner and richard under a boar banner, the roses malarkey came along afterwards
@52.6242973,-1.4017933,3a,15y,108.84h,95.5t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sWB_xqxl4JKmmN7aLnJOUhA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192">Street view of the road names shows the front line.
This might not be a fact
The F-14 Tomcat is older today, than Spitfires were when the 1st Top Gun was released.
I work in a hospital microbiology lab. When I started in 2001, there were a couple of guys worked there who had been there since it opened in the sixties. They could smoke in the lab, had ash trays on the bench! This would be next to open cultures of, amongst other things, salmonella and TB 🤣
They also used to culture TB in eggs and have live animals (mice and gerbils) for virology.
Stegosaurus, rather than triceratops is the correct mind blower innit
Yeah, fair enough, I couldn't quite remember and took a bit of a punt 😉
Life expectancy in England between the 1500’s and 1700’s was between 30-40. So basically i would likely be dead now
Perhaps the expertise on this site might help me with a random question that popped into my head a while ago related to this. ^
What is/was the average mortality age for everyone that has ever lived? And how much older am I than it at 53?
(I'm not going to get an answer on this but am assuming that the average age is less than mine, and quite like the idea that I might be regarded as ancient already by historical standards with all the wisdom that represents. 😀 )
The gap between the Wright brothers first flight, and man walking on the moon was 66 years!
Patrick Moore thought he was the only person to meet both, iirc.
I recently watched a YouTube of a restored 1929! film interviewing two Civil War veterans on a July 4th celebration day. they were in their 90’s by then but otherwise seemed as sharp as tacks
The last ACW veteran died in 1956. And as mentioned above, the last widow of a ACW veteran died in 2020!
The bands I listened to at university (Pixies, Nirvana, Jesus & Mary Chain, Orb, Aphex Twin etc) were closer to the Beatles than to current day music.
Most workplaces had smoking rooms.
My second workplace was a polytechnic, there was no specific smoking rooms or areas. I used to have to go in my bosses office for 1-to-1 meetings while he puffed away, smoke filling the room.
Funny how they still have the 'no smoking' lights on aeroplanes. Think they could use the space for something more useful.
Stegosaurus, rather than triceratops is the correct mind blower innit
Either that or it was a reference to Mark Bolan.
99% of gargoyles look like Bob Todd.
The bands I listened to at university (Pixies, Nirvana, Jesus & Mary Chain, Orb, Aphex Twin etc) were closer to the Beatles than to current day music.
There was only 25 years between the first ever rock n roll song and the Sex Pistols (if you agree that Rocket 88 was the first rock n roll song).
The orbital spaceflight of Yuri Gagarin on the 12th April 1961 technically did not qualify for the Guinness Record because the rules stipulated that the spacecraft must safely launch and land with the occupant inside.
We now know that after re-entry, Gagarin's Vostok capsule ejected it's occupant at an altitude of 7,000m and that Gagarin landed via parachute some distance away from his spacecraft.
Nearly everyone was pretty much on the edge of starvation nearly all the time.
Not sure this is true for medieval times. I have read lots of people debunking this. They had means to store food over the winter. The big problem was (as it is now in much of the developing world) that if the harvest were to fail, there wasn't enough and there'd be famines. This was every 30-40 years or something. But when there wasn't famine, there was enough.
During the industrial revolution it got worse because people were dependent on working and being able to pay cash for things that had to be transported into the city, rather than being part of a community that fed itself. And that work depended on external factors like markets. No market = no money = no food. Or, a greedy boss = not enough money = not enough food. In medieval times in the countryside, you were part of the harvest, most likely, so you'd be given your share before any surplus was sold.
potatoes
https://patient.info/news-and-features/nightshade-allergy-aubergine-potatoes-peppers-tomatoes
The geological age of the earth compressed to a timescale we can understand - one year
The Earth and the rest of the solar system is formed on New Year's Day.
It wouldn't be until late November that we saw the first animals with hard parts (fnarr!)
The first tetrapods appeared on land on the first day of December
The dinosaurs died out in a mass extinction that occurred on Boxing Day
Human beings appeared at about 11.35pm on New Year's Eve
Stonehenge was built about thirty seconds before midnight
The industrial revolution was a second ago
.....and in that second, we've managed to **** it all up to the point of no return.
What is/was the average mortality age for everyone that has ever lived? And how much older am I than it at 53?
Given the rate of population growth, You are probably below it. It took 1500 years to double from 200mn to 400mn. It then doubled much more rapidly and now has slowed. Multiply the curve below by average life expectancy, which is today over 70, and you'll get an average.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
times
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
in 1964, global life expectancy exceeded 53.
This is a good visual representation of the timeline of Earth...
'Live expectancy' seems a misleading term, because it's not a figure for how long you can expect to live. Age at death is not a normal distribution, so the most common value is not the mean.
Up until the 1960s, pregnancy tests involved injecting urine into frogs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-44886585
The B52 is only 5 years younger than the Lancaster bomber. When it was first in service there were still huge numbers of WW2 planes in service. The Lancaster was flying until 1963. The last B52 technically rolled of the production lines in 1962. Due to an upgrade policy it has now been in service since 1955, was last updated in 2015 and is due to remain in service until the mid 2050s. That is a century in service.
It is hard to think of many pieces of equipment that have survived that long in active service.
One that always blew my mind is that to Cleopatra the building of the Great Pyramid was longer ago than Cleopatra is to us. And to the Sumerians who were alive when the Great Pyramid was built the orgins of their civilisation were similarly ancient.
It's sometimes just hard to fathom how much history their actually is.
potatoes
Oh yeah, one I read earlier this week,
For decades, tomatoes were believed to be poisonous. People grew tomato plants for decorative purposes.
It’s sometimes just hard to fathom how much history their actually is.
And yet Jesus, if he was an historical figure, would have lived roughly 20 overlapping lifetimes ago.
Multiply the curve below by average life expectancy, which is today over 70, and you’ll get an average.
Oh c'mon, it's Friday afternoon! 😀
‘Live expectancy’ seems a misleading term, because it’s not a figure for how long you can expect to live. Age at death is not a normal distribution, so the most common value is not the mean.
I think we all know that. It's a useful term for a not particularly serious topic. 😀
One that always blew my mind is that to Cleopatra the building of the Great Pyramid was longer ago than Cleopatra is to us. And to the Sumerians who were alive when the Great Pyramid was built the orgins of their civilisation were similarly ancient.
Related to that:
Although there is no clear definitive "date of foundation", teaching existed at Oxford University in one form or another from 1096.
That means it's more than 200 years older than the Aztec civilization (the acknowledged start of which was the founding of Tenochtitlán in 1325).
On a slightly longer timescale...
All the carbon atoms in the universe were created in red giants and IIRC heavy metals like Gold have been ejected from black holes. So before life could even think about existing, all the elements necessary had to be created by the collapse of stars which had been shining for millions of years and before that it was just a sea of Helium which has to coalesce into stars.....
