This is all Microsoft’s fault. IE 3 had terrible implementation of CSS and could only support absolute font units like point (pt). Legions of web designers quickly began cranking out zillions of pages that were, and sometimes still are, damn near impossible to read. Here it is nearly 5 years later and the Web is still suffering from this.
I promise never to do that here. Geezers like me need things to be ergonomic, right?
Memepool is a great source for obscure, interesting and useful pages on a wide array of subects. The gadget section and the science section ought to be required reading for any MIT hopeful.
My urges to abolish any form of push marketing in my life compel me to investigate digital video recorders. But then my urges to only spend my money on real hardware compel me to investigate software that will convert a computer into a digital video recorder.
How do you build a superhero base?
Mr. Farlops is pleased! This web log is now fully operational. The mind boggles!
But how about you? Is this web log hard to navigate? How is the layout of the navigational links? Is it intuitive? Is it cumbersome? Do you miss the old bulletin board, even though none of us have used it form months?
Please, let me know what you think of this new script doodad.
By the way, I highly recommend the Greymatter script. If you like open-source, fully tweakable perl that does useful stuff, this is it. Why use Blogger (It’s only a matter of time before someone like Yahoo or MSN buys ’em and they start blaring ads at us.) when you can do it yourself on your own server?
Bulletin board is now retired and all links to it are certain to be dead. In coming days, we will replace this page with a Web log. Once this is in place and functioning smoothly, attention shall return to the Farlopsian Rogues Gallery.
1668 BCE: Freed from Egyptian domination, two Nubian kingdoms unify into one state, known to the Egyptians as Kush, with its capitol at Kerma. Currently Egypt is in decline and is ruled by foreign invaders: the Hyksos.
1700-1400 BCE: Minoan culture reaches its apex.
Circa 1570 BCE: Ahmose I founds the Eighteenth Dynasty and the New Kingdom of Egypt by expelling the Hyksos. Later he begins a series of invasions into Kush returning it to a vassal state. History before this point corresponds to our history.
Circa 1300 BCE: Smiths in the Southern reaches of Lower Nubia discover how to smelt Ethiopian ore into iron. Kush, breaking from Egyptian tradition, begins to favor iron weapons and tools over bronze ones.
1300-1000 BCE: Kingdoms and cultures around the eastern Mediterranean fall into decline following economic failures, waves of invaders and the rise of iron age technology.
1070 BCE: The New Kingdom of Egypt falls into decline.
732 BCE: Iron shod troops from Kush, under the leadership of King Piye, invade Egypt. Piye, seeing himself as a reformer of Egyptian culture, founds the Twenty-fifth, or Ethiopian, Dynasty. Piye rules land that stretches from upper reaches of Ethiopia in the South to the Mediterranean in the North.
677 BCE: Iron armed Assyrians, under Esarhaddon, attempt to invade Egypt. They are repulsed by Taharqa, Pharaoh of Greater Egypt.
674 BCE: The Assyrians attempt to invade Egypt again. They are routed at the Battle of Sile by Taharqa. Assyria never advances past the Sinai again.
Circa 670 BCE Assurbanipal, the Assyrian king, dies. Assyria, largely depending on the success of iron weapons to fill the power vacuum of the Middle East, rapidly falls into decline.
664 BCE Tanwetamani, nephew of Taharqa, conquers most of Jordan, Judea and Palestine. This Greater Egyptian Empire, known to history as Meroë,in the decades that follow, alternates between war and trade with the ascendant Chaldeans.
604 BCE: Nebuchadrezzar, upon the death of his father, ascends the Chaldean throne. He begins a series of military campaigns on the Merotic frontier. In an attempt to destabilize the border, he finances revolts in Israel.
598 BCE: The armies of Meroë sack Jeruselem to quell revolts there. This is recorded in the Old Testament as the Merotic Captivity. Many thousands of Hebrews forced to flee to Babylon and the Chaldeans.
562 BCE: Nebuchadrezzar dies. The Chaldean state rapidly declines under the three ineffectual kings. The Persian Empire rise to fill the vacuum.
538 BCE: Under Cyrus the Great, the Persians succeed in taking much of the territory seized by Meroë in 664.
530 BCE Cyrus attempts to invade Egypt. He fails. Subsequent attempts by his successors also fail to rest Egypt from Meroe.
510 BCE: Deprived of Judea, Meroë begins extensive trading relations with Greek citystates.
500 BCE: During this time, iron technology rapidly spreads throughout Africa carried by Bantu farmers and traders from
Meroë. Iron is in wide use in West and South Africa.
The nation of Axum, which is located in Ethopia, begins to expand with intensive road building and naval trading expeditions.
Axumite traders open extensive trading with India and the Arabian peninsula.
In the centuries that follow, a period of artistic, scientific and cultural flowering occurs in the borders of Meroë. By the time the Phoenician trading states rose to fill the vacuum in the Mediterranean left by the fall of Meroë,many peoples in the basin are heavily Egyptianized. The city of Carthage rises to prominence on a series of wars with Merotic colonies in the Mediterranean basin. The Etruscans become a minor vassal in this Phoenician empire and thus Rome never rises. Without the vast network of roads that would have been built by Roman engineers, Europe remains culturally, economically and politically divided. Writing, based mostly on Phoenician cuniform, slowly begins to filter northward. With the exception of some historical sagas written in Runic, most of European history during this period is orally based.
Circa 300 CE: The nation of Ghana rises in Mali river valley.
Need to scan and OCR the Ghana timeline in here.
1310 CE:
I’m tired of what-if stories about the Second World War and the Civil War. Those are allohistories that have been fictionally done to death. I’d like to see something different.
I graduated from university with a degree in history. I did three years of physics, astronomy and mathematics but, in the end, I was too lazy to complete a degree in that so, in order to get out of university as quickly as possible, I chose history because, out all things I had distribution courses in, it was the one subject I disliked the least.
Out of history, I suppose I like nonwestern history better. It’s easy to learn stuff about the US or Europe so, it’s boring to me. Me, I was always interested in the other histories of the world. It’s easy to find a list of all the Popes and Patriarchs in Europe since the founding of Christianity. But try finding a king list for the rulers of Kush. What did the Javanese do before the Dutch showed up? Try to learn what the Mayans where doing while Europe stumbled out of the fall of Rome. It’s damn near impossible.
Another question I’ve always pondered is, why did Europe rise to dominate the world first? Why not Africa? Why not the empires of Islam or, the courts of Asia? How come the Aztecs or Incas didn’t simply drive Cortez or Pizarro into the sea? Why weren’t there huge numbers of native Australians waiting to fend off any European exploiters?
A few months ago, I finished reading Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel and I think he provides a pretty good explanation as to why Eurasian civilizations rose first. The main point of his complex argument has to do with the location, size, shape and orientation of the continents. It has nothing to do with ethnic or cultural superiority. It’s just that some continents are better for emerging agricultural societies than other continents. Some continents are better for supporting and maintaining those societies in their formative years until a high level of technology arises.
Jared freely admits his theories still aren’t conclusive but I think they go a long way towards explaining how things turned out. It was just luck and geography, not cultural superiority.
I suppose history will never be fully rigorous until we event time travel or we discover an infinite set of nearby universes in which Earth’s history happened differently.
Jared’s arguments aside, I have created an allohistory based on two inflection points in our world’s history: The Battle of Sile in 674 BCE and Mansa Muhammad’s Atlantic voyage circa 1310 CE.
Never heard of these? That’s because they are inflection points in classical and medieval African history. Ancient and medieval African history, aside from Egypt, is hard to find sources on. The history of sub-Saharan Africa is especially hard to find sources on. Some of it is currently untranslatable, like the Merotic inscriptions on stele in the ancient ruins of Kush. Some of it has been lost or destroyed, like the Nubian monuments buried under the lake created by the Aswan High Dam. But most of it has been simply ignored because of racism, like the walled towns of northern South Africa and the city of Great Zimbabwe.
Luckily now, there has been a rebirth in African historical research. Three years ago, you could hardly find anything on the Internet about precolonial African history. Now the sources are proliferating, as evidenced in the links that follow.
Recommended books:
Recommended webs:
Or why, after many years, I still can’t get over the fact I flunked complex variable analysis
I’ve got something to prove.
It probably all started many years ago when, as a small child in grade school, I was deeply envious of my best friend’s ease with arithmetic. I wanted that power and it always bothered me that I couldn’t force myself to sit down and acquire or exercise it. Thus began a lifetime love-hate relationship with mathematics. Mathematics is hard for people to do. The human brain, despite what Penrose thinks, doesn’t have the hardware to do math naturally. Doing math is a highly unnatural act. That’s probably why it appeals to me.
Supposedly, according to Myers-Briggs, I have a personality suited for the study of mathematics. I have a strong appreciation for its beauty and power but, the thing is, I just don’t have the patience for it. Math takes a lot of mental ditch-digging and I have never been one to practice anything. I’d probably make a poor musician for the same reasons. And now that I am well past my mental peak, it seems unlikely that I will astound the world with some new and powerful proof.
I still toy with the idea of doing math as a hobby and I have decided that this page will be devoted to some of the more interesting ideas in mathematics. And perhaps I might include some of my own efforts here along with progress reports.
One of the more astounding ideas that was introduced to me in high school was the idea of different kinds of infinity and that it was possible to organize these kinds of infinity into a numbering system called the transfinite numbers. The sheer audacity of it! Of course mathematicians have always flirted with mysticism
Look upon what has happened to this site in it’s many incarnations! See how my skills at Web engineering and design improve!
