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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • According to Wikipedia:

    “The experiments were recorded by the monk Salimbene di Adam in his Chronicles, who was generally extremely negative about Fredrick II (portraying his calamities as parallel to the Biblical plagues in The Twelve Calamities of Emperor Frederick II) and wrote that Frederick encouraged ‘foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which he took to have been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.’”

    So, as you’d expect of someone raised without any formal language, other means of communication were necessary.



  • In his 1953 autobiography, Danish explorer Peter Freuchen claimed that in 1926, he became trapped in a blizzard while running a dog team and was forced to take shelter under his sled for 30 hours while snow built up and froze around him. When he tried to emerge, he found he was entombed in ice and unable to break free with his hands alone. Thinking quickly, he took a shit right there, shaped the turd into a chisel, and allowed it to freeze solid. He then claims he was able to use his newly made tool to chip his way free and make it back to camp. Peter was the only witness to his supposed escape. The study mentions it’s based on an Inuit ethnographic account, however. Maybe Peter, having spent much time in the Arctic with Inuit peoples simply took the story for himself. With the runners of the study finding that they were unable to replicate such a technique, it lends credibility to the claim that story may have been fabricated.





  • Depress_Mode@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlSociety
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    2 years ago

    This chart really makes no sense at all. How does Lord of the Flies lie at the intersection of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451?

    One’s about an ultra-conservative theocracy, one’s about government surveillance and propaganda, and one’s about destroying books because people’s attention spans have reduced past the ability to read and they’re too long/confusing/depressing. I guess authoritarianism might lie at the heart of all these? Meanwhile, though, Lord of the Flies is more about the dangers of unchecked groupthink and how it can lead to violence and cruelty.