I don't see any indication that pdftotext has been discontinued [1]. It looks like a Mac-specific installer available via Homebrew Cask has been discontinued [2], but pdftotext is still available through the normal poppler formula [3].
Rock art is really weird because there are exactly same motifs using the same materials (usually red ochre) all over the world and separated by tens of thousands of years.
People act like it’s no big deal, but it sure looks like a pretty big deal that raises some interesting questions. We have a global view of information flows now, and I feel like I haven’t seen a lot of behaviors in humanity that explain how this has been working. What is happening here? Every few thousand years some small group of people in a new random spot on earth somehow magically decides to do that hand thing with red ochre on a rock face? By what mechanism? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence that we are innately drawn to hand symbols in red ochre, aside from these examples separated by diameter of the earth and tens of thousands of years.
Given the time scale and given our current visibility into humanity, human information, and human creativity, it seems like whatever would cause that to happen should be something that’s still observable in the modern world.
Here is a theory - survivorship bias. Humans made all kinds of things, but only small amount of it survived. Red ochre on rock faces just happened to be something that lasts a long time.
To expand on that I think there was a lot of self expression covering all possible surfaces. So the statement shifts from many human groups picked same thing to express themselves to multiple self expressive groups discovered ochre techniques and produced artwork that survived to this day. There were probably plenty of groups that did not discover that and none of their art survived.
To elaborate on this, the white marble statues decorating the Parthenon and Acropolis are believed to have been painted very bright colors in their day. Not a single one of those dazzling pigments survived exposed to the elements after a mere 2500 years.
The white marble statues were usually copies of more highly regarded bronze statues. But you can’t melt the marble down to make weapons so those statues survived
Even things like arrowheads which are used to mark progress or reach of Native American populations in the US are useful because they survive and are dug up all the time while digging. I'm sure there would be more interesting cultural finds if baskets or clothes from the time survived at the same rate.
I'm sure the later stuff lasted, once we had perfected the technique of producing ceramic (still probably a lot is buried under earth somewhere and over time will be crushed with pressure). But I'm talking about the early to late-stone age period (10K YA and earlier), when we probably still produced containers, but they were probably made from less durable materials or techniques.
Spend some time around kids. Rock art is completely obvious.
After a few thousand nights in a cave with nothing to do, drawing on the walls with some charcoal from your fire is what every human probably did, and would do even today.
Switching to red ochre is just one step away from that.
Even chimps are known to scratch figures in the dirt.
What I find interesting about this explanation is that it suggests a much more limited scope of decision-making than is often attributed to humans. A practical example of why this could matter is that instead of spreading an idea through viral mechanisms where an information is transmitted between individuals, this would provide an illustration of how an idea could be spread by replicating conditions and causing the idea to essentially regenerate in a predictable manner among disconnected individuals, while from each individual’s perspective they are doing something novel.
It could be that there's tonnes of people doing hand things with lots of different materials. Then, because of the composition of that red ochre material, only the drawings that were made with that stuff stick around for long enough for us to see them.
Yes, and “long enough for us to see them” actually comprises two independent factors: (1) survivorship bias, in that red ochre on rock can last a long time, and (2) “discoverability” bias, in that red ochre on rock is relatively easy to spot.
Additionally perhaps people (would-be discoverers) ignore art in remote places that is not a hand print or otherwise pictographic as probably a natural anomaly and not human-made?
Basically humans have an instinct for graffiti, a few standard interests (hands, sexual anatomy, prey animals), and there are a few material combinations that survive the ages particularly well.
It’s probably not a coincidence that two millennia ago you find the same crude jokes and drawings of dicks scrawled on the walls of Pompeii that you find in any high school bathroom.
My favorite graffiti is in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY (transported from Egypt). British soldiers in Egypt to fight Napoleon, acting like naughty teenagers and carving their names.
As a solution to this problem, Rupert Sheldrake proposes his hypothesis of "Morphic Resonance" [1]. While it's a far-out idea and rejected by the scientific community, I found it an interesting read nonetheless.
Maybe rock art is a secondary effect of whatever evolutionary leap brought about language in the human species. Whatever brain mechanisms facilitated that also facilitated cave paintings. The rest can be explained by many independent inventors over tens of thousands of years. Maybe even call these paintings a first attempt at writing, a precursor to hieroglyphics.
Indeed. It seems possible that there’s something about the red ochre hand motif is hardwired into human brain and is related to language development. But on a time scale of tens of thousands of years, even if we somehow outgrew it as a species, it seems there would still be residual evidence.
When our daughter was one year old, we gave her some child-safe finger paints. Finger prints and hand prints were some of the first "drawings" she made without any parental instruction. She does not have any inherent access to global information flows or other esoteric explanations that would bind her to her ancient relatives -- beyond a bunch of shared DNA and common physiology & brain development.
She also prefers bright colors, and red pigments are probably some of the most accessible in nature that might be more robust to the sands of time (i.e. survivorship bias).
It seems like a likely explanation is that these are primarily done by children and that this is a human universal / instinctual behavior during child development. Looking at google scholar there are at least a couple studies of hand print sizes estimating that in a few regions they were almost exclusively done by young people. That would seem to suggest a biological basis for this specific behavior.
Red is the one of the most common and easily accessible pigments, and as others have pointed out what we see is durable. As far as the “same motifs” goes, is that really so unexpected? It’s not a particularly precise claim, but I’d certainly expect to see expressive similarities from groups of biologically indistinct humans living similar technological lifestyles despite their geographic or temporal separation.
> if we're talking about building an SPA you're typically going to be building a worse solution if you can't SSR your client views, which you need a js backend to do.
I have not used React with Rails and maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment, but the react-rails readme includes a section about SSR via ExecJS and integrated with Rails:
That is obvious (it's in the name). The way your comment is phrased reads to me like you are saying that one can't use Rails and has to switch to a full JS backend for SSR. If that's not what you are saying, then it's unclear what you are actually saying and why you juxtaposed Rails / Django against a JS backend.
My point is that you literally cannot SSR your client js views without a js backend, so node has a clear engineering purpose in this respect. Yes, you can import a second backend into your main backend to avoid writing node, and that's fine, maybe your team is mostly made of rubyists or maybe your existing code base is ruby, there's nothing wrong with this approach, but it is more complication and layers of abstraction than just using a js backend if you must build an SPA.
This is not typically how the term "backend" is used in this context. Most mature apps will use a variety of tools and services built in a variety of languages, but this is not referred to as "importing a second backend." In fact, your comment is apparently the first use of the phrase "import a second backend" on the entire internet: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22import+a+second+backend%2...
I'm speaking metaphorically. When I say "import a second backend" I'm saying that the thing being imported into the ruby backend is literally a wrapper around the exact same runtime that is typically used to run js backends, the corollary being that the "ruby" part is unnecessary added complexity from an engineering perspective unless you have some other compelling reason to use ruby (which is certainly possible).
There is a pie-slice of Antarctica that is unclaimed under the Antarctic Treaty System. Some guy in LA has claimed it as Westarctica[1], which is a pretty good name. You could probably go down there with a pistol and claim it yourself. Dress warmly. Would rank in the top 20 countries in square km (1.6M square km)
Nobody recognizes even the claimed pie slices (except the 7 claiming countries), just as none of the parties would recognize any claim on Marie Byrd Land (aka Westarctica).
It still remains a fact that no country claims that territory. And that's interesting in some abstract way to people with the fantasy of forming a country. Which is exactly what the parent comment was referring to.
The whole thing is just meant in fun. Aside from the fact that the treaty binds only the signatories.
Indeed. The closest you’ll get to this would be the Café Central in Vienna, circa 1913. A recreation of this on the internet would be fascinating.
The café was opened in 1876, and in the late 19th century it became a key meeting place of the Viennese intellectual scene. Key regulars included: Peter Altenberg, Theodor Herzl, Alfred Adler,[2] Egon Friedell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anton Kuh, Adolf Loos, Leo Perutz, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Alfred Polgar, Adolf Hitler, and Leon Trotsky. In January 1913 alone, Josip Broz Tito, Sigmund Freud, and Trotsky (the latter being regular) were patrons of the establishment.
Names change all the time. Leader / follower and primary / secondary are better for a lot of things, anyway. Even ignoring the social issue, master and slave are not great terms for how they are used. Frankly, I find it disturbing that so many developers are so attached to the master and slave terminology. It’s like the tech industry’s version of the confederate flag.
It is not an attachment to the words themselves it is a reaction to the idea that words have some kind of implied sinister meaning outside of the context in which they are used.
And yes, I use the word "sinister" deliberately - why aren't we banning the use of this word on behalf of left-handed people?
Words get their meaning from common understanding, common usage and most importantly context.
Agreed. Further, in most instances master/slave terminology is quite misleading with the master and slave doing similar work and commonly the master doing even more work. Leader/follower and primary/replica are much better terminology from a purely technical perspective. Its a plus that we also get to remove these two awful words.
> Frankly, I find it disturbing how attached so many developers are so attached to the master and slave terminology.
I was about to write that too. I'm not quite sure if I find the change necessary - but who am I to raise my word against it. I'm a white guy, it is obvious why master/slave has negative connotations and that's enough for me to let them decide.
I just listened to a podcast about "whiteness studies" maybe that enforced my opinion on this - but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion. Be open, be welcome, accept diversity is a main rule in many projects. Why would I not want to change something that others consider harmful(especially something as simple as wording)
So you're not entitled to an opinion? That's the sort of self-deprecation that the far left wants you to have, and I say this as a non-White myself.
Read up on world history, not just American history, and you'll see that slavery spanned not just Blacks, but all sorts of races, including whites.
> but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion
Because it's past the point where it became absurd, nothing to do with you being white or otherwise. I'm all for treating people properly and with respect and dignity, but at the same time lets not lose our minds here.
> it is obvious why master/slave has negative connotations
how? it only represents a kind of relationship (a terrible one, yes) between people. But it's only a historic terminology.
Killer is a word that, following that logic, has negative connotations and it is used when people say "that's a killer feature". Stopping using those terms won't make past events to disappear. At worst, they'll be forgotten, making it possible for history to repeat itself.
Killer and master/slave are very different. "Killing" has rarely singled out one specific ground of people and subjugated them for centuries. In cases where it has, you don't use the word. Imagine naming a program that kills a bunch of processes on a box “holocaust”.
But let's run with "killing" for a bit. If, hypothetically, you had a coworker whose family was murdered by a serial killer, wouldn't you be careful about using “He killed it out there” and similar terms around them? Or do you sit around logically proving why the context is different?
Those are fair points but I still don't think we are helping anyone with this over-protection. Would you hesitate to say that expression without knowing that coworker's background? Should he/she be offended when there isn't malicious intent behind those words? It looks to me more sensible and a better long term solution to help this person to deal with his/her emotions instead of trying to change everybody around them.
> Would you hesitate to say that expression without knowing that coworker's background?
Ok. But. The discussion is about specific expressions almost everybody knows, not just random words. One of those words is `slave`.
> It looks to me more sensible and a better long term solution to help this person to deal with his/her emotions instead of trying to change everybody around them.
I think this only applies to situations in which one specific person has specific triggers who are e.g. tight to an psychological trauma...
> "Killing" has rarely singled out one specific ground of people and subjugated them for centuries
While the term holocaust mainly refers to what the Jews went through during WWII, slavery encompassed not just blacks, but many other races including whites. The problem here is that the "discussion" happening is extremely US centric, that non-Americans are either looking at it as absurd, or they've become so Americanized that they think it's correct, meaning they also have no proper critical thinking skills and are easily swayed.
I find your deeply uncharitable assumption of why people use and prefer to use certain words unnecessarily hostile, and worth fighting. You want to only look at the context for people who oppose these words, and not at all for the people who want to keep them or their utility. I repudiate your goals, whatever euphemism you try to couch it in, e.g. "disturbed".
3000-2500 BCE is such an interesting time period. Civilization and technology somewhat inexplicably pick up throughout the world within just a few centuries. For example, coinciding with the Gilgamesh time period (around 2800 BCE to 2500 BCE) the major pyramids in Egypt pop up, and so do the Caral / Norte Chico pyramids and cities in Peru.
History Channel says the only possible answer is aliens.
Or maybe it’s an adjacent possible thing and the ancient world was far more connected by trade than we often think. It’s easy to forget that these were “just” neighboring countries/kingdoms back then. A lot like today.
The illusion of linear progression we get from history class is largely an effect of “You can’t learn everything at once”
> Or maybe it’s an adjacent possible thing and the ancient world was far more connected by trade than we often think.
Custard Apples, which are native to Central America, were thought to have been introduced to India in the 1500's through Portuguese contact. A few years ago, they found a custard apple seed carbon dated to 1800 BC at an archaeological site in Northern India [1]. Researchers still have no idea how it got there.
> A few years ago, they found a custard apple seed carbon dated to 1800 BC at an archaeological site in Northern India [1]. Researchers still have no idea how it got there.
Seed dispersal has been extensively studied, so I’m confused by this paper. I took a glance at it and noticed it said nothing about birds or water. In the case of Hawaii, one of the most isolated archipelagos in the world, many plants arrived by water and birds. Wild strawberries in Hawaii, for example, have been traced to the Pacific Northwest, and are assumed to have started from the passing digestive tract of birds flying over the volcanoes from that direction. More recent research has given rise to a new theory of seed dispersal mutualism between plants and animals, since seeds passing though bird guts have an almost 400% increase in survival, due to various survival benefits arising from their storage in the digestive tract.
Agreed; I don't think that constitutes a highly significant discovery about the history of trade unless you found what is a hand- or pouchful of seeds together.
> were thought to have been introduced to India in the 1500's through Portuguese contact
Funny how everything was introduced by us white european folk to the rest of the world. I wonder who wrote that version of history.
How much stuff do you think happened before we got there to see it happening and write about it for our branch of global science? We know for example that China had massive 14 mast ships and global-ish trade back when Europe was barely doing 3 masts as state of the art. And we know that Ancient Egypt traded as far as India
We also know that China considered itself "All under Heaven" and that in Ancient Egypt Pharaohs were thought to maintain the cosmic order.
I understand that hating themselves is a favorite pastime of upper-middle class white Americans, but there is no reason to denigrate all white people for what was a very common attitude among all cultures.
Oh I know everyone does it. I’m just pointing out the silliness of being surprised when it turns out history didn’t start with us. No denigration intended
Haha yeah, totally. Modern Western culture as we know it is only about 500 years old, though it arguably takes influences from the Greeks and Romans back another 2500 years. Even 500 BC though isn't that old in the grand scale of things. It's interesting how we refer to everything before ~500 AD as "ancient" when civilization really began around 3000 BC—that is to say, the "ancient" period is more than double the length of the post-ancient. It's mindblowing to think what could've happened in those entire centuries during which we just don't have records of certain areas. Partly the reason why I'm super interested in archaeogenetics, revealing the tremendous amount of history locked away in our very own DNA.
> Modern Western culture as we know it is only about 500 years old, though it arguably takes influences from the Greeks and Romans back another 2500 years.
That would be a difficult argument to make; classical Greece only goes back to about the eighth century BC. Mycenaean Greece goes much further back, but we can't observe most of the cultural continuity (though obviously there was a decent amount of it), because between Mycenaean Greece and classical Greece there was the Greek Dark Age of about 400 years when they forgot how to read and write. A cultural legacy of 2500 years total is a much fairer estimate than one of 3000 years.
As you note, though, the legacy of the classical world was itself interrupted and then purposefully reimported into Renaissance Europe. This is rather different from how, in the 4th century AD, there were still priests of the old religion in Babylon, reading tablets written thousands of years before them thanks to a historical tradition that had, at that point, never been interrupted.
Something I found charming from the wikipedia article on Sargon the Great is that the Babylonian king Nabonidus (6th century BC, "ancient" by any modern standard) sponsored archaeological research into his life. And well he might, since Sargon preceded Nabonidus by about 1800 years. But you just don't think about one ancient king supporting archaeology concerning another ancient king. Ancient is ancient, right?
Hm, I think we have to be a bit careful about the legacy of the classical world being "interrupted". This may be true in part (wasn't it that central heating was lost to Britain even though it had been known in Roman times?), but contrary to popular belief, the middle ages were in many respects also a continuation of the classical world.
For one thing, the Eastern Roman empire continued to exist until the 15th century and it is there that e.g. the Justinian code of law was devised, which, as far as I know, is still the basis of many modern legal systems, while itself being built upon ancient Roman law.
But even in Western Europe, Christianity can be seen as a continuation of the Roman Empire: It's not as if the religion hadn't been substantially changed and "romanised" after Constantine made it state religion. Also, in terms of scholarship, many key classical philosophers / scientists were never forgotten; Aristotle in particular remained a key influence. And, contrary to popular belief, middle ages scholars knew perfectly well that the earth was round, as had been shown by Ptolemy and others before him (they thought it was at the center of the universe, but as far as I know, nobody had successfully proven otherwise in antiquity either).
> Hm, I think we have to be a bit careful about the legacy of the classical world being "interrupted". This may be true in part (wasn't it that central heating was lost to Britain even though it had been known in Roman times?), but contrary to popular belief, the middle ages were in many respects also a continuation of the classical world.
I agree with you. We have to be careful, and the middle ages were in many respects a natural development out of the classical world.
But they were a natural development that saw a radical upheaval in the culture. The organization that the Romans put in place largely fell apart, forgotten. Industrial production crashed. There was not a continuous transmission of tradition -- a large part of the Renaissance really was reading ancient texts to discover what they said. They had vanished from the living tradition.
> (they thought it was at the center of the universe, but as far as I know, nobody had successfully proven otherwise in antiquity either)
That's not something that -- to the best of our knowledge today -- it's possible to prove or disprove. (Similarly, if you conceive of "the earth" as the spherical surface rather than the solid ball, you'll be perfectly correct if you say that Rome is at the center. You'll also be correct if you say any other point is the center.)
What evidence we do have, interestingly enough, points towards the earth really being at the center of the universe. Redshift in every direction! We reject that conclusion for philosophical reasons, not because it's been disproved.
Yup, you're totally right, I misspoke—I meant to say that the furthest you can trace back Western history is 2500 years [total] back to the Greek "golden age" ~500BC.
> Something I found charming from the wikipedia article on Sargon the Great is that the Babylonian king Nabonidus (6th century BC, "ancient" by any modern standard) sponsored archaeological research into his life.
Wow, never knew about this. I really want a term to come into the vernacular to describe history before ~800BC, because things really were completely different across Eurasia. In the Mediterranean and Middle East it was the revival of civilization after the Bronze Age collapse, in India it was the beginning of the Upanishadic era, and in China it was the beginning of the Spring and Autumn period. This [1] is sort of relevant.
One of the things I find really interesting about Chinese history is that Sima Qian, writing in the second and early first century BC, recorded a number of Shang kings reigning almost a thousand years before his time. For quite a while they were considered legendary, lacking any other corroborating sources -- but the Shang oracle bones eventually confirmed that kings matching the names Sima Qian gave reigned in the order in which he listed them.
(The Shang kings' names are actually ordinal markers -- something like Shang Fifth, Shang Second, etc -- but they did not reign in the order suggested by their names.)
Sima Qian, like Herodotus, receives a lot of credit for establishing history as a thing people kept track of. But he must have been working from some now-totally-lost fairly faithful sources.
And speaking of the coincidence between the recovery from the Bronze Age collapse and the Spring and Autumn period, I'm intrigued by the rough coincidence between the beginning of the Bronze Age collapse and the fall of the Shang dynasty. In that case, the coincidence is much rougher, though -- the Shang dynasty appears to fall about 100 years after the collapse.
>ancient," from Vulgar Latin *anteanus, literally "from before," [1]
I guess ancient is used to mean before 500BC because it has always meant that. It's a Roman word used by them to reference the time before them. As long as we use that word we already accept their point of view.
Ancient usually refers to the period before 500 AD (not BC) as indicated in my original comment. 500 AD is roughly the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, but definitely not the marker for before the Romans. It'd be nice if that explained it though.
It's demonstrably true that there was a significant period of introduction of new foodstuffs from the Americas into Eurasia in the wake of Columbus, in a phenomenon known as the Columbian Exchange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange. Since custard apples are native to Central America, it's the natural hypothesis.
Well we also state that the indigenous populations introduced, say, potatoes to Europe. No need to push an innocuous observation onto a racial framework.
I always assumed the aliens hypothesis was halfway racist as in "how could a non-white culture build things we don't know how to do, ah yes it must be otherworldly".
The remnants of early European propaganda that justified a lot of their conquest is still strong today, we just forget it's origins.
I find it quite disturbing now that everything seems to be racist and this needs to be brought up as a cause of any issue. As a European, I always thought and always had the general impression as we are fully aware of the ups and downs and what a shithole the geographic location of current Europe was for a long time, while other places of the world thrived or had quite advanced civilisations. Things like "aliens" building the pyramids or other structures in South America are just extreme topics you used to find in weird magazines or entertainment shows on TV.
The problem is that people don’t consider Stonehenge to be part of Western civilization. The latter is usually traced back to the beginning of Mycenaean Greek civilization
> The problem is that people don’t consider Stonehenge to be part of Western civilization
I’m not sure I agree with this. As someone living in Britain, I can attest to the fact that the people living on this island definitely consider it an integral part of their own cultural heritage.
This can be interpreted as racist, as you do, but it can also be interpreted as religious proselytism pushing 'intelligent design' against the idea of random and continuous human improvement.
My example here is 2001: A Space Odyssey. It all happens because of the monolith. Without it, we would surely still be monkeys killing each other with bones and stones. It's easy to see the monolith as symbolism for one or other religion.
And I hate that this is repeated through many other science fiction works.
>History Channel says the only possible answer is aliens.
One part of me always enjoyed those theories for the science fiction-ness of it. Some writeups i've seen about it read better than some science fiction books i've read.
The other part of me dislikes them though because it discounts the sheer human ingenuity, craftsmanship and skill that went into these things. It discounts the amazing things people are capable of and discredits our ancestors. I feel kind of the same way about the Roswell ufo tech leading to modern computers theories. They make light of the work of so many people and wave it off as being impossible without aliens.
> What would be the other plausible explanation though?
Other plausible? However "Aliens" isn't the plausible explanation at all. The series' producer has a very specific agenda: to train the viewers to not believe the science (1) in his own words:
"It’s really a show about looking for God. Science would have you believe we are the result of nothing more than a chance assemblage of matter. The real truth is we don’t know."
Whereas in fact, science is also very much about knowing exactly what we don't know and where the limits of our knowledge are. Some people find that unsatisfying, compared to the wrong answers but giving assuring "certainty."
It particularly catches the people who won't attempt to analyze what is actually claimed there. 082349872349872 here (2) comments about how the claims in the series are constructed. I'd say "required reading" only to study how the underlying untrue "message" is packed in the series of non-sequitur claims, effectively navigating in the direction opposite of logic.
Anti-gradualist explanation of history is an alternative and more likely explanation.
Gradualism means a version of history in which civilisation progresses gradually from less to more civilised over time. The opposite is a history in which there could have been moments when human civilization was more advanced way before our notion of recorded history, but suffered a massive hit to its existence. Then the civilisation after got rebuilt but with the previous culture and technological knowledge forgotten.
One such theory is by Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson [1]. They present an explanation of history in which there could have been a more technologically advanced human culture even during ice age which got wiped out when ice age ended.
The end of ice age was completely sudden, which they explain by a meteor crash into the huge ice sheets causing large tsunamis and sudden ocean level increase which wiped out majority of advanced population living in cities right by the sea - same as today. Causing the advanced culture and its knowledge to cease to exist with remains being picked up or reused by more primitive people living in mainlands and forming cultures which are now basis of our civilisation.
Their version explains currently unexplained phenomena such as
1. sudden extinction of ice age animal species. Hordes of mammoths found dead with broken femur bones (killed by massive tsunami vs killed by mammoth hunters as explained by current dogma)
2. Big Flood myths found consistently across many independent cultures around the world
3. Technological regress in Egyptian culture - pyramids and pottery way more advanced in older periods than in later periods (forgotten technology)
4. Way more advanced technology of construction in older structures in Latin America (Cusco, Machu Picchu, Sacsayhuamán, Pumapunku) with advanced construction techniques unexplained still until today
5. Geological evidence of massive tsunamis such as large travelling stones (sliding on melting ice sheets) deep into mainland North America or massive water erosion corridors also possibly explained by large tsunamis
Some of his claims are quite far-fetched and esoteric. However, even Michael Shermer, head of Skeptic magazine, recently admitted (https://twitter.com/michaelshermer/status/123755946996742144...) that there is some plausibility for the younger dryas impact hypothesis, which is currently an important part of Hancock's lost civilization claims. Such a major catastrophe would of course have a reset effect on any existing advanced civilization. This alone is not proof that there was one, of course.
Dismissing a hypothesis just on the basis of sticking to the baseline works in 99% cases. Then there are the 1% Galileos and Keplers which get dismissed too because their argument is not heard out.
And yes in such limiting circumstances you need to develop a fringe fan base or let your findings die out.
As John Anthony West puts it
"... it was Victor Hugo who wrote the famous line there's one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come. You know that line was that the second strongest thing in the world is an idea whose time has not yet gone ..." [1].
If you listen carefully, History Channel doesn't actually say that. (implied heavily, and maybe it was different in earlier seasons, but I think "Ancient Aliens" ought to be required viewing for anglophone school children[1], because each episode starts from presenting factual information and slowly works its way towards very carefully hedged wild "conclusions"[2]. as with the sorites paradox the question to keep in mind while viewing is: when does the shark jump occur?)
Global trade was a thing back then. It collapsed around 1200 BC, but before it did, there was a lot of knowledge (and probably cultural phenomena) spreading around amongst much of humanity.
No, that's likely to end up in the half we'll never be able to figure out. Unless the aliens are good at record-keeping and decide to tell us one day. :D
Assume the OP's point is that American civilisations developed without being plugged into a Eurasian 'global' trade system, starting in Peru. The Norte Chico system is generally believed to have developed cities and monumental architecture over a broadly similar time period as the Middle Eastern civilisations without any contact with them at all. They even built superficially similar step pyramids.
For what it's worth, I have to reactions to that, both positive:
1) I came from an SVN background and only switched to Git because I started working at companies that used it. I still prefer SVN's aesthetics (and I wish I had more opportunities to use Mercurial), so I would much rather have 'main' or 'trunk' than 'master'.
2) At my company, my team uses the forking workflow (i.e. we do all our work in our own forks and then submit PRs to merge into the repo on the central server). Whenever I clone and fork a repo, I always nuke the 'origin' remote and create two new ones: my own fork, which I name after my AD username at my company, and the repo on the central server, which I name 'upstream'. That way, whenever I pull or push, I don't have to worry about mindlessly pushing or pulling 'origin' and accidentally touching the wrong repo: if I accidentally do so, I'll just get an error. So I am very, very much used to pulling from 'upstream'.
It's not broken. It just works under assumptions applicable to the most common use cases. I know that a software engineer will sneer about dependencies of this kind, but such assumptions really simplify reality/software/whatever.
And yes, they are a pain in the ass when it comes to changes and that's why one should be careful with unnecessary changes.
It's not. This is more like a swear word. No one would expect that calling it the "fuck" branch would be OK. Just because more people are OK with "master" doesn't change the fact that it bothers other people who are just trying to code. This isn't hard to understand.
How do you account for all of the respected academic institutions that grant masters degrees in fields of study like African American Studies or Social Justice?
1. https://poppler.freedesktop.org/releases.html
2. https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/pdftotext
3. https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/poppler