Entries Tagged 'the past' ↓

Sorry everybody if I have something to do with this:

I have had a really lucky, great year – I have to keep reminding myself this as the rest of the world seems bent on spiraling itself into some kind of panicky little hole.

I’ve moved into a new house (with a wormhole in the center of the livingroom floor!), Couch is being published, Walker Tracker is going great, my kids are healthy and I’m happily married.

I hope you’re well and that you’re busy depression-proofing yourself too.

If not? Buy a bottle of red wine,  turn on the music loud and cook the New Brunswick Stew from this book.

Make sure to drink at least 5/8th of the bottle of wine while cooking.

That’s the best cure for the blues I know.

I mean depression-proofing in the emotional sense – but we do a lot of wealth building/depression-proofing here in the financial sense by making massive batches of soups and freezing them. Having stores of your own canned goods and frozen soups is one of the wealthiest feelings I think you can have. All that nourishment is stored away at your own home – not subject to bank runs or abstract financial instruments. It’s harvest time! Put away some of that summer for deep in the winter.

Fantastic page of lost cities with photos

The stonework is from the Teotihuacans. Just incredible stuff. I impatiently await the invention of time machine tourism!

“Teotihuacan’s control of the obsidian mines at Otumba and Pachuca allowed it to centralize the production of obsidian goods, some for domestic sale, the rest for export. With this, and its monopoly on the distribution of Thin Orange pottery, Teotihuacan developed a trading system that embraced almost every region of Mesoamerica, including places as far away as the Maya area, the modern state of Guerrero, and the area around the Gulf of Mexico.

Teotihuacan’s metropolitan feel, its trading system, and the religious prestige it accrued from its giant pyramids and related ceremonies, attracted a floating population that enriched the quality of life in the great city. At its peak between 150—450 CE, it stretched over 30 square km and had a population of between 150,000 and 250,000.

After flourishing for centuries, Teotihuacan collapsed c. 750 CE, partly due to adverse pressures from the new population centers that sprang up on the Mexican plateau. However, evidence of fire, and the systematic, devastating ways in which the buildings lining the Avenue of the Dead were destroyed point to the main cause of its collapse being internal rebellions.”

 

The editing of Couch is going well – thanks. Doing a little research on lost cultures and lost knowledge, I came across the term ‘Language isolate’ – (Thanks, Wikipedia).

A language isolate is a language that does not have a genetic or genealogical relationship with any other living language. The Basque language is the most common example of these, I believe.

The impossibility of linking Basque with its Indo-European neighbors in Europe made many scholars search for its possible relatives elsewhere. Besides many pseudoscientific comparisons, the appearance of long-range linguistics gave rise to several attempts at connecting Basque with geographically very distant language families.

Many hypotheses on the origin of Basque are considered controversial, and the suggested evidence is not generally accepted by most linguists.

Cool, I love this kind of stuff. And then I saw the enormous number of languages that are considered to be language isolates. Here’s a picture of what I could fit in my screenshot window of language isolates in S. America. Click for a full view.

The proposed column is for what language they might be related to.

Did this many peoples really forge their own languages out of nothing? Have we really lost this much knowledge over the course of our history?

The black hole of our past is awesome and huge.