Ancient wisdom often sounds like common sense now that it is commomly taught. What is some ancient wisdom that we no longer teach because it was wrong?
Medicine and not taking anything as the will of god you should just accept, this and perception of death. That direct war, colonies are necessary - because now soft power, investments, influence, proxies are seen as more effective and better for business. That raw physical fitness means an easy superiority - and not a gun. Slavery and serfdom took other forms, so are associated stereotypes. Talking while seemingly alone is, arguably, not a solid sign of a mental illness now. First paleness became no longer a wanted trait, then we learnt that sun tan can be bad too. Putting fire to a field or a property isn’t a good idea like it was before. Natural resources are free, limitless and harvested with no consequencies. Finding a stash of gold isn’t that tempting too. Mass production, services kind off changed the amount of skills one needs in an average household and added complexity to it. Knowledge of how to get a clean water noticeably changed our ways. And perception of sex and family in different cultures drastically changed over time due to religion, law and science.
I don’t know how common it is but my grandmas always said that you shouldn’t eat pork after being released from the hospital or while sick. Then I finally remembered to ask a doctor about it and he said there’s no such thing.
I understand that the notion behind it is to eat easy to digest foods, instead of red meat, in order not to burden your body trying to metabolise them while it is also fighting a disease.
I can sort of get behind this, but I also say you still need your protein. Over here a chicken stew is quite commonly given to sick people, maybe for this reasoning.
We don’t digest cellulose, our intestines and appendix are not long enough. Compare our body plan to a horse or rat (giant appendix) or cow or sheep (multiple stomachs, filled with bacteria that break down cellulose). Cellulose goes right through. But that’s the fiber that is always so highly praised and not actually a bad thing.
Could have been because of the prevalence of trichinosis in pork until relatively recently (i.e. in your grandmother’s lifetime). If your immune system is in good shape, it’s not terribly risky, but if you just came out of the hospital you probably aren’t in peak form. So avoid pork for a while until your body can properly fight off parasites again.
Proper food safety and livestock handling has dramatically reduced the risk of parasite infections from pork in most of the developed world.
I mean… the wisdom not really incorrect - the oil would soak into the ground. In this era people just piled up garbage in their back yard and burned it. Obviously this isn’t an appropriate way to dispose of things in 2024.
The wisdom is incorrect though, in the sense that you aren’t ‘disposing’ of the oil using this method. You are simply hiding it while simultaneously toxifying your immediate environment.
An advertisement from the official government thing over here. It’s the governments own official website.
Stop freaking out over some dude online you’ll never meet irl.
Collect yourself and go offline for the day, maybe try to relax for a bit and breathe some outdoor air. Have a conversation with a neighbour or local shopkeep.
I’m not sure why anyone would trust an ad; at best it’ll be one-sided and at the worst it’ll be a downright lie. That wasn’t the point of my comment though.
I just thought it was funny that a person getting their info from Instagram ads was telling someone else to go touch grass like they had any high ground at all.
It’s illegal to wash on the driveway or street over here. Well, technically not, it’s just illegal to wash it in a way without proper waste water disposal, which means that you could put up a water barrier (think kiddie pool) to collect everything and then dispose of it properly.
Rain water drains usually don’t go to waste water treatment, shit might get in there from ordinary use but there’s no need to put all kinds of random detergents and polishing agents and whatnot on top of that. Also at least on the Autobahn they have separate waste water cycles to catch all the tyre microplastics etc. And if you can afford a car that’s worth washing you can afford going to a DIY washing place stop whining.
Soap is not a grave concern for pollution. What got it banned - at least where I live - was the occupation of public space and consequent danger for circulation of other cars and pedestrians.
Lewis Carol noted that a clock that doesn’t work at all is right twice a day whereas a clock that loses a minute a day is right every 1.97 years, and by this calculation the broken clock is the better value.
But of course, if we know the clock loses a minute a day, you could derive the current time based on how long ago the clock was set to the correct time, or you could just throw it forward one minute at the end of every day and reset it that way with no reference. The broken clock is just completely useless as a timepiece, though. I think lewis carol was wrong.
I’m pretty sure Carol was being facetious. There’s more value obviously in a mechanical thing that works — even if not well — then one that doesn’t. The joke is in the notion that we judge clocks based on how well they tell time, which is not a good metric once they deviate significantly from that standard.
Read the theories of René Descartes (17th century) about the nature of air and the atmosphere. Try to get his original texts (translation if needed), not any secondary works.
It is some seriously sick stuff, from today’s point of view :-)
Check out the history of bird migration science. There was everything from birds going to the moon for winter, swallows burrowing in the mud, transmorphing to different species, up to the 19th century
Sounds stupid, but not worse than tiny animals in your blood making you sick (germ theory), or basically anything from cosmology from the Big Bang to dark energy
For anyone curious the history really is interesting, when reading previously I learned about Pfeilstorch, storks throughout the years that had flown to Germany with African arrows stuck in them. First seen at a time when people didn’t understand bird migration, it helped to explain where all the birds would go.
Lightning never strikes the same place twice. In fact it favors repeated strikes at the same arcing point.
In the middle ages churches would ring the steeple bells during a thunderstorm in an effort to soothe God. (it was assumed the Christian God was directly responsible for lightning.) This resulted in such an epidemic of lightning deaths among parish priests that ringing church bells in thunderstorms remains a criminal act in some regions of Europe.
Modern cathedrals and statues are fitted with replaceable lightning rods, in an admission God is content to let the mechanics of static electricity guide His thunderbolts.
I always suspected that the “no mixing wool and linen” verses in the Bible were due to miniature lightning striking (heh) the fear of God into the ancients.
Apply math and the object flies in a parabolic arc (not accounting for air friction and wind)
Launch it high enough and the arc start looking elliptical. Gravitational force looks less like a constant rather is tempered by distance². If the acceleration closes the ellipse without hitting the (circular at this scale) ground, your object is now a satellite in orbit.
Keep accelerating and eventually (a whole lot of acceleration) and special relativity factors affect the trajectory…and mass…and time dilates between the object and observers.
Drill a hole in your head as a cureall for any mental behaviour abnormalities. Still practised as an emergency surgery, only to release life-threatening blood and pressure buildup inside the cranial cavity.
Interestingly, we’ve kind of looped all the way around. We describe the particles of the universe with omnipresent fields, which isn’t really the same idea as aether but has some neat similarities.
Fun fact: This is also how Ethernet (wired network connection) got its name. Ether was already dismissed as a theory, but “omnipresent, completely-passive medium for the propagation of electromagnetic waves” was a good description of hardware layer that can transfer data in a way that’s abstracting all the signal handling complexity for higher layers.
So in a way I’m actually sending this comment via Ethernet.
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