Onesimus was an African man who was instrumental in the mitigation of smallpox in Boston by teaching the variolation method of inoculation, which prevented smallpox and laid the foundation for the development of vaccines.

After a smallpox outbreak began in Boston in 1721, Mather proliferated Onesimus's knowledge to advocate for inoculation in the population. This practice eventually spread to other colonies.

Historian Ted Widmer of CUNY's Macaulay Honors College noted that "Onesimus reversed many of [the colonists'] traditional racial assumptions... [h]e had a lot more knowledge medically than most of the Europeans in Boston at that time."

More broadly, I was taught in Murder Machines (schools) that Edward Jenner developed vaccines, but I'm recently learning that it was common knowledge in the Ottoman Empire and Africa before Jenner.

Variolation was also practiced throughout the latter half of the 17th century by physicians in Turkey, Persia, and Africa. In 1714 and 1716, two reports of the Ottoman Empire Turkish method of inoculation were made to the Royal Society in England, by Emmanuel Timoni, a doctor affiliated with the British Embassy in Constantinople, and Giacomo Pylarini. Source material tells us on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; "When Lady Mary was in the Ottoman Empire, she discovered the local practice of inoculation against smallpox called variolation."

I'm a country boy all my life. I can't cycle or take the metro anywhere. Walkable cities are great but they're a hundred miles away.

Everyone goes on about how they hate cars, but what else are you supposed to do?

https://electrek.co/2023/12/04/livaq-equad-unveiled-as-most-capable-electric-atv-ever/ – this article talks about something with a 108km/h and a range of 273 km. It's mad expensive unfortunately, but that is normally to do with adoption rates and scale.

(It says "claims a range of 170 miles (273 km) from its 15.4 kWh battery pack", which implies consumption of about 55 watt-hours per km travelled, though that'd be variable depending on speed and conditions)

If I had one of these, I could get to town, get to a train station, without a car. I could carry one child, which is worse than a car, but the energy consumption is a 3-4× lower than a car. If train stations had swappable batteries, that would be ideal, but I don't see that coming any time soon.

The invidious link bot was great and well-received.

Google are blocking invidious pretty effectively now, but they can't block ghostarchive because it's not on their server

The most steel-intensive power source – by far – is the modern wind turbine. The steel intensity of a wind turbine depends on its size. A single, large wind turbine requires significantly more steel per megawatt of installed power than two smaller wind turbines.

The link is from the-most-solarpunk-website and is mostly about steel in general, but I wanted to pull out that one fact.

Wind and solar energy are not "good for the environment"; they pollute; it's just that we hope they pollute less than the alternative. One major reason they pollute is because they require a lot of steel to build. But the household-scale or village-scale ones use less

de Decker is citing: Topham, Eva, et al. “Recycling offshore wind farms at decommissioning stage.” Energy policy 129 (2019): 698-709.

Let's pick out a line from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16643/16643-h/16643-h.htm to see what he has to say:

"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."

That's a pretty typical line. Let's set aside for now the debate on whether nonconformity is good or bad: look at the tone of the writing. It is a moral lecture. It is saying: "This is how you should think, what you should believe, how you should be." The reading allows only one interpretation. It's just beating you about the head with serious truth-claims. Another line:

"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is Christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that is given, something is taken."

Each sentence is a bland assertion. Commanding the reader what to think. I am reading a list of opinions. That is all it is: a list of opinions. This is considered peak Usan culture. It is considered to be literature or philosophy. Another line –

"He is a good man, who can receive a gift well. We are either glad or sorry at a gift, and both emotions are unbecoming."

This is not literature. This is a self-help book. It is downright bad, adolescent writing. It's relentlessly po-faced, and there isn't a whiff of creativity from the prose. I grew up on Irish writers. Irish writers say things like –

"Choosing his boot, the buttoned class, as a convenient example of inanation, he lifted it in the air"

Irish writers say things like –

"She opened the fridge for the ham, the butter, the can of Smithwick's. Happy as a duck she was"

These are just the first two lines before my eyes when I picked up the first two books by my elbow. Do you see the difference? Literature should have warmth, humanity, creativity. Writers should have the craic with language. The words should be buttered with character. Ralph Waldo Emerson's output has all the banality of ChatGPT's. Imagine living with this guy. Imagine trying to flirt with him and he just starts lecturing you like a charmless Anglican.

Edgar Allen Poe's pretty good though I'll give the yanks that.

They include:

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms

• Water Margin

• Journey to the West

• The Plum in the Golden Vase (of the Ming dynasty)

• Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone)

• The Scholars (of the Qing dynasty).

The Chinese historian and literary theorist C. T. Hsia wrote that these six "remain the most beloved novels among the Chinese."[2]

The Guardian and other liars are reporting Fmovies is "shut down"

• https://fmovie-s.to/

• https://www.fmovies.hn/

• https://fmovies.ps/

• https://fmoviesto.cc/

• many more

verified up and working today

The Guardian and other liars are reporting Fmovies is "shut down"

• https://fmovie-s.to/

• https://www.fmovies.hn/

• https://fmoviesto.cc/

• https://fmovies.ps/

• many more

verified up and working today

Really really good, best film I've seen in years.

Won the 2023 Palme D'Or.

It's a French courtroom drama I suppose you could call it, though it doesn't follow some genre formula.

The brilliance of it is that the questions aren't answered, the core of the plot is a mystery rather than a stated fact. My main gripe about American culture is there is only one interpretation of the text.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUXawkH-ONM

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_a_Fall

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17009710/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19382242

https://steamdb.info/charts/?sort=peak