tin_the_fatty weblog

In Jared Diamond’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, on the subject of human drug abuse,

However, archaeologists were long puzzled by slender tubes of unknown purpose that they kept finding in Mayan excavations.

The tubes’ function finally became clear with the discovery of painted vases showing scenes of the tubes’ use: to administer intoxicating [...]

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In a history project I am helping out with, there is a need to convert a bunch of dates from Chinese calendar to Gregorian dates. I googled for solutions, found the Perl library “DateTime::Calendar::Chinese”, and wrote a small script on my FreeBSD machine to show that it works.
It would be good to make a long-term [...]

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