(Part 2) Best products from r/MapPorn

Not quite. Clove cigarettes are still mostly tobacco, just with a bit of clove in them, kind of like menthols with mint. The ones I'm talking about I had order on Amazon, but they are like $3/pack and have no tobacco whatsoever. The ones I have now are American Billy Green Tea Cigarettes. They do a good job of emulating look and feel of tobacco cigarettes (same white paper, filter, cardboard pack, etc), but of course the hit is a bit different. People describe it as an off-brand Marlboro Red, which I definitely get. They get mixed reviews, which I understand. They definitely don't appeal to everyone, not even every smoker

While there's still some tar and monoxide, there's 0mg of nicotine and no added arsenic or whatever else. American Billy makes black tea cigarettes, as well as menthol ones, but I have yet to try either of those. The only other ones I have tried are Nirdosh Herbal Cigarettes from India, which are a blend of, like, basil, cloves, tea, etc. They are alright but the feel is all off. They don't look or feel like regular cigarettes, nor come in a regular container so part of the ritual is killed for me if that makes sense.

That's my little expose on them. I recommend trying them out if you think it might help, or if you're a social smoker not trying to become PMI's cash cow for the next 40 years.

It's interesting, because these things came along a while before e-cigarettes and were the OG "smoking alternative". Some old articles from 2005 or 2006 mention them in conjunction with vaping. Who would've thought vapid would take off like it did.

I have a lot of admiration/respect for Qaboos. I've been to Oman many times and while I really enjoy Muscat, I'm planning on making my next trip there out to Musandam. I developed a greater appreciation for Oman after reading Monsoon by Robert D. Kaplan. One of the most eye-opening books I've ever read on foreign policy and an excellent primer for anyone interested in the history/geopolitics of S.W. Asia. He spends a lot of time discussing in depth Oman's rich history and it's strategic position within the region in the coming decades. He also paints a very intimate profile of Qaboos - one that I don't think most people would expect:

>"Qaboos is one of a kind in the Arab world. He is unmarried, lives alone, plays the organ and lute, and composes music. A graduate of Britain's Sandhurst military academy, he may arguably be the most worldly and best-informed leader in the Arab world, who understands in depth both the Israeli and Palestinian points of view even as he balances Americans off against Iranians and provides U.S. forces with access agreements. Infrastructure projects, women's rights, and the environment are mainstays of his rule, and he has avoided creating the sort of personality cult that plagues the region. His shyness on the world stage is in line with the minimalist manner of Scandinavian prime ministers and in contrast with bombastic bullies like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chávez. One Western expert calls Qaboos the only head of state in the Arab world you can call a "Renaissance man." In 1979 Oman was the only Arab state to recognize Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's peace agreement with Israel."

Also since he is 72 years old, has no children and has not formally announced an heir, the succession of power could amount to one of the biggest political shakeups in the Gulf in years and perhaps the adoption of democratic form of government.

Not exactly

The German scientists who were working on the Nazi nuclear program were taken prisoner by the British and kept incarcerated in Britain. Their rooms were bugged, and they were secretly recorded discussing in disbelief the news of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. They knew the science and theory, but many of them didn't believe it was possible.

You are correct they didn't have sufficient uranium. Indeed, thanks to the Allied special forces and air-raids, and Norwegian resistance fighters, the only access to heavy water was destroyed and the largest shipment of heavy water itself was sunk (ironically).

I highly recommend Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It won a Pulitzer Prize in its own right. An utterly fascinating book and extremely well written.

This is actually really inaccurate according to all archaeological and historical (ancient or modern) data.

For starters the scale is out of whack. The city should not stretch all the way across the peninsula. Here is a map showing how big the Troad peninsula was, Troy only occupied a small portion of it, not this huge metropolis.

Another example showing the rivers and the famed Plain of Troy.

Here it is on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/39%C2%B057'27.0%22N+26%C2%B014'20.0%22E/@39.9575,26.238889,2792m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d39.9575!4d26.238889?hl=en

There is also zero evidence of that inner harbour/lake at Troy VIIh (the "Homeric Troy") or any of the other levels of Troy. The plain was fed by a pair of rivers that converged very near Troy and flowed into the inner bay. They could use and divert those rivers, but never in such a scale. The harbours used were the natural bay where the rivers debouched and a smaller one facing the Aegean. There were also none of those little artificial lakes around Troy.

The city was also very different. For starters there was no castle with a moat around it, the citadel was a complex of palaces and religious houses that looked the same as the lower city houses only were bigger, richer, and more opulent. This is a close up of what the citadel might have looked like (of which there is a lot of excavated ground): http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/images/MiddleEast/Anatolia/Troy_City_VIh_02_full.jpg

OP is correct in saying that the citadel was once believed to be all, but that recently more has been found. However, it's not as expansive as the illustration suggests. This is the boring archaeological diagram of what has been excavated so far, and you can see the outlines of an outer wall (called the Lower City wall). It's significant, and Troy was likely one of the biggest cities in the ancient Near East (with 5,000 to 10,000 people), and the way the city is set up basically proves that the culture was a lot more Hittite than Mycenean Greek or anything else. So a lot has been learned over the past couple of decades.

This is the best and most faithful representation of what Troy VII might have looked like: http://forum.boinaslava.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=26810&d=1413378933

I love that people can be excited about Troy as the real city that it was, not just the legend, and there's a lot to still discover about it, but I think it's important to be cautious about how it's portrayed. Especially in such a historical period where archaeology is so necessary, it's easy to take a little thing, a tiny piece of evidence, and blow it out of proportion; for example seeing any evidence of using river water for crops and jumping to the conclusion that Trojans were master canal builders - there's no solid evidence of the kind. It's easy to mythologize Bronze Age civilizations, especially Troy, but reality is, unfortunately, less glamorous; however, its complexities can still blow you away if you don't expect too much from a civilization that lived 3,500 years ago.

Source: Historian with extensive research knowledge of the Late Bronze Age Near East, including Troy.

EDIT: Well, since I've been gilded (thanks for that, by the way) I'll go the extra mile and give some book rec's for those who want to know more.

Disclaimer: Most of these are very academic-y, can be quite dense; unfortunately when it comes to this topic this is the norm, but I'll spare you guys the real dull ones. I'll start with one of the most accessible.

The Trojan War: A New History by Barry Strauss.

In Search of the Trojan War Paperback by Michael Wood.

The Trojans & Their Neighbours Paperback by Trevor Bryce.

1177 BC: The Year Civlization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline.

Greece in the Bronze Age Paperback by Emily Townsend Vermeule.

Life and Society in the Hittite World Paperback by Trevor Bryce.

Not agenda, but developmental macroeconomics. Capital flight is the number one reason developmental economies stay poor. It's not political, the UN says so, academics say so, and had increasingly become the accepted theory amongst developmental economists. On a whole, much more money is leaving African than entering it, even with aid programs, dictators and complacent corporations take out a much more massive amount from the continent, which is then redistributed to the developed world through these treasure islands.

Here's a short introduction;

http://www.uneca.org/media-centre/stories/capital-flight-africa#.VKrT2EvF9g0

This problem is currently one of the biggest ones the UN economic commission is trying to tackle. However, it does involve politics in the sense that the laws that many western countries have, either unknowingly or purposefully, keep this system in check. It's politics because American and Swiss voters lawmakers will essentially be choosing between what is fair and better for the world, and what is directly better for their constitutes in the short term. It's politics similarly how global warming is in that regard.

If you want to read a book about it to get you started that isn't too esoteric, I recommend this one;

http://www.amazon.com/Africas-Odious-Debts-Continent-Arguments/dp/1848134592

Ndikumana was the director of economic researcher for the UN commission for Africa for a long time, and currently he's one of the leading economists examining this phenomenon, his book is well written and easy to understand for people who never had any economics education. Boyce is also a very brilliant environmental macroeconomist.

In that case, welcome to the art of cartography! Just a few things:

The text placement is the biggest turn off for me on this map. The seemingly random font sizes and placements of the labels is very distracting.

The color scheme and visual hierarchy is very confusing. The Great Lakes are the first thing I notice when I look at this map, which shouldn't be the case unless the map is about the Great Lakes. Do the colors mean anything? If not, you might get your point across better with much fewer colors.

I would move "California" down to one of the lower corners, which would allow you to scoot the entire country up and get rid of the white space between the title and the country.

If you are planning on making more maps in the future and want to make them visually appealing and easy to understand, I would check out this book.

Good luck on your next map!

I recently picked up Great Maps, and think it's really good introduction to the history and the craft of mapmaking. It has great, large photos of the maps, detail insets, and excellent commentary. Both a great coffee table book and super informative.

Oh word, I was a weird kid too. A fun Saturday for me was to make myself a big-ass bowl of Lucky Charms and read World Book encyclopedias.

Honestly almost 25 years later, not much has changed. Lucky Charms are still my fave, except now I tend to fall down the Wikipedia rabbit hole instead. I do still have this atlas on my shelf though!

I found the passage I was thinking of. It's actually from the book Indians and English by Karen Kupperman. I misremembered slightly: she's not talking strictly about pre-Columbian native societies, but of the changes in eastern North American native societies between the time of Columbus and the arrival of the first European settlements in their territories - a gap of more than a century. So part of what she's talking about is the enormous disruption caused by the waves of disease that passed through natives as a result of contact between the Spanish and Americans thousands of miles away.

But there were also changes not caused by contact, including climate change: the Little Ice Age, which led to shorter growing seasons "and changes in wind and rainfall patterns" which seem to have triggered the worst drought conditions that natives had experienced in something like 800 years. So that's a factor independent of contact that was causing change in native nations, including "competition over the ability to bring rain through supernatural means." It also helps explain why relations with the Roanoke colony went south so quickly: the settlers were demanding food (including seed corn) from people who were experience a drought without precedent for hundreds of years.

Kupperman says that there's evidence that before contact, the village or band had been the main political unit for most coastal Algonquians, and that "tribes" per se may have only arisen as a result of these disruptions and of the European demand for negotiating partners. She says there is considerable evidence that at the time of the first European settlements in North America, native tribes were in the middle of a process of political consolidation, moving into new political groupings dominated by "unprecedentedly powerful chiefs". So one reading of the evidence is that this process was at least partially in response to European-American contact.

But the question is how much of this consolidation really was a result of contact - there's apparently lots of evidence that it was happening independently of European contact:

>The processes of change are seen in the archaeological record before colonization and therefore were an internal development within native culture which may have been intensified by the European presence but were not created by it. The Susquehannocks provide a good example of this process. Archaeological evidence suggests that sometime in the mid-sixteenth century, they moved their location three hundred kilometers down the Susquehanna River closer to the centers of trade, and instead of replicating their scattered villages, they built a single large fortified town at the new site. The trade in native-produced commodities that they controlled began to include European goods as these became available...
>
>Ethnohistorians agree that the strong Powhatan chiefdom at the head of a highly complex socieity began to emerge in the Chesapeake in the sixteenth century well before European influence was felt in a prolonged or systematic way....Helen Rountree argues that the process of consolidation was occurring on differeing scales throughout the mid-Atlantic region...
>
>In New England as well, archaeologists emphasize processes internal to American culture in fostering consolidation of political and economic life. Kathleen Bragdon, drawing on a wide variety of findings, argues that probably from the fifteenth century the introduction of maize agriculture and rising population had combined with a new long-range trade ... to create more heirarichal social structures with increasingly powerful chiefly lineages and more clearly defined specialist roles.

​

Here you go: http://www.amazon.com/The-Island-Center-World-Manhattan/dp/1400078679

It's a fun read, although occasionally a bit too speculative.

Edit: Oh, and Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan is really speculative, but also brilliant and fantastic. One of my favorite books of all time.

The entire public isn't going to be educated. I don't know what makes you think that's happening now, but there are multitude examples of people falling through the cracks either way.

Environmental costs start working when there is a real threat. Is that too late? Maybe. But the public resistance to nuclear power is evidence that there's something to the science of potential environmental costs.

If you're legitimately interested in the topic, here's a good starting point: https://www.amazon.com/Environmental-Economics-Introduction-Barry-Field/dp/007351148X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473177074&sr=1-1. We used it as a textbook in college, and it has its flaws, but it does a good job of summarizing the body of work thus far.

My very small company is sending an employee to training for a skill that was economically beneficial for the company to have in-house. This is not uncommon. I went to private school my entire life, so I don't see how that's an untenable situation anyway. Property taxes reflect the cost of education in any given area anyway, and that in turn is priced in to rent costs. A better educated person is more in demand in the workforce, and a lot of parents are willing and happy to pay for that.

The model works. Do people? That's the real question.

Ok, here's how this breaks down: The new arena is going to be almost fully funded by Olympia entertainment, who will run and operate the arena. BUT the arena will be owned by the DDA, which is a separate entity than the city of Detroit. The DDA will pay for a small portion of the stadium and the entertainment district. That money comes from bonds being issues as well as property taxes from businesses in the DDA.

I feel that the entertainment district is vital to the success of this stadium, you don't want another Pontiac Silverdome on your hands. So the tax payers, who aren't the residents but business owners, are really jus paying for the area around the stadium (part the DDA area) to get built up and will, in turn, increase their property values. So Olympia is building a stadium, giving it to the DDA, and the DDA is paying for the district. Sounds like a pretty fair deal to me.

That being said, most stadium development sucks. Because either it's poorly planned, a shitty scheme to suck money from people, or it's a new stadium for a new team in a new city and nobody even knows if it will take. I recommend this book, Major League Losers, which you can pick up for like $4 on amazon. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465071430

First Nations is definitely the preferred term in Canada, but Indian isn't necessarily derogatory for many people. A good source on this is The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King. He uses the term throughout because he thinks any collective noun referring to Indians as a group is somewhat insufficient because it doesn't take into account distinct tribal identities. So he uses the tribe name, i.e. "Mohawk", whenever possible, and Indian when he's speaking generally.

I highly recommend the book, it's super informative and very funny.

Hey, this is by Stephen Biesty!
He is a really cool british illustrator and became famous for his cross sections, like this or that, which are seriously awesome!


This is from a book called
"Into the Unknown, How Great Explorers Found Their Way by Land, Sea and Air" and features apart from this the journeys of Maggellan, Leif Eriksson, Zheng He, the Piccard Brothers and some other cool adventurers.

Credit where credit's due

There's a really good documentary about flights that got diverted to a small town in Canada. The townspeople all showed up with food, toiletries and supplies, and watched the news with the Americans. One couple on the flight were trying to get ahold of their FDNY son.

They... never did.

I think this is the movie: https://www.amazon.com/Day-World-Came-Town-Newfoundland/dp/0060559713 .