#113: Historical Bias
It‘s easy to assume that gender roles are old. It‘s rare to hear of female warriors, rulers, or otherwise notable persons, especially the farther back you go in time.
But as archaeologists are finding out, maybe that‘s because of their own gender biases. For example, when a Viking grave was discovered, filled with weapons and sacrificial animals, of course it would be a male Viking warrior. Right?
But when scientists did DNA testing on the Birka Viking skeleton from a grave discovered in 1889, they discovered that it was in fact a woman who was buried there. For over a hundred years, archaeologists had simply assumed, because of the weapons, that it was a male, and no one had thought of challenging that assumption.
And it might not be the only one where implicit gender bias played a role. A pair of skeletons found in 2009 were thought of as lovers, a man and a woman, because they were buried hand in hand. Unlike the Birka Viking, various DNA testing methods were tried unsuccessfully, until a new testing method revealed that both skeletons were, in fact, men.
History might seem like it‘s set in stone, a one true telling of what has happened. These discoveries show that history is just as biased as we are.
Growing a City
The way cities look is often determined by their location. The sea, for example, limits a cities growth directions, while also allowing ports that accelerate growth. But a lot of how large cities are and were has to do with how fast we get around — from walking to horses to todays cars and public transport: How a 30-Minute Commute Has Shaped Centuries of Cities.
Next Generation Cryptography
Star Trek presents a utopian vision of the future: Poverty is no longer an issue, people can work as much or as little as they like, and humanity is part of an interstellar alliance dedicated to exploration. Almost everything in our current lives would be better in Star Trek’s future — but for some reason, no one in this future could send an encrypted email to save their lives: Four theories on the cryptography of Star Trek.
Rosetta Stone
ESA’s Rosetta mission collected a lot of data and photos of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Now that Rosettas mission has ended (by crashing it into 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko), director Christian Stangl and his brother Wolfgang have composed the photos of its mission into this sci-fi looking trailer: the Comet on Vimeo (via).
📖 Weekly Longreads 📚
Sometimes, you come across a story that would be right at home in a cheesy TV police procedural, if it weren‘t for the actual murder of a person: ‘If You Want to Kill Someone, We Are the Right Guys’