It's so impressive that we can estimate someone's diet from a hair sample. I had no idea that this was possible.
Can you link your source?
I'd say it was part of some sort of manic/meltdown episode with multiple things going on with some logic. She was under a conservatorship for good reason, it's not some Deep State conspiracy.
I'd like to hear her explanation in her words.
[edit] - From her book
I went into a hair salon, and I took the clippers, and I shaved off all my hair.
Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! Even my parents acted embarrassed by me. But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken away from me.
With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom. No one would talk to me anymore because I was too ugly.
My long hair was a big part of what people liked—I knew that. I knew a lot of guys thought long hair was hot.
Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you. I’d been the good girl for years. I’d smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top, while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second-guessed my career choices even though I’d sold millions of records, while my family acted like I was evil. And I was tired of it.
At the end of the day, I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was see my boys. It made me sick thinking about the hours, the days, the weeks I missed with them. My most special moments in life were taking naps with my children. That’s the closest I’ve ever felt to God—taking naps with my precious babies, smelling their hair, holding their tiny hands.I know very little about the drama around Britney Spears, but even I know that the question was if her conservator was abusing it, not "the deep state". It's a case of the breach of trust of one or a very few people, NOT a grand conspiracy requiring a supernatural level of coordination and control. It happens with alarming regularity that people abuse conservatorships. It's an inherently very abusable position.
I hate it when people shout "conspiracy theory" over garden variety breach of trust/corruption. The latter actually exists, by using this accusation as a shield for it, you strengthen the actually unreasonable conspiracy theories.
Now that doesn't mean Spears' conservatorship abused their position, they may or have not have, but it's not something that can be reject as a possibility.
There are various forms of spectroscopy that leverage different physical characteristics: vibration, absorbance, emission, charge, etc.
It's spectroscopy that allows us to read the molecular atmospheric composition of exoplanets and that has the greatest chance of yielding detection of alien biosignatures or technosignatures given our current scientific understanding and capability.
Spectroscopic techniques are vital for remote sensing, cancer detection, biochemistry, materials science, and more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_agriculture
They not only used wood, but llama dung for fires. I wonder how much C4 ended up in the food via their dung, just from the smoke and air rising from the fire, as it would be rich in it.
Still a neat way to try to validate diet.
So the answer to your question is: insignificant amounts of smoke occur in fire-cooked foods, and the C4 composition wouldn't be affected anyway.
This article is a case study of non sequitur
If literacy were widespread, why did only colonial writers write about them?
Or at least that's the mainstream theory about quipus today, although their content is still being disputed today.
As I understand it, no mainstream scholar is suggesting that Inka society was that literate. Rather, the debate is whether any khipu literacy was confined to a narrow, specialist scribe class associated with the imperial administrative order or whether nonspecialists could also read and write, and whether a khipu written by one person to be read by another was limited to calendrical and numerical data or whether it could express a wider range of concepts: bills of goods, ancestries, perhaps even love letters.
The Qing dynasty (or Ch'ing in Wade-Giles, but never Qing) caused a disastrous collapse in literacy rates, as a matter of intentional policy, bringing the literacy rate well below 1% by the end of the dynasty. But we were talking about 400 years ago, which was the Ming dynasty, when literacy was indeed widespread even among "country bumpkins", though still far from universal. Many authors writing in vernacular Chinese at the time included prefaces explaining that their work was directed at all of the "four classes", one of which (though not the lowest) was those rural farmers.
There was a lot of variation even within Europe; literacy in medieval rural shtetls was nominally a prerequisite for adulthood for men, for example, and universal primary education dates back to the Talmudic period. See https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9hnt7/in_me... for more details.
About medieval Europe more generally, https://research.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... and https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68148/how-litera... look plausibly informative.
Literacy among "country bumpkins" was nearly universal 300 years ago among the New England colonists, fueled by movable-type printing and the Protestant rejection of priestly intermediaries, despite lacking the Imperial civil service examination system or the rabbinate as an incentive to study.
This should read "but never Q'ing". As written it is nonsense.
1. We don't know how to read khipus except for numbers. Even that knowledge was rediscovered rather than being preserved and passed down to current archæologists. There's debate over whether there was even a systematic written language encoded in the non-arithmetic khipus at all. Maybe each khipu user had their own system for encoding non-arithmetic data as khipu numbers, so that each person's khipu was incomprehensible to anyone else. And maybe the features of khipu such as fiber colors that aren't known to encode any information actually don't encode any information.
2. The Spanish eventually banned khipu making as a form of idolatry and burned all the khipu they could find. So the surviving khipu corpus is very small, about 1400 texts.
So, a great deal of detailed historical information about the late Inca empire and early colonial era was definitely recorded in khipu, but most of it was burned, and we will probably never be able to read the rest; possibly nobody ever could have.
1. The khipu appear to be slow and complex to make. It seems unlikely they'd be used to jot down thoughts, and so there wouldn't be that many. Compare with clay tablets, that clearly could be inscribed quickly and easily with a stick.
2. Easily erasing all knowledge of them argues against widespread literacy.
Widespread literacy could mean a lot of things as well. Is it 2% and reserved for priests or 70% and for everyone?
I agree that knotting a khipu looks significantly slower than writing with reeds on clay tablets or with pens on papyrus, vellum, or paper. You can knit or crochet at around 5 Hz, but nålbinding, hand-sewing, and macramé are significantly slower, and the khipu looks like it would be more similar to those techniques. In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFeYJ2uukrQ you can see Karin Byom making 7 nålbinding stitches in 30 seconds, about 250mHz, 20× slower than knitting or crochet. At that speed you could write about four digits per minute (250 millibits per second), compared to about 60 (4 bits per second) with west Arabic numerals and a pencil.
But there are Chinese and cuneiform characters with dozens of strokes; medieval scriptoria wrote fairly slowly, both because blackletter is fairly elaborate (especially Fraktur) and in order not to waste precious vellum; and a fair bit of the Egyptian hieroglyph corpus is literally carved into stone.
So, while slow writing systems are at a real disadvantage when it comes to producing large corpora, it's not clear that that factor alone dooms you to having a total surviving corpus that you could lift in one hand. And it certainly doesn't argue against widespread literacy, since a khipu once knotted can be read any number of times.
To be quantitative about it, the simplest wordwise probability model of English (assuming the probability that each word is independent of previous words) is about 10 bits per word, so even using the known inefficient numeric khipu encoding, you could write about 20-30 English words per hour in khipu just by assigning a number to each one. You could write down the 271 words of the Gettysburg Address in a day. This is not useful for a shopping list, but certainly for recording historical events, propaganda, contracts, proverbs, laws, or hymns.
Some of the postcolonial khipu epistles do encode spoken language, possibly inspired by Spanish writing with Latin letters, but I don't know anything about the encoding.
Sure, if you completely redefine "widespread" to mean "very highly limited", your statement is true.
Such a wide range means they have no idea.
I think https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_In... isn't up to date, but it is a decent introduction to the debate.
You could imagine a civilization that fed 100 million or even 600 million people on food raised on North American arable land, and in fact such a civilization actually exists today, feeding about 600 million people; North America is a net exporter of food, and its population is about 592 million. Currently that's being done with industrial agriculture mining phosphate rock and fixing most of its nitrogen with the Haber–Bosch process because that is far less labor-intensive than the alternatives, but some varieties of biointensive cultivation are actually almost competitive with current industrial agriculture when you measure by yield per acre instead of yield per hour of work.
However, biointensive agriculture didn't exist 500 years ago any more than the Haber–Bosch process did, there's no archæological evidence there for such dense populations, and as far as I know no mainstream archæologist suggests a pre-Columbian population of North America anywhere close to 100 million.
That is the sort of things linguaphiles do, like JRR Tolkien, and certain highly neurodivergent people, but in general that's not something a general population would do.
By definition, it still wouldn't make them literate even if true: "I can only read and write my own writing."
I don't agree that being literate in a writing system nobody else uses is equivalent to not being literate.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/university-oxford-...
warrenm•5mo ago