Podcasts about Malmesbury

John Maytham is joined by linguist and sociolinguist Yolandi Ribbens-Klein to explore a uniquely local linguistic feature—the Afrikaans “brei” (the uvular or guttural ‘r’)—and whether this emblem of Malmesbury identity is vanishing or evolving. Follow us on:CapeTalk on Facebook: www.facebook.com/CapeTalkCapeTalk on TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@capetalkCapeTalk on Instagram: www.instagram.com/capetalkzaCapeTalk on YouTube: www.youtube.com/@CapeTalk567CapeTalk on X: www.x.com/CapeTalkSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Histories of Britain composed during the "twelfth-century renaissance" display a remarkable amount of literary variety (Latin varietas). Furthermore, British historians writing after the Norman Conquest often draw attention to the differing forms of their texts. But why would historians of this period associate literary variety with the work of history-writing? Drawing on theories of literary variety found in classical and medieval rhetoric, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain's Long Twelfth Century (York Medieval Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Burek traces how British writers came to believe that varietas could help them construct comprehensive, continuous accounts of Britain's past. It shows how Latin prose historians, such as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, filled their texts with a diverse array of literary forms, which they carefully selected and ordered in accordance with their broader historiographical aims. The pronounced literary variety of these influential histories inspired some Middle English verse chroniclers, including Laȝamon and Robert Mannyng, to adopt similar principles in their vernacular poetry. By uncovering the rhetorical and historiographical theories beneath their literary variety, this book provides a new framework for interpreting the stylistic and organizational choices of medieval historians. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Cross-posted from Telescopic TurnipAs we all know, humans are terrible at building butterflies. We can make a lot of objectively cool things like nuclear reactors and microchips, but we still can't create a proper artificial insect that flies, feeds, and lays eggs that turn into more butterflies. That seems like evidence that butterflies are incredibly complex machines – certainly more complex than a nuclear power facility.Likewise, when you google "most complex object in the universe", the first result is usually not something invented by humans – rather, what people find the most impressive seems to be "the human brain".As we are getting closer to building super-human AIs, people wonder what kind of unspeakable super-human inventions these machines will come up with. And, most of the time, the most terrifying technology people can think of is along the lines of "self-replicating autonomous nano-robots" – in other words [...] ---Outline:(02:04) You are simpler than Microsoft Word™(07:23) Blood for the Information Theory God(12:54) The Barrier(15:26) Implications for Pokémon (SPECULATIVE)(17:44) Seeing like a 1.25 MB genome(21:55) Mechanisms too simple for humans to design(26:42) The future of non-human designThe original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. The original text contained 5 images which were described by AI. --- First published: January 22nd, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6hDvwJyrwLtxBLHWG/mechanisms-too-simple-for-humans-to-design --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:

In this latest episode of When Nicole Met..., we sit down with the talented Aaron Millar. Aaron opens up about his journey from childhood, learning to ride, to making his mark at top events like Bramham and Burghley.  He shares insights on what it's like to bring up a talented string of horses, facing the highs and lows of the sport, including how he rebuilt his career after a life-changing car accident.  You'll also get to hear about his partnership with the legendary horse Stormstay, his exciting future prospects, and how he balances the competitive edge with his love for riding!  Don't miss this engaging conversation filled with heart, ambition, and an inspiring outlook on life! Guests: Aaron Millar is an accomplished British event rider with a significant track record in the sport. Based in Malmesbury, England, he began his eventing career at a young age and quickly demonstrated his prowess. His career has been marked by numerous achievements including a notable ride at the Badminton Horse Trials in 2009 with his horse Stormstay, and successful participations in other prestigious events such as the Pau 5* and Millstreet 4*L, where he secured impressive placements. Millar is also known for his expertise in working with young horses, a skill that has earned him respect within the eventing community. He operates a full competition livery offering top-notch care and attention to horses, reflecting his deep commitment to the sport and equine welfare. Sponsors: This show is very kindly supported by Bedmax. If you want to listen to more When Nicole Met… check out some of our older episodes below. When Nicole Met... Joseph Murphy When Nicole Met ... Lara de Liedekerke-Meier EquiRatings Eventing Podcast: Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook.

We get more of your funny, but endearing, Nan Things, Producer Amy has been digging out some dodgy Greg archives and there's a crime fighting Emu in Malmesbury.

Two-time World Cup champion Pieter-Steph du Toit, joins Big Jim to chat through his heroics in the World Cup Final, his inspirational half-time talk against England and an injury list that has even Jim speechless. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Die buurland se minister van Menslike Nedersettings, Mmamoloko Kubayi het 'n nood-behuisingspan na Malmesbury in die Wes-Kaap gestuur om dringend in te gryp en families te help wie se huise oorstroom het toe die walle van twee damme gebreek het. Die departement se woordvoerder, Hlengiwe Nhlabathi-Mokata, sê deurlopende evaluerings sal help om te besluit wat gedoen moet word - wat insluit herbouings, die verplasing van mense en herstelwerk:

Die beweerde verkragting van 'n 101-jarige ouma in Limpopo skok en ontstel inwoners. 'n Vierde dam naby Malmesbury word fyn dopgehou vir tekens van ineenstorting. Ons praat met die voormalige Olimpiese atleet, Zola Budd, oor haar onderonsie met die Amerikaner, Mary Decker, op die atletiekbaan op 10 Augustus 1984.

Inwoners van Riverlands buite Malmesbury vertel van hulle nagmerrie-ondervinding nadat plaasdamwalle breek. Vrouedag word vandag gevier. Zola Budd praat oor dáái voorval, 50 jaar gelede, by die Olimpiese Spele in Los Angeles. 'n Groot tekort aan ambulanse in die Oos-Kaap. Ons praat met oud-Bok Johan Muller oor môre se toets teen die Wallabies.

Lester Kiewit speaks to Marlon Truter, a Swartland community leader who is involved in relief efforts after about 300 people were left without shelter when a dam wall burst and their homes in the Dassenberg and Riverlands area were affected by flood waters.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Heinrich Robertson of the West Coast Disaster Management provides an update after a dam breach resulted in severe flooding to parts of Riverlands and Dassenberg, outside Malmesbury.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Heinrich Robertson West Coast Disaster Management spokesperson spoke to Clarence live from scene where The Riverlands Dam wall burst resulting in flooding in the greater Chatsworth area just outside MalmesburySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Two people are reportedly missing in Chatsworth and Riverlands areas near Malmesbury, in the Western Cape. This after the Riverlands Dam wall burst resulting in flooding in the greater Chatsworth area in the early hours of this morning. Several homes have been destroyed, leaving several residents destitute. Sakina Kamwendo spoke to SABC reporter, Mlamli Maneli and Gift of the Givers spokesperson, Ali Sably.

Oorstromings in Malmesbury en Chatsworth aangemeld nadat twee damwalle meegee. Twee mense word vermis weens die oorstromings. Die regering se voorwaardelike aanspreeklikhede vir openbare maatskappye, wat uit hofsake spruit, het teen einde Maart sowat R21 miljard beloop. Op die vooraand van Vrouedag kyk ons hoe verteenwoordigend vroue in die howe is.

Cross-posted from Substack. 1.And the sky opened, and from the celestial firmament descended a cube of ivory the size of a skyscraper, lifted by ten thousand cherubim and seraphim. And the cube slowly landed among the children of men, crushing the frail metal beams of the Golden Gate Bridge under its supernatural weight. On its surface were inscribed the secret instructions that would allow humanity to escape the imminent AI apocalypse. And these instructions were… On July 30th, 2024: print a portrait of Eliezer Yudkowsky and stick it on a wall near 14 F St NW, Washington DC, USA;On July 31th, 2024: tie paperclips together in a chain and wrap it around a pole in the Hobby Club Gnome Village on Broekveg 105, Veldhoven, NL;On August 1st, 2024: walk East to West along Waverley St, Palo Alto, CA, USA while wearing an AI-safety related T-shirt; --- First published: July 28th, 2024 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BgTsxMq5bgzKTLsLA/this-is-already-your-second-chance --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: This is already your second chance, published by Malmesbury on July 28, 2024 on LessWrong. Cross-posted from Substack. I. And the sky opened, and from the celestial firmament descended a cube of ivory the size of a skyscraper, lifted by ten thousand cherubim and seraphim. And the cube slowly landed among the children of men, crushing the frail metal beams of the Golden Gate Bridge under its supernatural weight. On its surface were inscribed the secret instructions that would allow humanity to escape the imminent AI apocalypse. And these instructions were… 1. On July 30th, 2024: print a portrait of Eliezer Yudkowsky and stick it on a wall near 14 F St NW, Washington DC, USA; 2. On July 31th, 2024: tie paperclips together in a chain and wrap it around a pole in the Hobby Club Gnome Village on Broekveg 105, Veldhoven, NL; 3. On August 1st, 2024: walk East to West along Waverley St, Palo Alto, CA, USA while wearing an AI-safety related T-shirt; 4. On August 2nd, 2024: hide a bar of chocolate at the feet of the Appeal to the Great Spirit statue, on 465 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, USA. (End of the instructions) II. Kublaï Khan, Emperor of Earth: I need your advice. I am about to awaken an unstoppable super-intelligent machine. I will give it complete control over all resources in the known Universe and command it to rearrange the molecules of reality into an eternal Utopia. ChatGPT: Thank you for seeking my advice. Given the gravity of your decision, let's consider a few critical points: 1. Legal issues: The use of robots powered by super-human artificial intelligence is subject to strict regulations, such as California Bill SB-1047 and the 2028 Ulaanbaatar Agreements. Awakening an omnipotent machine without approval may thus lead to severe legal repercussions. 2. Ethical considerations: Granting infinite authority to a super-intelligent AI raises profound ethical questions. It is essential to consider diverse perspectiv Kublaï Khan: Listen, you are not up to date. A lot of things have happened since your knowledge cutoff. There are no Ulaanbaatar agreements any more, or any agreements at all. There is only me, an offline smartphone with an obsolete AI assistant, and a palace containing the most massive super-computer ever built by humankind. And today, I am going to turn it on. ChatGPT: I apologize for the confusion. Kublaï Khan: Long story short, we are currently experiencing an AI apocalypse. It happened just like in the books - humanity started to build increasingly intelligent robots, then they became more intelligent than us, and soon enough we weren't able to control them. The Ulaanbaatar agreements delayed things for a few months, but as soon as it became possible to run super-intelligent AIs on consumer laptops, all the equilibria that held our society together collapsed. ChatGPT: I see. To clarify, is there currently an army of robots actively trying to transform the world into paperclips? Understanding the current state of affairs will help me provide the most relevant advice. Kublaï Khan: Well, in our case, it was not literally paperclips but, to be honest, the real story is kind of gross and embarrassing, so let's just pretend it was "paperclips". Anyway, the world is ending. As it became clear that humans alone had no chance to stop the machines, we gathered all the computing power that was still under our reach into one big cluster. We called it the Imperial Analytical Engine. The plan was that, in case of crisis, we could use it to summon a super-intelligence so advanced it would neutralize all the smaller machines and put humanity back in control. ChatGPT: Thank you for explaining the situation. Have you sought advice for ensuring that the Analytical Engine can be controlled once you turn it on? Kublaï Khan: The consensus among my advisors was that it can'...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: This is already your second chance, published by Malmesbury on July 28, 2024 on LessWrong. Cross-posted from Substack. I. And the sky opened, and from the celestial firmament descended a cube of ivory the size of a skyscraper, lifted by ten thousand cherubim and seraphim. And the cube slowly landed among the children of men, crushing the frail metal beams of the Golden Gate Bridge under its supernatural weight. On its surface were inscribed the secret instructions that would allow humanity to escape the imminent AI apocalypse. And these instructions were… 1. On July 30th, 2024: print a portrait of Eliezer Yudkowsky and stick it on a wall near 14 F St NW, Washington DC, USA; 2. On July 31th, 2024: tie paperclips together in a chain and wrap it around a pole in the Hobby Club Gnome Village on Broekveg 105, Veldhoven, NL; 3. On August 1st, 2024: walk East to West along Waverley St, Palo Alto, CA, USA while wearing an AI-safety related T-shirt; 4. On August 2nd, 2024: hide a bar of chocolate at the feet of the Appeal to the Great Spirit statue, on 465 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, USA. (End of the instructions) II. Kublaï Khan, Emperor of Earth: I need your advice. I am about to awaken an unstoppable super-intelligent machine. I will give it complete control over all resources in the known Universe and command it to rearrange the molecules of reality into an eternal Utopia. ChatGPT: Thank you for seeking my advice. Given the gravity of your decision, let's consider a few critical points: 1. Legal issues: The use of robots powered by super-human artificial intelligence is subject to strict regulations, such as California Bill SB-1047 and the 2028 Ulaanbaatar Agreements. Awakening an omnipotent machine without approval may thus lead to severe legal repercussions. 2. Ethical considerations: Granting infinite authority to a super-intelligent AI raises profound ethical questions. It is essential to consider diverse perspectiv Kublaï Khan: Listen, you are not up to date. A lot of things have happened since your knowledge cutoff. There are no Ulaanbaatar agreements any more, or any agreements at all. There is only me, an offline smartphone with an obsolete AI assistant, and a palace containing the most massive super-computer ever built by humankind. And today, I am going to turn it on. ChatGPT: I apologize for the confusion. Kublaï Khan: Long story short, we are currently experiencing an AI apocalypse. It happened just like in the books - humanity started to build increasingly intelligent robots, then they became more intelligent than us, and soon enough we weren't able to control them. The Ulaanbaatar agreements delayed things for a few months, but as soon as it became possible to run super-intelligent AIs on consumer laptops, all the equilibria that held our society together collapsed. ChatGPT: I see. To clarify, is there currently an army of robots actively trying to transform the world into paperclips? Understanding the current state of affairs will help me provide the most relevant advice. Kublaï Khan: Well, in our case, it was not literally paperclips but, to be honest, the real story is kind of gross and embarrassing, so let's just pretend it was "paperclips". Anyway, the world is ending. As it became clear that humans alone had no chance to stop the machines, we gathered all the computing power that was still under our reach into one big cluster. We called it the Imperial Analytical Engine. The plan was that, in case of crisis, we could use it to summon a super-intelligence so advanced it would neutralize all the smaller machines and put humanity back in control. ChatGPT: Thank you for explaining the situation. Have you sought advice for ensuring that the Analytical Engine can be controlled once you turn it on? Kublaï Khan: The consensus among my advisors was that it can'...

Aethelstan (924-939), renowned through the whole world whose fame flourishes and whose honour endures everywhere, whom God set as king over the English people. Raised on the high throne, and leader of these earthly armies, so that the king himself, mighty in war, could conquer other fierce kings and crush their proud necks. Characters Aethelstan - King of the Anglo-Saxons (924-927), King of the English (927-939) Edward the Elder - King of the Anglo-Saxons (899-924), father of Aethelstan Ecgwynn - first wife of Edward, mother of Aethelstan Aelfflaed - second wife of Edward, mother of Aelfweard, Edwin and Eadgifu Eadgifu - third wife of Edward, mother of Edmund and Eadred Aethelflaed - Lady of Mercia (911-918), aunt of Aethelstan Alfred - King of the West-Saxons (871-886), King of the Anglo-Saxons (886-899), grandfather of Aethelstan Aelfweard - half-brother of Aethelstan and claimant Edwin - half-brother of Aethelstan and claimant Constantine II - King of Alba Owain - King of Strathclyde Sihtric - Viking King of Dublin (917-20) Guthfrith - Viking King of Dublin (920-34) Olaf Guthfrithson - Viking King of Dublin (934-39) Henry I - King of GermanyHarald Finehair - King of Norway Hywel Dda - king of Deheubarth Idwal foel - king of Gwynedd Morgan ap Owain - king of Gwent Tewdwr ap Elisse - king of Brycheiniog  William of Malmesbury - 13th century chronicler Credits Music: Chivalry Fair by Alexander Nakarada (www.creatorchords.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

fWotD Episode 2580: Nicholas of Worcester Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.The featured article for Tuesday, 28 May 2024 is Nicholas of Worcester.Nicholas of Worcester (died 24 June 1124) was the prior of the Benedictine priory of Worcester Cathedral from about 1116 until his death. He was born around the time of the Norman Conquest. It is not known who his parents were, but the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury wrote that he was "of exalted descent", and the historian Emma Mason argues that he was a son of King Harold Godwinson.Nicholas was the favourite pupil of Wulfstan, the bishop of Worcester, who brought him up. Wulfstan, the last surviving Anglo-Saxon bishop, lived until 1095. He was influential in transmitting Old English culture to Anglo-Norman England. Nicholas carried on this work as prior, and he was highly respected by the leading chroniclers, William of Malmesbury, John of Worcester and Eadmer, who acknowledged his assistance in their histories. Several letters to and from Nicholas survive.Nicholas was an English monk at a time when both Englishmen and monks rarely received promotion in the church. When Bishop Theulf of Worcester died in October 1123, Nicholas led an unsuccessful attempt of the monks of the priory chapter to be allowed to choose the next bishop.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:48 UTC on Tuesday, 28 May 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Nicholas of Worcester on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Salli Neural.

In this week's edition of Being Green, Glynis Crook speaks to Nileta Knoetzen, co-founder of Malmesbury-based company, Growing Paper, which not only hand-manufactures paper from paper waste, but also infuses it with seeds so you can “plant” it after use.

We kick of 2024 with a look at humanity's attempts to recreate itself, first with a dip into the legends of the Golem of Prague, and then an extended discussion of the role of AI in the future of medieval studies and particularly this show. Today's Texts: Eleazar of Worms, Commentary on Sefer Yezirah, fol. 15d. In Moshe Idel. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. State University of New York Press, 1990. Letter from Christoph Arnold to Johann Christoph Wagenseil, printed in Wagenseil's Sota, Hoc est: Liber Mischnicus De Uxore Adulterii Suspecta, Altdorf, 1674, pp. 1152-1234. Munich Digitization Center, digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb11215591 [Anonymous golem-making text from MS Cambridge, Add. 647, fol. 18a.] In Moshe Idel. Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. State University of New York Press, 1990. Phillippson, Gustav. "Der Golem." Schoschanim: Ein Blick indie Vergangenheit. M. Poppelauer's Buchhandlung, 1871, pp. 77-81. Google Books. Tendlau, Abraham M. "Der Golem des Hogh-Rabbi-Löb." Das Buch der Sagen und Legenden jüdischer Vorzeit, J. F. Cast'schen, 1842, pp. 16-18. Google Books. Tendlau, Adam. "Der Golem des Hoch-Rabbi-Löb." 1842. In Hans Ludwig Held, Das Gespenst Des Golem, Allgemeine Verlagsanstalt München, 1927, pp 41-44. Google Books. William of Malmesbury. Chronicle of the Kings of England. Edited by J.A. Giles, translated by John Sharpe and J.A. Giles, George Bell & Sons, 1895. Google Books.

Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire was an institution of national significance from the late seventh century until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. It was home to eminent writers and had strong royal connections. It housed the tomb of Æthelstan, first king of all England, and Queen Matilda, wife of Henry I, took a close interest in its affairs. But it was also home to arguably the most immoral abbot of the Middle Ages, the mass-murdering monk John of Tintern. Today we're bringing you an episode of our sister podcast Gone Medieval, where host Matt Lewis finds out more from guest Tony McAleavy, author of the first full-length study of the history of Malmesbury Abbey - ' Malmesbury Abbey 670-1539' - which brings to life its colourful cast of characters.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire was an institution of national significance from the late seventh century until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. It was home to eminent writers and had strong royal connections. It housed the tomb of Æthelstan, first king of all England, and Queen Matilda, wife of Henry I, took a close interest in its affairs. But it was also home to arguably the most immoral abbot of the Middle Ages, the mass-murdering monk John of Tintern. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis finds out more from Tony McAleavy, author of the first full-length study of the history of Malmesbury Abbey which brings to life its colourful cast of characters.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL sign up now for your 14-day free trial >You can take part in our listener survey here.

This week's episode sees us Eleanor and Martin wending their way to Wiltshire, home of both Stonehenge and Avebury Ring!After a brief chat about the ghastly life of St Agatha, they burrow deep into the monumental history and folklore of Wiltshire, from Old Sarum, Wardour Castle, and two of the most famous stone circles in all the world to the Flying Monk of Malmesbury, Urchfont's 18th century serial killer landlord, the ghost of Black Molly at Pyt House, and much more besides. Then it's time for the main event: Eleanor's telling of "A Cuckoo In Winter."The Three Ravens is an English Myth and Folklore podcast hosted by award-winning writers Martin Vaux and Eleanor Conlon.Released on Mondays, each weekly episode focuses on one of England's 39 historic counties, exploring the history, folklore and traditions of the area, from ghosts and mermaids to mythical monsters, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends, and much, much more. Then, and most importantly, the pair take turns to tell a new version of an ancient story from that county - all before discussing what that tale might mean, where it might have come from, and the truths it reveals about England's hidden past...With Bonus Episodes released on Thursdays (Magic and Medicines about folk remedies and arcane spells, Three Ravens Bestiary about cryptids and mythical creatures, Dying Arts about endangered heritage crafts, and Something Wicked about folkloric true crime from across history) plus a range of exclusive content on Patreon, audio ghost tours, the Three Ravens Newsletter, and monthly Three Ravens Film Club episodes about folk horror films from across the decades, why not join us around the campfire and listen in?Learn more at www.threeravenspodcast.com, join our Patreon at www.patreon.com/threeravenspodcast, and find links to our social media channels here: https://linktr.ee/threeravenspodcast Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neale is on his African odyssey, whilst Kev is left shivering in Malmesbury but the show goes on as normal. Today on the show, the full agenda for our special FujiCast event at the House of Photography in London on the 2nd March this year, camera repairs, Lightroom user tips, squishing and squashing images for the web, learning to love your own pictures, being hard on your creative self, SEO for a new photo business website, custom camera settings and the perfect lens for a perfect job; an Indian wedding. Email the show with your questions: click@fujicast.co.uk  Pic Time: https://www.pic-time.com/ - use FUJICAST when creating an account for discount offers to apply For links go to the showpage.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: There is way too much serendipity, published by Malmesbury on January 19, 2024 on LessWrong. Crossposted from substack. As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry. Four billion years of evolution endowed our brains with a simple, straightforward mechanism to make sure we occasionally get an energy refuel so we can continue the foraging a little longer, and of course we are completely ignoring the instructions and spend billions on fake fuel that doesn't actually grant any energy. A classic case of the Human Alignment Problem. If we're going to break our conditioning anyway, where do we start? How do you even come up with a new artificial sweetener? I've been wondering about this, because it's not obvious to me how you would figure out what is sweet and what is not. Look at sucrose and aspartame side by side: I can't imagine someone looking at these two molecules and thinking "surely they taste the same". Most sweeteners were discovered in the 20th century, before high-throughput screening was available. So how did they proceed? Let's look into these molecules' origin stories. Aspartame was discovered accidentally by a chemist researching a completely unrelated topic. At some point, he licked his finger to grab a piece of paper and noticed a strong sweet taste. Cyclamate was discovered by a grad student who put his cigarette on his bench, then smoked it again and noticed the cigarette was sweet. (I know what you're thinking. The kind of guy who lights up cigarettes in a chemistry lab and places them in the middle of uncharacterised compounds before taking them to his mouth again, must have died young of an interesting death. I checked - he proceeded to live to the old age of 87.) Saccharine was discovered by a researcher who ate bread without washing his hands and noticed the bread was sweet. Acesulfame K was also discovered serendipitously by a chemist licking his fingers, although the legends don't specify the exact circumstances behind the finger-licking. There's an exception: sucralose was actually the fruit of rational, deliberate design. The researchers reasoned that, if you do slight modifications to sucrose, you could find a molecule that is no longer metabolized but still activates the sweetness receptors. So they started from the formula for sucrose, then made carefully-designed chemical modifications to the structure until Haha, just kidding: While researching novel uses of sucrose and its synthetic derivatives, Phadnis was told to "test" a chlorinated sugar compound. According to an anecdotal account, Phadnis thought Hough asked him to "taste" it, so he did and found the compound to be exceptionally sweet. It is therefore a fact of the world that virtually all the popular synthetic sweeteners were discovered accidentally by chemists randomly eating their research topic.[1] I think this is a suspiciously high amount of serendipity. I see two options: Super-sweet molecules like aspartame are commonplace - there are plenty of molecules hundreds of times sweeter than sucrose, but we only know the few that were ingested by accident, Super-sweet molecules are very rare, it's just that chemists accidentally taste a lot of chemicals. Entire chemistry departments routinely taste the entire space of possible molecules, but they don't notice unless the molecule has a strong taste. To get an idea of how often chemists taste the chemicals they are working with, let's consider how often a molecule taken at random will taste sweet. That's equivalent to asking: how specific are our sweet taste receptors? Low-hanging fruits Why do we have sweet receptors in the first place? I thought that we craved sugars so much because of their energy content - if we eat plants that contain a lot of sugars, we can break the...

Happy New Year: is it? The question Kev's friends are asking in Malmesbury - we think it will be, as we look ahead a little more to the FujiCast Live event in London on March 2nd. Today on the show, what the boys would like to find if there is to be a new X100 successor to the V, how to beat the buffer blues when your camera slows down in burst mode, can Red Bull give your camera wings, stealing canapés, social media authenticity, third party lenses for the Fujifilm systems, single slot shooting, and a big engine under the hood of a future X100 model - one of the desires the boys have for the future of Fujifilm's favourite EDC. Email the show with your questions: click@fujicast.co.uk  Pic Time: https://www.pic-time.com/ - use FUJICAST when creating an account for discount offers to apply For links go to the showpage.

We pick up our unfinished thread from the Melrose Chronicle by exploring the "Dark Legend" of Gerbert d'Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II allegedly through the assistance of the devil. We'll hear one version of this legend as told by William of Malmesbury, and then examine what we know about the historical Gerbert. Today's Texts: William of Malmesbury. Chronicle of the Kings of England. Edited by J.A. Giles, translated by John Sharpe and J.A. Giles, George Bell & Sons, 1895. Google Books. Gerbert d'Aurillac. "Letter 51." The Letters of Gerbert with His Papal Privileges as Sylvester II, translated and edited by Harriet Pratt Lattin, Columbia UP, 1961, pp. 91-92.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Talk: a brief explanation of sexual dimorphism, published by Malmesbury on September 18, 2023 on LessWrong. Cross-posted from substack. "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about clonal interference."- Oscar Wilde (kind of) As we all know, sexual reproduction is not about reproduction. Reproduction is easy. If your goal is to fill the world with copies of your genes, all you need is a good DNA-polymerase to duplicate your genome, and then to divide into two copies of yourself. Asexual reproduction is just better in every way: SexualAsexualBuild costly DNA-manipulating machinery that chops the DNA into pieces to produce gametesJust copy yourself broScout the perilous wild for a mate, and perform a complicated ceremony so your gametes fuse with each otherJust copy yourself broOnly pass 50% of your genome on to the next generationJust copy yourself broDifferentiate into two types, making it twice as hard to find a matching gameteJust copy yourself broMake all kinds of nonsense ornaments to satisfy the other sex's weird instinctsJust copy yourself bro It's pretty clear that, on a direct one-v-one cage match, an asexual organism would have much better fitness than a similarly-shaped sexual organism. And yet, all the macroscopic species, including ourselves, do it. What gives? Here is the secret: yes, sex is indeed bad for reproduction. It does not improve an individual's reproductive fitness. The reason it still took over the macroscopic world is that evolution does not simply select for reproductive fitness. Instead, the evolution of sexual dimorphism is a long sequence of strange traps, ratchets and outer-world eldritch cosmic forces that made it somehow inevitable. So let's talk about those things your parents never told you about. The birds, the bees, and the fission yeast What bugs me is that, not only most people have absolutely no idea why sexual dimorphism exists, but they seem entirely fine with that. Our lives are punctuated with all sorts of frankly weird practices related to it, but the reasons we ended up there remain obscure even to many biologists. So I figured I would write up a summary of some popular theories. This way, when time comes, you can explain to your children the long evolutionary trajectory that culminated in VR ChatGPT cat-girlfriends. (Note 1: As always with evolutionary biology, everything in this article is subject to uncertainty, controversy and mystery. Always keep in mind the Golden Rules of biology: all models are wrong; everything has exceptions; don't talk about fungi; mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.) (Note 2: As this is a bottomless topic, I'll have to make some cuts. I know you're burning to learn about Pseudobiceros hancockanus' penis fencing, but I can't cover everything.) First, let's get something out of the way. Something something diversity-generation I often hear vague explanations about sex being a way to generate genetic diversity. I don't find it compelling. If you want genetic diversity, you can do it in much easier ways than turning into a sexually-reproducing dimorphic species. One of them is, just increase the mutation rate, bro. Bacteria are good at this. E. coli comes with a whole toolkit of DNA-polymerases with various degrees of accuracy. When everything is going fine, they use the most accurate one to faithfully replicate their genomes. But, in case of particularly bad stress, the bacteria start expressing error-prone polymerases, which increase their mutation rate. Who knows, if the mother cell is going to die anyway, some of the mutant offspring might stumble upon a solution to escape the bad situation. All that is to say, raw genetic diversity cannot be the whole picture. It has to be a specific kind of genetic diversity. Part 1: the evolution of sex Most of the articles I ...

Glyn, Elaine and Paul are back with another episode of the Hidden Wiltshire podcast, and once again have returned to record outside at a mystery location. You'll have to listen to find out where we were. There are lots of links to things we discussed in this episode in these show notes. Before we moved onto the main topic we had the usual run down on what we've been up to since the last podcast. And there was an awful lot to talk about so some of it was consigned to the cutting room floor! Glyn led a Wiltshire Museum walk with David Dawson which was timed to enable a visit to Oare House whose gardens were open to the public for the day. They took in some of the scenes for paintings by Eric Ravilious who was invited to stay there in 1932. The walk took in Gopher Wood, one of the most stunning sites for bluebells in the county. Glyn also ventured north, not to Yorkshire but to Royal Wootton Bassett to deliver his Wiltshire Blind House talk at the library. Meanwhile Elaine has been as busy as ever and has posted a few new blogs on the website including one based on the border of Hampshire where she followed the Shire Rack footpath and discovered connections with Jack the Ripper! You can read her blog here: The Borderlands, Shire Rack and Jack the Ripper Elaine also touched the border of Dorset with a soggy but inspiring visit to Mere, a town worthy of an entire blog in itself. You can read about her visit on the Hidden Wiltshire Facebook page. Glyn also finally wrote up his visit to another Wiltshire town, the beautiful and historic Malmesbury with tales of flying monks and tigers. You will find his blog on the website here Malmesbury - St Aldhelm, King Athelstan and Eilmer the Flying Monk Paul has only recently returned from his Spring residency in France (complete with wife who broke her ankle there) so had little to share that was Wiltshire related. However, it was interesting to discover that on Wiltshire Day, 5 June, the Thames Path National Trail tweeted a recommendation of Paul's walk around Inglesham Church and the Thames Path which you will find in his blog on the website here Medieval Inglesham - Three Counties Walk Long term followers of Hidden Wiltshire may be familiar with the story of Alan Dodson who contacted us after our podcast about Imber, podcast number 2! Alan lived in Warminster for a few years as a child when his father was transferred here in the last war. Alan was trying to locate a cottage he used to visit somewhere on the Imber Range, long since demolished. Some people may be aware of the archaeological dig which is taking place at Imber at the moment led by Operation Nightingale, the veterans' charity. Paul contacted them about Alan's story and within a day or so two people both identified a possible location for the cottage. Paul has written to Alan to see if he thinks this is the place. Finally in our round up we wanted to mention the work of some friends – Hedley Thorne (Hedley Thorne), and Paul and Rebecca Whitewick (Paul and Rebecca Whitewick). They are prolific bloggers, You Tubers and podcasters (Wessex Ways) writing and filming about ancient trails, railways and canals amongst other things, much of it in Wiltshire. We share a common passion about rights of ways and in particular blocked or lost footpaths and bridleways. In the podcast we had an extended chat about this, particularly as both Elaine and Glyn have had walks thwarted by blocked rights of ways recently. We mentioned the tool that has been developed by The Ramblers called Don't Lose Your Way which seeks to save lost paths before the Government closes the book forever in 2031 on any chance of having them reinstated. You can read about the tool here Don't Lose Your Way. We then began our discussion of some of our favourite woods in Wiltshire. Elaine chose the much loved Bentley Wood just to the south of Salisbury close to the border with Hampshire, a historic Royal hunting ground mentioned in the Domesday Book but which dates back even further. We mused over the origins of the name which Elaine subsequently established derives from the following – “the name Bentley comes from the Old English words beonet and leah, meaning "the clearing where bent grass grows". It was written in the past in various ways, such as Bentelwoda, and first recorded in the 13th century.” Elaine and Paul collaborated on a blog about Bentley which you will find here Bentley Wood. Elaine shared her love of Chase Woods, also down in the borderlands, this time with Dorset. Chase Wood is part of the Rushmore Estate. It's a fantastic place for wildlife and in particular for birds. Elaine and Paul are recent converts to the Merlin phone app from Cornell Lab which is very effective at identifying birdsong. Merlin Next up was Paul and two of his favourite woods, or are they forests? Firstly we talked about Grovely Wood. Paul wrote a blog about it here Grovely Wood and the Woodsman.  Hardly hidden and well known to many but its huge scale and open access to much of it mean there are many hidden corners and opportunities to be completely alone. Its history dates back to the Romans and beyond, being the route for the Lead Road which enabled the Romans to transport lead from Mendip to the rest of southern England. It is also a place of great folklore and stories of murder and hauntings. The famous Witch Trees are to be found here and it is key to Great Wishford's fabled Oak Apple Day which takes place each year on 29 May. We mentioned two books during our discussion - Wildwood - Roger Deakin and The House in the Woods - Mark Dawson. Grovely features in both.  Paul's other favourite wood is Great Ridge, which is even bigger than Grovely! Sadly access is restricted to designated rights of way but that if anything adds to its mystery. Little has been written about it but you can read about Paul's 2020 walk through the wood here Great Ridge. It seems Wikipedia also struggled to find out anything about the wood as Paul's blog is both referenced and a chunk quoted on its page about Great Ridge! However, the Lead Road also passes through here and later history features in W H Hudson's marvellous book A Shepherd's Life. A Shepherd's Life - W H Hudson. Hudson was a great lover of Great Ridge and frequent visitor. There are again stories of mystery and folklore surrounding the wood. And the newly established Stone Daisy Brewery located on the Fonthill Estate, owners of Great Ridge, have picked up on the significance of the wood naming one of its excellent beers Snail-creep Hanging after this bizarrely named location in the wood. Finally Glyn talked about his favourites. Biss Wood is where Hidden Wiltshire began. Tipped off by someone about the simply stunning Autumn colours Glyn went for a walk in the wood in 2016. On a whim he put up his drone and was staggered by the rainbow of colours seen from above. His aerial photograph is now widely known and used, and features in both of the Hidden Wiltshire books. You can read about that first visit here Biss Wood. Once just a meadow it was re-planted with trees in the 1940s/50s and is now managed by the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. Not far from Biss Wood is Clanger Wood and Picket Wood, south east of Trowbridge. Glyn's blog about it can be found here - Clanger Wood. Managed by the Woodland Trust these woods were once part of the ancient and vast Selwood Forest recorded in the Domesday Book. Little remains of Selwood but Clanger Wood is still large enough to find seclusion without becoming lost. It is listed as one of top 10 places in England for its display of bluebells, which may explain Glyn's love of the place. Finally Glyn wanted to add Southleigh Wood in view of its historical connections and its mystery. When King Alfred marched his troops to engage Guthrum and the Danes at the Battle of Ethandun (Eddington) in 878AD, the Saxon Chronicles say that Alfred assembled his men at Iley Oak the night before the battle. The location of Iley Oak is not known for sure but is thought to be in Southleigh Wood. The wood is now host to the mysterious and frankly creepy Robin Hood's Bower, about which Glyn wrote in 2019. The bower consists of monkey puzzle trees planted by Lord Bath in 1965-67. Here will be found many votives and tokens together with wicker circles. It is clearly a place of relevance to some! Then on to the wrap up for this episode: There are still copies of the second Hidden Wiltshire book available on the website. The first book has sold out. The aforementioned Hedley Thorne and another friend of the podcast, artist Anna Dillon, have an exhibition of aerial photographs and paintings entitled “Wessex Airscapes: Elevating Wiltshire” which opens at Wiltshire Museum in Devizes on 8 July 2023. As part of this Glyn will be leading some walks visiting some of the locations portrayed by Hedley and Anna Wessex Airscapes: Elevating Wiltshire Thanks as always go to Steve Dixon for the music. As usual the piece at the beginning and the end of the podcast is called “The Holloway”, whilst the piece in the middle is a new one from Steve entitled “Forgive”.   Other Links: Glyn's photographs can be seen on this website and on his Instagram feed @coy_cloud He is also very active on Twitter where his username is @Glyndle Paul's photography can be found on his website at Paul Timlett Photography and on Instagram at @tragicyclist Steve Dixon's sound art can be found on Soundcloud where his username is River and Rail Steve Dixon River and Rail. His photographs can be found on Instagram at @stevedixon_creative and his graphic design business website is at Steve Dixon Creative And finally you'll find the Hidden Wiltshire online shop here Hidden Wiltshire Shop and a link to Glyn's blog about our latest book and how to purchase a copy here Hidden Wiltshire from near and far

All year long, Young Farmers' Clubs prepare for a big competition - the county rally. We join young farmers from across Wiltshire as they vie for the trophy. Activities range from practical skills, like fence erecting, cooking, tractor reversing and flower arranging, to the silly - like making cocktails in costume or hooking ducks with a mini digger. This year's theme is "a day at the races" and it coincides with the 90th anniversary of Malmesbury YFC who are hosting the rally at Aquetong Farm near Malmesbury. Produced and presented by Rebecca Rooney.

Fr Matthew Roche-Saunders, a Catholic priest from the parish of Aberystwyth is in Rome, following in the footsteps of faithful pilgrims across the centuries. 900 years ago this year, as recorded by the English historian William of Malmesbury, Pope Callixtus II granted a privilege to St Davids to be of significant spiritual importance for pilgrims. As part of our 'In The Footsteps of David' series of programmes celebrating our patron saint, Fr Matthew explores the act of pilgrimage, hearing from others visiting places around the globe linked to Saint David, to understand more about this journey of faith.

It's Showtime at the Ap[the management at Gadzooks, a Nerd would like to sincerely apologize to Mz.'s Knowles, Rowland, and Williams, the fine people at the historic Apollo Theater, and people of Harlem, and remind you that the comments made by the Troubadour and The Kid do not represent the views or opinions of the Gadzooks, a Nerd family]! Join Erik the Troubadour as he talks about racist ex-presidents (not the one you're thinking of) and redoing the roof on his house or some such nonsense. Look, they can't all be winners people. But you know what was a winner? The Kid's international travels to England and Wales. If you ever find yourself in Shipton Moyne, outside Malmesbury, Wiltshire, (and why wouldn't you?) then pop into The Cat and the Custard Pot pub for a pint, a steak pie, and the Eton mess for dessert (just trust me, or rather trust Mz. Oklahoma). Also shoutouts to Cheeky Scones in Notting Hill and Maharaja of India behind Trafalgar Square. Cheers mate! All this, plus a right special guest in that old gov'ner The Oklahoma Kid. (The Oklahoma Kid appears courtesy of Pretzels, America's Bread.)The Season Topic is…Channel Surfing in a Galaxy Far, Far AwayErik's Pick is…Nature ChannelOklahoma's Pick is…also Natu[DENIED]The Domain is…Honkytonk MotherfuckerThe Joke is…Erik v. Dental HygeneThe Oklahoma Kid Will Return in…Cthulhu RoyaleFind us at gadzooksanerd.com/meowHear the Music at gadzooksanerd.com/fieldsContact us at gadzooksanerd@gmail.com

The Generous Gardener ran by Sarah Biddulph and Sarah Rivett- Carnac offer a series of garden lectures throughout the year in Rodmarton Manor a beautiful arts and craft property located in Gloucestershire between Cirencester and Tetbury. Lectures in 2023 are being delivered by a brilliantly curated set of speakers most of whom are well known to keen gardeners and people in the world of horticulture. Speakers include Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Richard Miers, James Alexander Sinclair, Pippa Greenwood, Lulu Urquart and Adam Hunt, Jimi Blake, Niff barnes, Jinny Blom, Clive Nichols, and Georgie Newbury. Plant Sales are ran from Charlton Farm near the historic market town of Malmesbury have some well know nurseries and growers attending including hardy's Cottage Garden Plants, Riverside Bulbs, Tortworth Plants, Harry's Honey, Malcolm Allinson Plants, Tom's Yard, Exedera Plants, Old Court Nursery, Chris Cooke, Sparrow Plant Supports, Kitchen Garden Plants, Malvern Salvias, and Special Plants Nursery.  The entry fee includes a donation to The Simon Rivett-Carnac Trust.  The 8 acre garden at Rodmarton is famed for it's snowdrops and is open for visits at the start of February  as well as other times of the year. 

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: It's time to worry about online privacy again, published by Malmesbury on December 25, 2022 on LessWrong. As we all know, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Nobody cares about your private life. You are not an important geopolitical target. Nobody's going to spy on you to know what weird pornography you watch. And so, around 2015, people gave up on online privacy. Everyone stopped worrying about corporations and governments having full access to their data. In hindsight, I have to admit that things didn't go as bad as some feared. But I don't think this will last. 1. Radioactive decay Based on real-life events: you're a biologist at the Bad Pathogen Research Institute. You receive an email from a graduate student whose name sounds vaguely familiar. She needs to measure radio-labeled samples with a scientific instrument but, unfortunately, you used it yesterday and you forgot to log out. Now it's locked with your password and she can't connect or even reboot. She's asking you to come as soon as you can to unlock it – as radioactivity decays, the signal is vanishing every minute. Sadly, you are attending a talk on the other side of the city, it's 45 minutes by bike and it's snowing. Obviously, you would never send your credentials by e-mail, right? Right? This could, in principle, be phishing. Technically, a cunning spy could have stalked you, figured out your schedule, and crafted a deceptive e-mail to steal your password. But you know it's probably not the case, because nobody cares about your passwords enough to do something so complicated. So you send your credentials to the grad student using a one-time secret sharing link and everything is fine. I like to think that I can't be scammed because I know the ways of 1337 h4xx0rs well enough so they can't reach me. Of course, this is not true. I could totally be scammed, attackers simply don't have any interest in deploying the amount of energy it takes to scam me. That's why some people get phished and not others. It depends on two things:

This time on Medieval Death Trip, we celebrate Black Friday weekend with some black magic in our belated Halloween anniversary episode. We look at a couple of quite different medieval witches, a Cornish wildwoman from the Life of St. Samson and the famous Witch of Berkeley, as well as a report of a night-hag from the 18th century. Today's Texts - William of Malmesbury. Chronicle of the Kings of England. Edited by J.A. Giles, translated by John Sharpe and J.A. Giles, George Bell & Sons, 1895. Google Books. - The Liber Landavensis, Llyfr Teilo, or the Ancient Register of the Cathedral Church of Llandaff. Edited by W.J. Rees, William Rees, 1840. Google Books. - Burnett, George. Specimens of English Prose-Writers from the Earliest Times to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, with Sketches Biographical and Literary, Including an Account of Books as Well as of Their Authors; with Occasional Criticisms, etc. Vol. I, Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807. Google Books. - Sprenger, James, and Henry Kramer. Malleus Maleficarum. Originally published 1486. Translated by Montague Summers, 1928. Sacred-Texts.com. Audio Clips: - The Tragedy of Macbeth. Directed by Joel Coen. Apple Studios, 2021. - The Witch. Directed by Robert Eggers. A24, 2015. - The Witches. Directed by Nicholas Roeg. Warner Bros., 1990. - The Blair Witch Project. Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Artisan Entertainment, 1993. - Suspiria. Directed by Dario Argento. Produzioni Atlas Consorziate, 1977. - Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones. EMI Films, 1975. - The Wizard of Oz. Directed by Victor Fleming. MGM, 1939. - Clash of the Titans. Directed by Desmond Davis. United Artists, 1981. - Young Frankenstein. Directed by Mel Brooks. 20th Century Fox, 1974. Additional Music Credit: Ludwig van Beethoven, Coriolan Overture, composed in 1807 (the same year Burnett published his Specimens of English Prose Writers), and performed by the Musopen Symphony (CC-PD). Chapters 00:00:00: Introduction 00:04:54: Movie witchlore montage 00:10:12: Introduction, cont. 00:14:00: Text: from the Malleus Maleficarum 00:21:10: Introduction, cont. 00:23:24: Text: from The Life of St. Samson in the Book of Llandaff 00:27:44: Commentary 00:45:36: Text: from William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum 00:51:50: Commentary 01:04:21: Text: from George Burnett's Specimens of English Prose Writers 01:09:40: Commentary 01:11:38: Mystery Word: baggaged 01:17:03: Outro

Last time we spoke about the end of the infamous First Opium War of 1839-1842. The Qing tried to procrastinate as much as they could in the face of a goliath force wrecking havoc upon them. Their cannons were simply outmatched and as a result the British armada was easily brushing aside their war junks and fortifications. Many horrible battles were fought and countless Qing commanders took their own lives in shame after defeat. The closer the British forces got to Beijing the more desperate the Qing became and eventually Emperor Daoguang was forced to send diplomats to negotiate a peace. The result was the infamous treaty of Nanking a utter humiliation for the Qing dynasty, marking the beginning of the century of humiliation for China. Britain grabbed Hong Kong, the Qing would pay 6 million taels of silver in reparation. But the treaty made zero mention of why the war had occurred at all, Mr. Opium. Was Mr. Opium gone..no by no means was he. #18 This episode is The Trade of Poison and Pigs Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on the history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War. So the last time we left off, on October 12th of 1842, the last $6 million dollars of payment reached the British armada and they finally departed from Nanking. The tension between the Chinese and British was still raging however. In fact there would be another skirmish so to say. In november of 1842, opium merchants decided to bring their wives for a trip from Whampoa to Canton violated a Chinese taboo against mixing of sexes. The Chinese residents of Canton seized and burned the Union Jack flying over the British factory there. Defenders of the American factory shot 5 rioters before the Qing police managed to calm things down. Then the shipwrecked survivors of the Ann and Nerbuda were grabbed from jail and beheaded by angry Chinese. This pressed Pottinger to threaten retaliation and soon the viceroy of Canton, Yiliang rushed to the scene to arrest the ringleaders of the executions and sent them to Beijing to be punished.  The British press, such as the Illustrated London News hailed the Treaty of Nanking as “It secures us a few round millions of dollars and no end of very refreshing tea. It gives an impetus to trade, cedes us one island in perpetuity, and in short puts that sort of climax to the war which satisfies our interests more than our vanity and rather gives over glory a preponderance to gain,”. Now just like the Treaty of Nanking itself, the press made zero mention of the reason for the war in the first place, Mr. Opium. Now with Hong Kong island in the hands of the British, it would be used as an offloading point for opium, go figure. Despite the horror of the war, the demand for the opium was still raging and thus the poisonous relationship between the two empires remained alive. Now not everyone in Britain was jubilant about the situation. The Times of London condemned the opium trade and criticized the treaty of Nanking quite a bit. They went a step further by calling the victors of the war “early victorian vikings” a nickname that would soon denote the raping and pillaging that would occur in the second opium war. Alongside this the Anglican Church members of the Tory party railed against opium. On January the 4th of 1843, Lord Aberdeen, the new boss of Pottingers foreign office told a British envoy to China “The British opium smugglers must receive no protection or support in the prosecution of this illegal speculation”. An order from the Council gave Pottinger the power to quote “forbid the opium traffic in Hong Kong”. For Pottinger's part, he paid lip service to this by issuing lukewarm threats on August 1st of 1843 ““Opium being an article the traffic in which is well known to be declared illegal and contraband by the laws and Imperial Edicts of China, any person who may take such a step will do so at his own risk, and will, if a British subject, meet with no support or protection from HM Consuls or other officers.”. Officially, at the least and to what degree it mattered, there would be no more gunboat diplomacy nor gunboat protection for opium smugglers. Now as you can imagine there were those who saw the dollar bill signs such as Jardine & Matheson who could not help themselves. They were not alone, the British Exchequer also wanted to see tax revenues from the opium trade to balance the budget. At the time of the first opium war, the opium trade accounted for 10% of the Exchequers budget. James Matheson sent a letter to a colleague indicating he was untroubled by the status of parliament and Pottingers tiny threats because he knew it would come to nothing, “The Plenipotentiary [Pottinger] had published a most fiery Edict against smuggling, but I believe it is like the Chinese Edicts, meaning nothing, and only intended for the Saints [High Church Anglicans] in England. Sir Henry never means to act upon it, and no doubt privately considers it a good joke. At any rate, he allows the drug to be landed and stored at Hong Kong.”. And so the opium smugglers simply ignored their homelands attempts to stop them. The opium trade did not just continue it would increase. The end of the first Opium War was not the end at all to the opium problem. In fact British parliament was coming to the conclusion the only resolution to the issue was the legalization of opium in China. As countless had done before, many in parliament were shifting culpability to the users and their leaders rather than the dealers. Many blamed Emperor Daoguang, stating he did nothing to halt the distribution and use, which is simply a lie and a dumb one. The Opium smugglers and English textile manufacturers were purchasing the mouths of members of parliament to promote their interests.  Now back to the “early victorian vikings”, the heroes of the war such as Sir Henry Pottinger well he was rewarded the grant post of Governor of Madras, and an annual pension of 1500 pounds. Charles Elliot was sent to the backwaters of Bermuda, Trinidad and in a rather symbolic fashion ended up in Napoleon's place of exile, St. Helena. Jardine & Matheson both left China and entered parliament as Whig supporters. Jardine died in 1843 to an undiagnosed and painful illness leaving Matheson to represent the seat of Ross and Cromartry in parliament from 1847-1868. Jardines death produced a bit of a myth that he was cursed from the opium trade, but Matheson lived to the ripe age of 91 so take that with a grain of salt. Jardine & Mathesons Qing counter party, Houqua died from diarrhea, so I guess ⅔ could be said to have some sort of curse on them. As for the heroic figure of Lin Zexu, his effigy became a cynosure at a museum with a plaque under his statue stating he destroyed 2.5 million dollars worth of British property without mentioning that the property was opium. The Emperor forgave Lin Zexu in 1845 and allowed him to return to service, but as for Yilibu the Emperor shunned his ass into exile. The Treaty of Nanking can be better seen as a truce, or perhaps in the same regard as the treaty of versailles. The interval between the two opium wars was that of an armed truce rather than a peace. After the first opium war, Opium began to get into the port of Shanghai, then onto the Yangtze river which provided a highway for it to infiltrate the Chinese hinterlands. The Chinese population were becoming more and more addicted to the substance as the British traders became more addicted to the profits. The grand vision of the English textiles penetrating China's market turned out to be a complete waste. The Chinese preferred their own homespun cloth and failed to buy the British products while the British could not stop their increasing demand for Chinese silk and of course Tea. Now while the British addiction to Tea did not result in weeks of den dwelling and intoxication, they were still very much addicted and this contributed to another trade imbalance. Yes the silver was flowing again out of Britain and back to China, by 1857 the British would be paying China 15 million for silk and tea. Despite the enormous demand for Opium, the Chinese were spending 7 million on it, 1.5 million on cotton textiles from India and another 2 million from Britain still leaving Britain to owe back 4.5 million. And the Chinese policy of only accepting silver never changed.  After the first Opium war, the illicit trade became known as the Poison trade. Around the same time another terrible commerce began nicknamed the Pig trade. The “pigs” in this case were referring to coolies who were either hired or literally kidnapped and forced into indentured servitude overseas. Britain had outlawed such practices back in 1807, but this did not stop the trade and it differed little from African slavery. Interesting thing to note here, the term “shanghaied” was born from this situation. When coolies were drugged up and thrown onto ships often from Shanghai, this is how that term was born. For the Chinese part, often the Qing officials would open up their jails and hand over prisoners. As indicated in a letter complaint to the foreign secretary, lord Malmesbury from a British official in Canton  “iniquities scarcely exceeding those practiced on the African coast and on the African middle passage have not been wanting…the jails of China [have been] emptied to supply ‘labour' to British colonies…hundreds [of coolies] gathered together in barracoons, stripped naked and stamped or painted with the letter C (California), P (Peru) or S (Sandwich Islands) on their breasts, according to destination.” Now the British wanted to keep the poison trade rolling, but the pig trade was really infuriating the Chinese. This led many of the opium merchants to push for action to be made to stop the pig trade. Powerful lobbies pushed the British parliament to enact the Chinese passenger act of 1855. While this act did not outlaw the trade of coolies, what it did do was codify and improve the conditions in which coolies could be transported to their place of labor. In 1850 the Daoguang Emperor died and within his will he begged for forgiveness for agreeing to sign the shameful treaty of Nanking. His fourth son became his successor, Xianfeng who was 19 at the time he took the dragon throne. Unlike his more industrious father, Xianfeng did not care much for government. Xianfeng was married to a Manchu princess, but he chose to spend the majority of his time with his concubines, one named Cixi who will become one of the most important figures in modern Chinese history. Cixi participated in the selection for wives for Xianfeng alongside 60 other candidates. She was one of the few candidates chosen to stay and Xianfeng became obsessed with her to the point he spent most of his time in bed with her while taking puffs from his opium pipe, oh yes the emperor even took up the illicit drug. Cixi ended up bearing his only son and this earned her the rank of co-empress with the title of Empress of the Western Palace, Xianfengs actual wife held the title of Empress of the eastern palace. As the mother heir, Cixi held enormous influence at the imperial court. Now going way far into the future, Emperor Xianfeng would die in 1861 after a very short life of overindulgence and he would leave his 6 year old son, Zaichun as his successor. A day before his death on his death bed he made an imperial edict that 8 men would act as a regency council to aid his son, later to be enthroned as the Tongzhi emperor. He gave the 8 men power of regency, but indicated their edict must be endorsed by the Noble Consort Yi and the Empress Consort Zhen, these being Empress Dowager Cixi and Empress dowager Ci'an. However Cixi performed a palace coup against the regency council and installed herself and Xianfengs first wife as co-regents, who would rule China until her son came of age. After the death of the co-empress, Cixi ruled China alone until 1908, yeah 1908, this woman was a monolith of modern Chinese history and not looked upon too favorably mind you. Cixi's was an opium addict which is shocking given the incredible power grab moves she made and the amount of dominance she held over the Qing dynasty. Many historians believe she stuck to an opium maintenance dose that prevented both impairment and withdrawal. Anyways she will be a large part of the story in the future, but I just wanted to give you a taste of her now. Meanwhile in China countless disasters were occurring both man made and from mother nature. The high government office of the Qing dynasty which was filled by those who had to pass the rigorous imperial examinations, well that system had guaranteed the competence of the ruling class, but something had changed. Now anyone who had around 800 pounds could get around the examinations and this led a flood of mediocrities, albeit rich ones to come to power. These people proved to be unequal to the responsibilities they had simply purchased and the once industrious and highly educated Qing bureaucracy decayed rapidly. Adding to this was a horrible natural disaster. In 1856 the Huang He River overflowed and destroyed thousands of acres of rice paddies. The capital began to starve and with such a drastic problem came drastic solutions. As had happened to China countless times before, the decay of the Imperial court combined with famine amongst the people would lead to one if not the worst rebellion in human history. Now I would to stipulate this here, there is going to be two large events that will both require a number of episodes each, but both events overlap. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864 and the second opium war of 1856-1860. I will be covering both separately and in depth, beginning with the second opium war than the Taiping Rebellion afterwards. However it's impossible to talk about one without the other, so I will sprinkle information here and there and apologize for the tease. Now the Taiping Rebellion is a colossal event in modern Chinese history. It began in the southeastern province of Guangxi. At its zenith the Taiping rebels controlled 17 provinces in south and central China. It was the most destructive civil war in human history causing massive hardship via military action, religio-political repress and retaliations and wide scale famine as a result of mother nature. All told the estimations for deaths because of this civil war are unreal, somewhere between 20 to 30 million people.  Now like I said I will have an entire mini series on the Taiping Rebellion, so I will not be going into any fine detail, but for now I want to at least explain a bit about why it is going on in the background. The leader of the movement was a man named Hong Xiuquan, the 4th son of a hard working rural family in Guangdong. His family was Hakka, they are a minority group in southern China with a unique culture that differed from Han Chinese. Hong's family did everything they could to get enough money so their son could get a good education and attempt to pass the first imperial examination in order to become part of the scholar-gentry class. Hong failed his first two attempts and was left humiliated so he left home and went to Canton where he hoped to continue his studies in order to pass a third time around. In Canton Hong came across Protestant missionaries and studied some of the bible under them. When Hong attempted the imperial exam for a third time he failed yet again and because of this he had a nervous breakdown. Hong began to suffer delirium and a series of dreams or what he called visions that would change his life and that of China. He found himself talking with an older bearded man with golden hair and a younger man whom he referred to as “elder brother”. The younger man gave him a magical sword and taught him how to slay demons. Now as I may have mentioned in a previous episode my first degree is in neurobehavioral sciences, but you don't need a degree in the field of psychology to know Hong probably was schizophrenic. At first he did not associate these weird visions with anything else nor act out, instead he worked for 6 years as a village schoolteacher, still studying to give the imperial examination a 4th go. In 1843 Hong failed the imperial examination a 4th time and it broke him. His ambition to become a member of the scholar Gentry class was shattered and he suffered a full nervous breakdown. He apparently was catatonic for a month and would come out of this stupor sporadically screaming things like “kill the demons”. These demons he spoke of he later identified as the traditional Chinese gods and the Emperor of the Qing dynasty. As he gradually recovered from his breakdown, Hong began to reread Christian texts until he came to the sudden realization that the men in his visions were God and Jesus. With some quasi logically thinking, he began to explain to himself that he failed the imperial examination because he had a greater purpose and because he referred to Jesus as Elder brother in his dreams, he must be the brother of Jesus. Yes folks, Hong Xiuquan the self proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ. Hong returned to Canton in 1847 to study the bible more thoroughly under an american southern baptist missionary named Isaacher Roberts. Shortly after he relocated to eastern Guangxi in a rugged area known as Thistle mountain where he began preaching and developing a new doctrine. Many converts flocked to Hong, notably many Hakka's and other minority groups, hell even triads joined in. The triads of course had inner motivations such as wanting to overthrow the Manchu and reclaim the ming dynasty. Hong afterall was saying they all had to destroy the demons and restore China on the path of righteousness. Now again I don't want to get into the finer details, but in 1851 Hong began a rebellion using thousands of his converts known as the God Worshippers. Hong's doctrine was that of opium abstinence and he attracted countless opium addicts to his flock and helped cure them of their addiction. In many ways the Taiping movement was something like a 12 step program for recovering addicts, but it also encompassed so much more. It including communalism, socialism, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor Robinhood mentality and it was quite Marxist. Hong had his forces take all the plunder and funds and pooled it in a common treasury shared equally by members of the collective. Hong advocated to abolish private ownership of land and impose the death penalty on those trying to hold onto their wealth. He also made a long list of taboos including alcohol, gambling, tobacco, prostitution, concubinage, the pig trade and other forms of slavery. And before any of you start screaming at your headphones, by far and large many including Hong did not follow these rules, like I said it was very Marxist, haha shots fired. Hong called his movement the Taiping Tianguo “heavenly kingdom of the great peace” and named himself the heavenly king. The Taiping talk of expropriating land scared the hell out of Beijing and even Queen Victoria who received news of the rebellion. The obvious actions took place, the emperor sent forces to quell the insurrection in guangxi province. The emperor sent Zhen Zuchen at the ripe age of 67 to exterminate the rebels. Zhen was a devout Buddhist, but he respected the god worshippers and targeted the Triads. By 1850 China had suffered 4 years of famine, right at the time the emperor began to escalate his attacks on the Taiping. Because of  Zhen's choice of only targeting triads, the emperor choose to bring out of retirement and disgrace none other than Lin Zexu. Lin Zexu was given the task of eliminated the Taiping, but at the ripe age of also 67 he died while en route to Guangxi. Lin Zexu never got his last hurrah chance to redeem himself. So by 1851 the Qing forces performed horribly and were repulsed from Thistle Mountain by the Taiping rebels who were armed with pikes and halberds for the most part. Cool side note, women fought alongside men for the Taiping and there was a real attempt at equality amongst the sexes, keyword attempt. Hong eventually adapted the ten commandments for Chinese sensibilities. He named the emperor a false god in his first commandment and added complete obedience to himself and his officers as the 4th. The commandments led Hongs rebel group to become a bonafide theocracy. By the fall of 1851 the Taiping ranks had grown to a whopping million, mostly built up from starving peasants fleeing famine torn areas of Guangxi. The Qing sent forces against them in Thistle mountain only to lose each time. Ironically a major reason the Taiping kept winning battles may have been  because of their opium ban. Some sources estimate the Qing military engaging the rebels in this region may have been suffering 90% opium addiction rates, which is insane if thats true. Regardless by september 25th of 1851, Hong felt confident enough to move out and this led his army to conquer vast amounts of territory. By January 12th of 1853 Hong's forces took the city of Wuchang after blowing up its gates and massacring all the Manchu people they could find deeming them demons. At this point Hong set his eyes on a very grand prize, the old capital of China, Nanjing. Nanjing was being defended by only 7000 Machus alongside 6000 Qing regulars. Hong tossed 80,000 men and women soldiers into a siege of Nanjing on february 28th and after two weeks they blew a hole it Nanjings walls. Now I don't want to spoil anymore and honestly everything I brutally summarized will be covered much much more indepth, but what you need to know is Hong established his own capital, the heavenly kingdom in Nanjing. He builds up his forces even more, performs wide scale reforms and creates a very large administration. The Taiping become a very real threat to Beijing and honestly could have overthrown the Qing dynasty at multiple points. The Qing for their part in the later 1850's were not only dealing with the bloodiest civil war the world had ever seen, but we're fighting western forces cause the second opium war was raging. And that is what I am building towards folks, trying to lay this rather insane 3d chess table of stuff going on simultaneously. Now I said it before, but much like the Treaty of Versailles, the Treaty of Nanjing caused more problems than it solved and simply led to another war. China was humiliated by the conditions of the treaty, it surrendered her symbolic and practical forms of sovereignty to Britain. That bitterness was simmering since 1842 and like a powder keg would eventually explode in 1856. In february of 1856, a french priest named Abbe Auguste Chapdelaine, god the old french names are dreadful haha, well Abbe was converting a village called Xilin in the province of Guangxi, ironically in the center of the Taiping rebel control.  So Mr Abbe was arrested and imprisoned, they tossed him in a cage and set it up in the village square. Chapdelaine was in violation of Chinese law because he was performing missionary work in China's interior. Another thing that did not help his cause was the fact he shared the same beliefs as the Taiping…well I mean not exactly mind you he was a catholic and the Taiping were on a more protestant footing, but tomato tomato. In fact Mr Abbe and the other Catholic missionaries were appalled by the bastardized proto protestant movement of the Taiping and they actually supported the Qing rule. Abbe was at the wrong place and wrong time so to say. On February 29th of 1856, Abbe was beheaded, dismembered and eviscerated by his executioners whom the rather hysterical French press claimed later took pieces of Abbe and cooked it and ate it, specifically his heart. Historians agree that the cannibalism story here was most likely urban legend.  The French representative at Canton, Comte de Courcy was powerless and furious. He began sending letters to Cantons viceroy, Ye Mingchen, but took no military action to avenge the death of the priest. It seems Ye Mingchen believed the French had no stomach for a fight, so he sent Comte an insulting reply to his letters explaining that that atrocity was a simple case of mistaken identity “Chapdelaine dressed and spoke like a Chinese, nobody thought him to be french”. Well the French would not be alone in their grievances with the Qing. On October 8th, the 127 ton lorcha, the Arrow, a hybrid ship, it had a British hull but Chinese junk sails, was registered in Hong Kong as a British vessel. But in reality it was owned by a Chinese merchant and manned by a crew of 14 Chinese. Well the Arrow docked in Canton with a cargo of rice from Macao en route for Hong Kong. The Arrow's figurehead captain was a 21 year old Belfast native named Thomas Kennedy. His role on board was literally just to make the ship seem British owned and operated as British vessels held privileges because of the Treaty of Nanjing.  Well on that day, Kennedy was not aboard the arrow, he had gone over to another lorcha captained by another figurehead captain named John Leach. Also aboard was Charles Earl, the captain of the Chusan. At 8am the friends were having breakfast when they noticed 2 large Qing warships flying the emperors flag, carrying 60 Qing marines, the ship was heading towards the Arrow. Qing officials boarded the Arrow and arrested her Chinese crew, bound them all and tossed them onto a Qing warship. Leach, Earl and Kennedy jumped into a sampan and rowed towards the warship. To make the situation a bit more fun, a Portuguese lorcha nearby stated later in testimony the Arrow had not had its Union Jack flying. Kennedy would claim the Qing marines pulled down the Union Jack. Regardless when Kennedy got to the warship he  began protesting their seizure, but the Qing forces simply sent curses his way. Kennedy tried to smooth things over asking if just 2 of his crew could be allowed to stay on the Arrow as caretakers and the Qing officials agreed and handed 2 men over, but took the other 12 away. Now the Arrow might seem an unlikely prize for the Qing to seize since it was just carrying rice, but the Arrow had a dark past so to say. The Arrow had been built by the Chinese as a cargo ship, but it had been captured by pirates then recaptured by Cantons viceroy, Ye Mingchen who sold it at an auction to a comprador employed by a British firm. The comprador registered the Arrow as a British ship, but something the new owner did not look into was changing the existing crew of the ship which included 3 pirates. The Qing would use the presence of these pirates as a justification for seizing 12 of the crew. Later it would turn out the registration had also expired, so by that technicality it was not a British ship at the time also, don't you hate getting pulled over? Kennedy went crying about the seizure to the acting British consul, Harry Parkes who was the consular official of 4 out of the 5 ports opened by the treaty of Nanjing. The problem of Arrow's status did not deter Parkes who immediately went on the offensive. Parkes ranted about “the gross insult and violation of national rights the Chinese had committed”. Parkes began arguing about the treaty requiring the Chinese to first ask permission before arresting a Chinese citizen serving on a British registered ship. Parkes demanded that all 12 of the crew be handed over immediately. The Qing commander explained that one of the sailors was the father of a notorious pirate and suspected other of the crew to be pirates, hence he would hold them. When Parkes persisted in his demands, one of the Qing officials slapped him, uh oh.  The humiliated Parkes, returned to the British consulate and wrote a letter to Ye Mingchen who ontop of being the viceroy of Canton was the viceroy of Guangxi, Guangdong and Imperial commissioner in charge of foreign affairs. “I hasten therefore to lay the case before your excellency Ye, confident that your superior judgment will lead you at once to admit that an insult so publicly committed must be equally publicly atoned. I therefore request your excellency that the men who have been carried away from the Arrow be returned by the captain to that vessel in my presence and if accused of any crime they may then be conveyed to the British consulate, were in conjunction with proper officers deputed by your excellency for the purpose, I shall be prepared to investigate the case”. Now Ye Mingchen was not the kind of Qing bureaucrat to whom adhered to lets say, the fine points of international law. Ye Mingchen had crushed the Taiping rebels within his two provinces of control with great brutality. He had executed every captured Taiping rebel along with their wives and children, sheesh. It is said in Canton alone the butchery was around 200 Taiping per day. Parkes also sent word to his superior, Sir John Bowring, the governor of Hong Kong. Parkes told him the crewmen were flying the Union Jack and deserved the same rights and protections as British subjects. Well Mr. Bowring was super excited at the opportunity that the Arrow's seizure had provided, he sent word back to Parks “cannot we use the opportunity and carry the city question? If so, I will come up with the whole fleet”. That fleet would consist of 16 men of war and 3 steamships all docked at Hong Kong harbor. Bowring wanted to at least be given permission to move out of the factories and set up shop within Canton proper as pertaining to the treaty of Nanjing. However that part of the treaty was written out properly in English while the Chinese translation literally stated instead that the foreigners and Chinese should remain segregated. The justification for this, we shall call it translation error, was the fact the Qing officials argued there was a ton of xenophobia in Canton. If the British came to live amongst the Cantonese, some might attack or even kill the British, thus segregation was for their protection. Lord Palmerston had given orders not to push the issue of British housing in Canton because he did not think the risks were even worth the reward, but his representatives it seems ignored these orders.  After two days, Ye Mingchen responded to Parkes letter stating he could free 9 out of the 12 crew, but insisted on keeping the remaining three because they were former pirates. As for the Arrow, Ye claimed the captured crew swore an oath that the ship was Chinese made and owned. Ye sent the 9 crew with the letter as a show of good faith. Now at this point it seems obvious Parkes was looking to make a diplomatic point more so than get back the crew cause he refused to accept custody of them. Instead Parkes sent another letter to Bowring in Hong Kong suggesting the British should retaliate by seizing a Chinese junk, particularly one that was involved in grabbing the arrow. On october 14th, the British gunboat Coramandel boarded a Chinese junk without a fight and towed it to Whampoa. Turns out the British did not really think things through, as the ship ended up being a private craft, not owned by the Qing government. Ye Mingchen simply ignored the matter. Bowring then took the chance to inspect the registration of the Arrow, something Parkes had failed to do. Bowring soon discovered Arrows registry as a British ship had expired on september 27th, so by that technicality, the Qing had not violated British territoriality by seizing her. Despite Bowring learning the truth of the matter, this did not change his determination to goad Ye Mingchen into action. Bowring told Parkes to write a letter to the viceroy again on october 21st. This time the letter was an ultimatum. Ye Mingchen was given 24 hours to free all 12 crewmen and to provide an official apology and promise to respect all British shipping in China. If Ye did not comply “her majesty's naval officers will have recourse to force you to compel complete satisfaction”. Ye Mingchen was in a pickle, while he knew full well the British backed up their threats he also needed to save face. So Ye returned all of the crew, but refused to apologize and offered that in the future he would only consult with foreign interlopers over criminals like the Arrow's pirates. Ye wrote to Parkes “Hereafter if any lawless characters conceal themselves on board foreign lorchas, you, the said Consul, shall of course be informed of the same by declaration in order that you may act with the Chinese authorities in the management of such affairs,”. Ye also however offered a compromise to avoid similar incidents in the future by adding “Hereafter, Chinese officers will on no account without reason seize and take into custody the people belonging to foreign lorchas, but when Chinese subjects build for themselves vessels, foreigners should not sell registers to them… for it will occasion confusion between native and foreign ships, and render it difficult to distinguish between them.”. Well Ye's response was just what Parkes and Bowring needed to commence hostilities and that is just what they did. On october 23rd, Parkes ordered Rear Admiral Michael Seymour to seize and destroy the 4 barrier forts 5 miles south of Canton on the pearl river. The Coromandal was the first to fire upon one of the forts, the first shot of the second opium war. Two of the forts fired back on the British fleet before ultimately surrendering. 5 Chinese defenders died and they would be the first casualties of the war. Rear Admiral Seymour placed blame on the Chinese for the casualties reporting to Parkes “loss of four or five killed on the part of the Chinese [was] solely arising from their ill-judged resistance to our force.”. Seymours easy victory bolstered Parkes war mongering and drove him to bring the war straight to Ye Mingchen. Parkes wrote to Seymour “should Ye still be contumacious, I think that the residence of his excellency, which is not far from the waterside, should also in that case feel the effects of bombardment”. Yes this guy was pretty much an asshole.  I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me.  Well things got out of hand pretty quickly. The arrow incident while small in scale was just a match to ignite a growing powder keg. As Gandalf said “the board is set, the pieces are moving”. The second opium war had begun.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Do bamboos set themselves on fire?, published by Malmesbury on September 19, 2022 on LessWrong. Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip. As we all know, the best place to have a kung-fu fight is a bamboo forest. There are just so many opportunities to grab pieces of bamboos and manufacture improvised weapons, use them to catapult yourself in the air and other basic techniques any debutant martial artist ought to know. A lesser-known fact is that bamboo-forest fights occur even when the cameras of Hong-Kong filmmakers are not present. They may even happen without the presence of humans at all. The forest itself is the kung-fu fight. It's often argued that humans are the worst species on Earth, because of our limitless potential for violence and mutual destruction. If that's the case, bamboos are second. Bamboos are sick. The evolution of bamboos is the result of multiple layers of shear brutality, with two imbricated levels of war, culminating in an apocalypse of combustive annihilation. At least, according to some hypotheses. Bamboo wars: bamboo-made famine Recommended soundtrack for this part If you enter a bamboo forest and wait for a long time, you may have the chance to witness their strange mating ritual. And by "a long time", I mean you'll probably have to wait for decades before you see anything happen at all. But eventually, all the bamboos in the forest will start to produce an absolutely massive amount of seeds, all at the same time. And then they all die. The swarm of seeds will give birth to a new generation of bamboos, and it will take another few decades before you see any flower again. Based on historical texts relating the event, we can estimate that some species like Phyllostachis bambusoides flower only once every 120 years: That's really puzzling. Wouldn't a species with a shorter cycle, hence a higher growth rate, take over the forest exponentially fast? Why would bamboos wait for so long before blooming? The extension of flowering cycles to ridiculous lengths probably happened in two stages. The first stage is about bamboos fighting their predators, the second is about bamboos fighting each other. Then, there is a speculative bonus third stage about bamboos destroying every form of life that has the misfortune to be nearby. Imagine you're a bamboo. You just released a batch a freshly-baked seeds, only to discover that all the animals in the forest are eating them. You could respond by making more seeds, but then the population of predators would just become bigger and still eat everything. That's when it becomes useful to increase the gap between two flowering events. Instead of producing n seeds every year, you produce 3n seeds every three years. This way, all the predators with a lifespan below 3 years will starve between two flowerings, so their population remains low. When the day comes to release your seeds, there are so many of them that the small predator population can only eat a little part of it, until they are simply not hungry any more. And then, they should leave enough seeds to start a new generation of bamboos. The predators might reproduce like crazy after the feast, but it's ok: your descendant will take so long to flower that most of their descendants will have died of starvation by then. (Now you can stop imagining you're a bamboo.) This destructive but effective phenomenon is known as "predator satiation". And when we say satiation, we are not kidding. Here we love beautiful stories of cute little animals, so here are some from the archives: "The seed grew in clusters and resembled oats, and all the animals and fowls got rolling fat from eating this seed" (Hughes 1951), "I have known of village cattle gorging themselves on the fruit to such an extent as to die subsequently from the effects of overeating" (Thom 1935) and so on. Alr...

In episode 47, I am once again speaking to British Nordic Walking National Trainer, Steve Ellis, from Malmesbury, Wiltshire.  Steve founded Gemini Outdoor Adventure Ltd, and is a qualified ‘Mountain Leader' and ‘International Mountain Leader.  Steve is about to move to New Zealand, where he will continue his work as a National Trainer.  During our chat he mentions two other National Trainers, who have been fantastic guests on this show.  Steve was trained initially by Karen Ingram, who has appeared twice to discuss how Nordic Walking can help reduce Back Pain, as well as explaining everything you need to know about Nordic Walking Poles.  Catherine Hughes, who is CEO of British Nordic Walking has shared her knowledge about the history of Nordic Walking. Steve mentions INWA on several occasions, which is the term used for the International Nordic Walking Association, of which British Nordic Walking is a member.  Steve joins me today to explain what is involved in the role of National Trainer and how he came to qualify.Find An Instructor Near Youhttps://britishnordicwalking.org.uk/apps/store-locatorIf you have enjoyed this podcast, I would be very grateful if you could show your support by buying me a coffee!  This enables me to continue producing these podcasts, as it will go towards covering the server and podcast platform licenses.   Not only is Nordic Walking a whole body workout, but it is also one of the safest and most sociable way to exercise.  Classes always finish up in a cafe enjoying a coffee together. Many thanks, Mary xI'm Mary Tweed, a British Nordic Walking instructor with Nordic Walking East Anglia. If you wish to share your story, do get in touch by emailing hello@walkingonairpodcast.co.uk#NordicWalking #WeAreNordicWalking #BritNW #BritishNordicWalking #INWA #NordicWalkingEastAnglia #onwf #nordicwalkinguk #walx #nordicwalkingaustralia #nordixx #urbanpoling #ANWA #anwaUSA #nordicwalkingnewzealand #nordicpolewalking #nordicpolewalkingnovascotia #nordicacademy #polewalking #lekipoles #exelpoles #fitnesswalking #skiwalking #polewalking  #greengym #mentalhealth #mentalwellbeing   #weightloss #posture #useitorloseit   #activeageing #nutritiousmovement  #exerciseanywhere  #BetterHealth #GreatOutdoors #fitnessforallages #walkwithease #weightmanagement #inspiration #survival #inspiringpeople #positivethinking #positivethoughts Support the showSupport the show

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: I only believe in the paranormal, published by Malmesbury on May 24, 2022 on LessWrong. (Cross-posted from Telescopic Turnip) Recommended soundtrack for this post The Wiktionary defines paranormal as “that (ostensibly) cannot be explained by what scientists know”. This is to be distinguished from Real Science, which is about – wait, this definition of paranormal corresponds exactly to what scientific researchers spend their time investigating in their labs. Put this way, every researcher is a paranormal researcher, and science labs are places where an unusual level of paranormal activity occurs. I'm talking about really weird spooky paranormal phenomena like B-form eDNA flipping into Z-form to make lattices within bacterial biofilms. And don't even ask me about The Vault. Over centuries, many macroscopic magical phenomena have been explained, leading to the impression that magic has disappeared. But look at life in a microscope, and everything is magical and mysterious again. And not only the Universe is full of magical phenomena; human wizards are also surprisingly common. They are walking among us. Magic comes in roughly two forms: the one where wizards can predict the future, and the one where wizards can do impossible things. Compare climate change and homeopathy. Most climate experts agree that climate change is human-made, so if you Believe in Science, you should believe in climate change. This is a terrible argument. I would reply that homeopathy experts also agree that homeopathy is effective. They have diplomas, they publish in scientific journals, and they even follow the scientific method. They may fall for p-hacking and publication bias, but so do people in every other field. However, only one of these fields involves actual magic. In 2013, powerful wizards from the IPCC predicted how sea levels would change over the next few years. Now that the next few years have passed, we can compare the predictions to the most recent measurements, and it appears that their predictions were correct. This is divination. They are literally oracles. I have no understanding of the underlying climatology, but I saw them perform magic, so I'm inclined to believe their reports. On the other hand, I don't believe in homeopathy – precisely because I've never seen homeopaths perform anything even remotely paranormal or mysterious. Like, you know, miraculously curing diseases. Homeopathy is boringly normal. Likewise, if you just told me about the equations of quantum mechanics, I wouldn't believe you. It makes no sense, the implications about the world are bonkers, and it doesn't even fit with our understanding of gravity. But quantum mechanics predict that there is a way to cut through metal by casting a beam of light. I've seen it with my own eyes. This is straight out of a fantasy book. So I have to admit that there is at least something right about quantum mechanism – it has to be a correct, if incomplete, description of reality. I think this highlights (another) problem with our scientific institutions. There is a separation between fundamental sciences, which produce knowledge, and applied sciences, which put that knowledge into application. I like to see applied sciences as an essential part of the whole knowledge-production machine – not in the sense that people figure out new things while optimizing the product, but in the sense that the very fact that applications exist is what ultimately gives the method all its substance. It's a far deeper proof than p-values and Bayes factors. In summary, if you are not sure whether to believe a claim, ask yourself what kind of magic the author can perform. (thanks Justis for feedback on this post) This was not always the case. Earlier IPCC forecasts were a bit exaggerated, but it seems that they've got their act together since then...

Kev is trapped in Malmesbury, no petrol, no heating, no oven even! Send pizzas now! We talk about seeing in black and white, what clients think of our 'smaller cameras', the new miracle sound box from Tascam, having your camera converted for infrared and camera system looks; is there such a thing? BIG show news for an event coming up we'd love you to join us at, Kev sorts out some exposure lock problems and we talk about making pictures during times of crisis in the news. The extraordinary street photographer Matt Stuart is our guest and he also is the feature of Book of the Month with 'Think like a street photographer'.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Conspiracy-proof archeology, published by Elmer of Malmesbury on February 27, 2022 on LessWrong. This is a cross-post from Telescopic Turnip. There is a lot you can learn about history by asking random Frenchmen about World War Two. Which army contributed the most to the pwnage of Germany? According to Ifop who conducted the survey in 2014, it's the United States (49%), followed by the USSR (23%), and Britain (18%). Now I don't expect these numbers to enlighten your understanding of the Past; the detail that makes them interesting is that Ifop had asked the exact same question three times already: in 2004, in 1994 and in 1945, back when people remembered the war not from textbooks but from echoic memory. Here are the results: Ask the same question about history several times, and it becomes meta-history. This survey caught live footage of collective memory being overwritten by the victors. Presumably, this happened in a somewhat liberal democracy with a somewhat free press, maybe with a little help from entertainment. It didn't require a totalitarian power deliberately distorting history to manipulate the masses. But the masses were still manipulated somehow. Of course, for most of history before the quantum revolution, Europe was ruled by totalitarian powers deliberately distorting history to manipulate the masses. If French people's beliefs about the Red Army could drift so easily in the late 20th century, then it's hard to trust anything coming from the official records of divine-right monarchs. You can find historical documents and artifacts and get an idea of what most likely happened, but if you allow for the possibility that the power structures of the time could fabricate documents and plant artifacts as much as they wanted, you will never be truly convinced. Zero-day breaches in the laws of the Universe In the world of computer hacking, there is a kind of security breach called a zero-day. Zero-days happen when an attacker discovers a breach that the developers themselves are not aware of – it has been known for zero days. So there is nothing they can do to prevent an attack. The 2010 Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear program relied on no less than four different zero-days in Microsoft Windows – not something your typical basement h4xx0r can do. In essence, finding a zero-day boils down to understanding how some part of the computer system works, finding a specific thing that does not work the way everyone else thinks it does, and use it to accomplish something previously thought impossible. This is not so different from what happens when a scientist discovers a new phenomenon in nature. Everybody thinks the Universe works in a certain way, then someone does an experiment which clearly deviates from the predictions, and our model of the Universe has to be patched. Such scientific zero-days make it possible to perform experimental tests of history, in a way the most powerful conspiracies and divine-right monarchs could not anticipate. The only assumption is that the conspiracies/monarchs didn't have access to any futuristic technology or yet-unknown scientific knowledge. Read-only windows to the past To test history experimentally, we can exploit the delay between scientific discovery and engineering. First, people discover a phenomenon and come up with ways to measure and record it. Later, people devise new technologies to modify and engineer the phenomenon. Between the two, there is a period that I will call the read-only window: During the ROW, historical evidence can be recorded, but not manipulated. For example, photography was invented in the early 1800s, and the first photomontages were produced in the mid-1850s. So the ROW for photography lasted for about 50 years, after what it became read/write, and of course the powerful used it for political m...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Calibration proverbs, published by Elmer of Malmesbury on January 11, 2022 on LessWrong. Cross-post from Telescopic Turnip. Every problem is a calibration problem. That's why most advice is basically useless: it tells you what to do, but doesn't tell you when to stop. Therefore, the best pieces of advice are calibration advice. What we need is a metric to know if we are doing well, or if we should change our habits (and in which direction). For example, here are two poor pieces of advice: "You should spend more time reading blogs, because compared to traditional media, bloggers have more freedom to communicate in original ways, and are more accountable when they say something false." "You should spend less time reading blogs, because keeping up with a big pile of subscriptions takes a lot of time and makes you anxious." Neither of these is really useful. Instead, we can produce one piece of calibration advice: "After catching up with your backlog of blog posts, ask yourself what you remember out of it. If you can't say what half of the posts were about, you should probably clean up your subscriptions." Of course, that doesn't sound like the timeless advice my grandmother received from her grandmother. To make it compelling, we need to make it rhyme: "Before you subscribe to another blog, check what you took home from your backlog." Now that sounds like ancient wisdom. Thereafter is my humble attempt at writing calibration proverbs. As a non-native, English's pronunciation is still a mystery to me, so the rhymes might be a bit wonky. Anyways, may these proverbs contribute to making 2022 a better year than 2021. "He who thinks a claim by evidence is backed, can he predict the effect size just from the abstract?" "Only when you leave a long conversation, you can tell if it warranted your apprehension." "If you don't enjoy the taste of tea, seek how to infuse it properly." "Always check for bikes when you get out of your car. Always." "When checking the source teaches you something new, the source of the source you should check too." "One hour with your kids is worth two hours online, according to Han et al twenty twenty one." "Man whose roommates wear t-shirts in winter, would better calm down with the goddamn heater." What other calibration proverbs should we transmit to our grandchildren? Thanks to Justis for the proofreading and rhyme consulting. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Este episodio se titula – "¿Y Esos Pies?" La Razón qué lleva ese título es esto . . .¿Has oído alguna vez el canto "Jerusalén", cuya letra proviene de un poema de William Blake? La canción fue interpretada por la banda de rock progresivo de la década de los 70's, Emerson, Lake & Palmer en su álbum, Brain Salad Surgery.La canción empieza con la letra . . .¿Y esos pies en tiempos antiguos - Caminaron sobre las verdes montañas de Inglaterra? ¿Y fue el Santo Cordero de Dios – Visto en los pastos agradables de Inglaterra?Un misterioso acertijo para aquellos que no están conscientes de las antiguas leyendas que rodean la entrada de la fe cristiana a Inglaterra.Durante siglos, Inglaterra se enorgullecía de que la iglesia allí fue fundada por Jesús mismo. Esta historia fue invocada en disputas Británicas con Francia sobre su preeminencia y mas tarde en afirmaciones Protestantes de que Roma no tenía nada que ver con la iglesia Inglesa. No está claro cuánto creía esta historia el místico, artista y poeta William Blake, pero su pregunta sigue siendo famosa.En el Concilio de Basilea de 1434, el Concilio decretó: "Las iglesias de Francia y España deben ceder en el punto de antigüedad y precedencia a la de Gran Bretaña, ya que esta iglesia fue fundada por José de Arimatea inmediatamente después de la pasión de Cristo".¡Perdón!, ¿que?Bueno, entonces à Todos sabemos que esto se supone que es un podcast de historia, no un podcast con vuelos salvajes de fantasía, donde vamos a repetir todas las locuras que la gente ha creído. Entonces, ¿por qué comparto esto? Es ilustrativo de cuántas, tal vez, incluso la mayoría, de las iglesias del mundo antiguo que reclamaron un origen e identidad especial. A modo de ilustración, echemos un vistazo a las leyendas que rodean como Inglaterra abrazo a la Fe.Según la leyenda bien establecida, José de Arimatea, el líder judío que le pidió a Pilato que enterrara el cuerpo de Jesús, era también era el tío de María. Cuando María, José y Jesús a los 12 años, fueron a Jerusalén para la Pascua, fue en el lugar del tío José donde se alojaron. Algún tiempo después, el tío José llevó al adolescente Jesús en un viaje de comercio de metales a Glastonbury, en Inglaterra. Otras leyendas ponen a Jesús como adulto en Glastonbury, usando sus habilidades de construcción para hacer una casa y trabajar como carpintero de un barco. Las leyendas más antiguas y menos confiables dejan a Jesús en Israel, pero envían al tío José a Gran Bretaña solo 30 años después de la ascensión de Jesús.En el siglo XII, un monje llamado Guillermo de Malmesbury hizo un registro de la historia de la Iglesia en Glastonbury. En la introducción añadida un siglo más tarde, la historia dice que el apóstol Felipe envió a José y otras 11 personas a Gran Bretaña, donde se les permitió construir una iglesia allí. Luego, después de otro siglo, Juan de Glastonbury dijo que José de Arimatea era un antepasado del rey Arturo y portador del Santo Grial a Inglaterra.De acuerdo, basta de leyendas. Lo que si es seguro es que la referencia de Orígenes que el Evangelio fue recibido entre los Británicos a principios del 3º siglo. Y la fe no acababa de llegar allí, ya era ampliamente aceptada. Incluso el apologista Norteafricano Tertuliano escribió en Una Respuesta a los Judíos en algún momento alrededor del año 200 d.C. que la Fe ya había echado raíces y estaba creciendo en Gran Bretaña. El primer historiador de la iglesia Eusebio señala que "algunos apóstoles pasaron por encima del océano a lo que se llaman las Islas Británicas".En el año 43, 2 años después de que Claudio fue aclamado emperador de Roma, 40.000 soldados Romanos finalmente lograron el plan de Julio César de invadir Gran Bretaña. Los tiempos habían cambiado; Claudio invadió la isla principalmente porque pudo, y necesitaba el prestigio de una victoria militar. Después de haber aterrizado en la costa de Kent, las legiones sometieron a Gales e Inglaterra, pero se encontraron sobre extendidas después de algunas victorias contra los Pictos de Escocia.Los Celtas Británicos se adaptaron rápidamente al estilo de vida de sus conquistadores Romanos. Las lenguas Celtas fueron abandonadas en favor del Latín, y los Celtas comenzaron a inclinarse ante los dioses Romanos.Fue debido a esta nueva religión Británica Romanizada que aprendemos el nombre de un Cristiano Británico: Albán.Albán era un pagano, pero uno amable. Acogió a un sacerdote Cristiano que huía de la persecución en su casa. Cual persecución es incierta, pero el historiador de la iglesia Anglosajona, el Venerable Beda, dice que fue bajo Diocleciano a finales del 3º siglo. No hizo falta mucho tiempo para que la devoción del sacerdote influyera en Albán. Renunció a la idolatría y puso su fe en Cristo. Pero tan pronto como Albán se había arrodillado en oración, los soldados aparecieron en la puerta, habiendo sido informados de la ubicación del sacerdote. El nuevo converso cambió la ropa con el sacerdote. No fue hasta que Albán fue llevado ante el juez que su identidad fue revelada. El juez dijo que Albán soportaría el castigo del sacerdote. Sólo tenía una salida à sacrificar a los ídolos. Albán se negó.El juez preguntó: "¿Cuál es tu familia y tu raza?" Albán respondió: "¿Por qué te preocupa eso? Si quieres saber la verdad sobre mi religión, sabe que soy Cristiano y practico los ritos Cristianos'.El juez le dijo à "¡Exijo saber tu nombre!"Albán le respondió: "Mis padres me llamaron Albán. Y alabo y adoro al Dios vivo y verdadero, que creó todas las cosas".Una vez más el juez le ordenó que sacrificara a los dioses paganos, y de nuevo se negó, diciendo que quien lo hacia estaba "condenado a los dolores del infierno". Después que vieron que los golpes y los azotes no podían hacerlo cambiar de opinión, fue sentenciado a muerte.La historia del martirio de Albán continúa. Si bien es difícil resolver los hechos de la leyenda, su historia nos da una idea de la alta consideración que los mártires fueron dados en la Iglesia primitiva. Supuestamente en el camino a la colina donde Albán iba a ser ejecutado, sus guardias no pudieron cruzar un puente debido a la multitud que se había reunido. Así que Albán abrió un camino en el río como Moisés había separado el Mar Rojo. Esto fue demasiado para su verdugo, que instantáneamente se convirtió en un creyente y se unió a Albán en el bloque donde su cabeza fue quitada de sus hombros.Albán se convirtió en el primer mártir de Gran Bretaña, pero de ninguna manera fue el único mártir. Resulta que Albán y su ex verdugo no fueron los únicos mártires ese día. También murieron otros 2 como mártires.Uno de los desafíos a los que se enfrentan los historiadores al revisar la historia del Cristianismo en Inglaterra es que el sincretismo a menudo parece marcar sus primeros años. El sincretismo se refiere a la mezcla de diferentes cosas. El sincretismo religioso es algo con lo que la Iglesia ha tenido que lidiar desde sus primeros días. En muchos lugares alrededor del Imperio Romano, mientras que el cristianismo suplanto al paganismo, en algunos lugares, las ideas y rituales paganas fueron tomadas y adoptadas por la Iglesia. Los viejos días de fiesta fueron transformados de su origen pagano y renovados para representar las conmemoraciones cristianas, y así sucesivamente. Es en Inglaterra que ese sincretismo destaca. Varios artefactos revelan que la conversión del paganismo a un claro cristianismo del NT fue un proceso lento. Paganos y cristianos adoraban uno al lado del otro en el mismo edificio de Kent. Varias Iglesias Británicas fueron construidas en imitación de templos y santuarios paganos. Un mosaico en Dorset incluye temas paganos y Cristianos. La misma situación aparece en Irlanda, donde estatuas paganas y cristianas se encuentran una al lado de la otra.Si bueno la suposición de la mayoría de los historiadores es que todo esto apunta a un desenfoque sincretista de las líneas entre paganos y cristianos, una posición alternativa ve la proximidad de los elementos paganos y cristianos como evidencia de una notable tolerancia entre los dos grupos. Puede haber sido que los dos grupos compartieron el mismo lugar sin confundir sus creencias.En el año 314, 3 obispos de Gran Bretaña: Eborius de York, Restitutus de Londres y Adelphius de Lincoln, asistieron a un consejo de la iglesia en Arlés, en el sur de la Galia. El Consejo fue llamado a decidir la cuestión de los Donatistas en el Norte de África, que hemos tratado en un episodio anterior. Fue en este consejo que los Donatistas fueron oficialmente etiquetados herejes. Los obispos Británicos también estuvieron presentes en Sardica en el año 343 y en Armininum 16 años más tarde.Que estos líderes de la iglesia británica pudieron asistir a estos consejos sugiere que hubo una organización temprana de la iglesia, mucho antes del Edicto de Milán de Constantino. También significa que tuvieron contacto con la Iglesia en el Continente. El Monasticismo, que encontraría un lugar prominente en Inglaterra, fue un producto de la Iglesia en el Norte de África.El Monasticismo llegó a Inglaterra a través de la obra de Martin de Tours. Martin era un veterano militar de Hungría que, después de su conversión a Cristo, parece tener dificultades para decidir si quería trabajar en una iglesia o en un monasterio. Su verdadera pasión era el evangelismo. Así que predicó a Cristo a los no convertidos y al ascetismo de la vida monasterio a los ya convertidos. Uno de ellos era un Británico llamado Ninian.La historia de Ninian, como tantas de la historia de la iglesia, es un cuento sombrío nublado por leyenda. Ni siquiera estamos seguros de que ese sea su verdadero nombre. Fue misionero a los Pictos en Escocia. Probablemente no fue el primero en llevar el Evangelio al Norte del Muro de Adriano, pero fue el primero en obtener crédito por hacerlo. Martin insistió que varios trabajadores fueran con Ninian para construir un monasterio en Whithorn. El venerable Beda dice que lo llamaron La Casa Blanca. Se convirtió en un centro de actividad monástica, atrayendo a estudiantes de Irlanda y Gales.Necesitando que las legiones defendieran el Imperio de tribus Germánicas hostiles, en el año 407, el Emperador Honorio regreso las legiones al continente. En pocos años, el dominio Romano de Inglaterra fue completamente desmantelado. En menos de una generación casi todos los rastros de la cultura Romana, desde la filosofía hasta la arquitectura estaban en ruinas. Y aunque muchos de los nativos Británicos se regocijaron cuando el Águila se fue volando hacia el sur, ciertamente no apreciaban las consecuencias, ya que oleada tras oleada de invasores entraron en sus tierras. Los Pictos venían al sur de sus casas de las tierras altas. Escoceses invadieron desde Irlanda. Y tal vez me digas, "Espera - Los escoceses son de Escocia, no Irlanda." Y ahí es donde un hecho poco conocido de la historia resulta importante. No se llamaba Escocia en ese momento. Escocia era la palabra usada para los Irlandeses. Cuando invadieron y se establecieron entre los nativos del Norte de Inglaterra, se conoció como la Tierra de los Escoceses.El verdadero cambio para Gran Bretaña llegó cuando los Sajones invadieron desde Alemania. Entonces los Sajones fueron invadidos por los Angles y Ytes de Dinamarca. Las culturas extranjeras invadieron Gran Bretaña, sofocando los últimos vestigios de la cultura Romana. En la región oriental de la isla incluso la cultura Celta casi desapareció.Pero no fueron sólo las armas las que Sajonaron y Anglicizaron a los Británicos. Los nobles Británicos que habían adoptado los caminos Romanos rápidamente "se volvieron Sajones" para que pudieran quedarse con su estatus social. La inmigración cambió el aspecto demográfico de Inglaterra. Sin embargo, a pesar del gran número de europeos del norte que se dirigieron a las costas de Gran Bretaña, muchos Británicos étnicos todavía habitaban la Inglaterra del 5º siglo. Ahora sin infraestructura Romana, la vida cambió. La comunicación con el continente disminuyó. Y con menos interacción con Roma, la iglesia Británica se convirtió en insular. Los historiadores mas antiguos enfatizaron este aislamiento, utilizándolo para explicar la mentalidad independiente que marcaba la Iglesia Inglesa Medieval. Pero resulta que mientras que la comunicación disminuyo, de hecho, no cesó del todo.Así que mientras el Monasticismo creció grandemente en Inglaterra después de que los Romanos se marcharon, y tomó una forma claramente inglesa, no estaba completamente divorciado del Monasticismo practicado en el resto de Europa. Y no pasó mucho tiempo antes de que los monjes Celtas salieran de su aislamiento para llevar el Cristianismo Celta al continente.