Michael Daaboul ~ I Could Do This Forever (Part 4)
(via michaeldaaboul)
Tbh I never read Gifted Kid™ Angst as “I’m no longer special” but more like “I had unrealistically high academic expectations put upon me at a very young age and learned to measure my worth by academic success and as a consequence constantly feel as if I’m not good enough”
Also we never had to study or try very hard in earlier grades, so by the time we get to high school or college, our skills have plateaued and we have no study skills to fall back on whatsoever. We go from excelling with no effort to failing and having no idea how to catch up.
Also, once you are out of school, there are no more academic tests with which to prove your own worth to yourself. This only heightens the sinking sensation of ‘I am not good enough.’
Gifted kid angst also fits neatly into imposter syndrome - if you hit a place where you suddenly start failing (because you never had to work hard to learn things before), imposter syndrome steps in to say “this is proof you were a fake all along! otherwise you’d know how to deal with this!”
Another part of it is (at least for me) that being labeled gifted led to no one looking for or recognizing developmental problems like ADHD. Clearly I was smart, so any failures on my part to demonstrate that had to come from laziness or not applying myself.
all of this, my god,
For me it has major repercussions in later life and fed a lot of my depression. Every failure (and things that weren’t even failures, but just average) had a massive hit to my self worth because throughout school, clever was all I was. I’m lucky that my PhD adviser is very understanding, and makes sure to remind me at our progress meetings that I’m doing very well given how early I am in the course.
(via heyoitsjen)
(via michaeldaaboul)
Arms and Armor From the Islamic World
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (February 10, 2016-January 2, 2017)
This exhibition features a selection of more than three dozen historical examples of Islamic arms and armor, which represent the breadth and depth of The Met’s renowned holdings in this area. Focusing primarily on the courts of the Mamluk and Ottoman sultans, shahs of Iran, and Mughal emperors of India, the exhibition celebrates the publication of Islamic Arms and Armor in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum’s first scholarly volume on the subject.
This exhibit is actually still happening, until December 3!
(via medievalpoc)
This is a video about how people used to walk in the middle ages, and how it changed around the 1500s when people started wearing a different kind of shoes.
This reminds me of something interesting I read in Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork:
“Much of the science of modern orthodontics is devoted to creating - through rubber bands, wires, and braces - the perfect “overbite.” An overbite refers to the way our top layer of incisors hang over the bottom layer, like a lid on a box. This is the ideal human occlusion. The opposite of an overbite is an “edge-to-edge” bite seen in primates such as chimpanzees, where the top incisors clash against the bottom ones, like a guillotine blade.
What the orthodontists don’t tell you is that the overbite is a very recent aspect of human anatomy and probably results from the way we use our table knives. Based on surviving skeletons, this has only been a “normal” alignment of the human jaw for 200 to 250 years in the Western world. Before that, most human beings had an edge-to-edge bite, comparable to apes. The overbite is not a product of evolution - the time frame is far too short. Rather, it seems likely to be a response to the way we cut our food during our formative years. The person who worked this out is Professor Charles Loring Brace (born 1930), a remarkable American anthropologist whose main intellectual passion was Neanderthal man. Over decades, Brace built up the world’s largest database on the evolution of hominid teeth. He possibly held more ancient human jaws in his hand than anyone else in the twentieth century.
As early as the 1960s, Brace had been aware that the overbite needed explaining. Initially, he assumed that it went back to the “adoption of agriculture six or seven thousand years ago.” … But as his tooth database grew, Brace found that the edge-to-edge bite persisted much longer than anyone had previously assumed. In Western Europe, Brace found, the change to the overbite occurred only in the late eighteenth century, starting with “high status individuals.”
Why? There was no drastic alteration to the nutritional components of a high-status diet at this time. … What changed most substantially by the late eighteenth century was not what was eaten but how it was eaten. This marked the time when it became normal in upper- and middle-class circles to eat with a table knife and fork, cutting food into little pieces before it was eaten….
In premodern times, Brace surmises that the main method of eating would have been something he christened “stuff-and-cut.” As the name suggests, it is not the most elegant way to dine. It goes something like this. First, grasp the food in one of your hands. Then clamp the end of it forcefully between your teeth. Finally, separate the main hunk of food from the piece in your mouth, either with a decisive tug of your hand or by using a cutting implement if you have one at hand, in which case you must be careful not to slice your own lips. This was how our ancestors, armed only with a sharpened flint, or, later, a knife, dealt with chewy food, especially meat. The “stuff-and-cut” school of etiquette continued long after ancient times. Knives changed - from iron to steel, from wood-handled to porcelain-handled - but the method remained.
The growing adoption of knife-and-fork eating in the late eighteenth century marked the demise of “stuff-and-cut” in the West. … From medieval to modern times, the fork went from being a weird thing, a pretentious object of ridicule, to being an indispensable part of civilized dining. Instead of stuffing and cutting, people now ate food by pinning it down with the fork and sawing off little pieces with the table knife, popping pieces into the mouth so small that they hardly needed chewing. As knives became blunter, so the morsels generally needed to be softer, reducing the need to chew still further.
Brace’s data suggest that this revolution in table manners had an immediate impact on teeth. He has argued that the incisors - from the Latin incidere, “to cut” - are misnamed. Their real purpose is not to cut but to clamp food in the mouth - as in the “stuff-and-cut” method of eating. “It is my suspicion,” he wrote, “that if the incisors are used in such a manner several times a day from the time that they first begin to erupt, they will become positioned so that they normally occlude edge to edge.” Once people start cutting their food up very small using a knife and fork, and popping the morsels into their mouths, the clamping function of the incisors ceases, and the incisors continue to erupt until the top layer no longer meets the bottom layer: creating an overbite.
We generally think that our bodies are fundamental and unchanging, whereas such things as table manners are superficial: we might change our manners from time to time, but we can’t be changed by them. Brace turned this on its head. Our supposedly normal and natural overbite - this seemingly basic aspect of modern human anatomy - is actually a product of how we behave at the table.
How can we be sure, as Brace is, that it was the cutlery that brought about this change in our teeth? The short answer is that we can’t. Brace’s discovery raises as many questions as it answers. Modes of eating were far more varied than his theory makes room for. Stuff-and-cut was not the only way people ate in preindustrial Europe, and not all food required the incisor’s clamp; people also supped on soups and potages, nibbled on crumbly pies, spooned up porridge and polenta. Why did these soft foods not change our bite much sooner? Brace’s love of Neanderthals may have blinded him to the extent to which table manners, even before the knife and fork, frowned upon gluttonous stuffing. Posidonius, a Greek historian (born c. 135 BC) complained that the Celts were so rude, they “clutch whole joints and bite,” suggesting that polite Greeks did not. Moreover, just because the overbite occurs at the same time as the knife and fork does not mean that one was caused by the other. Correlation is not cause.
Yet Brace’s hypothesis does seem the best fit with the available data. When he wrote his original 1977 article on the overbite, Brace himself was forced to admit that the evidence he had so far marshaled was “unsystematic and anecdotal.” He would spend the next three decades hunting out more samples to improve the evidence base.
For years, Brace was tantalized by the thought that if his thesis was correct, Americans should have retained the edge-to-edge bite for longer than Europeans, because it took several decades longer for knife-and-fork eating to become accepted in America. After years of fruitless searching for dental samples, Brace managed to excavate an unmarked nineteenth-century cemetery in Rochester, New York, housing bodies from the insane asylum, workhouse, and prison. To Brace’s great satisfaction, he found that out of fifteen bodies whose teeth and jaws were intact, ten - two-thirds of the sample - had an edge-to-edge bite.
What about China? “Stuff-and-cut” is entirely alien to the Chinese way of eating… The highly chopped style of Chinese food and the corresponding use of chopsticks had become commonplace around nine hundred years before the fork and knife were in normal use in Europe, by the time of the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD), starting with the aristocracy and gradually spreading to the rest of the population. If Brace was correct, then the combination of tou and chopsticks should have left its mark on Chinese teeth much earlier than the European table knife.
The supporting evidence took a while to show up. On his eternal quest for more samples of teeth, Brace found himself in the Shanghai Natural History Museum. There, he saw the pickled remains a graduate student from the Song dynasty era, exactly the time when chopsticks became the normal method of transporting food from plate to mouth.
The fellow was an aristocratic young man, an official, who died, as the label explained, around the time he would have sat for the imperial examinations. Well, there he was, in a vat floating in a pickling fluid with his mouth wide open and looking positively revolting. But there it was: the deep overbite of the modern Chinese!
Over subsequent years, Brace has analyzed many Chinese teeth and found that - with the exception of peasants, who retain an edge-to-edge bite well into the twentieth century - the overbite does indeed emerge 800-1000 years sooner in China than in Europe. The differing attitude to knives in East and West had a graphic impact on the alignment of our jaws.”
It’s a rather interesting book. It’s got other interesting stuff in it, e.g. about knife culture in Medieval Europe:
“In medieval and Renaissance Europe, you carried your own knife everywhere with you and brought it out at mealtimes when you needed to. Almost everyone had a personal eating knife in a sheath dangling from a belt. The knife at a man’s girdle could equally well be used for chopping food or defending himself against enemies. Your knife was as much a garment - like a wristwatch now - as a tool. A knife was a universal possession, often your most treasured one. Like a wizard’s wand in Harry Potter, the knife was tailored to its owner. Knife handles were made of brass, ivory, rock crystal, glass, and shell; of amber, agate, mother of pearl, or tortoiseshell. They might be carved or engraved with images of babies, apostles, flowers, peasants, feathers, or doves. You would no more eat with another person’s knife than you would brush your teeth today with a stranger’s toothbrush. You wore your knife so habitually that - as with a watch - you might start to regard it as a part of yourself and forget it was there. A sixth-century text (St. Benedict’s Rule) reminded monks to detach knives from their belts before they went to bed, so they didn’t cut themselves in the night.
There was a serious danger of this because knives then, with their daggerlike shape, really were sharp. They needed to be, because they might be called upon to tackle everything from rubbery cheese to a crusty loaf. Aside from clothes, a knife was the one possession every adult needed. It has been often assumed, wrongly, that knives, as violent objects, were exclusively masculine. But women wore them too. A painting from 1640 by H.H. Kluber depicts a rich Swiss family preparing to eat a meal of meat, bread, and apples. The daughters of the family have flowers in their hair, and dangling from their red dresses are silvery knives, attached to silken ropes tied around their waists. With a knife close to your body at all times, you would have been very familiar with its construction.
…
The habit of carrying your own sharp knife with you was as much a bedrock of Western culture as Christianity, the Latin alphabet, and the rule of law. Until, suddenly, it wasn’t.”
Also, having special knives made for silver for fish was originally a practical thing, because before stainless steel lemon would react with steel knives and make the fish taste bad.
This is very cool. Thank you @whyisitfollowthespiders for the tag!
nerdy tags below
If you don’t think this is the coolest shit gtfo of my face, this dude’s like the Indiana Jones of Teeth, Indiana Jones and the Quest for the Holy Overbite. Holy crap this is awesome
(via durnesque-esque)
The immortals are getting bold.
One of those is… Weird Al…
Weird Al has barely aged since the 90s, why is anyone surprised he’s immortal
(via thatsthat24)
Some of my favourite backstage images from 1954 Pierre Balmain Haute Couture fashion show captured by the great Mark Shaw.