The Piltdown man forgery of 1912 is an amazing example of anthropology/archeology gone awry. Certain British antiquarians were looking to find human remains older than the Neaderthal, to prove that the first humans were British!A genuine great find like Raymond Dart's australopithecine in 1924, went gravely underappreciated. http://www.clarku.edu/~piltdown/map_prim_suspects/ABBOTT/Abbot_defense/piltman_englishmystery.html

One of the reasons the forgery was so successful was that there were so many internal inconsistencies; scientists spent more time arguing over the interpretation of details than they did on validating the whole matter. For example, there were no systematic excavations at the site of Piltdown I, and the Piltdown II site was never found. The forger had also cleverly salted the gravel bed with faunal elements that indicated up to four separate horizons for geologists to fit into the existing Pliocene-Pleistocene chronology.As the years went on, other paleontological finds? especially the discovery of Peking man in the 1920s and 1930s by W. C. Pei and Teilhard de Chardin, the australopithecine facial skeleton discovered by Raymond Dart in 1924, and many other European remains showed that Piltdown man's combination of an advanced cranium and a primitive jaw was anomalous. Piltdown man became very much a side issue.In 1953, the Piltdown man controversy was revived at a London conference on human origins convened by the Weiner-Gren Foundation. Notably, the conference brought together two men: Kenneth Oakley, a geologist from the British Museum, who had been using various novel chemical analyses to test the age associations of fossil remains including Piltdown, and Joseph Weiner, a South-African-born anthropologist of Oxford University. The two shared a skepticism about the age of the Piltdown remains, the association of the jaw and the skull, and the haphazard pattern by which the fossils were collected. Oakley, for instance, had already shown that the remains were not very old at all.

“Let France have great mothers, and she will have great sons” Napoleon Maria-Letizia Ramolino, his dear old mum can take some of the credit, if nothing else she instilled a sense of urgency, drive, and nationalism in her son. Drive is as important as charisma and timing, the ability to labor without immediate gratification for a lofty, future reward. Kind of like graduate school I imagine!

I think that Napoleon's move to abandon his forces in Egypt around 1799 was a really odd decision.  He doesn't even tell the general under him, Jean Baptiste Kleber, that he's leaving?  What's up with that?

Wasn't there some sort of urgent crisis in France? I think the unreliability of messages at the time meant he would have stayed in Egypt if had he received word sooner.

“Pleased to meet you” dates back 2000 years to the Indo-European language Latvian, the same phrase can be traced back to the Estonian, Uralic language of about the same time period. It is suggestive of a parting of the Proto-Indo-European language of the ancient Silk Road, 9,000 years ago.

I wasn't aware of the Frankfurt School before this video

Columbia U makes much more sense to me now, “the narrative” how very creepy. Makes Orwell's 1984 seem inevitable.

Thanks, Phid that was awesome, I'm gonna pass this along.

Interesting Scout, maybe you could write a guide for tourists. The Mrs. sounds grand. so you married up? 😀

The Maryland arms are used quite prominently for a variety of purposes. In addition to appearing on what is technically the reverse (but the only side actually used) of the state seal, they also appear on the seal of the University of Maryland. The shield of the arms is painted on highway signs welcoming travelers to the state, cast into historical markers, and imprinted on Maryland license plates. The Calvert quartering alone appears on the seals of three Maryland counties, the combined Calvert and Crossland quarterings on three more. It has inspired a large number of other arms, including those of Baltimore County and the City of Baltimore, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, the ballistic missile submarine USS Maryland, and a number of Maryland National Guard regiments and battalions. Finally, and most famously, the state flag of Maryland is a simple banner of the quartered Calvert and Crossland arms.   http://americanheraldry.org/pages/index.php?n=State.MarylandThanks Wally, it seems the seal was changed and changed again, I guess thats how they like it in Maryland. Fort McHenry, Star Spangled Banner and a baron cattle driver ???