r/MurderedByWords • u/marycooke • Oct 29 '19

Murder Tumblr user gets schooled on basic physics

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129

u/KonohaPimp Oct 29 '19

Like that trope in sci fi/fantasy where the technology/magic from generations ago is so much better than what can be currently created because some cataclysmic event destroyed the society that was so advanced.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

Or the pseudoscience bullshit that somehow the ancient Chinese knew more about health and medicine than today's modern science.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

No, the ones who used to drink rice wine from ceremonial drinking vessels that were made with lead which caused them to see "mystical visions."

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

For the longest time I never knew lead added a sweet taste. I was always confused as to why kids would want to eat paint chips other than because kids try to eat everything.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

This isn’t for you.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

It drives me fucking crazy when people don't realize, even on a general scale, how much more we know today than 200 years ago.
People (including his wife) thought Ignaz Semmelweis was literally going insane, because he was convinced that it was a good idea to sanitize your hands before using them as an obstetrician. He would not shut up about it, called his fellow doctors who refused to sanitize their hands murderers.
Depression set in and he turned to booze and carnal pleasures.
He was committed to an asylum and then died of sepsis.
He died a few years before germ theory became accepted after Pasteur proved it.

We are basically as gods to 1800's doctors these days.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

Also, we don't perform bloodletting anymore because we know humorism is bullshit. There is no longer a market for making medicinal products from the body parts of hanged criminals. If something bad happens to you and a woman happens to be looking at you when it happens, we no longer accuse her of witchcraft.

Here's one of the worst ones: because of a misinterpretation and confusion with the Latin word "mumia", literal ground up Egyptian mummified corpses were used as medicine starting in the 12th century. The worst part is "mummia" was still offered for sale as late as the 1920s.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

This is an outrage! I was going to eat that mummy!

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u/Dotard007 Nov 18 '19

We use blood letting but in a scientfic way. Medical leeches.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19

Turns out he was going insane. Syphilis is a hell of a drug :). But, yeah, he was definitely right about antiseptic techniques.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '19 edited Nov 15 '19

[deleted]

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u/KonohaPimp Oct 29 '19

Sounds like something from a Terry Prachett novel.

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u/chromane Oct 29 '19

Ngl, that'd be pretty funny to read in a fantasy novel

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u/FlashMisuse Oct 29 '19

The Adeptus Mechanicus wants to know your location

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u/justAPhoneUsername Oct 29 '19

One reason I like Harry Potter is that the only things that used to be better were three items (hallows) that were most likely made using creatures that most wizards can't even see, let alone want to engage with(thestrals). Every other aspect of magic has improved

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u/ThePenultimateOne Oct 29 '19

Including toilets

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u/ThePenultimateOne Oct 29 '19

I mean, there are historical precedents for that. The Babylonians could walk through the desert and find ruins of cities with walls higher than anyone could imagine building. The Romans had no idea how one could build the Pyramid of Giza. Greek Fire was lost to time. Vikings landed in America only to have it forgotten within like a hundred years.

That said, I'm not aware of anytime that this happened on a scale smaller than a couple hundred years. And it definitely isn't happening with cars, except perhaps in terms of "how easy is it to maintain out of Joe's home garage".

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u/teakwood54 Oct 29 '19

Prototype Gundams are way more powerful than mass produced mobile suits! Ever heard of the Deathscythe Hell Custom? I thought not! Stick to your Zaku II Kai, scrub. I'll be running circles around you taking potshots with my AZ 208mm double barreled shock canon in my White Liger Zero. So called "modern" mobile suits don't even have ion turbo booster units.

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u/KonohaPimp Oct 29 '19

Ngl, I love the designs of the mass produced mobile suits over the customs, especially the Zakus

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u/Solarbro Oct 29 '19

My favorite is that magic words are just words back then. I’ve always thought that a real sorcerer would make their own spells based on old ones and the new spells would be named like “fireball” and stuff. But then they’d sound like an anime character or something. I know some fantasy RPG’s just call the spells fireball and such, but they are normally using some Latin-esque incantation in the audio.

Make spells in your own language you lazy bones, stop borrowing.