Ada Palmer
@Ada_Palmer
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Historian (U Chicago), author SF/Fantasy, composer; @AdaPalmer @wandering .shop Renaissance, censorship, manga, disability/chronic pain, gelato
Hyde Park, Chicago
Joined September 2012
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Differences in the chemical composition of urine caused by changes in diet mean that many medieval recipes for paint etc don’t work right unless you get the urine from someone whose diet resembles a medieval one. (Tested in illuminated manuscript labs, thank you book historians!)
#renfacts
Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance urine as source of ammonia remained vital to many processes including bleaching, tanning leather, dying, fertilizer, tinting pigment, & making gunpowder
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Friend found this one on Facebook and I just couldn't stop laughing. And groaning.
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When tackling the "All we need is STEM!" attitude, my response: Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem--which did we fail?
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Also to anyone feeling like you should’ve accomplished great things in quarantine: remember that in 1521-2 Michelangelo was dealing w/ lawsuits & got so stressed he couldn’t concentrate on art & made nothing for two full years. Stress hurts productivity, no matter who you are.
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The longer I work as an historian the more I keep reconfirming that one of the top rules of history should be: "Always look up everybody's mom."
*So much* that doesn't quite make sense makes more sense when you look up mothers and sisters and the connections that get left out!
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I used "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born" in an essay, and the copy editor flagged it and informed me that slouching is not a verb of motion, and then I was sad.
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I did it, everyone.
I finished “Perhaps the Stars”
I finished Terra Ignota.
(Due out in the first half of 2021)
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Plato’s mother Perictione was a Pythagorean philosopher. As recently as the 16th c. some scholars considered her an equal of Socrates as Plato’s 2 teachers. 19th c scholars believed a woman couldn’t have been a philosopher & removed her from the story leaving only the male mentor
This is *good content* so it needs to be translated:
If Socrates had been a woman, as soon as she said "I know that I know nothing", men would have arrived to explain life to her.
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Other gods' advice to humans: Be fruitful & multiply. Don't make idols. Don't murder. Don't take My name in vain.
Odin's advice to humans: Don't leave the house at night except to take a piss. Don't have sex with witches in a cave. When hiking, don't forget to pack a lunch.
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Just discovered there's such a thing as a GOAT TOWER! To let you watch your goats go up and down a HUGE SPIRAL for NO REASON!
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There's a surviving letter of Lorenzo de Medici in which he writes basically: "Hey, mom, I left my favorite purple bathrobe at home, can you send it to me?" I find these familiar human moments helpful as we try to remember that famous historical figures were also just people.
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The brilliant Lila Goldenberg, currently doing her book history Ph.D. at
@PennHistory
, told me her book history class was struggling to recreate a green shade used for illumination, so she got urine from a weightlifter who ate super-high-protein, & that got the color much closer.
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Antiquity: Plato's Mom was a philosopher!
Middle Ages: Cool! Like Catherine of Alexandria?
Renaissance: Great! I'll paint her in my daughter's room. Keep up your Greek lessons, dear!
Enlightenment: Another proof of equality!
19th Century: Must be fake, women can't be philosophers
Plato’s mother Perictione was a Pythagorean philosopher. As recently as the 16th c. some scholars considered her an equal of Socrates as Plato’s 2 teachers. 19th c scholars believed a woman couldn’t have been a philosopher & removed her from the story leaving only the male mentor
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Even if you aren’t afraid yourself, please do it for others, the high-risk, the kids who are still waiting for doses, and those who medically can’t get the vaccine.
⚠️WEAR MASK EVEN IF VACCINATED—Top
@WHO
leader urges masks against
#DeltaVariant
even if 2-dose vaxxed. "Vaccine alone won't stop community transmission. People need to use masks consistently, be in ventilated spaces—even if you're vaccinated"
#COVID19
🧵
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#renfacts
Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance urine as source of ammonia remained vital to many processes including bleaching, tanning leather, dying, fertilizer, tinting pigment, & making gunpowder
#ancientfacts
@Ada_Palmer
Ancient Romans had their clothes professionally cleaned--with urine. The cleaners ("fullones") didn't use their own pee, but left vessels on the roads to be filled by passers-by, which they would then collect and dilute with water before using.
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SENT! THE PAGE PROOFS ARE DONE! THE LAST BOOK OF *TERRA IGNOTA* IS COMPLETE!
Also: it's perfectly normal to balance your laptop on top of a bunch of cold carrots to keep it from overheating because the file is so ridiculously huge. Right?
THANK YOU, CARROTS, YOU SAVED THE DAY!
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Agreed. And as writers in the fantasy & science fiction genres we need to be aware of how often monarchy is depicted positively in genre fiction, & to think carefully if we choose to depict it to make sure we depict its flaws & failings & help dismantle not valorize.
I don’t believe in monarchies, which means I don’t revere them and will do whatever I can, however I can, aggressively, sometimes passive aggressively, to dismantle them.
Yep, pretty simple. 😊
[yes, there’s a reason I say all this…but you won’t know]
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Yes, what historians really want: please sign and date EVERY DOCUMENT EVER! And include your full name plus all common nicknames. A brief marginal note on why you're making the document & how you feel about your current regime and/or other power structures would be handy too. ;-)
Gotta hand it to you, these massive choirbooks get the job done! Having a dated initial (1625) is pretty handy too.
Deering Library, Northwestern University Manuscript 60
@NUL_PresCons
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Its only solar power when it comes from the star Sol. Exoplanet settlements will have to make do with sparkling star power.
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If Clifford grows with love and is 30 feet from one kid it would take minimum 300,000 people’s love to make him big enough to fight the Fenris wolf (basing the size on wolf jaw ratio & the texts saying Fenris can’t open his jaw the whole way w/o his nose hitting the sky).
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I have a partial and answer to this important question, from an experience interacting with a former student who had done an internship with a weapons manufacturer, which is interesting as an example of why it's so important that we teach people how to think about history 1/?
How does a person go home at night from a job making and selling vile, destructive implements designed to rip the life from fellow humans, then kiss their kids and sleep peacefully? How can anyone justify making a living this way?
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Men, what’s stopping you from dressing like this?
Seriously, I own a copy of this outfit and it looks fabulous on everyone! Every body type, every weight! Renaissance clothes were cut to look good on everyone even as bodies change with age, so unlike modern things!
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What the study actually shows is that masks aren’t effective *when proper compliance with masking instructions is low.* It doesn’t show masks don’t work, it shows that we need people to use masks properly for them to work. It shows we need solidarity & empathy.
NEW: One of the largest and most comprehensive studies on masks to date found they do almost nothing to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.
The study was done by the Cochrane Review—a database long considered the Bible for evidence-based medicine.🧵
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#SomethingBeautiful
The Noon Cannon! Tiny cannon set into a sundial with a magnifying lens that concentrates heat on the butt so it fires off when it's exactly noon. Pop in a bullet and it's perfect for your stately home garden murder mystery needs! (Galileo Museum, Florence)
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I remember a teacher friend was arguing with a parent on a school board who was complaining about budgeting, and teachers asking for raises. Friend asked "How much do you think the teachers here make now?" Parent answered "I realize it's probably not much, maybe $300,000 a year?"
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If they put this on Kickstarter it would be funded in an hour
🦇 Miniature (3.5” wide) hand-painted bat fan, circa 1900🦇
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The event volunteers did a great job handling
#disability
needs, moving along the line they spotted me with my cane, invited me to join others inside for early special needs seating, gave everyone careful attention, no trouble about bringing companions with us. Well done.
#ADA
I’m in this fight because I believe that we can make our government, our economy, and our country work not just for those at the top—but for every working family in America. Thank you, Chicago!
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Yeah I can never talk about that speech without tearing up. “We live in capitalism. It’s power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”
Speculative fiction master Ursula LeGuin was born on this day in 1929. A very apt quote.
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Finished the book 4 copy edit and sent it off to Tor. Now...
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Just got confirmation that I have received tenure here at
@UChicago
in the
@UChicagoHistory
department. Overjoyed to permanent welcome for projects like my current work on the history of Censorship, starting with our student-curated
@UChicagoSCRC
museum exhibit opening fall 2018
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#SomethingBeautiful
to brighten your feed: a "military compass" dagger which pops apart to become a compass you can use to measure angles for aiming artillery, so you can show off your gentlemanly ability to do geometry and then stab people with it!
#historypix
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While I smiled at the spirit of this line, the Sistine Chapel floor is paved with imperial purple & green porphyry mined in ancient Egypt, that cost way more per square foot than Michelangelo and his team were paid in a year. Ceilings got the cheap stuff.
If no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.
—Neil Simon—
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Such an amazing honor. I couldn't imagine a warmer welcome to the field. Thank you, everyone in this amazing community.
The 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer goes to
@Ada_Palmer
! Her novel TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING is a Best Novel nominee tonight.
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“Another big strike in France.”
“France is always having strikes. I don’t get it, they have so much vacation, sick leave, some the best worker conditions in the world so why strike all the time?”
“…They have great worker conditions BECAUSE they strike all the time. It works.”
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In addition to protecting bigotry & the other terrible consequences of this move, usually those DEI offices handle disability accommodations and emergency medical leave for staff & faculty. The impact on lives will be immediate and horrible.
All state-funded colleges and universities in Texas will have to close their diversity, equity and inclusion offices under a measure signed into law by Gov. Abbott.
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@eyammer
@GoingMedieval
I have a blog post on it coming soonish. . Also my Machiavelli series covers it a little bit
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It’s amazing how useful this has been when I’ve been explaining it to people who are wary of vaccines.
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@D_Libris
@nkjemisin
I encounter that strange and toxic attitude so often, too! This groundless myth that pain, anxiety, and poverty stimulate art instead of choking it with exhaustion & the damage fear does to the brain. We write more when we’re okay! Worth repeating: we write more when we’re okay!!
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This fall I'm launching the ExoTerra Imagination Lab, an online collaborative research role-playing game where
@UChicago
students from all majors will pool their skills 2 design a new civilization on an imagined freshly-terraformed exoplanet. Because UChicago is just that awesome
Planning for Autumn Quarter? Join
@Ada_Palmer
’s ExoTerra Imagination Lab, a collaborative, role-playing game community for
#UChicago
students.
For more information:
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The periodic table we almost had. Science would feel so much more magical. Or would magic feel more scientific? (Table from Florence’s history of science museum, the Museo Galileo)
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Important thread about web copyright filters. I’ve experienced this too, having my own performances of my own songs automatically taken down for resembling other videos I’ve made of myself singing my own songs, even though I’m an indie musician snd never asked anyone to do this.
Last week, "Marina" - a piano teacher who publishes free lessons her Piano Keys Youtube channel - celebrated her fifth anniversary by announcing that she was quitting Youtube because her meager wages were being stolen by fraudsters.
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Must say, while the elevators are a problem, the
@worldcon2021
access team has been really on top of helping me w/ things like chairs, minimizing the walking I need to do, ramps, even spotted me w/ my cane on arrival & approached to walk me through checkin. Fabulously proactive!
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Once I was in an academic LARP & the only two of us who got tenure were the werewolf who manipulated people using pheromones & the Yith who published 3x as much as everyone else by tapping eldritch knowledge from an alien civilization & sometimes it feels accurate & makes me sad.
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Milestone: my Terra Ignota is now referenced on the Wikipedia page for the Marquis de Sade! 🎯
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I just love how happy *everyone* looks in the first photo. People happy about bread, bonding over mutually loving bread, and people happy seeing how happy *other* people are about bread. Let’s do more things like this, humanity! 😄🥖🫂😍
UNESCO has just made the French baguette part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of humanity, and the French delegation is wildin out there
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After decades of museum visits around the world I’ve concluded that everybody who was anybody in history had a rock crystal bowl shaped like a duck. You wouldn’t believe how common they are in royal tombs, crown jewel sets: Napoleon to the Agamemnon tomb at Mycenae, St Peter’s 💯
Rock crystal duck-shaped vase. Culture: Mycenaean or Minoan craftsmanship. Found in Grave Circle B, Mycenae. Date: c. 16th cent BC. Collection: National Archaeological Museum Athens.
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Yes, as a historian who studies multiple centuries I keep telling people we haven't been trying large-scale democracy very long, & the USA is still running the barely-updated beta software which had had no user testing, of course we're finding exploitable bugs.
#fixthem
Great Op-Ed by
@m_older
in
@nytopinion
section. Glad to see this! Cc
@GreatDismal
@ramez
@doctorow
@jeremyscahill
@GreenHejira
@EJinAction
@billmckibben
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The Marine Worlds Carousel (Nantes, France) is a huge carousel, rising nearly 25m high and measuring 20m in diameter. It features 35 moving underwater creatures on three levels: the ocean floor, the depths, and sea and boats.
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I’ve always loved this particular fox photo. I look at it when it feels like I’m fighting hard against obstacles but need to push on. Go, little encouragement fox!
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New blog post reflecting on needing to take medical leave this fall as my health took a turn for the worse, and how we don't tell enough stories about *not* "overcoming" disability but instead living w/ it:
#Disability
#DisabilityTwitter
#DisabilityStories
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It’s important to have large & diverse sample sizes, because if you use my data (Renaissance Florence) then 80% of men were bisexual and 90% of women were the Virgin Mary.
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News!
@BluejoWalton
& I are co-teaching an online course on the History of Science Fiction this winter, w/ U Chicago, open to anyone! Saturday mornings Jan 7 to Feb 25: 2023
https://grahamcourses.uchicago.edu/search/publicCourseSearchDetails.do?method=load&courseId=3999109
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I can’t unsee the face on this turret tower on the castle of Anne of Brittany in Nantes.
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Finished another chapter of Terra Ignota book 4 today ("Perhaps the Stars"). Feels great to be working again after weeks of pneumonia! On to the next!
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Finished writing another chapter of “Perhaps the Stars” (Terra Ignota book 4). Now officially past the 3/4 mark. Great feeling.
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Just did my math and I am in fact past the 80% mark of finishing Book 4 of Terra Ignota. (Also apologies to
@balticon
for being antisocial between panels but this chapter is finally going well!)
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@pnh
Now I want a T-shirt with "STET" in big letters, but when you look closely it's composed of tiny text with lines from major works and hilarious editorial notes like that. I bet everyone would want to wear it to Worldcon!
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This toxic practice, in addition to the other horrors, is also lowering vaccination rates, because people who have been hurt by surprise billing in the past are wary of being told "it's free" and don't trust that there won't be a giant surprise bill for the vaccine afterward.
Of all the dysfunctions of the famously cursed US healthcare system, few are so obviously a total scam as "surprise billing." Here's how that works: you go to a hospital (often its ER) that is covered by your insurer, and then, despite this, you get a giant bill. Surprise!
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The Girl Scouts have millions of boxes of unsold cookies because of the pandemic, and if you donate $$ to their program they'll donate cookies to first responders, food banks & similar causes.
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Much needed!!! Amtrak could be such a great tool if it wasn’t being sabotaged constantly by freight. Greener, more comfortable, less stressful
@and
invasive than flying, let’s you see & understand the land anew as you cross.
.
@Amtrak
trains run late 27% of the time. More than half of those delays are due to interference by freight trains. My new bill, the Rail Passenger Fairness Act, will help Amtrak address & fix this ongoing problem.
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Very much how I feel. We want AI and made a thing and named it AI but it’s not what AI is in fiction. Just as since 300 BC the atom was defined as the tiniest piece of indivisible matter so we wanted to split the atom & then named a complex thing with parts “atom” & then split it
saw ted chiang give a talk yesterday where he basically told a bunch of ai bros, "we are nowhere near having real ai, and what we call ai today is just a tool of capitalism. i don't fear ai, i fear capitalism" and the ai bros got their feelings hurt. it was great.
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Sighted on our balcony this morning, Joyeux the Christmas Hawk brings fresh meat to good little children and death to the unwary!
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Continuing to share fun
#TerraIgnota
images to celebrate the release of the final book. Here's me excitedly cuddling book 1 when the first ARC arrived! (Did I also excitedly cuddle book 4 when it came out? Yes! Yes for days! And it's fatter so it's cuddlier!)
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Teared up this morning seeing
@torbooks
put "Too Like the Lightning" in the
#Pride2019
$2.99 Kindle sale on LGBTQ+ books. I tried to portray a future where diverse relationships are victoriously ubiquitous but it's subtle, few people comment on it. Thank you, everyone, 4 noticing
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When Roman statues were struck by lightning they immediately buried the statue whole and put a plaque on top with the exact date. I often think this custom was suggested to them by time traveling archaeologists.
Yes, what historians really want: please sign and date EVERY DOCUMENT EVER! And include your full name plus all common nicknames. A brief marginal note on why you're making the document & how you feel about your current regime and/or other power structures would be handy too. ;-)
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A couple of weeks ago, and for the first time, battery storage became the biggest source of supply on California's electricity grid. This is a major milestone in the clean energy transition.
#ShareGoodNewsToo
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Page proofs of "The Will to Battle" (Terra Ignota Book 3) finished and sent off to
@torbooks
! This one is so intense, so proud of it!
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