[HN Gopher] The Surprisingly Sacred Roots of Chocolate
___________________________________________________________________
The Surprisingly Sacred Roots of Chocolate
Author : Thevet
Score : 36 points
Date : 2023-02-15 05:57 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| klondike_klive wrote:
| We've given up eating chocolate now since the recent report about
| heavy metal contamination in it. They said in most articles "but
| you'd have to be eating a tremendous amount - like a bar of dark
| chocolate per day - to be consuming a dangerous amount of heavy
| metals." We could put that away in a morning! Anyway I guess the
| moral is don't go overboard.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _The Surprisingly Sacred Roots of Chocolate_
|
| I have ~2895876932.3 and ~1.998^126
|
| (Sorry. Once per year... Actually, I think I really misread as
| 'Square' Roots)
|
| Edit: although, it's really lossful... Reversing the process,
| only half of the original data is retained - for the 64bit. Not
| to mention the double precision. Oh well.)
| px43 wrote:
| Nile Red made chocolate recently.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaCZcdWk1DU
|
| I have no idea how an ancient culture might randomly stumble into
| this process.
| dpflan wrote:
| What is surprising about learning that earlier civilizations
| developed advanced understandings and respect and reverence for
| nature and integrating it into their daily lives? We've lost so
| much connection to nature as modern society chugs along.
| chasd00 wrote:
| with earlier civilizations if you didn't have understanding and
| reverence for nature it would kill you dead in a heartbeat.
| today we have heating furnaces and 7/11.
| hummus_bae wrote:
| Yeah but they didn't have chocolate yet. That seems much more
| surprising to me.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| The reason for this is that they had very little control over
| nature and saw it as something of a deity that they had to
| appease.
|
| A breech baby was pretty much a sentence to an agonizing death
| for both mother and baby (for a portrayal, see House of the
| Dragon). A compound fracture was also either a death sentence
| or at a minimum and amputation. If you lived in an area with
| cyclones, you didn't know when you could get catastrophic
| winds. Anytime you sailed out of sight of land, could be your
| last. Floods and drought were far more devastating then. A
| pandemic might easily kill a 30% or more of the people and you
| had no idea how to deal with it (or even 90% as some of the New
| World civilizations experienced after the arrival of the
| Europeans).
|
| In that environment, nature was seen as a capricious deity that
| you wanted to mollify.
|
| After the scientific revolution, we now see nature as a system
| that is governed by laws that we can understand and take
| advantage of to improve humanity. We can monitor hurricanes. We
| can ship food to areas suffering famine. We are able to use
| medicine and surgery to make childbirth much less dangerous and
| much less painful. We don't viscerally feel as if we are at the
| mercy of nature. Even with the recent earthquake, look how
| quickly the discussion has turned to how the ignoring safety
| codes in building led to a large portion of the deaths.
|
| We don't look at a natural disaster now and throw up our hands
| and sacrifice virgins to appease the gods, now. Instead, we
| look at what we can do to prevent and mitigate a future
| occurrence.
|
| I for one, much prefer how we are now then how we were before.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's surprising because society today is conditioned to treat
| everything as a disposable resource that should cost as little
| as possible so they can buy more stuff with the money left
| over.
| cannaceo wrote:
| If you ever get a chance to do a cacao ceremony I'd recommend it!
| It's subtle but enjoyable.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-15 23:02 UTC)