…and not a single mention of vast piles of corpses in Central America, Angola, and elsewhere.
Except the theropod in the skeletal display is an Allosaurus (note, among other things, the three-fingered hands), which did co-exist with Stegosaurus. The name of the image (DMNS42L_T-RexVsStegosaurus.jpg) is incorrect; the display is not. Not surprising, of course, since the image comes from a creationist website…
If I’m not mistaken, steam can surpass 212 degrees.
Yes, although steam from boiling water doesn’t usually get any hotter than that. Steam escaping from a sealed container (or a partly-sealed container like a pressure cooker) can get much hotter.
Another thing to consider is the total heat transfer. Water is much denser than steam, so I’d expect 190 degree water to give a worse burn than, say, the same volume of 220 degree steam.
Be glad I didn’t go all TL;DR on the totally ineffective War on Drugs. I know a guy who did 18 months in prison, and had to sue to get his house and possessions back after a sting on marijuana growers that targeted him because he grew tomatoes indoors, and bought lights and fertilizers that allowed the police to get a search warrant. He had a roach in an ashtray, but no live plants, and they still arrested him for dealing. He was originally sentenced to something like 15 years. There are thousands of stories like that from the Reagan era, and don’t forget the Satanic panic happened under his watch as well.
The crime rate was a lot higher in the US in the 80s than it has been at any time since (albeit, not child kidnapping), so there were plenty of bodies here as well.
I think the fact that she spilled it on clothes, which kept it in place, had to make it worse.
There is a very slight offsetting capillary effect, as the liquid wicks out into the fibers of the clothes, thus expanding and cooling. But…yeah! Holding the hot liquid in place gives it more time to transfer heat, and that’s nasty.
Also, liquid water conducts heat fairly well. If you grab the handle of, say, a hot pyrex beaker full of water with a dry hand, it doesn’t hurt nigh as much as if your hand is wet.
Hot tomatoes hurt when you chomp 'em, more than equally hot bread, because the structure of bread is somewhat insulating. (Not entirely unlike Space Shuttle tiles.)
Ah, science! (Or “Ow, science!”)
Or prove that, while both of them had a motive to kill the boys, only Henry had a motive to do it in the way it was done.
I lean strongly towards Henry for a bunch of reasons, but mainly because of one thing: the boys simply faded off the scene.
Richard did have reason to worry about them, but as a focus for rebellion. Legally, they weren’t heirs to the throne - the act making them illegitimate had been passed by Parliament (rightly or wrongly, it doesn’t much matter for the purposes of this debate). So if he was going to kill them to eliminate that danger, he would have needed it universally *known *that the boys were dead, so that no malcontents could use them as a focus for rebellion. Rumours that they might possibly be dead would have done him no good. He would have announced that they’d died of illness, had a big state funeral, end of problem. He was well established as king, by the time the boys supposedly died; no one was going to call him on it. Having them simply vanish, with no one having a clue that they were dead, did Richard no good at all. The argument that ‘Well, maybe he was hoping he could make it public at some unspecified future time, for some reason’ doesn’t hold water. He had absolutely nothing to gain from killing them until and unless he could proclaim their deaths to the world.
Why murder your own nephews, the sons of a brother you’d been close to all his life, for no gain at all? There’s nothing in Richard’s life to imply that he was a raving psycho. He was a practical, intelligent ruler.
For Henry, on the other hand, things were a lot more complicated. As soon as Henry got into power, he repealed the act making the boys illegitimate, because he wanted to marry their sister in order to seal his claim to the throne - he had practically no blood claim to it, and that mattered - so he needed her to be legitimate. But by doing that, he made the older boy the legal king, and the younger one next in line to the throne. He needed them off the scene. He didn’t need to eliminate them just as potential foci for rebellion (most of the people who would have risen to their cause would be satisfied by the fact that their sister was queen) - he needed to eliminate them as actual kings, and he needed to do it fast. And, unlike Richard, he not only didn’t need to parade their deaths openly, he couldn’t really do it: he wasn’t secure enough on his throne to be confident of pulling off the ‘oops, dead of fever’ stunt, and he couldn’t risk pissing off their family, or his marriage to Elizabeth might not happen. So he would have needed them to just vaguely disappear.
Which is exactly what happened.
There are other reasons why I favour Henry. The boys’ mother not only came out of sanctuary to join Richard’s court, but she wrote to her older son (no relation to Richard) telling him to come home and make friends with Richard because Richard was basically a good guy - both of these *after *the time when Richard supposedly had her sons murdered. And when Henry took the throne, his official claim to it listed all kinds of reasons why Richard sucked, going back years, but never once mentioned ‘And by the way he had his nephews killed’ or even ‘And while he was supposed to be taking care of his nephews he somehow mislaid them, we can’t find them anywhere’. But the vague way the whole thing was done is the big one, for me. It’s something that would have benefited Henry but not Richard.
Sheesh, that whole epic post and I forgot the bit that actually answers the thread question…
The ‘Richard III killed the Princes in the Tower’ myth gets on my tits. He may have. But the fact is, we don’t have enough evidence to know whether it was him or Henry VII - the belief that it was definitely Richard comes from Tudor propaganda, which is winners writing history, and from the Shakespeare play. I love Shakespeare with a passion, but he wasn’t a historian.
If Henry had them murdered right after he took the throne, and planned to unearth the skeletons after a year or so, and claim to have discovered them, it’s possible someone might have noticed they looked a little to old to have died at the beginning of Richard’s reign, and anything later might be suspicious. The older boy would have aged from almost 13 to almost 15. He could have had a significant growth spurt.
Instead they were simply were never mentioned until vague rumors began to circulate.
There’s no record that Henry looked for the bodies. Supposedly, Thomas More got the story from people directly involved in the murder, and yet there was no search for the bodies. These were Henry’s brothers-in-law, and there was no hunt for the bodies. This was a time when people believed that you didn’t go to heaven if you didn’t have a Christian burial in consecrated ground. I think whether Henry wanted to or not, he would have had to put on a show of looking for the bodies. If the boys were actually missing.
I agree. I’m in the “Henry” camp, but ultimately, it’s unknowable, save uncovering some amazing new evidence with a rock-solid provenance-- we found Richard himself, so nothing is impossible, but with what we know now, the evidence isn’t very good one way or the other. There’s not even any proof they were murdered. It’s always remotely possible they ran away, or something <– I do not believe nor advocate for this-- just pointing out that we don’t actually have proof of anything.
As for the hot-coffee issue, here are the facts on the MacDonald’s case.
How do you explain Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble and the rest of Bedrock, Einstone?
Modern scientists view those documentaries with some mild embarrassment.
Kinda like Piltdown man.
Well, I was only quipping…
In a sense, Piltdown is a triumph for real science. The hoax was exposed by the advance of real physical anthropology. Creationist methods didn’t reveal the truth; evolutionary science did.
I might be misinterpreting but: the Piltdown man had nothing to do with creationism.They don’t have any methods. It was a simple financial and/or for the lulz hoax, wasn’t it? Creationists actually consider it a good thing because it shows the evilutionists were wrong 1 time out of thousands.
You’re right, of course. I was attempting to echo an essay by Stephen Jay Gould, who said that the Piltdown affair isn’t an embarrassment for science, really, but a demonstration of how science is supposed to work.
At first, scientists were triumphant over a major discovery, one that filled in a gap in their knowledge. But, over time, as other (real) fossils came to light, Piltdown started to stick out. It wouldn’t fit into the pattern of the new discoveries. And, in due course, scientists re-examined it more critically, and exposed the hoax.
Creationists point at it and laugh at foolish science…but this only shows how they fail to comprehend real science.
Anyway, apologies: I was just making a quip regarding the Flintstones! I’ll bet that real Paleontologists and Anthropologists do watch the cartoon, but perhaps with just a wee bit of guilt. It’s like a real chef sneaking a Mcdonalds burger!
The Flintstones would be a prehistorical myth.
No, The Flintstones was a pre-hysterical myth!