Harry Patch was alive as of September 23rd 2008 and was wounded at Ypres.
In that case I stand corrected, and wish Mr. Patch the best of health and continued longevity.
I hadn’t heard that “witch” mighjt be a mistranslation of “poisoner”, but i have to take issue with your statement. I love a good quasireductio ad absurdum as much as the next guy, and maybe a little more. But the truth is that the folks in Salem were well and truly freaked by the events of 1692, and it didn’t require a Bible verse to make it happen. This was probably the case in Europe, as well, but I’ve not read as much about their witchcraft hysteria as I have about Salem/Danvers’ (which is just down the road from my house). I sincerely believe that events would’ve been pretty much the same in an alternate universe where that verse didn’t exist, or read “poisoner”.
Out of curiosity, what did this open your eyes to? I’ve heard this a lot too and I’ve never understood why it was meaningful.
But would this alternative baby still be “you”? Or would “you” be born to someone else’s family?
To play devil’s advocate (no pun intended): the previous hysteria over witchcraft thanks to the mistranslation of the Bible certainly played a major role in why the girls chose witchcraft to get attention / start a smear campaign / generally act out. Without any kind of scientific proof beyond ‘spectral evidence’, witchcraft was the perfect catchall for any kind of behaviour–and it got you locked up and/or hanged very quickly.
I had always known that there used to be a hell of a lot of passenger pigeons, but until yesterday I didn’t know they flew around in flocks of up to a BILLION. They hung out in the second largest groups of any animals we know about, second only to the desert locust.
And we ate them all essentially in a hundred years.
Remember that thread last week or so about “does an animal alone get lonely?” and we talked about Albert the Lonely Albatross? Screw Albert - Martha, the last passenger pigeon, had to be the most lonely creature on Earth.
Well, right back atcha, it’s not universally accepted that the girls were acting out/starting a smear campaign/trying to get attention. Chadwick Hansen, for one, argues that most of the girls felt they were genuinrely aflicted.
And, in any case, I’m not disputing that witchcraft wasn’t the issiue. My point is that the trouble doesn’t require that the verse “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” even exist. You can be freaked out by the suspicion of witchcraft and want to take desperate measures without a Bible verse explicitly teling you to do so.
Every once in a while I see a huge crowd of people somewhere and think “Every single person in that huge crowd has a life as rich and complex as my own” I then realize, there’s a lot of stuff happening out there that I never see.
Approximately one half of the US population has an IQ of 100 or lower.
Explains a lot.
The fact that the last Civil War widow is still alive open my eyes to how young our country is. One way to look at the age of the United States is younger than three lifetimes.
-Everyone’s responsible for their own actions. We make a choice in everything we do.
-As good and as just you might want/wish our society to be; someone, somewhere is getting away with it.
Does it make me sound bitter? 
To Hrududu and Cheesesteak: at a young age as i used to stand on an overpass, looking at each window (in the numerous apartment buildings) with their different decorations and marvel about all the lives that i would never know, learn, understand or how many resemble mine.
Thanks man, I thought I was going to have to get up. 
That’s probably what my husband meant.
I grew up in an apartment nearly level with a subway platform nearby. I used to be awed by the thought that right outside my window there were always dozens of people leading lives I did not know who did not know about me not so far away.
I’ve moved to the suburbs as an adult and sometimes I still marvel at the things I do not know about my neighbors or what they do not know about me.
My eyes are now opened to the fact that I’m getting old.
Also most of the helium in the Universe and a smattering of lithium were created in the Bang. Anything heavier than that (“metals”, as astronomers refer to them) was from stars, though.
On the “light from dead stars” question, not only did none of the stars we see die before the Earth was born, but the vast majority are probably still alive. Betelgeuse has about a 50-50 shot of still being around, and Eta Carinae has probably already gone supernova, but so far as I know, those are the only stars discretely visible to the naked eye which might have died.
That .999999… does not approach 1. It is 1.
Eye-closer!
Awesome post and awesome summation.
This one may need verifying: there is far less than a google things. Anywhere. Not a google bits of sand on Earth, not a google stars in the universe. Not a google bits of sand on all planets plus all stars … there isn’t even a google helium atoms. Not sure how it opened my eyes per se, but it did change my perspective.
Truly understanding why (or maybe just accepting) we – or any fantasmical being anywhere in the galaxy – will never travel faster than light. Coupled with the vastness of space (see above post), my hope of humanity ever shaking hands with E.T. essentially vanished.
Again with the math, learning enough linear algebra and other math fun to make it through a course in quantum mechanics paid off when I suddenly got what all the fuss was about. Mind you, word pictures and observations were weird enough, and cause for knocking reality about for a bit… but what is really going on down there, what can only be understood through mathematics, is the Medusa’s stare.
People don’t really live inside my television.
Bugs Bunny is not a real person.
Naps are fun.
The cake is a lie.
What? There were at least three of them at the senotaf (sp?) just two days ago. And I am fairly sure they were alive.
The TV said they were WW1 vets.