▲ 157 points
back
21 comments
I read this earlier this year - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/02/book-review-the-mummy-a-tal...
Some of its predictive power is astonishing. The plot is pure melodrama. But it also contains lawyers hacking robot judges, so it is pretty fun.
An interesting mummy fact: animals were mummified too.
In the 1800s, an English company acquired 180,000 mummified cats and pulverized them into fertilizer.
Weirder still, they were used in pigment until astonishingly late in the last century (and a rather long time after they ran out of actual antiquities to grind). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
Pretty cool story.
The second chance queue works. I had a little-noticed submission become #1 for while, because of it (2020).
This line: " It drew many favourable reviews, including one in 1829 in The Gardener's Magazine on the inventions proposed in it. In 1830, the 46-year-old reviewer, John Claudius Loudon, sought out the 22-year-old Webb, and they married the next year."
Sounds pretty creepy by contemporary standards, but reading Loudon's page he was also a fascinating character and both he and Jane were accomplished horticulturalist"
She was also a poor orphan who took to writing to have fund to live, so a marriage proposal from someone with similar interests - they even wrote books together - and they apparently lived quite happily until he died from cancer 14 years later.
It's an unremarkable age gap by Victorian standards. Men above working class status typically waited until they could support a family before marrying, and women typically married young (16-21 was common among the nobility: at 22 an unmarried woman was all but washed-up). Death in childbirth was sky-high by modern standards, and older husbands died of diseases which today would be survivable, so the average duration of a marriage was much the same as it is today -- about 12 years -- even though divorce was difficult hence rare.
(Victorian mores may seem alien to modern eyes because they arose from medical and social constraints we're no longer subject to.)
This is echoed in a trope that many will recognize from Back to the Future: Part III. Scientists/intellectuals in earlier eras attracted to each other by interests rather than age.
My first thought was to the 1999 movie:
me too
Any reason this was posted today? (e: and voted to the top?)
It's exactly 340 days until Halloween
It is appropriate for HN (unlike this sort of meta), users like it and it went through the second chance pool.
Posted two days ago, doesn't have very many upvotes; not super obvious why it's even on the frontpage right now.
Interesting - the visible timestamp says "2 hours ago", but hovering over it does show a time two and a half days ago. I guess the mods think it deserves a second chance, as not-so-well-known early scifi that has things like:
> Surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons. Air travel, by balloon, is commonplace. A kind of Internet is predicted in it. Besides trying to account for the revivification of the mummy in scientific terms—galvanic shock rather than incantations—"she embodied ideas of scientific progress and discovery, that now read like prophecies" to those later in the 19th century.
> but hovering over it does show a time two and a half days ago
now that's pretty incriminating. could it well be that this jane webb, if that is her true name, is in cahoots with the hn management?
The second chance pool is a thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Although this seems the likely reason I prefer to think the previous comment is right. Jane has been reanimated and is in cahoots (was it?) with the HN management!
Probably because it's sufficiently interesting for the nerds on HN. Random articles like this crop up from time to time! I upvoted.
I not only upvoted but bought the book. HN would be a poorer place without occasional dashes of serendipitous whimsy like this.
Amen to that. I love AI as much as the next nerd, but I don't need every post on the front page to be Sam Altman...