Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Extra History" channel.

  1.  @sessh573  to be fair, many of those things being "so bad", or at least 'a little bad but a really dumb idea' was kind of the point. (Though, yeah, some of them are just cultural differences from being thousands of years ago, and a few of them are missing a bit of context, if I recall the story correctly.)
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  2. Same concept, though given that the original dragoons evolved into standard shock/melee cavalry over time, the revival of the concept in WW1 (see, among others, most of the Australian and New Zealand forces for examples) had the units designated as "mounted rifles". Of course, by ww2, most of those were replaced by motorized infantry (trucks instead of horses), and the Rest of the cavalry were converted to armoured units. Or at least, so it went in the Empire. But yeah, calling them dragoons would be anachronistic (at least in English), but not incorrect.
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  3. Won? No. Came out ahead? There's a case to be made.
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  4. And for quite a while after. The British empire didn't reach its height until after losing what became the USA, and the USA didn't hit a comparable level until after Britain was already declining The Empire was starting to have problems before WW1 (not yet too big, as such things go, but there), and by the end of WW2 was pretty much Done (cue the weirdest "fall" of an empire Ever) Meanwhile, WW2 and its aftermath are basically when the USA became more than a secondary power at best (and it pretty much skipped straight to Super power due to the competition being wrecked.)
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  5. Well, not Everyone. Just, you know, Almost everyone. Most of the time.
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  6. Stop? Probably not. Reduce/improve by allowing modeling to get further before you reach the "must test against the real world to ensure no part of the input or process was screwed up" point? Almost certainly. Testing will still be needed, but more undesirable results can be found, filtered, and prevented before that stage in more situations. Or at least, that's the idea.
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  7.  @Archon3960  koei, if the latest entry in the series is anything to go by :p
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  8. TamTroll Pi is a property of circles and the like. It is necessary for finding the radius from the area, or the reverse, and some other things. Thing is, in any formula it shows up in, if you find all the numbers, then treat Pi as a variable and solve for it, and write out the number... You'll never stop, because the decimal places just keep coming. I believe the pattern of digits also doesn't repeat, which is why memorising it to however many decimal places is a big deal.
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  9. Depends how many of his descendants married into the other royal (and high noble) houses of Europe. Being a descendent does not require that line of descent to follow the same path the crown passed down through, nor does it need to be the same line the dynasty's name passed down through (and dynasties/families get renamed from time to time too.). All it takes is for one link to have been a woman who had brothers around to inherit the name and all the titles and the lines can diverge, and nothing stops them meeting up again generations later. After all, the house of Windsor was the house of... Was it colburg-saxgotha? Something like that. A German house, either way, before they came to the British throne. And either way, the European royalty intermarried so much that as of ww1 it was becoming a problem. (Though in the past they had married other high ranked nobility, who had married slightly lower ranked nobility, etc, often enough to prevent it becoming too much of a problem in most places most of the time) So, yeah, much like most of asia can trace ancestry back to Gangis Khan, it would not be surprising if this was the case.
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  10. More commonly, a king or other noble, as the highest authority in the land (by conquest or birth) would judge disputes or criminals. As law codes got more complicated, populations larger, etc. the ruler delegated more tasks, including such legal matters. It is noteable that in Britain (and not that many years ago, most of the Commonwealth), the highest "court of appeal" is, on paper, directly to the monarch in their role as the highest judge in the land. (In practice even this is deligated to the privy council, but that is in their role as the Queen's personal advisors and lieutenants acting on her behalf at her discretion) Not as a direct part of the judiciary. Well... Again, on paper. So to speak). Well, that and republics without a single head of state needed someone (or a group of someones) to do the same job. Biblical judges... Were basically that for a nation who's government was "tribal and theocratic bits here and there, and they have a code of laws, but mostly anarchy" at the time. Which in practice meant they were the leadership that was to be had when a military campaign or revolt was in order.
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