Ask HN: What rabbit hole(s) did you dive into recently?

- Designed/built a small USB controlled pan/tilt camera head to control the mirrorless I use as a webcam (couple of servos, gears, belts), and then designed/built a custom ortholinear keyboard with a joystick to control the camera (custom PCB, CNC'd aluminum case, etc)

- I'm a pretty big runner, built my own web based calendar UI that integrates with Google Calendar where I can type in workouts like "1 mile warmup @z2 + 5x(30 seconds @ 6:00/mile + 0.5 miles recovery) + 1 mile cooldown" and this gets parsed/total weekly mileage gets tallied. The next step down this rabbit hole is building a small iOS app to automatically generate Apple Watch Workouts using WorkoutKit.

* Turns out the work is not 'weird' or 'Gnostic' but is directly addressing details from Lucretius, including paraphrasing his view of evolution and atomism, but refuting the claim there's no afterlife by basically appealing to the idea we're in a simulated copy of an original physical world where the spirit doesn't actually depend on a body, because there is no actual body.

* As I dug more into the various mystery religions the followers of the work claimed as informing their views, I saw a number of those were associated with figures various Greek historians were saying came from the same Exodus from Egypt as Moses.

* Turns out a lot of the ahistorical details in the Biblical Exodus narrative better fit the joint sea peoples and Libyan resistance who end up forcibly resettled into the Southern Levant latter on. In the past decade we've also started finding early Iron Age evidence of Aegean and Anatolian settlement and trade previously unknown in the area, including in supposed Israelite settlements like Tel Dan, lending support to the theory that Dan were the Denyen sea peoples.

* Also turns out that in just the past few years a number of Ashkenazi users have been puzzled by their genomic similarity to ancient DNA samples, where the closest overall match in a DNA bank was 3,500 year old Minoan graves sequenced in 2017 or that they have such a high amount of Neolithic Anatolian (which the 2017 study found was effectively identical to Minoan).

* The G2019S LRRK2 mutation that's almost only found among the Libyan Berbers and the Ashkenazi appears to have originated with the former but appeared in the ancestry of the latter ~4,500 plus/minus 1k years. Which is a window that predates the emergence of the Israelites in the first place, but is on the cusp of the sea peoples/Libyan alliance.

* There's also been discovery of endogamy among some of the Minoan populations. Did the Ashkenazi endogamy evidenced from their emergence in Europe and the bottleneck in the first millennium CE actually go back much further than we've been thinking? Maybe Tacitus wasn't so off base when he talked about how some claimed the Exodus involved people from Crete hiding out in Libya.

Anyways, that's a very rough summary of some of the rabbit holes I was going down.

Bonus: Herodotus's description of Helen of Troy spending the whole time in Egypt has two datable markers to the 18th dynasty, which is when Nefertiti, "beautiful woman who arrived" is around during a complete change to Egyptian art and religion while she's the only woman in history to be depicted in the smiting pose, with her only noted relatives being a sister and wetnurse.