31–40 of 58 posts
what a mess, what is the significance of resolving this? land claims? title? access to frozen assets? recarving borders? treaties?
But yes, if they had malaria, does it make it their cause of death? Who knows?
My family has spent centuries marrying into an alternative claimant to the Grand Duke of Tuscany who did not inherit through Ferdinando I. We were planning to use this as an excuse to invade Italy and put the scion of our own dynasty on the throne and establish ourselves as royalty in the annals of history. Unfortunately, this + the unification of Italy may have irredeemably foiled our plan. Not sure what to do now,…
I choked on my latte
In related news, tiny drones to take out mosquitoes. https://tornyol.com
so interesting. I worked for a very small company getting funding by the Medici Fund a while back. First I ever heard of the name. So much intrigue in the past. Guys like Montaigne were said to have "food tasters" to sample the goods before they ate themselves. As a career trace analytical chemist, I can tell you for sure, that weird poisonings are so much less likely to occur now, because of the probability of detec…
Sure, but as soon as you add wild-collected fungi [1] or greens [1] to the food mix... it gets easy enough to slip in the bad doppelgangers into a meal.
That's also why I never deal with collecting any food in the wild, I don't trust myself (and certainly I don't trust any of the vibecoded AI apps!) to reliably tell the difference between "this is edible", "this probably will give you a few days of diarrhea" and "even touch that thing and you'll die a horrible painful death".
[1] https://niedersachsen.nabu.de/tiere-und-pflanzen/pilze/23048...
[2] https://www.wwf.de/aktiv-werden/tipps-fuer-den-alltag/famili...
I am living in Poggio a Caiano and I never expect it will be mentioned on HN. I know very well the history of Bianca Cappello and I am not surprised about the malaria. The area around Poggio a Caiano (Poggio means exactly "small hills") was a swamp and malaria was very common.
My family has spent centuries marrying into an alternative claimant to the Grand Duke of Tuscany who did not inherit through Ferdinando I. We were planning to use this as an excuse to invade Italy and put the scion of our own dynasty on the throne and establish ourselves as royalty in the annals of history. Unfortunately, this + the unification of Italy may have irredeemably foiled our plan. Not sure what to do now,…
Nah, ditch the wife. Become a cardinal in the Catholic church, then get elected pope. From there it should be fairly trivial to re-establish the Papal States to their largest extent.
tl;dr; - Scientists did DNA testing on the remains of the Grand Duke and his wife, and found malaria. The rival theory is poisoning by the relative who was next in line for the Ducal throne. HOWEVER, this test result solves nothing: > But is there any guarantee that Francesco was not also poisoned? > “Perhaps not,” Ochoa said, “but the genetic evidence presented in our study decreases the margin for speculation.” > G…
Maybe they were poisoned, had malaria, were stabbed, and also suffocated and drowned, all at the same time? "solves" is a silly thing to ask for in matters of probability. I think this test result adds data which shifts probabilities, and that's the best we'll get.
Maybe? If testing of their remains had revealed (say) LD95 of arsenic, or some other poison well-known at the time, it'd be pretty reasonable to call that "solved". (At least as to their cause of death. It wouldn't establish the perpetrator.)
In related news, tiny drones to take out mosquitoes. https://tornyol.com
I am living in Poggio a Caiano and I never expect it will be mentioned on HN. I know very well the history of Bianca Cappello and I am not surprised about the malaria. The area around Poggio a Caiano (Poggio means exactly "small hills") was a swamp and malaria was very common.
Then Mussolini came to power and drained all those swamps.
After the first world war, they built a big area for blimps, with also a big hangar, but I am not sure if it happens during the Fascism or earlier.