Parallel Lives
April 12, 2024 10:26 AM Subscribe
That's neat, though I don't primarily think of David Bowie as a "painter."
posted by pangolin party at 10:35 AM on April 12 [4 favorites]
posted by pangolin party at 10:35 AM on April 12 [4 favorites]
You can use arrow keys, but the scrolling is determined by your own mouse's scrolling speed/skip lines. You could also use the middle mouse button's continuous scroll and move ever so slightly from center to scroll very slowly year by year.
I wish there was a bit more info, like why some names are different colors and what the asterisks mean (maybe it's an estimate without concrete historical data). The names should also link to their wiki pages, but that's just my preference. Edit: I just realized there's only green as the other color, and I think it's to denote females, which made me feel sad that early on it was all male names.
posted by numaner at 10:40 AM on April 12
I wish there was a bit more info, like why some names are different colors and what the asterisks mean (maybe it's an estimate without concrete historical data). The names should also link to their wiki pages, but that's just my preference. Edit: I just realized there's only green as the other color, and I think it's to denote females, which made me feel sad that early on it was all male names.
posted by numaner at 10:40 AM on April 12
Asterisk means year of birth and the green names are female.
posted by ellieBOA at 10:43 AM on April 12
posted by ellieBOA at 10:43 AM on April 12
CTRL-F "Katarin Kariko", 0 results.
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:45 AM on April 12
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:45 AM on April 12
A boon to people writing alt-histories.
posted by Artw at 10:51 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
posted by Artw at 10:51 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
It is kind of fun. The titles are quixotic. Cleopatra is titled as a "Reina," which isn't inaccurate but wouldn't be my first choice for an English-language website. Tokugawa Ieyasu is titled as a "Tokugawa."
posted by adamrice at 10:57 AM on April 12 [3 favorites]
posted by adamrice at 10:57 AM on April 12 [3 favorites]
CTRL-F "Katarin Kariko", 0 results.
I don't know if her name's in there or not, but you spelled it wrong.
posted by pracowity at 11:01 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]
I don't know if her name's in there or not, but you spelled it wrong.
posted by pracowity at 11:01 AM on April 12 [1 favorite]
That's neat, though I don't primarily think of David Bowie as a "painter."
Agreed - this is very neat and I enjoy this kind of thing. But there are several questionable entries. Ernest Hemingway (screenwriter), Martin Luther (linguist), John Lennon (producer). I'll give all three of those a 'kind of?' but that's not the first thing that comes to mind for those or many of the others.
I feel like I know when a lot of these people lived but it can be hard for me to think of some of these people as contemporaries, even in recent history.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 11:02 AM on April 12
Agreed - this is very neat and I enjoy this kind of thing. But there are several questionable entries. Ernest Hemingway (screenwriter), Martin Luther (linguist), John Lennon (producer). I'll give all three of those a 'kind of?' but that's not the first thing that comes to mind for those or many of the others.
I feel like I know when a lot of these people lived but it can be hard for me to think of some of these people as contemporaries, even in recent history.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 11:02 AM on April 12
That's neat, though I don't primarily think of David Bowie as a "painter."
Or Martin Luther as a linguist.
I did also notice that the Discovery/Science section just stops - Stephen Hawking is the only person on the list from 1977-2018. It's a very "my public school hasn't purchased new textbooks in decades" view of the history of science.
posted by thecjm at 11:03 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
Or Martin Luther as a linguist.
I did also notice that the Discovery/Science section just stops - Stephen Hawking is the only person on the list from 1977-2018. It's a very "my public school hasn't purchased new textbooks in decades" view of the history of science.
posted by thecjm at 11:03 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
Jesus was 21 in the year 17 AD?
posted by mazola at 11:54 AM on April 12 [6 favorites]
posted by mazola at 11:54 AM on April 12 [6 favorites]
sappho and the prophet Ezekiel were contemporaries!
posted by dismas at 11:54 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
posted by dismas at 11:54 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]
sappho and the prophet Ezekiel were contemporaries!
I can guarantee they didn't date each other.
posted by grubi at 11:57 AM on April 12 [9 favorites]
I can guarantee they didn't date each other.
posted by grubi at 11:57 AM on April 12 [9 favorites]
Jesus was 21 in the year 17 AD?
The underappreciated miracle of his birth is that he was born as a four year old.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:03 PM on April 12 [8 favorites]
The underappreciated miracle of his birth is that he was born as a four year old.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:03 PM on April 12 [8 favorites]
I wondered why the ancient history part is missing almost anything outside of the Near East and Greece. The database used is based on Wikipedia and Wikidata; my guess (based on not a lot of checking) is that a lot of biographical entries for that period don't have birth/death dates attached, or given in the expected format. For example, Hammurabi's Wikipedia entry has those dates ("c. 1810 – c. 1750 BC"), but the entry for Cheng Tang, who according to this entry on his dynasty ruled circa 1600 BCE, doesn't have birth/death dates, or any dates in the BCE/CE format; any dates given are all in an "Xth year of Y" format.
The paper about the database says they used "more than 25" different language editions of Wikipedia, but (again, based on my cursory check) it doesn't look like they addressed different calendars or different ways dates can be presented, and didn't try to do any clever inference of dates based on other information (such as, the first king of the Shang dynasty can be inferred to have been alive around the projected start of said dynasty).
posted by trig at 12:08 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
The paper about the database says they used "more than 25" different language editions of Wikipedia, but (again, based on my cursory check) it doesn't look like they addressed different calendars or different ways dates can be presented, and didn't try to do any clever inference of dates based on other information (such as, the first king of the Shang dynasty can be inferred to have been alive around the projected start of said dynasty).
posted by trig at 12:08 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
I guess Jesus was somehow born between 4 and 6 BC, which put him at 21-23 in 17 AD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_the_birth_of_Jesus
posted by crushthemall at 12:14 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_the_birth_of_Jesus
posted by crushthemall at 12:14 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
Oh boy. This has every Muslim leader after Muhammad listed as a prophet. You know, otherwise known as the Seal of the Prophets.
posted by NoMich at 12:21 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
posted by NoMich at 12:21 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
Who is the first woman listed?
posted by Keith Talent at 12:49 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
posted by Keith Talent at 12:49 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
Long story short about the year of Jesus' presumed birth: basically someone miscalculated and it wasnt until the BC/AD dating convention had been well established that someone else figured out the error. I'm sure there's a more detailed explanation out there
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:18 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:18 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]
I landed in the last half of the 1400s, which looks like it should be a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
- Johannes Gutenberg
- Hieronymus Bosch
- Christopher Columbus
- Martin Luther
- Nicolaus Copernicus
- Niccolo Machiavelli
- Vlad The Impaler
- Lots of Medicis
- Leonardo
- Michelangelo
- Donatello
- Raphael
>that he was born as a four year old
''King Herod can't kill you at birth if he's already been dead for 4 years' <--- man pointing at head
I listened to Bertrand Russel's History of Philosophy audiobook on my Texas roadtrip last week (solid if occasionally imperfect way to fill 40 of the hours LOL), and he mentioned in passing that Galileo was born close to the death of Michelangelo, and died the same year Newton was born . . .
posted by torokunai at 1:42 PM on April 12
''King Herod can't kill you at birth if he's already been dead for 4 years' <--- man pointing at head
I listened to Bertrand Russel's History of Philosophy audiobook on my Texas roadtrip last week (solid if occasionally imperfect way to fill 40 of the hours LOL), and he mentioned in passing that Galileo was born close to the death of Michelangelo, and died the same year Newton was born . . .
posted by torokunai at 1:42 PM on April 12
Wow. The overwhelming impression I get from scrolling through all this is that none of us get very long on this earth. All these famous names, just zipping past in a few pixels. Amazing that any of us make a mark at all.
posted by tomsk at 1:49 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
posted by tomsk at 1:49 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
Who is the first woman listed
Enheduanna, 2299 B.C.
couple of awesome posts on her life and work
I think this feature is kind of neat but as a chronological tool, it is very hard to navigate on a mobile.
posted by clavdivs at 1:52 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
Enheduanna, 2299 B.C.
couple of awesome posts on her life and work
I think this feature is kind of neat but as a chronological tool, it is very hard to navigate on a mobile.
posted by clavdivs at 1:52 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
The underappreciated miracle of his birth is that he was born as a four year old.
Ah, so that's why medieval artists were always painting him as a tiny old man.
posted by jedicus at 2:09 PM on April 12 [5 favorites]
Ah, so that's why medieval artists were always painting him as a tiny old man.
posted by jedicus at 2:09 PM on April 12 [5 favorites]
My main takeaway is that Wikipedia would have been pretty sparse in 3000 BC.
posted by mazola at 2:21 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
posted by mazola at 2:21 PM on April 12 [2 favorites]
Are you kidding? AncientPedia was so great, but, sadly, the servers all got erased in the Bronze Age Collapse. Fuckin’ cloud storage.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:35 PM on April 12
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:35 PM on April 12
Fuckin’ cloud storage.
So devastating that Aristophanes was still jokng about it in the 420s.
posted by cocoagirl at 3:24 AM on April 13 [1 favorite]
So devastating that Aristophanes was still jokng about it in the 420s.
posted by cocoagirl at 3:24 AM on April 13 [1 favorite]
The original data for this timeline is stored at https://janwillemtulp.github.io/parallel-lives/data/output.csv and has 1,165 entries.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:27 AM on April 13
posted by AlSweigart at 5:27 AM on April 13
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posted by The Notorious SRD at 10:32 AM on April 12 [6 favorites]