I <3 Wikipedia

Sunday I was checking out a bit of trivia mirisa_ardruna told me and discovered that apparently there was a herb that was a reasonably effective birth control without major side effects -- a lot of herbs that work to prevent pregnancy are also pretty poisonous -- that was picked to extinction by the Romans since no one could cultivate it. Oddly enough, this came up the next day in our Mayan reading group. We were wondering about all these Mayan kings who lived to be quite old, and speculating why -- granted, some of it was 'not getting killed in battle' and 'not being female, so no chance of death due to childbirth' and 'pre-Columbian America was low in disease*', but Shoshe wondered if maybe there was some good antiseptic to keep wounds clean so they didn't end up dying from infection, and she brought up an example of that birth-control plant.

* Speculation that a lot of human endemic diseases came from multiple social species (us and our livestock) living in close quarters. The Mayans didn't have many domesticated animals, so they didn't pick up these until the Spaniards showed up.

Today I also spent a half hour looking up the word for fooling the automatic switches on pre-digital phones via tones -- it's phreaking, BTW. Context was writing a fic about a fantasy-world-early-20th-century-equivalent woman writing science fiction while me accepting that it will be influenced by my early-21st-century outlook. So, 'hacking' doesn't work and nor does anything from the automatic phone switches, since those came into use after WWII.

I might even just delete it and have it be the strangely computer-free futures of old SF, and just have the main character get her information by calling a live person. (Seriously, one of the Heinlein juveniles had interstellar travel but had the main characters having to enter each calculation in one step at a time and read out the output in binary and check tables in books -- the main character saved the day by having memorized all the charts after they got lost, and one astrogator died and the other hid his books in a plea for attention.)

I <3 Wikipedia

Sunday I was checking out a bit of trivia mirisa_ardruna told me and discovered that apparently there was a herb that was a reasonably effective birth control without major side effects -- a lot of herbs that work to prevent pregnancy are also pretty poisonous -- that was picked to extinction by the Romans since no one could cultivate it. Oddly enough, this came up the next day in our Mayan reading group. We were wondering about all these Mayan kings who lived to be quite old, and speculating why -- granted, some of it was 'not getting killed in battle' and 'not being female, so no chance of death due to childbirth' and 'pre-Columbian America was low in disease*', but Shoshe wondered if maybe there was some good antiseptic to keep wounds clean so they didn't end up dying from infection, and she brought up an example of that birth-control plant.

* Speculation that a lot of human endemic diseases came from multiple social species (us and our livestock) living in close quarters. The Mayans didn't have many domesticated animals, so they didn't pick up these until the Spaniards showed up.

Today I also spent a half hour looking up the word for fooling the automatic switches on pre-digital phones via tones -- it's phreaking, BTW. Context was writing a fic about a fantasy-world-early-20th-century-equivalent woman writing science fiction while me accepting that it will be influenced by my early-21st-century outlook. So, 'hacking' doesn't work and nor does anything from the automatic phone switches, since those came into use after WWII.

I might even just delete it and have it be the strangely computer-free futures of old SF, and just have the main character get her information by calling a live person. (Seriously, one of the Heinlein juveniles had interstellar travel but had the main characters having to enter each calculation in one step at a time and read out the output in binary and check tables in books -- the main character saved the day by having memorized all the charts after they got lost, and one astrogator died and the other hid his books in a plea for attention.)