Today I Learned:
1) ...some history of the lightsaber. The precursor of the lightsaber was a weapon called the force saber, developed by the Rakata (more on them later). It ran off of pure force energy channeled from the user, and was effectively a "frozen blaster". The technology behind the force saber was lost along with most other Rakatan technology when their Infinite Empire fell.
The first lightsabers were developed by the Jedi (or possibly the Sith) probably in immitation of the Rakatan force saber. They required immense amounts of energy, which could only be supplied by a small belt-mounted nuclear reactor, and even that could only power the devices for seconds or minutes at a time. As such, they were mostly ceremonial, and were really only used as handheld seige weapons in combat.
As an aside, during this time and for a long time afterwards, the role of the modern (if such a word can be used in a fictional universe that takes place a long time ago....) lightsaber was filled by swords, sometimes enhanced by the force to be extremely good at cutting things. Swords were considered a more elegant weapon, and, like lightsabers later, the skilled use of a sword signified a certain mastery of the force.
It was the Sith that refined the lightsaber into something closely resembling the modern version. The Sith developed a technique for reflecting a blaster-like beam back to the hilt, a technology somewhat distinct from designs based on earlier Rakata weapons. These lightsabers had vastly reduced power requriements and could run without a tethered power supply. The Sith developed a kind of synthetic crystal to focus the device (I believe they lacked access to the natural crystal caves of Ilum, Adega, and Dantooine), which gave their lightsabers their traditional red color. The use of synthetic crystals actually fell out of favor for a time, and during this time the Sith used lightsabers of the same color as the Jedi. Red lightsabers were reinstated in the Sith Empire around the time of Darth Revan. The Imperial Knights circa ~50-137 ABY would later use a different form of synthetic crystal, which produced a silver color.
It took a long time for lightsabers to become standard weapons of force users. Probably out of tradition, swords dominated for quite a while after the modern lightsaber's introduction. This was especially true among the Sith, who were quite good at alchemically modifying their swords to resist lightsabers, or at simply building their swords out of cortosis or other lightsaber-resistant ores.
A friend of mine claimed today that the lightsaber was really developed as a weapon that couldn't be disrupted by the force, in order to break the kinds of stalemates that tended to happen in battles between adept force users. I have not been able to corroborate this claim.
2) The Assyrians were some seriously important people. They were a major power in the Middle East (which was a HUGE chunk of the Western world at the time) from the 23th century BC to the 6th century BC. Hold on a second. Stop. 23rd century to 6th century -- SEVENTEEN HUNDRED YEARS. And they survived as a somewhat-independent region until the 7th century AD, so that's 2.3 THOUSAND years of civilization. I mean, I knew the Assyrians were important enough to merit a mention in any history book covering the period, but I had no idea they went that far back. Oh, and they also ruled over just about all of the peoples of the Middle East for three hundred of those years.
I also learned a little bit about Assyrian culture. Most of it was militaristic, for the Assyrians were a pretty militaristic culture. They pretty much invented the pre-modern system of military division, with cavalry, missile infantry, and modern-ish infantry. Their economy, it seems, was run largely off of invading neighboring empires and looting them, then annexing them and demanding regular tithes. This worked shockingly well for a long time -- there was one king in particular, whose name I forget, who took his army to the field almost every year of his 30 year reign.
These were a bloody people, by their own accounts. They used an Imperial form of terrorism to discourage rebellions -- they had a habit of wiping out entire cities, killing the population down to the animals and reserving particularly brutal and torturous executions for the leaders of those cities, often with the Assyrian king watching. This didn't keep rebellions from popping up all the time, which goes to show how much the Assyrians' vassal states disliked them. Internal politics were no less blody, with the deaths of Assyrian kings typically followed by bloody civil wars between the kings' relatives.
When the Assyrian empire was finally toppled more or less for good (by a confluence of a particularly nasty war of succession, a very expensive war in Egypt, and a coalition rebelling Babylonian/invading Medes/invading Persians), their capital city of Assur was sacked in more or less the same fashion employed by the Assyrians. The ruins left behind was described in awe a couple hundred years later by a Greek army moving through the area -- its fortifications, devestated though they were, still far outstripped anything the Greeks had seen. When the Greeks asked the peoples of the area who had built those walls, nobody knew.
I can't help but be reminded of the Rakata of the Star Wars universe. The Rakata were a brutal Empire-building species who ruled over most of the galaxy for over 10,000 years. They developed the first hyperdrive technology, and left behind some truly devestating structures and weapons, most notably the Star Forge. And, much like the Assyrians, they were very nearly completely erased from history by their conquerers, many of whom had numbered among their slave species. (Unlike the Assyrians, the Rakata were felled by a combination of a deadly plague and a mysterious loss of their connection to the force, possibly brought on by their dark-side corruption, which itself was fueled by centuries of powering their most potent technologies from dark-side-sources.) Admittedly, the theme of a massive, highly-advanced, now-extinct civilization is a pretty common theme in fiction in general and in sci-fi in particular, but I can't help but wonder if any of the Star Wars writers responsible for the Rakata were inspired by the story of the Assyrians.
3) Ok, let's make this short. Apparently at least some kinds of molecular cloning are ridiculously robust to DNA molarities. A couple days ago, I and another student accidentally ran a bunch of golden braid cloning reactions with essentially random amounts of DNA. The result... they basically all worked. The ones with 10-fold too much of one part might have failed... or we might have just not amplified them up properly afterwards. We'll know tomorrow.
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