March 12, 2018 at 03:28AM

Today I Learned: 1) Medieval executioners were almost completely separated from larger society. Firslty, executioning was, like most trades in medieval Europe, familial. Executioners were born into the job, whether they liked it or not. Secondly, executioners were considered kind of magical, kind of blessed, and kind of cursed. Importantly, they had the special ability to remove a person's honor with a touch, like a morbid, adult form of cooties. You're in a marketplace and you accidentally brush up against an executioner? Whoops. You just got infected with the executioner's aura. You are no longer fit for polite society. One side effect of executioner hygeine was that executioners were a bit of an inbred breed -- only the children of executioners were fit to marry an executioner, so their lineages remained separate from most of society. This fact-set courtesy of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. 2) Henna tattoos are traditional for brides. Didn't know that. 3) The Viking probe we sent to Mars found some evidence for life, although it didn't pan out in the long-term. Viking carried four tests for carbon-based life: a mass spec to directly look for organic compounds, and three experiments that looked for release of compounds of various kinds when nutrients were added to soil samples. One of the release experiments came up strongly positive... but it turned out that the release (in this case, radiolabeled CO2) could be explained quite well by gamma ray irradiation of the sample.