There is an unexplored archeological/anthropological investigation to be about the relationship between board games and counting boards in ancient history. Counting boards were used for (of course) counting large quantities and doing arithmetic, the classic example being the Salamis board [1].
Separately, were divination methods used to determine the will of the gods, an example of which were the Urim and Thummin of the Old Testament [2], apparently some form of dice. Senet, the Egyptian game, was also closely tied to religious belief and ritual [3].
At some point, no one knows when, these came together and became games that were played for fun.
IANAA, but perhaps some caution needs to be exercised before announcing that "XX ancient people were having fun playing gamez!" and consider whether they were trying to count bushels of grain or trying to find out if it would rain the next day.
That seems to be a common thing on most sites these days to not be able to click back button on a browser. I'm noticing it more and more even on well-known sites like Microsoft.
On some sites now after you click a link to it and you're on the site the back button is not clickable to go back. Even a right-click on the button doesn't allow you to select page history. I thought it was a bug on Firefox and it seems people are reporting it as so. I'll have to use another browser to test to see if it's browser-related or site-related.
I recently got a new MacBook for work and when I was surfing there was all sorts of popups and ads and such. I got none of these things on my personal iMac. It took a day or two for me to realize that it wasn't about (e.g.) the different version of macOS or Safari that I was running.
Once I updated the work machine's hosts(5) file things it was a night-and-day difference.
I cannot believe that people tolerate surfing the web without any ad filtering / blocking.
Yup: I set up one the other day and it "Just Works [TM]". It's trivial to set up if you've got any experience with the Pi and in case you don't there are many tutorials out there. Highly recommended.
I’m doing it in Docker now days and it seems even easier than doing it ‘for real’.
A word of warning though, if you run it on a machine with lots of containers, is buggers up internet access for the other containers and it’s a complete pain to solve (and sometimes reverts to broken on reboot).
Me. I want websites to actually face the consequences of excessive advertising, like driving me away. I'm not happy with the idea of more ads being shoved at a smaller fraction of the visitors.
Do you regularly update the blacklist yourself? Ublock origin uses close to no memory or cpu for me, and offers instantaneous, effortless disabling in times where it is needed.
uBlock Origin does not noticeably affect the responsiveness of my T100 from 2013 with a Bay Trail atom CPU and 2GB RAM. What exactly are you browsing on?
There’s another game trending on Reddit but they have some Babylonian documentation for rules (backgammon precursor) but it appears different from this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Game_of_Ur
I always wonder how they can be so sure what these things are. In this case, for example, it's described as a "carved grid" and "is hewn into the stone slightly clumsily". Perhaps it was made for storing some specific small item? Or maybe it was used to keep track of something (i.e. move the pebble to the next grid space every time X happens). Or maybe it was just someone bored and carving a design?
Separately, were divination methods used to determine the will of the gods, an example of which were the Urim and Thummin of the Old Testament [2], apparently some form of dice. Senet, the Egyptian game, was also closely tied to religious belief and ritual [3].
At some point, no one knows when, these came together and became games that were played for fun.
IANAA, but perhaps some caution needs to be exercised before announcing that "XX ancient people were having fun playing gamez!" and consider whether they were trying to count bushels of grain or trying to find out if it would rain the next day.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salamis_Tablet
[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urim_and_Thummim
[3]. http://www.eloquentpeasant.com/2010/10/14/its-not-just-a-gam...
PS: All that said, it sure looks like a Mancala board to me.