A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
What a wonderful rabbit hole to go down. My takeaways are it could possibly be used for knitting, but traditional spool knitting that the Grandma uses in the video doesn't show up in history until the 1500s. If the Romans did use it for gloves then knitting has been around much longer than we have evidence of or they were using a different method with the dodecahedron.
Except that's probably not what they're for, I saw a video recently (I think it was this one) that went into detail about the reasons why it doesn't make much sense for these to be a knitting tool.
There's a lesson here about the differences between history and a good historical narrative, but that's the lesson of most history and no one ever listens to it.
First and foremost: knitting wasn’t invented until centuries later and didn’t appear in Europe until about the 14th century.
Last time one of these threads popped up, I saw someone suggest that it might have been a holder for some of those bottles with pointed bottoms the Romans had, don't remember the name. I'm not sure if this is a hypothesis with any level of acceptance, but it feels like it could be plausible just from looking at the thing, having different sized holes would allow different sizes of bottle to fit, and you'd want feet for each possible side that it could be resting on, which would explain the prongs.
Grandma's are the best
Future archeologist: What do you think they used those things for?
My point is, maybe it was just art, fun, deko?
Spinny boi
It's a girth measurer.
Grandma knows how to use it.
Possible Ritual Use™ 😸
Love these, though I'll never remember the name or how to write it ...
Source: it was revealed to me in a dream
You put fossils in them dude
Dang it, someone thought of it already
It's just a papyrus weight