What is the origin of the lake tank image that has become a meme? (2021)
history.stackexchange.com523 points by napolux 17 hours ago
523 points by napolux 17 hours ago
Since Know Your Meme doesn't give the reference for why it's a lake, maybe not everybody is familiar with british lore:
The mythical Lady of the Lake:
Probably best known via Monthy Python:
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
In short: She teaches Lancelot arts and writing, infusing him with wisdom and courage, and overseeing his training to become an unsurpassed warrior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_the_Lake
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnigmaticEmpower...
This reminds me that Monty Python and the Holy Grail contributed actual historical knowledge about Arthurian legends to my knowledge base while growing up. Other examples of Python unintentional education include knowing the names of a myriad of obscure cheeses (the cheese shop skit), a shocking number of anachronistic synonyms for death (the parrot skit) and notable contributions of the Roman Empire (Life of Brian 'What have the Romans ever done for us?' skit).
While it didn't contribute to my GPA at the time, I'm sure I could name more notable philosophers than any other 8th grader in my school (philosopher's song skit). However, in high school it did spark the interest to look up and read about each of the philosophers in the song.
The problem is that comedy is frequently not factually accurate.
Roman Imperial contributions? Was Roman wine better than pre-Roman wine in that region? Did they improve sanitation, irrigation, medicine etc.? Rome was an oppressive slavery based society.
Then what about the Spanish Inquisition sketch? It keeps repeating "fanatically devoted to the Pope"" The Spanish inquisition was an arm of the Spanish monarchy, at least two Popes tried to shut it down, and some historians have suggested one of its aims was to reduce the power of the Papacy.
I do like the Philosopher's Song, the Dead Parrot and Cheese Shop.
Other comedies are no better. Black Adder has a witchfinder (an early modorn innovation) in a Medieval setting.
Pop culture is not historically accurate!
>Did they improve sanitation, irrigation, medicine etc.?
They built a network of aqueducts that was the largest in the world for a thousand years. The plumbing and sewage systems they installed in their cities were so effective that some are not just intact, but in use, right now. There are plenty of negative points you can raise about the Roman Empire, but water systems aren't one of them.
But apart from the aqueducts, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Okay, but apart from orthography and aquaducts, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Now as punishment go write this on the wall 100 times!
Seeing the comedy beats of that scene play out on HN, first unintentionally and then intentionally, has made my day!
well, being part of the Roman Republic/Empire meant peace, even if it was enforced at the tip of a pilum. And the population under the Empire were more prosperous and numerous, so much that the collapse of the Empire in the West had long-lasting negative consequences (I'm mostly basing my opinion off this article: https://acoup.blog/2022/02/11/collections-rome-decline-and-f...)
Ok, but beside the aqueducts, orthography and lasting peace, what good were the Romans for us?
The "what have the Romans done for us" sketch is partly about Rome, but largely a disguised defense of the British Empire.
Indians have a love/hate relationship with the British because it really is an apt comparison.
India (as in the country) literally would not exist without the British. They were right assholes (to put it mildly), but compared to the other colonial powers, actually did leave a somewhat useful legacy. And weren’t that rapacious compared to many others (cough Belgium, Spain).
As to how much, if any, that justifies anything is up for debate. But Indians would generally hold that debate in English, because it works.
In a pre-industrial agricultural society, slavery or something similar (serfdom etc.) tends to be widespread, as human and animal muscles are the only reliable and ubiquitous source of energy. Humanity only really started getting rid of unfree backbreaking work by adopting steam engines. 300-400 years ago, most of us forists here would be unfree people working the fields in unfavorable conditions, with maybe 5 per cent being burghers and 1 per cent nobility.
It's not that pre-industrial society causes slavery, it's closer to the other way round. If you're pre-industrial then everyone has to do farm work, yes, but slavery is /economically inefficient/ because the slaves don't provide demand (since you don't pay them) and don't grow the economy.
This is why economics was called "the dismal science" - economists told people to stop doing slavery and the slaveowners called them nerds. They wanted to own slaves because they wanted to be mini-tyrants, not because they were good at capitalism. Adam Smith did not go around telling people to own slaves.
You are right that slavery is economically inefficient and that economists were one of the fiercest crusaders against slavery etc.
However: lack of demand is not a problem. People can create any amount of total nominal demand for basically free, as long as you have access to a printing press. (And with some minor caveats that's generally true in a gold standard setting, too.)
And even without that: your argumentation would suggest that as long as the slave-owners lavishly spend the money they save on wages, the economy would do just as well as without slavery. That's not the case; have a look at the arguments of the very economists you mention.
Nope. If the only kilowatts at your disposal are the ones that you, your slaves and your horses can digest, you cannot just upscale the production of goods (or anything else) arbitrarily. The whole economy is bottlenecked on production which is bottlenecked on energy supply. Increasing the demand when supply is the problem would only make things worse.
However once you're burning coal (or harness the wind in case of dutch) things are very different, kilowatts flow freely and all the things you say above start to be true.
From 1000-1700 there was increasing wealth in Europe not through serfdom intensifying (but see Poland) but through increased trade, fishing, agricultural improvements and culminating in the steam engine. Watermills were medieval inventions.
Smith's pin factory has no steam engine. Nor did Slaters mill which created US industrialization. Steam required institutions to grow, institutions that had created growth earlier.
I would say that inventing new technologies is one of the things that isn't possible when you've enslaved the inventors and made them farmworkers.
I mean, making them do research might work. That's a command economy, aka actually existing communism. Should be able to invent the waterwheel and crop rotation.
I do think it's hard to invent antibiotics and the Haber-Bosch process, and without that you are still in a Malthusian economy where everyone's going to die if they slack off farming.
Well yes, but how is this even relevant to the conversation? No one says innovation thrives with slavery. The point made is very simple, it's about commandable energy and EROI in particular. No amount of antibiotics can change that.
> Was Roman wine better than pre-Roman wine in that region?
If I were to guess, I would say that Roman wine was made from grapes, Levantine wine was made from dates, the vast majority of wine in the Levant continued to be made from dates during Roman rule, and imported Roman wine probably cost a lot more than local wine did, making it "better" by definition.
…I think it kinda goes without saying that , perhaps with a very few notable exceptions, satirical television shows are not necessarily renown for their historical, scientific, or anecdotal accuracy.
That being said, in my own experience at least, such pseudo-historical references in comedy in particular have spurred me on to independent investigation as to what they were on about, exactly.
I’d say that the slapdash integrity is a feature, rather than a bug, since it is implicit in the format that a certain fraction of the assertions made will be bullocks cheese. This spurs curiosity and is also an excellent comedic mechanism.
It would be interesting, however, to have a backdrop of steadfast historical “accuracy “ in an otherwise pseudo-slapstick context a-la Monty pythons flying circus. That was kinda part of the gig, but it might be even funnier if they obviously took that aspect with unflinching seriousness.
As for the Roman Empire, I’d dare say that in slavery they were contemporary with most societies of their day, and I think to imply that their use of slavery somehow diminishes their contribution to global cultural heritage is not only disingenuous, but also smacks of some kind of pointless reflexive regurgitation of a partisan talking point or conformance/virtue signaling. It kinda undermines your point.
Ultimately, there are probably very few, if any, living humans that cannot trace their cultural heritage to slavery, slave ownership, perpetrators horrific atrocities, genocide, human rights violations, war crimes, and violent crimes against women, children, and humanity in general. What matters is what -you- chose to do. Be known for the fruit of your tree, and not as the product of the hill from which you sprout.
Poe never wrote "Quoth the raven, eat my shorts", but I suspect an order of magnitude or two more people are aware of that poem thanks to The Simpsons, compare to all the poetry teachers ever.
> It would be interesting, however, to have a backdrop of steadfast historical “accuracy “ in an otherwise pseudo-slapstick context a-la Monty pythons flying circus. That was kinda part of the gig, but it might be even funnier if they obviously took that aspect with unflinching seriousness.
That can get super grim too.
I saw (maybe read?) an interview with Margaret Attwood about The Handmaids Tale. She took the atrocities committed by Gilead very seriously - and did not make a single one of them up. Every one of them was something historically accurate that really happened somewhere in the world.
Would say I prefer comedy/satire, since you don't run into the danger zone of historical dramas, where you mistake artistic story alterations for dramatic effect for some historically factual narrative.
Those are hard to rectify once internalized, and have a tendency to even overshadow historical research for the general public.
> in slavery they were contemporary with most societies of their day
> Ultimately, there are probably very few, if any, living humans that cannot trace their cultural heritage to slavery
Indeed. Historically, for most of human civilization, chattel slavery was a linchpin of most societies. The Romans were unremarkable in this respect.
And if I may take a long digression to emphasize just how normal chattel slavery was for not only the ancient world, but for centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it took Christianity to mount a challenge to this practice. It gave us a robust notion of the Imago Dei and human dignity, and a recognition of the evil of unjust servitude (which must be distinguished from just title servitude). Ancient Christians, having been born into a pagan world of entrenched and ubiquitous slavery, while believing that slavery was indeed evil, recognized that its abolition was impossible and impractical at the time. Of course, membership in the Church was open to everyone equally; social status had no significance. After Christianity's legalization under Constantine, the Church worked to free slaves and eventually managed to eradicate the practice in Europe. A former slave even became pope (Callistus I).
Some will point to chattel slavery in the New World, but this confuses what the Church as an institution held with what individual Catholics or Protestants did. Eugenius IV, prompted by slavery in the Canary Islands, condemned slavery in the papal bull Sicut Dudum in 1435, threatening excommunication. In 1537, Paul III issued Sublimus Dei to condemn enslavement of the natives of the Americas. In 1591, Gregory XIV promulgated Cum Sicuti to counter the practice in the Philippines. Urban VIII promulgated Commissum Nobis in 1639 in support of Philip IV's edict prohibiting the enslavement of American natives. Benedict XIV, in his 1741 document Immensa Pastorum, reminded that the penalty for enslaving the indigenous was excommunication.
Similar condemnations were issued regarding the Atlantic slave trade by Innocent XI, Gregory XVI (In Supremo, 1839), and Leo XIII in two bulls condemning slavery in 1888 and 1890. The condemnations were often so harsh that their publication was often forbidden without royal approval.
And we credit the abolitionists of and from the Christian West for politically ending the practice in their various respective jurisdictions that fell under Western rule. Their appeals were grounded in the general heritage of the Christian tradition and its understanding of the human person, whatever theological or philosophical differences there might have been between them.
> What matters is what -you- chose to do. Be known for the fruit of your tree, and not as the product of the hill from which you sprout.
Wise words. History ought to be remembered, and unresolved historical trauma should be addressed and resolved lest it fester (reasonable justice and remembrance matter; without truth, there is no authentic reconciliation or unity), but to stew perpetually in stomach-churning grievance over what someone else's ancestors did to your ancestors (often overlapping groups, btw) only succeeds in wasting the short time we have in this life and contributes nothing to it. It's an excellent method of self-sabotage.
Note that, at least in Thomas Malory’s telling, the arm holding Excalibur out of the lake is not the Lady Of The Lake, who is nearby on the lake. The arm holding Excalibur is neither named nor explained.
Is Thomas Malory of some kind of significance?
Edit: he was apparently one of the primary fanfiction authors of the english tradition
Sorry maybe I'm dense, but what does the lady of the lake have to do with this image aside from a body of water being present?
I believe the meme format typically involves asking the tank questions as if it were a great sage with wisdom to impart.
So it has to so with the lady of the lake because not only is there a body of water but in both cases there is a role for paying deference to the entity in the water (Lady or tank).
There's also Father Thames, the River God of London https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1140390
This feels like a ghost of the internet of the 1990s.
This writeup deserves its own website, something with minimal CSS, where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
That's an aesthetic / scene preference (that I happen to agree with). The content is the most important part -- you can find this kind of curiosity and knowledge seeking all over the place. It'll probably even stay readable on stackexchange longer than the average handmade site from the 90s.
Where the url root is /~username, and if there is an error it is an Apache one not Nginx and certainly not a 404 page that cost $10k to design.
> where you'll discover a bunch of family snapshots and party photos if you click around.
Yes, lovely. The sort of site where private moments might be kindly shared by an individual. To be distinguished from the forcible asset stripping and loss of ownership (theft, really) that form the terms and conditions of a large corporate's ToS today.
I still think wikipedia hit those "this is my passion" sites harder than social media did. What's the point of building a site about widgets, when 90% of people are just going to hit the Widget page on wikipedia?
Plus Wikipedia offers arguing about widgets with other widget enthusiasts/detractors as a first-class feature via the Talk page.
This entire deep dive is great. I feel compelled to call out this heroism:
> 1st Lieutenant de Wispelaere had prepared the bridge for demolition ... De Wispelaere immediately pushed the electrical ignition, but there was no explosion... Wispelaere now left his shelter and worked the manual ignition device. Trying to get back to his bunker, he was hit by a burst from a German machine gun and fell to the ground, mortally wounded. At the same time, the explosive charge went off.
This is also mentioned in the ConeOfArc video linked on stackexchange. However, at 4:17 in the video, the speaker shows a sign describing two versions of the event. In the first version, Wispelaere died due to a German shell (not a machine gun). In the second version, he was killed by the explosion of the detonating device after shortening the fuse (“l’explosion du dispositif de mise à feu”; not sure how to translate this exactly).
I haven't seen the lake tank image being used as a meme anywhere, except now or maybe I have to explore the world of memes some more.
Hats off to all who helped each other find this once lost story from history.
Went there for the first time and found out it's banned in my country.
Another point is the fact that i saw more "anime version" of this meme than the original foto
i'm aware of the "senpai of the pool" version, but probably i'm biased... I'm a huge WW2 nerd.
You're not getting your BM degree, not with that attitude.
I am feeling the humor behind this sentence if only I knew what BM is.
The fact that this extraordinarily obscure question had such a thoroughly researched and intricately detailed answer almost restores my faith in Internet forums.
Helps that it tickles a few things that people in subcultures get very nerdy about: military topics, WWII, etc.
> The photo was taken about coordinates 50.29092467073664, 4.893099128823844 near modern Wallonia, Belgium on the Meuse River.
Great writeup, but I did have a little chuckle reading "it was taken about near here", followed by coordinates precise enough to identify a single atom. https://xkcd.com/2170/
Going to be a different atom once you walk near. Or temperature changes, the wind blows, and so on.
We’ll need to give each atom a unique ID. That would solve the problem.
Let's start with electrons. I've got SN001 here with me, but I haven't been able to find any others...
IPv8 is accepting RFCs
Earth has about 2^170 atoms. If we ignore the core and mantle, focusing on the crust, surface and atmosphere, we should be able to cram it into IPv6. Even if we add a couple planets and moons in the future. At least if we stop giving each person 18 quintillion IPs just because we once thought encoding MAC addresses in the lower 64 bits was a good idea.
Addressing isn't really the big issue with IPv6. The main issue is that moving to mobile networks means all its assumptions about how routing will work are wrong, since you don't want to lose IP connections when you move across cell towers.
There are 10^80 atoms in the universe, therefore 266 bits are enough to give each a unique identifier. Due to how computers work maybe we can do two numbers: a 32-bit type or area code and a 256-bit counter. Or perhaps we just combine them into a single 272 or 288 or 320-bit number.
When I toured Jacques Littlefield's Tank Ranch they had, what I believe to be, this exact tank. They told the story of how it had been lost in the river and sat there and they went to see if it was still there and arranged to get it removed and returned to California where they restored it.
If someone was so motivated, they could probably go back to the internet archives of the auction that happened after Jacques died to find a picture of both the restored tank and its providence.
The stack exchange link and the article about the search say it was recovered in 1941
Cannot wait for the day that question will be a ChatGPT prompt and the answer will be its response.
A very different ChatGPT of course, but what a dream would that be.
How would that be very different? I sent that prompt now and got a similar response, not as detailed, but the summary is correct and the same.
Are they training on StackOverflow?
StackOverflow and Wikipedia are the main things they trained on. These days they have more custom content written for them.
Don't know the origin of the image but I wonder if it formed the inspiration for this iconic hostile emergence from the River Thames:
Germans pioneers wore white uniforms? That sounds like the worst possible colour for digging ditches, recovering tanks or camouflage (if it isn't snowing). Why would they do that? Did Hugo Boss do the design?
From the link, the white pants are part of the "Drillich" work uniform. From searching around, these were intended as work uniforms / overalls. You were intended to wear these (there were both pants and jackets) over your actual uniform, and these would take the abuse.
It seems like the early war patterns were simply undyed. Mid-war versions were apparently dyed darker.
Here's a forum with a bunch of pictures of examples: https://www.militariacollectors.network/forums/topic/4042-th...
Post WW II the Panzer IV's were offloaded to the Middle East. But it competed well with its Soviet T-34.
At first it looked like Czech military fatigue but the confluence of two rivers points to Germany.
> The man is an unnamed German pioneer likely at the time of recovery.
Edit: ops, that joke wasn’t clear.
A prisoner’s uniform needs to be cheap, distinctive, and easy to spot it doesn’t need to be clean.
If the person were a prisoner he wouldn't be carrying a rifle..
Thus the joke…
It’s a play on words, and the involuntary nature of service in the German military at the time.
German Army had 1.3 million conscripts and 2.4 million volunteers in the period 1935-1939 so odds are he signed up to be there.
Those numbers aren’t independent of each other. People about to be drafted will often volunteer to be in a military as a volunteer rather than a draftee, to get the waiting over with, etc.
For some value of 'joke'.
Fair, but it’s a meme thread. My initial thought was.
Pioneer: O panzer of the lake, why are our uniforms white? Panther: They must be easy to spot.
But, I tried to reach past the pun and failed.
> Did Hugo Boss do the design?
I'm not saying that you're saying that, but there is a persistent meme that Hugo Boss designed the Nazi officer uniforms, or maybe is was the SS, or it was the whole Wehrmacht. This lends a certain mystique to the Nazis and cements the notion that they were somehow extra sharp. Aesthetic forbidden fruit. I don't like that, not in the least because it's not correct. The uniforms for all the Nazi arms of the state were designed by party insiders. Boss didn't even start designing men's tailored suits until after the war.
This is not to exculpate Hugo Boss, but to knock the shine of fancy suits off of the nazis. Hugo Boss had been selling ready made menswear since 1923, joined the nazi party in 1931, and won contracts to produce the uniforms much the way FEDS Apparel makes the USDA branded polo shirts [1]. In fact, he produced the uniforms using slave labor. He's guilty as sin.
someone with better citations saying the same thing with more details seven years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/78ho4c/comme...
[1] think of these dorky (no offense to the dorks who keep our milk free of pathogens) polos or windbreakers when you think of the nazi uniforms https://www.fedsapparel.com/collections/us-department-of-agr...
I thought Hugo Boss designed Nazi uniforms. Apparently not. As you say, he just made them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Boss_(businessman)
Nerd sniping is my favorite kind of content on the internet
Ok, now I need the answer to that question, what will the resistance...
Answered on explain xkcd ((4/π − 1/2) ohms, or roughly 0.773 ohms): https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/356:_Nerd_Sniping
> It's a Panzer IVD of the 31st Panzer Regiment assigned to the 5th Panzer Div. commanded by Lt. Heinz Zobel lost on May 13th, 1940. The "lake" is the Meuse River. The man is a German pioneer.
Interesting uniform
"Panzer of the Lake, what is your origin?"
"Krupp factory in Essen, apparently."
I love the train of comments confidently but incorrectly identifying the tank (there are at least three highly-specific, different identifications given which use words like "definitely" and make claims to expertise).
Can tanks work underwater?
With a snorkel attached. The engine needs oxygen and dislikes water. Both sides of the war invented that capability in the early 40s, though obviously not every tank had the capability.
It's also a great example of the doctrines and tradeoffs of different armies. For example Russian tanks usually have space-efficient thin snorkels, while modern Western tanks have wide snorkels that double as a way for the crew to escape if they get stuck while driving submerged
Why on earth doesn't the top answer have more upvotes. Impressive research, with full background, alternative pictures and an original picture of the panzer falling into the river.
While this didn't get much attention on History Stack Exchange, see ConeOfArc's YouTube video (which has 963k views as of today): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaRO_dTqO1E
See also ConeOfArc's video from a month later, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO58B6LcTfM (1M views). The video above is about the initial search and problem, this video is after many Internet strangers worked together to solve it.
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new to me, kinda lame meme lol
That's a meme? I've never seen that photo before in my life and I'm pretty aware of most memes.
I highly doubt that - most memes are short-lived, community specific or barely identifiable to outsiders.
But you are, of course, unaware of memes you are not aware of.
Just google 'tank of the lake, what is your wisdom' and you can catch up on a new meme genre
I think a very small number of people today are aware of Arthurian legend. I think I have heard the phrase "lady of the lake" before but never really knew any context around it until I just now searched the term. I would have guessed it was the name of a ship or something.
Most of them? Are you sure?
https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/comments/egxfws/12880_m...
It's most popular in military enthusiast circles, especially around the video games World of Tanks and War Thunder, which tend to be somewhat insular
This begs the question, is it a meme if it is not seen?
Yeah and I seriously question what feels like “I couldn’t find anything about this in Google therefore nobody knows anything about this”. [1] I worked in a specialized reference library for a while and it was very eye-opening to see university students fail to find, say, 90% of our materials.
[1] Quoting: > However, no-one seems to know the origins of the image
Do you have a go-to bit of advice you give to students who you've spotted are lacking research (and just plain search) skills?
(i.e. Something to kickstart them in the right direction, not just a way of saying "learn how to search better!")
I think people prefer the similar (derivative?) "senpai of the pool" for receiving wisdom from a non-native occupant of a body of water.
As long as you remember that supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.