Dillon
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Post by Dillon on May 15, 2015 19:17:26 GMT
WHY YOUR LAP IS CALLED THAT May 14, 2015Used as a noun, verb and adjective, most with several distinct meanings, lap is a prominent word in the English language.
One of its most common meanings denotes the upper part of the legs when seated. Derived from a Proto-Germanic word *lapp, meaning the “skirt or flap of a garment,” or as the OED notes, “A part (of a garment or the like) either hanging down or projecting so as to admit of being folded over.” (Think toga, or the front of a robe.) This ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-Eurpoean root “*leb”, meaning “be loose, hang down.”
This was later incorporated by a variety of early languages, including Old Saxon and Old High German (lappa), Middle Dutch and Dutch (lappe and lap), and, of course, Old English (læppa). The first known instance of “lap” meaning the top of the space between your hips and your knees when seated occurred in 1275 in Layamon, The Brut: And then more notably in the prologue of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the late 14th century, “His walet lay biforn hym in his lappe.” A second popular meaning, to pull up liquid with the tongue, also dates back to Old English (500-1150 AD) with the word lapian, first documented around the year 1000. If you’re wondering about the sense of a trip around a track or the like, in the mid-1600s, one meaning of lap was something coiled up. By the mid-1800s this morphed into “laps” of a track. | |
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Dillon
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"He's probably a circus freak!"
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Post by Dillon on May 15, 2015 19:27:38 GMT
WHY LEAD IS BAD FOR HUMANS May 15, 2015Given that humans have been using lead in various product for over 8,000 years (with the first known mining of it in Anatolia around 6500 BCE), you might be surprised to learn that we have known that lead is dangerous and shouldn’t be trifled with since at least 150 BC, when its effects on the human body were noted by famed Greek physician Nicander of Colophon. Nicander even went so far as to describe the metal as “deadly”, writing extensively on the crippling effects it has on the human body in his work, Alexipharmaca.
Further, Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides noted in the first century AD: “Lead makes the mind give way”. To quote the Occupation Safety and Health Research Institute: “Lead poisoning is one of the earliest identified and most known occupational disease. Its acute effects have been recognized from antiquity.”
So what exactly does lead poisoning do to the body? Well, depending on how much of the substance gets into your body (and it doesn’t take much, particularly for children), it can cause everything from constipation to permanent reduction in your IQ and mental capacity. It also can potentially fundamentally change a given person’s personality, causing them to be irritable and suffer from erratic mood-swings and fatigue without warning; cause a reduction in sperm count and infertility; stunted growth (in children); miscarriages; and a whole slew of other terrifying symptoms.
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So that’s what it can do, but how? Why is lead so dangerous to the human body while we can safely ingest many other types of metals, like iron, without worry (and, in fact, need some of them to survive)? While research is ongoing into the full effects and mechanisms involved in lead poisoning, what we do know is that a lot of the damage is due to the fact that important things like zinc, calcium, and iron in the body can ultimately get replaced by lead in many key biochemical reactions, if lead is present. Unlike these other metals, though, while lead is happy to bind and interact with various critical enzymes, the result isn’t the normal reaction you need. For example, with calcium, as noted in this paper on the Mechanisms of Lead Neurotoxicity, lead has a nasty habit of being able to mimic, or in some cases straight up inhibit the actions of calcium in natural biological reactions that take place within the human body, inhibiting neurological function, among other things. Lead also can damage DNA, as well as your cell membranes, the latter of which, combined with the fact that it also interferes with heme synthesis, can result in anemia among a host of other problems. It can interfere with the ability for your body to synthesize vitamin D, which comes with yet another host of its own problems if you don’t have enough. It also causes a few different problems with your immune system; interferes with metabolism of bones and teeth; can cause abnormal calcium build up within cells… the list goes on and on and on. If that wasn’t bad enough, lead can easily find its way into almost any part of your body once introduced, whether by breathing it in, ingesting it, or (very rarely) via skin absorption. From this, you might find it completely unsurprising that, unlike many other poisons, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lead is so toxic to humans that, “No safe blood lead level has been identified.” So, in short, lead is bad for you because, though lead has no useful function in your body, it’s happy to jump on in and give it its best college try, interacting up a storm with various enzymes, failing the whole way at producing the reactions that are needed for normal body function. But what it lacks in end result, it makes up for in staying power. You see, the half-life of lead in the body is quite long- weeks in your blood, months in your soft tissues, and years in your bones; and by years we mean up to two to three decades. Who needs proper enzymatic function anyway?
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on May 18, 2015 18:21:00 GMT
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HARDWOODS AND SOFTWOODS May 18, 2015Generally speaking, wood is often put into one of two categories- hardwood and softwood. But what exactly makes a given piece of wood qualify as either hard or soft and how did those definitions come about?
Perhaps the most important and misunderstood aspect of defining wood as either hard or soft is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the individual qualities of the harvested wood itself. The most famous and oft used example of this concept is that of balsa wood which, despite being literally one of the least dense (and hence softest) woods of all, is technically classified as hardwood. Likewise, the wood of the yew tree, which is classified as being a softwood, is a great deal tougher than many hardwoods including several types of oak. So what’s going on here?
Well, the basic answer is that classifying a wood as either hard or soft is entirely dependent on the seeds produced by the tree it comes from. If a tree’s seeds have some sort of covering when they fall from the tree, be it in the form of a shell or fruit, then the wood of that tree will be classified as hardwood. On the other hand, if a tree produces seeds that are simply left to the elements when they fall to the ground, then the wood harvested from it will be classified as a softwood.
The technical term for a tree that produces seeds sans any sort of covering is “gymnosperm”, a term derived from Ancient Greek which literally translates to “naked seed“. In regards the trees that produce covered seeds, the technical term is “angiosperm”, a word that is again taken from Ancient Greek and roughly translates to “vessel seed” or more aptly, “seeds contained in a protective vessel”. As previously mentioned, angiosperms include any tree that produces fruit as well as any tree that produces seeds protected by some sort of shell, like an acorn. | |
According to The Dawn Angiosperms, by Xin Wang, the term “angiosperm” was first coined way back in 1690 by a German botanist, Paul Hermann, who coined it as a way of classifying members of the plant kingdom by the one thing they all had in common- seeds. Although the terms hardwood and softwood are in no way related to the relative toughness of a given piece of wood, it’s noted that, for the most part, hardwoods are usually harder than softwoods. This leaves the obvious question of how exactly one classifies how hard a piece of wood is? The most common way is using something known as the Janka Hardness Test, which has been an industry standard since 1906. This involves measuring the average amount of force required to “embed a .444-inch steel ball to half its diameter” in some type of wood, with the average used so that the difference in hardness between heartwood and “live edge” wood doesn’t skew things too much. It is also distinguished via “side hardness” and “end hardness” (whether this test was done on the surface of a plank (side) or on the cut surface (surface of the stump), which is “end hardness”. Most of the time, the numbers you’ll see quoted here are referring to side hardness. The Janka test itself it the brainchild of one Gabriel Janka who came up with it after being asked by the Department of Agriculture to find an “objectively and scientifically” sound way to measure the hardness of a piece of wood. For the curious, according to the Janka test, the softest wood in the world belongs to the Cuipo tree, which has a rating of just 22 lbf (pounds-force) making it is drastically softer than Balsa wood which has a higher, but still very low rating (as you’ll soon see) of 100 lbf. Interestingly enough, like Balsa wood, Cuipo wood is classified as a hardwood. The hardest wood is said to come from the Australian Buloke (pronounced “Bull-oak”) tree, with a staggering rating of 5060 lbf. (For reference, a commonly worked with type of wood that is generally considered very hard is Hickory, which rings in at 1820 lbf.) Wood from the Buloke is fairly difficult to come by, so not often worked with, though woodworkers who’ve had the chance often describe it as being “like a rock”. However, this is relative to many other woods. In truth, it can be cut with a regular old handsaw. It just takes a lot more time and effort than most commonly worked with woods.
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Dillon
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"He's probably a circus freak!"
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Post by Dillon on May 21, 2015 4:01:14 GMT
THE UNORTHODOX WAY BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY FIRST MADE IT TO AIR May 19, 2015Clocking in at 5 minutes and 55 seconds long and encompassing elements of hard rock, opera and pop, Bohemian Rhapsody is certainly one of the more eclectic songs to make it into the charts, but it’s by no means the longest. Hey Jude by The Beatles (7:11), I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That) by Meatloaf (7:58) and All Around The World by Oasis (9:38) are all songs that have managed to squeak their way into the charts despite being about twice the length of most other pop songs. That said, the fact that there are so few songs over 5 minutes in length that have gained that much airtime is a testament to how rare of an occurrence that actually is.
Taken from the album A Night at the Opera and credited solely to Freddie Mercury, Bohemian Rhapsody is noted as being one of the most lavishly expensive songs ever recorded. In fact, it was reportedly the most expensive single ever at the time. This was, in part, due to the band ultimately using 180 separate overdubs, which was incredibly tricky to do given that they were working with 24-track analogue tape. | |
There was also the fact that Mercury wasn’t exactly sure how the song was supposed to go. Queen’s producer and a close friend of Mercury, Roy Baker, would later note that the opera section of the song ended up sounding nothing like Mercury’s original concept because they “kept changing and adding things to it.” He also noted that when Mercury first introduced him to the idea of the song, “He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, ‘And this is where the opera section comes in!’ Then we went out to eat dinner.” Initially, Baker set aside a 30 second strip of tape for the opera section, but had to resort to cutting and adding new pieces of tape to the reel due to Mercury’s habit of “adding another Galileo” every time they tried to record it. Due to this type of thing, the opera section on its own reportedly took almost a month to record. To quote Baker a final time on why this was a big deal: “in 1975 [that] was the average time spent on a whole album”. Although today the song has been lauded as a masterpiece, when recording wrapped on Bohemian Rhapsody, EMI (Queen’s record label at the time) didn’t rate it that highly with their general manager of international sales going as far to say “what the f*ck is this?” the first time the band played him the song. EMI wasn’t alone in this thinking and almost everyone the band played an advanced copy of the song for said the same thing, including Elton John who famous exclaimed “are you f*cking mad?” upon first hearing the song and being told it was going to be the first single of A Night at the Opera. As it turns out, EMI had banked on You’re My Best Friend, being the big hit of the album and they pushed the band to make it the first single. Queen remained steadfast in their decision and told EMI that the first single had to be Bohemian Rhapsody. In response, EMI tried to meet the band in the middle and suggest that they trim the song down, a suggestion that the band quickly dismissed. The one person who saw the genius of the song, other than the band of course, was famed DJ and a close friend of Mercury, Kenny Everett, who famously stated that it was “going to be number one for centuries.” Exactly how Everett first got hold of a copy of the single early in October of 1975 isn’t clear. Depending on who you want to believe, Everett either asked Roy Baker for a copy after hearing it at a private demonstration or was sent one by Mercury himself shortly after it was recorded. Either way, we know that Everett was asked to kindly keep the record to himself and absolutely not play it on the radio or talk about how he’d gotten his hands on a hot new record live on air. According to Baker, Everett got the message with Baker stating he said, “I won’t play it”, while giving them a wink. You see, the band was still struggling to get their label to make it the first single of the album, so took matters into their own hands. Despite the “strict” instructions not to play it, immediately after getting a copy of the single, Everett began playing clips of the song on his morning show on Capital FM, a popular London based radio station. Each time Everett aired a clip from the song, he’d play it off as an accident, telling listeners that “his finger must’ve slipped” and that they weren’t supposed to have heard anything. Steadily, interest in the song grew. Callers began flooding the station with requests, begging Everett to play the whole song, which he’d by this point built up to a ridiculous degree, telling his now captive audience that he couldn’t play the entire song because he’d been made to promise that he wouldn’t. Eventually, Everett relented and played the entire song 14 times over the course of two days. One critical thing Everett left out about the single was where fans could buy it, causing the station to be visited by hundreds of curious music fans hoping to acquire a copy. Record stores across the country were also similarly surprised when demands began pouring in for the single the following Monday morning after Everett had played the full song. The problem was that at this point the song hadn’t actually been released yet. A similar thing was happening on the other side of the pond when Paul Drew of RKO managed to wrangle a copy of the song from somewhere and started playing it across the RKO network of stations. As Baker later stated, “It was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!” With the song already something of a hit on the radio even before being released, the label relented and on the 31st of October, 1975, Bohemian Rhapsody was officially released as a single in the UK where it spent 9 weeks at number one. In keeping with Kenny’s predictions, the song is regarded today as one of the finest ever recorded, including being inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004.
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on May 21, 2015 14:24:28 GMT
THE AMAZINGLY TOUGH HERO SHREW May 21, 2015At only a few inches long and with no distinguishing external physical features to speak of, Scutisorex somereni, better known as the Hero or Armoured Shrew, is seemingly an unremarkable creature. That is, until you accidentally step on one. You see, the Hero shrew can comfortably survive being stood on by a typical adult human without any injury. The secret to this remarkably skill lies in the shrew’s skeletal system, or more specifically, its spine. Unlike almost every other mammal on Earth, with one notable exception which we’ll get to in a moment, the Hero shrew’s spine features intricate interlocking vertebrae, a very large number of spinal processes, and is incredibly thick relative to its size (accounting for roughly 4% of its total body weight, or about a 6-8 times higher percentage than mammals of comparable size).
As a final insult to other, lesser shrews, the Hero shrew’s spine also contains more than twice as many lumbar vertebrae (10-11 instead of 5) giving the little guy significantly more flexibility than its peers, allowing the Hero shrew to turn around in much tighter quarters than its brethren can. What makes this adaptation even more unusual is that most of the rest of the Hero shrew’s skeleton, aside from slightly beefier ribs, doesn’t follow suit and is not all that different to that of other small mammals.
However, as alluded to previously, in some of the earliest reports of encounters with this creature in its native habitat of the forests of certain regions of Africa, researchers, such as German naturalist Herbert Lang, noted that
Whenever [the Mangbetu] have a chance, they take great delight in showing to the easily fascinated crowd its extraordinary resistance to weight and pressure. After the usual hubbub of various invocations, a full-grown man weighing some 160 pounds (72 kg) steps barefooted upon the shrew. Steadily trying to balance himself upon one leg, he continues to vociferate several minutes. The poor creature seems certainly to be doomed. But as soon as his tormentor jumps off, the shrew, after a few shivering movements, tries to escape, none the worse for this mad experience and apparently in no need of the wild applause and exhortations from the throng. For reference, the man in this story weighed around 1,000 times more than a typical Hero shrew. This would be like having a Boeing 757 balanced on top of a typical adult male, if humans could perform the same feat, scaled up. Although the Mangbetu have known about the Hero shrew’s remarkable resilience to pressure for centuries, when British zoologist, Oldfield Thomas became the first western expert to encounter one back in 1910, he didn’t notice that there was anything unusual about it. In fact, Oldfield described the creature as being rather uninteresting, only noting that it was slightly larger than an average shrew and had quite dense fur. The shrew’s remarkable spine wasn’t observed by academics for another seven years, when a curator at the Natural History Museum stumbled across a preserved specimen and wrote a paper about it called, “The skeletal characters of Scutisorex Thomas“. |
White-Toothed Shrew Spine (left) vs. the Hero Shrew Spine (right) |
Since its discovery until very recently, experts were baffled about exactly why the Hero shrew evolved in the way that it did, with there being no obvious explanation for why its spine needs (or needed) to be as strong as it is. There was also more or less a “missing link” between the spines of a typical shrew and the exceptionally different spine of the Hero shrew. This latter point was initially explained by perhaps being an example of punctuated equilibrium, a theory that posits that under just the right circumstances, a subset of some members of a species can evolve rapidly in response to a threat or change in environment while the rest of the species that aren’t experiencing these same environmental pressures may stay more or less the same. Once the rapidly evolving group adapts to the environmental pressures, it also more or less stays the same in this new form, with the rapid scale and isolation of the event leaving little record of the transition. However, quite recently the potential “missing link” was found. In 2012, William Stanley and his team, acting on behalf of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, encountered a close relative of this remarkable shrew species in a small African village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Like the Hero shrew, this new species, named the Scutisorex thori, sported an unusually thick spine consisting of interlocking vertebrae. Unlike the Hero shrew, though, this new species had only 8 lumbar vertebrate, 3 more than regular shrews, but 3 less than the Hero shrew. It also had fewer and bigger spinal processes, a little more like a typical mammalian spine. Essentially, this spine is more or less half way between a Hero shrew’s and a typical shrew in form. After analysing the new species of shrew’s DNA, the researchers found that, indeed, they are closely related to the Hero shrew. As to the question of why such an evolution would have taken place, during his time in the Congo, Stanley was told by locals that the best place to find Hero shrews was in swampy palm forests, where beetle larvae and other such creatures can often be found under dead palm leaves, branches, and the like. After watching the natives pry up such things to expose large grubs for harvesting, he logically theorised that the reason this new shrew, and by extension its sister species, had evolved such strong backs and spinal muscles (as well as thicker ribs) was because it allowed them to pry up branches and other such objects enough to expose the grubs the shrew like to eat, all without risking injury. This gives these shrews a significant biological advantage over other shrews in certain regions. However, according to Stanley “no one has seen the shrew actually do this”, so it remains just a very reasonable sounding theory without hard evidence to back it up.
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on May 26, 2015 20:31:55 GMT
WHO IS BURIED IN THE TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER? May 25, 2015It’s Armistice Day, November 11th, in the nation’s capital. It is a brisk day at Arlington National Cemetery. Dignitaries stand silently on the third anniversary of the ending of World War I, watching as a single white casket is lowered into a marbled tomb. In attendance is President Calvin Coolidge, former President Woodrow Wilson, Supreme Court Justice (as well as former President) William Howard Taft, Chief Plenty Coups, and hundreds of dedicated United States servicemen. As the casket settles on its final resting place in the tomb, upon a thin layer of French soil, three salvos are fired. A bugler plays taps and, with the final note, comes a 21 gun salute. The smoke clears and eyes dry as the Unknown Soldier from World War I is laid to rest; the first unknown soldier to be officially honored in this manner in American history.
The United States’ allies in World War I, France and Britain, were the first countries to practice the concept of burying an “unknown soldier.” World War I was, at the time, the most destructive global war in human history. A staggering 37 million people (about 1 in 48) were killed, wounded, captured, or missing in action across both sides in what was called “The War to End All Wars.” (Interestingly, around this same time, the Spanish Flu killed between 50-100 million people and infected around a half a billion around the globe, roughly 1 in 4 humans.)
Even before the end of the war, the idea of finding a way to properly commemorate the lost, missing, or unable-to-be-identified French soldiers who died fighting for their country was conceived. Around November 1916, a full two years before the war ended, the city of Rennes in France performed a ceremony to honor those local citizens who were lost and unable to be found. Upon hearing of this ceremony, three years later, France’s Prime Minister approved a tomb dedicated to France’s | |
unknown soldier to be installed in Paris. He originally proposed that the tomb be placed in the Pantheon, with other French historical figures like Victor Hugo and Voltaire (the latter of which made his fortune by rigging the lottery). However, veterans organizations wanted a location that was reserved solely for the Unknown Solider. They agreed upon a tomb under the Arc de Triomphe, originally completed in 1836 to commemorate other lost French military members. With the help of a 21 year old French baker turned “valiant” soldier named August Thin, a representative unknown soldier was settled upon. On November 11, 1920, his casket was pulled down the streets of Paris, before settling under the Arc de Triomphe, where he was laid to rest. To this day, the tomb is still there with a torch by its side, rekindled every night at 6:30 PM. That same day, two hundred eighty five miles away in London, Great Britain was holding a similar ceremony. “The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior,” as it is called in London, is housed at Westminster Abbey. It is the only tombstone in the Abbey that it is forbidden to walk upon, and bears this inscription, “Beneath this stone rest the body of a British warrior unknown by name or rank brought from France to lie among the most illustrious of the land and buried here on Armistice Day 11 Nov: 1920.” Many countries worldwide adopted this symbol of commemoration, including the United States of America. In December 1920, Congressmen Hamilton Fish Jr. of New York introduced in Congress a resolution that asked for a return of an unknown American soldier from France for proper ceremonial burial in a to-be-constructed tomb at the Memorial Amphitheater in Arlington National Cemetery. The measure was approved a few months later for a “simple structure” that would eventually serve as a basis for a more elaborate monument. Originally set for Memorial Day in 1921, the date was pushed back when it was noted that many of the unknown soldiers in France were being investigated and may be identified, rendering them no longer qualified to be the unknown soldier. The date was then changed to Armistice Day, 1921. An important qualification to be selected as the “unknown soldier” is, of course, that the soldier is truly unknown, for they are meant to symbolize any soldier. Thus, there could be no ID on the body, no personal records of the deceased, no family identifications, and no information anywhere at all about who this person was. It also meant that certain precautions needed to be taken to make sure the selected would never be identified. For example, in France, when eight bodies were exhumed from eight different battlefields, they mixed up the coffins to make sure no one knew who came from where. When August Thin, the young soldier who was given the honor of selecting the Unknown Soldier, walked around the caskets and delicately placed flowers upon one of them, he legitimately had no idea who he was choosing. In Britain, six bodies were chosen from six different battlefields. Not told of any order to the bodies, Brigadier L.J. Wyatt closed his eyes and walked among the coffins. Silently, his hand rested on one- the Unknown Warrior. In America, the process was even more ceremonious. Four unknown Americans were exhumed from their French cemeteries, taken to Germany, and then switched from case to case, so not even the pallbearers knew which casket they were carrying. The honor of choosing exactly which casket was then given to Sgt. Edward F. Younger of Headquarters Company, 2d Battalion, 50th Infantry, American Forces in Germany. Placing one rose on top of the chosen casket, the Unknown Soldier was selected and sent to the U.S. on the ship Olympia. Later, that rose would be buried with the casket. Arriving on the shores of America, the casket was taken to the Capitol, where it was laid out under the rotunda. President Warren G. Harding and the first lady, Florence, paid their respects, with Mrs. Harding laying a wreath she made herself upon the casket. After visits from many notables and military, a vigil was kept overnight. The next day, the rotunda was opened up for public viewing. It was reported that nearly 100,000 people came to commemorate the Unknown Soldier. Around 10 AM on November 11th, the funeral procession began, passing by the White House, the Key Bridge, and the construction of the Lincoln Memorial (which would be finished six months later). Arriving at Arlington National Cemetery and the Memorial Amphitheater, the ceremony began rather quickly. In fact, it was reported that the President, who was traveling by car, got stuck in a traffic jam on the way there and would have been late if it wasn’t for his driver’s quick decision to cut through a field. The beginning of the ceremony featured the singing of the National Anthem, a bugler, and two minutes of silence. Then, President Harding spoke, paying tribute to the Unknown Soldier and asking for the end to all wars. He then placed a Medal of Honor upon the casket. Congressman Fish followed with laying a wreath at the tomb. Next, Chief Plenty Coups, Chief of the Crow Nation, laid his war bonnet and coup stick. Finally, the casket was lowered into the crypt as the saluting battery fired three shots. Taps was played with a 21 gun salute at the end. The ceremony for America’s first Unknown Soldier was finished. Many elements for this ceremony were repeated in 1956, when President Eisenhower made arrangements for unknown soldiers to be selected from World War II and the Korean War. In 1984, President Reagan presided over the ceremony for the Unknown Solider for the Vietnam War. Acting as next in kin, he accepted the flag presented at the end of the ceremony. In 1998, a mini-controversy occurred when, through DNA testing, it was discovered that the remains of the Unknown Soldier from Vietnam was Air Force 1st Lt. Michael Joseph Blassie, who was shot down near An Loc, Vietnam, in 1972. Due to this, it was decided that the crypt that once held his remains would remain vacant with only this inscription, “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958-1975.” Today, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in America is under ceremonious guard 24/7, with the changing of the guard happening up to 48 times a day. It is truly one America’s most somber, affecting, and patriotic memorials.
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on May 26, 2015 22:22:29 GMT
FONT(S) OF KNOWLEDGE May 26, 2015Living History
As you sit there reading the letters on this page, you’re actually looking at symbols from the distant past. Take the two oldest letters in our alphabet, “X” and “O”; they were created by the Phoenicians more than 3,000 years ago. Most of the rest of the “modern” alphabet was created by the Greeks and Romans a few centuries after that. (The term alphabet is derived from the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta, which still look like “A” and “B” today.) Even the younger letters, such as “J” and “U,” are hundreds of years old.
What has changed a lot over the centuries is how these letters have been chiseled, written, and printed. Yet the desired effect is the same- to convey a specific message. When people speak, their words make up only a portion of what they’re trying to communicate. Additional information is conveyed by their tone, volume, posture, and even the setting. This principle works for reading as well: The font acts as the world’s “body language.” The study and creation of this language is called typography, from the Greek typo (“impression”) and graphy (“writing”).
Font or Typeface?
The terms typeface and font are often used interchangeably, but technically they’re not the same thing. A typeface is a lettering style that was created by a designer (called a typographer), whereas a font is a | |
set of guidelines for how a specific letter, symbol, or number within a specific typeface should appear. Helvetica, for example, is a typeface. An example of a font might be “Helvetica 10-point bold italic.” Today, typefaces are primarily created on computers, but their history goes back more than a thousand years. There are an estimated 100,000 typefaces in existence. Here are the stories behind a few of them. WHOCARESABOUTREADABILITY?
In A.D. 781, a scholar named Alcuin of York was tasked with creating a uniform script to be used throughout Charlemagne’s empire, which covered most of Europe. Lettering had changed very little since the fall of the Roman Empire in the 400s, except that it had become even more difficult to read. There were no lowercase letters, no breaks between words, and no punctuation. Everything was hand-written by scribes, each of whom added his own flair. Alcuin’s style of script, which we now call carolingian minuscule, helped put an end to that. Here’s a sample:
This typeface remained the standard long beyond Charlemagne’s rule and into the 1200s, but as time went on, it too became increasingly difficult to read as new scribes added new embellishments. The strokes of the letters got thicker, and the ends of the strokes got spikier. Result: carolingian minuscule went from what you see above to something resembling this:
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Variations of this style of lettering, also called Old English and Textura, were used by monks who toiled away with ink and paper in small rooms called scriptoriums for months or even years just to make a single book. That was the norm until the mid-1400s when a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg (1398-1468) realized that he could make a lot of money printing Bibles that appeared as if they were lettered by hand, but were made in a fraction of the time. There were a few rudimentary printing methods in use in Europe and the Far East, but the most popular one- block printing – was really only useful for printing pictures, not words. Utilizing his metalworking skills, Gutenberg created the movable type system in which individual letters and numbers could be carved out of soft metal, cut out with a punch-cutter, and then placed (in reverse) to form a page of text. Then, using new oil-based inks, these letters could be transferred onto pages. The impact of Gutenberg’s printing press cannot be underestimated- it effectively ended the so-called Dark Ages and ushered in a new era of literacy in which books became available to the average person. (And his basic method of printing was the norm until the 1970s.) Yet Gutenberg was equally important to the world of typography: The 270 individual letters and numbers he created at difference sizes are considered the first true fonts. Why is his typeface called “gothic”? It was the Italians who gave it the name. In Italy in the 1500s, the word gothic was an insult meaning “barbaric.” Because the Italians blamed the fall of the Roman empire on the Germanic tribes- called Goths- who sacked Rome in the 400s, anything resembling Germanic culture, from their spiked architectural building styles to their hard-to-read, spiked letters, was considered “gothic.” Garamond (1550s)
Claude Garamond (1480-1561) was a French bookmaker who refined Gutenberg’s movable type system to make it even easier to operate. He’s also one of the pioneers of roman type, so named during the Renaissance because it harkened back to the letterforms used in ancient Greece and Rome. Back then, because each letter had to be chiseled by hand, the carvers created typefaces that required few strokes. The Latin alphabet (which consisted of only capital letters) mirrored the Greco-Roman ideals of symmetry, proportion, and geometry- thin lines with rounded tops, akin to arches. Garamond brought back a unique feature of the roman text: serifs, the little notches and hooks at the ends of letters. During his lifetime, Garamond was most famous for his Greek typestyles, which he designed on commission from King Francis I. Today, however, he’s known for the typeface family that bears his name. Garamond has been a favorite font of book printers for nearly 500 years. (Italic type, a slanted version of roman type, was created by Italian Francesco Griffo in the early 1500s.) | | Caslon (1722)
You may not recognize the name, but Caslon- designed by Englishman William Caslon in 1722- is widely considered to be the first typeface created in English. When British foundries started shipping the metal forms of Caslon to presses in the New World, they had no way of knowing that American revolutionaries would one day use this “British national type” to print the first copies of the document that would free America from British rule (I.e. The Declaration of Independence). After that, Caslon fell out of favor in the United States for decades- mostly because of its ties to England, from which the new nation wanted to distance itself. In the mid-1800s, old type-styles started to become fashionable again and Caslon staged a comeback. (Playwright George Bernard Shaw insisted that all his works be set in the typeface.) By the early 20th century, the mantra among typesetters on both sides of the Atlantic was, “When in doubt, use Caslon.” More-contemporary fonts would soon take over, but in recent years Caslon has been making another comeback. |
Times New Roman (1932)Stanley Morison (1889-1967) was among the 20th century’s most influential typographers. Employed by the Monotype Corporation, he was responsible for the resurgence of several nearly obsolete fonts, including Bodoni, Garamond, Baskerville, and Bembo. In 1931, while serving as a consultant to The Times of London, he criticized the newspaper’s outdated typeface. So Times-London bosses commissioned him to come up with a better one. Morison based his design on the roman serif font Plantin, sometimes refereed to as Times Old Roman, but he made it much easier to read. A year after its 1932 debut, The Times gave up its ownerships rights to the typeface, making it freely available to any newspaper that wanted to use it. However, because Times New Roman prints best on white paper, few other newspapers used it. Why? Because most newspapers used a darker grayish stock. Instead, Times New Roman became the preferred typeface for books and magazines. A close derivation of Times New Roman is used for the title font of TIME magazine. But don’t go looking for that font online; the title was created by a graphic artist by hand. And he only created the word TIME. Goudy (1915)
Frederic William Goudy (1865-1947) was an American artist, publisher, teacher, and typographer. He designed more than 100 typefaces, the most lasting of which bears his name. Its main benefit: The small descenders (the part of a letter that falls below the baseline) allow for more lines per printed page. Goudy spent much of his career creating scripts for advertising purposes, but that pursuit felt hollow to him, so he spent his later years working as an instructor; he mentored some of the 20th century’s most influential typographers. But what Goudy really wanted to do was create the “perfect” roman script, so he built a foundry at his New York home to experiment with new designs. Sadly, it was destroyed by a fire before he could finish. | | Courier (1956)
Technically, Courier is a “monospaced slab serif” typeface (each letter takes up the same amount of horizontal space), but it’s commonly known as the “typewriter font.” That’s what Howard Kettler had in mind when he designed it for IBM in 1956. Because of IBM’s dominance in the typewriter market, Courier (and dozens of subsequent imitations) became very popular. One place you may recognize it- on de-classified government documents with blocks of text blacked out. The U.S. State Department used Courier because it was monospaced, making it more difficult for snooping eyes to identify the blacked-out letters. In 2004, the State Department switched to Times New Roman, which has consistent spacing and is much more readable (except the blacked-out parts). |
Palatino (1948)German typographer Hermann Zapf, born in 1918, is one of the most prolific (and copied) type designers in modern history. His most famous typeface is Palatino, which he designed in 1948. He named it for the Italian writing master Giovanni Battista Palatino, a contemporary of Michelangelo and Claude Garamond. Zapf didn’t just copy a Renaissance script, though; he used it as inspiration for a roman serif font that’s legible and attractive- suitable for both title and body text. Since writing began, scribes have used “non-letterform glyphs” to add visual pizzazz to their work: stars, flowers, scrolls, borders, toilet paper rolls, etc. By the 1800s, these glyphs were known by so many different names- including ornamentals and fleurons- that printers simply called them dingbats, the 19th-century equivalent to “thingamajigs” or “watchamacallits.” Today, there are hundreds of symbol fonts to choose from, the most famous of which (printed above) is Zapf Dingbats, created by Hermann Zapf in 1978. Futura (1928)
The French word sans means “without”; hence, sans serif letters lack notches and hooks. (This T has serifs; this T does not.) Although the sans serif style dates back to ancient Greece, it didn’t really catch on among designers and printers until the 19th century. And even then, most European typographers thought letters without serifs were ugly (which may explain why they’re also called grotesque fonts). The style got a big boost in the 1920s thanks to the German Bauhaus movement of modern art, which stressed function over style- no unnecessary elements. The most famous sans serif typeface to come out of this movement is Futura, created in 1928 by German typographer Paul Renner. His goal was to combine the strength of gothic type with the elegance of roman type, all while staying within the strict boundaries of the Bauhaus movement. Futura was revolutionary for its time: Advertisers used it to show that their products were clean and refined (as a contrast to the dirty coal-burning technology of the day). Futura and the other sans serif typefaces that followed were mainly used in titles and headlines. Aptly, the commemorative plaque that Apollo astronauts left on the Moon in 1969 is set in Futura. Also, the floating title of the TV show LOST is set in the typeface. And if you spend a lot of time browsing the Internet, you’ll see that Futura is used for the body text on many websites because of its readability.
Century Gothic (1991)
Why is this typeface- based on Twentieth Century, a 1930s design by Sol Hess of Monotype- called Century Gothic, when it seemingly has little in common with Germanic texts still refereed to as Gothic Blackletter? Because “gothic” is an outmoded typographic term for sans-serif, so named because of the type color of | | Helvetica (1957)
In 1957 Swiss typographers Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann set out to create a typeface that was simple, elegant, and modern. Based on a German sans serif font called Akzidenz-Grotesks, they called their design Neue Haas Grotesk (it was created and formed at the famous Haas foundry in Switzerland). In 1960 the typeface was refined and renamed Helvetica, based on the Latin Helvetia, which means “Swiss.” Helvetica was an instant hit: Corporations liked it for its neutral tone; advertisers, for its readability. It became one of the most popular fonts of the 20th century, especially for transportation: New York City Subway signs, the logos for Jeep and TOYOTA, and millions of road signs.
Arial (1982)
You don’t see Helvetica used on most computers. Instead, you see its look-alike, Arial. Why are these two typefaces almost identical? In the 1980s, Helvetica became a standard system font in Apple Macintosh computers, but a battle (that’s still being waged today) was brewing: Adobe Software Systems purchased the Helvetica family of typefaces directly from Haas for use in its TrueType system. Result: Adobe won the respect of the typography industry by purchasing the rights directly from Haas, as opposed to going with some cheap knockoff…but only Adobe had the coding required to display it clearly on a computer screen. When it came time for Microsoft to choose its own default system font, instead of using Helvetica and being at the mercy of Adobe’s software, the computer giant went with a cheap knockoff, Arial, designed in 1982 by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders from Monotype.
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early sans-serif typefaces was similar to that of blackletter script. Also, unlike roman typefaces like Garamond or Goudy, both are sans serif (the spikes and adornments on old gothic faces aren’t considered true serifs). The script kept the strength of gothic-style letters, but featured a large x-height (a typographer term, referring to the height of a lowercase “x” in any particular font). Century Gothic proved great for advertisements, which is where you’ll see it used the most. Comic Sans (1994)
In 1994 Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare opened a test version of a welcome screen for kids that featured a cartoon dog speaking with a text bubble. Connare immediately saw that the words were set in Times New Roman. “That’s not a good font for kids,” he told his bosses. So they told him to create one that would be. Connare drew inspiration from 1980s Batman and Watchmen comic books and came up with Comic Sans. It has since become one of the typefaces most reviled by designers. Why? Although Comic Sans was designed for kids, Microsoft added it to its font menu on home computers. And within a few years, Comic Sans was showing up all over the place. From church bulletins to restaurant signs, amateur designers frequently chose Comic Sans for their projects. It grew even more common when it became the default font in many instant-messaging programs. It’s become so hated that there’s a “Ban Comic Sans” movement online, initiated by designers Holly and David Combs in 1999.
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In 113 A.D., a 100-foot-tall column was erected in Rome to celebrate Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian Wars. Etched into the base is a dedication set in classic Roman script. Ever since the Renaissance, typographers have attempted to create typefaces based on this script, including Frederic Goudy and Hermann Zapf. In 1989 a modern version of Trajan was created by Carol Twomby, a type designer working for Adobe. Like the true Roman alphabet, Trajan has no lowercase letters. As was the case with Helvetica and Times New Roman before it, many graphic designers condemn Trajan for committing the greatest sing of any typeface: overuse. Who overuses it? Hollywood movie poster designers, as evidenced by the posters for Apollo 13, Titanic, The Da Vinci Code, Sex and the City, Black Swan… and so on.
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Their manifesto reads in part: Like the tone of spoken voice, the characteristics of a typeface convey meaning. The design of the typeface is, in itself, its voice. Often this voice speaks louder than the text itself. Thus when designing a Do Not Enter sign, the use of a heavy-stroked, attention commanding font such as Impact is appropriate. Typesetting such a message in Comic Sans would be ludicrous. So far, they’ve gathered about 5,000 signatures for a petition to “eradicate” the font. They even have a favorite joke: “Comic Sans walks into a bar, the bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your type!'”
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on May 29, 2015 13:56:36 GMT
ESCAPING THE GREAT PLAGUE OF LONDON (1665-1666) May 27, 2015Occurring between 1665 and 1666, the Great Plague wasn’t exactly the first time London had experienced such a terrifying spread of disease, with periodic cases being reported in the city for decades up to this point and, of course, that time about two-thirds of China’s population and then a decade later about half of Europe’s, including an awful lot of people from jolly old England, up and died during the “Black Death”. Nevertheless, the Great Plague was certainly noteworthy. According to the Bills of Mortality from the year, in 1665 alone 68,596 deaths occurred in London as a result of the plague. However, it is generally thought that this number is drastically under-recorded as the likes of groups like Quakers did not report their death tolls and many poor were simply dumped in mass graves without their deaths being recorded.
This latter point is particularly significant as many of the more affluent city members left London when the plague broke out, including King Charles II and his entourage who left the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Lawrence, to deal with the plague while the king and court retired to Salisbury; they possibly brought the plague with them in the process, as it broke out there after they arrived. Once this happened, the king and court retired to Oxford to wait it all out. In the end, somewhere between 25%-50% of the population of London died as a result of the plague during 1665-1666. With everyone dropping like flies and nobody knowing what was causing the plague in the first place, this lead to some interesting methods of preventing its spreading, as we’ll get to in a moment.
So how did it all start? Well, this was one of the many waves of the bubonic plague that had been literally plaguing much of the developed world for a few centuries up to this point off and on. We now know that the plague was generally transmitted via fleas that carried strains of Yersinia pestis microbes they had picked up via rats. As for this specific iteration of the plague around London, the first recorded instance was just outside of the city in a parish known as “St Giles-in-the-Fields” sometime early in the spring of 1665. Soon after this, the number of reported cases and the death toll rapidly increased until it reached its peak in the summer of the same year, during which thousands of Londoners were dying each week.
In fact, the death rates became so severe that daytime collection of bodies was banned as those in charge feared a mass-panic if people were to see the massive amount of bodies being carted off by dead-cart drivers and dumped into mass graves every day. | |
(One such mass-grave was found to house 1,114 bodies, being dug down until the grave diggers hit the water table at about 25 feet.) However, this daytime ban didn’t work out at all because there were simply too few dead-cart operators to keep up with carting away all the bodies just at night. As a result, it was common for people to stack the bodies in the streets, rather than wait for a dead-cart driver who had room on his cart. With rotting corpses literally piling up, the ban on daytime collection was lifted. As you can imagine from all this, fear ran rampant and terrified Londoners tried anything and everything possible to ward off the disease. As mentioned, since the actual cause of the plague was still a mystery at this point, many of these preventative measures were either useless or harmful in of themselves. For instance, it was a common idea back then that the plague was caused or at least facilitated by “bad air”. As a result, besides bonfires being kept burning throughout the city at all times by order of the authorities and homes also having their fires going day and night, regardless of outside temperature, many took to smoking tobacco as a way of keeping the air going into their lungs free of disease. This led to a rather surreal situation in which people of all ages, including children, were essentially forced to smoke (or start smoking if they hadn’t previously). For instance, AJ Bell wrote a few decades after the plague, For personal disinfections nothing enjoyed such favour as tobacco; the belief in it was widespread, and even children were made to light up a reaf in pipes. Thomas Hearnes remembers one Tom Rogers telling him that when he was a scholar at Eton in the year that the great plague raged, all the boys smoked in school by order, and that he was never whipped so much in his life as he was one morning for not smoking. It was long afterwards a tradition that none who kept a tobacconist shop in London had the plague. (If you think that’s weird, how about the time when people commonly blew smoke up a person’s arse to save them from drowning, including equipment for the procedure hung along major waterways like the River Thames, much like AEDs are today.) Other more sensible preventative measures included cleaning money in vinegar before handing it to a shopkeeper, not letting those same shopkeepers touch raw food with their bare hands and wearing dead toads around your neck… (Not to keep being linky, but there was also a time when putting frogs in milk was used as a way to preserve it, sans refrigeration. Be glad you live in the 21st century!) Another thing that Londoners believed helped spread the plague was the many stray cats and dogs that roamed London’s streets; so much so that an official edict from King Charles II stated that “no Swine, Dogs, Cats or tame Pigeons be permitted to pass up and down in Streets, or from house to house, in places Infected.” As a result, many thousands of these animals were killed and promptly buried or burned. While in some sense they weren’t exactly wrong on this one (the dogs and cats carried fleas that may or may not have been previously infected with the offending microbes), this nonetheless is generally thought to have had a net effect of helping the plague’s staying power as the stray cats and dogs formerly helped keep the more worrisome rat population somewhat in check. Perhaps the most extreme thing Londoners did back then to help curb the spread of the disease was quarantine any house that had been host to a plague victim by sealing it shut for 40 days. The doors to these houses would be locked and then marked with a huge red cross, above which the words “Lord have mercy upon us” would be scrawled. To ensure that nobody escaped, a guard would also often be posted outside. Since it was common to seal a house with all of the occupants still inside, regardless of whether they were sick, many Londoners took to bribing the guards tasked with searching homes for signs of the plague to ignore any such signs in their home, which is one of the reasons records from that era are so lax. When this didn’t work, some resorted to fleeing their homes and all their possessions before their house could be sealed, choosing to risk living on the street rather than succumb to plague or starve to death locked away. Even when a house was bolted shut and placed under the watch of a burly guard, there were still a number of escape options available to an enterprising occupant. One of the more popular and straightforward escape methods was to simply convince the guard to temporarily leave his post, usually via a bribe. Some of the more clandestine escape methods from the time included tunnelling to freedom, enlisting the help of friends to poison or drug the guards and stealthily making a daring rooftop escape at night like a plague-ridden ninja. Other, less subtle, methods of escape included punching through the thinnest walls of the property to the outside world or setting fire to the building and escaping in the confusion. In at least one case, a man used a makeshift explosive crafted from fireworks to blow up his front door as he and his entire family leapt from a first story window to escape at the same time. It turns out, going out the window wasn’t necessary though. The blast had killed the guard. Arguably the most ingenious method of escape was to, essentially, go fishing for guards. In this method, the occupants of the home would carefully lower a noose from windows to settle around the necks of the guards outside their homes and either drag them upwards to their death, or just choke them until they surrendered their keys. In the event of the former, the guard’s body would then be discretely disposed of by wrapping it in a sheet (thereby disguising it as the body of a plague victim which nobody would check very closely) and dumping it unceremoniously into a passing dead-cart. Amazingly, it’s noted that at least “a score” of guards (about 20 to you and me) were killed in this way by desperate citizens. Luckily for both citizens and guards, the worst of the plague passed by the fall of 1666 and absolutely nothing terrible happened to London ever again… Unless you want to count the huge fire that tore through the city just a year later, destroying approximately 85% of the walled area of the city, leaving about 65,000 people homeless, and destroying an awful lot of records concerning the recent plague, making it difficult to nail down things like the exact death toll and how many people were infected but ultimately recovered. Then, of course, there were all the other times horrible things happened in London throughout its very eventful history. But who’s counting?
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on May 29, 2015 13:58:22 GMT
WHY AN ELEPHANT’S NOSE IS CALLED A “TRUNK” May 28, 2015It’s not clear who first tagged the elephant’s snout with the name “trunk,” but it seems to have happened sometime in the late 16th century. The first documented instance appears in the 1589 work by Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations: “The Elephant . . . With water fils his troonke right hie and blowes it on the rest.”
As with most etymologies, the precise reason trunk is used to denote an elephant’s proboscis is difficult to distinguish. Arguably the most reasonable theory is that it derives from the fact that just a few decades before “trunk” started getting applied to an elephant’s snout, it was also a word used to describe a pipe or hollow tube, such as a speaking tube or ear-trumpet. For instance, in the 1546 John Bale work, The Acts of English Voltaries: “The roode spake these wordes, or else a knaue monke behynde hym in a truncke through the wall”.
Similarly in the 1553 work by Richard Eden, A Treatyse of the Newe India (which was a translation of part of Cosmographia, by Sebastian Muenster), where it describes the tubes used for blow-guns “They… blowe them [arrows] oute of a trunke as we doe pellets of claye.” This “blow gun / hollow tube” usage particularly fits with the aforementioned first known use of the word to refer to an elephant’s proboscis, “With water fils his troonke right hie and blowes it on the rest.”
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This might all have you wondering how the “trunk” of a car got this name. (For the British readers, we’re referring to the boot of a car here.) For this, we need to go back to the Latin truncus, “main stem or stock of a tree or human body.” This, in turn, gave rise to the Old French “tronc” (“alms box in a church, trunk of a tree, trunk of the human body, wooden block”) around the 12th century and then the English “trunk” around the 15th century. It is the “main stem of a tree” definition that is important in this one. By the mid-14th century, this gave rise to wood chests or cases being referred to as “trunks,” presumed to be because they were made from wood from tree trunks. Whatever the case, the first known instance of this definition of the word can be found in a 1462 receipt (Mann. & Househ): “Item, payd ffor a new tronke ffor my lord whych was delyvared to Willyam off Wardrope x. s.” Fast-forward a little under a half century later and we find an advertisement in the November of 1929 Hearst International Magazine where an automobile is listed as coming standard with “Six wire wheels and a trunk rack”. The rear trunk rack eventually gave way to a built-in storage compartment in the same region of the car that itself was referred to as a “trunk” in North America. Another interesting one is the use of “trunks” to refer to an article of clothing, such as swimming trunks or “shorts.” This general definition for the word seems to have popped up in the 19th century with the first reference in 1836 in the Pickwick Papers, “The appearance of Mr. Snodgrass in blue satin trunks and cloak, white silk tights and shoes, and Grecian helmet.” As for specifically “swimming trunks,” we have the first instance appearing in a July of 1883 edition of the Pall Mall Gazette where it states, “Captain Webb attempted his perilous feat of swimming the Niagara Rapids… He wore a pair of silk trunks…” In this case, it’s generally thought the definition either stems from the “hollow tube” idea, with the trunks having two hollow tubes to stick your legs through (hence “trunks” instead of “trunk”), or is referring to the fact that the shorts contain part of the base of the trunk of the body.
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on May 29, 2015 14:01:01 GMT
THE FRUIT THAT TASTES LIKE CHOCOLATE PUDDING May 29, 2015Recent headlines that chocolate supplies could fall short of demand by as much as a million tonnes by 2020 have been alarming. Those in despair over the news can take heart, however, as substitutes are available to get you through the rough times, including one that is actually relatively healthy – black sapote.
Native to the coastal regions in and around Central America, black sapote is a fruit, related to the persimmon, and it is today cultivated primarily across the Caribbean, as well as in Mexico, Australia and the Philippines.
On the tree, the fruit sort-of resembles a green tomato when ready for picking. And it is extremely important that you don’t try to pick it too early or eat it right off the tree. Unripe black sapotes not only don’t taste like chocolate, but are quite gag-worthy. Further, if it’s picked too early, the fruit won’t ever ripen and will simply rot, which one imagines doesn’t improve the flavor over the non-rotted, unripe version.
Picked at the right time, though, the black sapote will ripen within about 3 to 6 days after harvest. When this happens, the formerly white pulp turns a deep brown and develops a distinctive taste that, together with its papaya-like texture, have caused many to compare it to chocolate pudding (hence the nickname, “chocolate pudding fruit.”)
The pulp can be eaten as is (but not the skin), but given that it tastes a lot like chocolate pudding, it’s also commonly used in various recipes as a substitute for chocolate. | |
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thyarchery
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Post by thyarchery on Jun 2, 2015 19:35:58 GMT
WHY LEAD IS BAD FOR HUMANS May 15, 2015Given that humans have been using lead in various product for over 8,000 years (with the first known mining of it in Anatolia around 6500 BCE), you might be surprised to learn that we have known that lead is dangerous and shouldn’t be trifled with since at least 150 BC, when its effects on the human body were noted by famed Greek physician Nicander of Colophon. Nicander even went so far as to describe the metal as “deadly”, writing extensively on the crippling effects it has on the human body in his work, Alexipharmaca.
Further, Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides noted in the first century AD: “Lead makes the mind give way”. To quote the Occupation Safety and Health Research Institute: “Lead poisoning is one of the earliest identified and most known occupational disease. Its acute effects have been recognized from antiquity.”
So what exactly does lead poisoning do to the body? Well, depending on how much of the substance gets into your body (and it doesn’t take much, particularly for children), it can cause everything from constipation to permanent reduction in your IQ and mental capacity. It also can potentially fundamentally change a given person’s personality, causing them to be irritable and suffer from erratic mood-swings and fatigue without warning; cause a reduction in sperm count and infertility; stunted growth (in children); miscarriages; and a whole slew of other terrifying symptoms.
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So that’s what it can do, but how? Why is lead so dangerous to the human body while we can safely ingest many other types of metals, like iron, without worry (and, in fact, need some of them to survive)? While research is ongoing into the full effects and mechanisms involved in lead poisoning, what we do know is that a lot of the damage is due to the fact that important things like zinc, calcium, and iron in the body can ultimately get replaced by lead in many key biochemical reactions, if lead is present. Unlike these other metals, though, while lead is happy to bind and interact with various critical enzymes, the result isn’t the normal reaction you need. For example, with calcium, as noted in this paper on the Mechanisms of Lead Neurotoxicity, lead has a nasty habit of being able to mimic, or in some cases straight up inhibit the actions of calcium in natural biological reactions that take place within the human body, inhibiting neurological function, among other things. Lead also can damage DNA, as well as your cell membranes, the latter of which, combined with the fact that it also interferes with heme synthesis, can result in anemia among a host of other problems. It can interfere with the ability for your body to synthesize vitamin D, which comes with yet another host of its own problems if you don’t have enough. It also causes a few different problems with your immune system; interferes with metabolism of bones and teeth; can cause abnormal calcium build up within cells… the list goes on and on and on. If that wasn’t bad enough, lead can easily find its way into almost any part of your body once introduced, whether by breathing it in, ingesting it, or (very rarely) via skin absorption. From this, you might find it completely unsurprising that, unlike many other poisons, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lead is so toxic to humans that, “No safe blood lead level has been identified.” So, in short, lead is bad for you because, though lead has no useful function in your body, it’s happy to jump on in and give it its best college try, interacting up a storm with various enzymes, failing the whole way at producing the reactions that are needed for normal body function. But what it lacks in end result, it makes up for in staying power. You see, the half-life of lead in the body is quite long- weeks in your blood, months in your soft tissues, and years in your bones; and by years we mean up to two to three decades. Who needs proper enzymatic function anyway? I always found amazing that, despite its effects being well known since the Antiquity, lead has been used in everything involving liquid ever since the Romans (from beer mugs to roof cladding). It was only recently that it stopped being used in water pipes-actually in English, the words "plumbing" and "plumber" come directly from the latin name for lead (plumb)
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on Jun 5, 2015 22:13:12 GMT
CAN AMBULANCE DRIVERS GET SPEEDING TICKETS June 1, 2015Subject to the same rules of the road as other drivers, with a few exceptions for emergencies, ambulances can be pulled over and ticketed for speeding and other traffic violations, although it is exceedingly rare.
Generally speaking, ambulance drivers should observe all traffic laws and regulations; however, some of those laws are waived when the ambulance needs to respond to an emergency (sometimes called “Code 3″). Typical exceptions (which usually apply to other emergency response vehicles like fire trucks as well), include: (1) allowing the vehicle to park or “stand” pretty much anywhere the driver puts it; (2) blowing red lights and stop signs – after ensuring it’s safe to do so (and slowing down); (3) driving in the “wrong” lane or the “wrong” way up a street or through an intersection; and (4) exceeding the maximum speed limit.
Depending on the jurisdiction, with the exception concerning speed, some limit it to 10 miles per hour (mph) over the speed limit, others 15 mph, and still others leave it to the driver’s discretion “so long as (s)he does not endanger life or property.” In addition, again depending on the location, many states and localities require that the vehicle “make use of visual signs,” I.e. have its lights on and some may prefer the siren to be blaring as well. However, even in places where the siren is supposed to be on, medics may choose to turn it off, since the sound may disturb some patients (as one EMT said, it “makes the patient freak out.”) | |
Note that some of the exceptions to the basic traffic laws have vague language, and the interpretation depends on your perspective. According to one EMT whose crew was attempting to reach a site expeditiously, the driver chose to “oppose traffic” (presumably drive the wrong way down the street) for about 300 feet, driving about 15 mph; obviously, that driver made the judgment call that do so was safe. Unfortunately for him, a police officer who observed this made a different judgment call, that it wasn’t, and pulled the ambulance over; while she did not give the ambulance driver a ticket, she did hold it at the location well past the time for the call and, we can only hope, another ambulance was dispatched to the emergency. Since ambulances are expected to behave as other vehicles when not responding to an emergency, if they are approached by an emergency responder, like everyone else, they are expected to pull over too. In a 2009 incident in Oklahoma, an ambulance that did not have its lights or sirens running was pulled over by a state trooper after it failed to give the trooper the right of way when he was attempting to respond to a call. According to the trooper, the ambulance driver also flipped him off, so the trooper pulled him over. It turned out that the ambulance was transporting a patient, but was not running either the lights or the siren in an effort to keep the patient calm. So, as soon as the ambulance stopped, the lead medic emerged from the ambulance to discuss the situation with the trooper, but the latter was too incensed to listen. An altercation ensued, which escalated to the point where the trooper grabbed the medic by the neck. The incident was caught on camera (by the patient’s family who were travelling behind the ambulance), and the trooper was suspended. Historically, the medical community has held to the belief that there is a “golden hour,” in which serious trauma patients who make it to a hospital within 60 minutes of being injured are much more likely to survive, and that the faster the patient makes it to the ER, generally, the better. For example, some say that Princess Diana, who died in 1997, could have been saved had the ambulance not taken 40 minutes to transport her to the hospital (some say it could’ve made the trip in 5 minutes, but took so long due to French emergency procedures). However, recent research is challenging the assumptions behind “faster is better,” in regards to the “EMS interval.” In a 2010 study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, after looking into the time it took over 3,000 trauma patients to make it to the hospital and their outcomes, the study revealed that, extremely counter-intuitively, “shorter intervals did not appear to improve survival.” However, according to the Chairman of the London Ambulance Service, Sigurd Reinton, even a minor delay from things like speed bumps kills numerous people every year by slowing emergency vehicles. This is a notion backed up by a study done by Ronald Bowman in Boulder, Colorado that indicated that for every life saved by various traffic slowing measures like speed bumps, an astounding 85 people die because of this slowing effect on emergency vehicles, whether inherently, like in speed bumps, or by jamming up traffic.
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on Jun 5, 2015 22:14:23 GMT
GANDHI’S LETTERS TO HITLER June 2, 2015By the late 1930s, Gandhi’s method of peaceful non-cooperation had already won significant concessions from the British Raj, including the founding of a national administration and local and national legislative assemblies, albeit still under British oversight. Gandhi, himself, was internationally famous for his various acts of non-violent, civil disobedience, including his 241-mile Salt March, which, while protesting Britain’s monopoly on salt and its high tariff, also galvanized the Indian people against British rule altogether.
With his reputation for effective, nonviolent change well established, many implored Gandhi to write to Adolph Hitler, whose increasingly aggressive regime in Germany had them worried that a second world war was imminent. For example, by February 1935, Hitler had ordered the establishment of a German air force, the Luftwaffe, and by March 1936, Hitler had sent troops into the Rhineland – both in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Also in 1936, Hitler had established pacts with Italy and Japan, and in March 1938, Germany invaded Austria.
At this time (1938), Hitler was named Man of the Year by Time magazine. They stated, “Lesser men of the year seemed small indeed beside the Führer.” That said, their reasoning for picking him was not to honor his actions up to that point, but to widely publicize his exploits. They noted, among other knocks against him, “Germany’s 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to earn a living, chased off the streets. Now they are being held for ‘ransom,’ a gangster trick through the ages.” They ended their article on their decision to name Hitler the Man of the Year on the ominous note, “To those who watched the closing events of the year it seemed more than probable that the Man of 1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered.”
Indeed, although Britain and France thought they had “appeased” Hitler’s ambition, and ensured “peace in our time,” with the Munich Pact (that handed only a portion of Czechoslovakia over to Germany) in September 1938, by March 1939, Hitler had breached that agreement by soon occupying the entire country. At this point, finally realizing that Hitler couldn’t be trusted, Britain pledged to defend Poland if Germany invaded the latter. | |
Seeing the writing on the wall, Gandhi sent a short, typewritten letter to Hitler on July 23, 1939, telling the dictator: Dear friend,
Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence. Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.
It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to the savage state. Must you pay the price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success? Any way I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you.
I remain, Your sincere friend M.K.Gandhi However, this letter never reached the German Chancellor, as it was, apparently, intercepted by the British government. Shortly thereafter, Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939 (which kept the USSR out of the war until 1941), and Britain signed the formal Anglo-Polish Common Defence Pact two days later. Germany then invaded Poland with its Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) on September 1, 1939, and on September 3, 1939, World War II formally began when Britain and France declared war on Germany. Despite facing two powerful enemies, Germany encountered little real resistance during those early months of the war. It tore through the European continent, and by May 1940, Belgium, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Norway were all occupied by Nazi forces. The Battle of Britain, which saw the British homeland pummeled by a months-long bombing campaign, began in July 1940. Over the coming months, nearly 30,000 bombs were dropped on London, during which more than 15,000 people were injured or killed. Once again, on December 24, 1940, Gandhi sent a letter to Hitler, this one significantly longer. Again addressing him as “Dear Friend,” Gandhi explained that: “That I address you as a friend is no formality. I own no foes. My business in life has been for the past 33 years to enlist the friendship of the whole of humanity by befriending mankind, irrespective of race, colour or creed.” But, taking a harder line this time, Gandhi chastised the Chancellor: Your own writings and pronouncements . . . leave no room for doubt that many of your acts are monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity. . . . Such are your humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and the swallowing of Denmark. He also challenged Hitler, noting that although Nazi Germany had lifted the “science of destruction” to a level of “perfection”: It is a marvel to me that you do not see that it is nobody’s monopoly. If not the British, some other power will certainly improve upon your method and beat you with your own weapon. You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud. They cannot take pride in a recital of cruel deed, however skilfully planned. I, therefore, appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war. Accepted that both men shared a common disdain of Britain, Gandhi continued: We know what the British heel means for us and the non-European races of the world. But we would never wish to end the British rule with German aid. We have found in non-violence a force, which, if organized, can without doubt match itself against a combination of all the most violent forces of the world. He ended with a final appeal: During this season when the hearts of the peoples of Europe yearn for peace . . . is it too much to ask you to make and effort for peace? If this letter ever reached Hitler, it apparently was too much to ask.
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on Jun 5, 2015 22:15:09 GMT
MOONSTRUCK June 3, 2015
Our favorite childhood classics make us feel as snug as a bunny in bed. Here’s a look at what’s down the rabbit hole.
Goodnight Moon
“Goodnight light and the red balloon…” Margaret Wise Brown wrote more than 100 books for children, but her most famous is Goodnight Moon, published in 1947. It was a revolutionary book in its time, inspired in part by the poetry of Gertrude Stein. More than four generations of children have nodded off to this classic’s hynpnotic spell, and 11 million copies have been sold since its first printing. But in the beginning, the book’s prospects looked dim.
In its first year, Moon sold a modest 6,000 copies at $1.75 each. That yielded a typical author’s royalty rate of a dime or less per book, earning Brown around $500. Sales declined from there. In 1951 Goodnight Moon sold only 1,300 copies, and there was no reason to believe that sales would ever recover. That may explain why in May the following year, Brown made a whimsical addition to her will: Upon her death, the royalties from her books would go to the three sons of her neighbors, Joan and Albert Clarke, probably figuring they’d get a few dollars a year to blow on toys and bubblegum. But that’s not how it turned out.
Good Neighbor Policy
The Clarke family had provided a measure of stability to Brown, who lived a bohemian life in her nextdoor flat, never marrying and never having kids of her own. Apparently she loved the Clarke children and allocated royalties from various books to each. Her will provided that the middle child, nine-year-old Albert, would receive 100 percent of Goodnight Moon. What happened next was completely unexpected. Four months after writing her will, while on a book tour of Europe in late 1952, the 42-year-old author suffered a coronary embolism and died. | |
It took a few years for Brown’s estate to be settled, and in 1957 the Clarke family learned the peculiar details of her will. In the meantime, though, the situation had already begun to change for Goodnight Moon. As parents across the country and world began telling each other about this “magic” book that put toddlers to sleep, sales grew and the publisher began issuing new printings. The result was that Albert, now 13, learned that his share of the estate was already $17,530 (about $134,000 in today’s money) and still growing robustly. By 1970 Goodnight Moon was selling 20,000 copies a year; in decades that followed, that number jumped into the hundreds of thousands, with total sales reaching four million in 1990. The Plot ThickensYou’d think that a story about a children’s book might have a happy ending; perhaps Albert would use his money wisely and generously. No. In 2000 Joshua Prager tracked Albert Clarke down for the Wall Street Journal, writing that “in the intervening years, the trajectories of Ms. Brown’s book and the boy who inherited it began to diverge with strange symmetry.” Prager describes a life of squandered millions, murderous fistfights, theft, a sequence of broken homes, domestic violence, lost custody of children, clothing bought and thrown away instead of being washed, houses bought and sold at a loss, vagrancy, debt, drug abuse, and arrests on an array of charges ranging from menacing and resisting arrest to criminal possession of a weapon, criminal trespass, assault, and grand larceny. According to Prager, Albert Clarke said he believed-with no supporting evidence or corroboration from any source-that Brown was his real mother, a notion his older brother Austin characterized as “delusional thinking. It’s a fairy tale that makes him feel better.” The Never Ending StoryAustin’s response is understandable: Albert’s most recent six-month royalty check had been $341,000; Austin’s (for Brown’s book The Sailor Dog): $13.88. Their youngest brother Jimmy, also the recipient of small checks, had joined a cult years earlier before committing suicide in 1995. How long will this continue? Thanks to extensions of copyright laws in the 1990s, Albert or his heirs will be receiving royalties for Goodnight Moon-one of the most successful children’s books of all time-until 2043.
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Dillon
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Post by Dillon on Jun 5, 2015 22:16:00 GMT
HARRY HOUDINI ON TRIAL June 4, 2015In 1901, the Cologne, Germany newspaper, Rheinishe Zeitung (RZ), published a story titled (translated) “The Unmasking of Houdini,” in which a chief of police, Schutzmann Werner Graff, accused Houdini of attempting to bribe him into rigging an escape from the city’s jail, and of paying another man, Herr Lott, to help him with a phony performance.
Incensed (and facing an existential threat), Houdini hired “the best lawyer of Cologne, Herr Rechtsantwalt Dr. Schreiber” to prosecute a series of slander trials.
Held in Cologne, at the first trial, on February 26, 1902, Graff testified that Houdini had offered him 20 marks in exchange for Graff giving him both his “handcrafted lock” and a duplicate key. Graff also testified that Houdini had another man (named Lott) secretly provide him with a duplicate chain to display, after he would appear to have freed himself from the first chain, although really, according to Graff, he just sawed through it.
Of course Houdini denied the charges and claimed that Graff had, in fact, attempted to deceive Houdini by providing him with an inoperable or “dead” lock, and that, since Lott had warned him of Graff’s deception, Houdini offered Lott some compensation for that information. | |
Witnesses were presented for the defense and the plaintiff, although no clear conclusion could be drawn. To solve the matter definitively, the chairman of the case asked Houdini for a demonstration. Locks, as well as chains, were placed around him. Houdini first banged one lock against a metal plate he had fastened on his leg, which weakened the spring, enabling him to open the lock. Then Houdini and the judge went to a corner of the court (in an attempt for Houdini to keep some of his secrets), where Houdini showed the judge his method for freeing the chains. The judge and jury were convinced, and Houdini won. Undeterred, Graff sought a second trial with a higher court, the Strafkammer, where the second proceeding was held on July 26, 1902, and at which some of the “highest officials of Cologne” testified for the defense. Here, a lock manufactured by master mechanic Kroch, claimed to be of such a construction that once locked “nothing would open it . . . even the key,” was used to chain Houdini. According to contemporary reports, he then: walks into the room selected by the jury where he could work unhindered. In four minutes, with a quiet smile, reenters the court room, and hands the judges the prepared lock opened. Houdini won the second trial, as well. Graff remained unrepentant and pursued the matter with Germany’s highest court, the Oberlandesgericht, where the third trial was held on September 26, 1902. Houdini again prevailed. Graff was found guilty of “openly slandering” Houdini and was fined 30 marks. Houdini was awarded his expenses and an amount to compensate him for lost bookings (both also paid by Graff), as well as “An Honorary Apology” that was to be publicly advertised.
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