A violin that was played as the Titanic sank in 1912 has been found to be authentic and will be auctioned to the public on October 19.
“Government shuts down, nation descends into riots, looting and cannibalism.”
“The government shut down! We can do anything we like,” shouted Sam Hasbley of Grassley, Iowa, while tearing the tag off a mattress despite an explicit warning label forbidding such a dangerous course of action. “Tear yours off. The government is shut down. It can’t stop you.”
Eyewitnesses spoke of further horrors. On a quiet street in suburban Massachusetts, a man brought out a set of highly illegal lawn darts. In Maryland, there were allegations that an entire family had begun digging ditches to collect rainwater runoff. With the fall of the government, citizen activists took it upon themselves to chronicle the culture of lawlessness. Men played Gibson guitars made of wood imported from India, but not finished by Indian workers. Women bought cold medicine without a photo ID. Children went hours without hearing lectures about the environment.
Heh. Read it all. You will be horrified.
The Maddron Bald trailhead on October 3, 2013, during
the government shutdown.
Today we did our last hike in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. As I described yesterday, we decided to go to a place where we could park on private land and easily hike to a trail in the park. That way, we would reduce the level of power any fascist-minded ranger from the National Park Service might have over us should they confront us for being in our park.
As it turns out, there was no evidence at all of a shutdown at the trailhead we choose. We went to the Maddron Bald trailhead, just off state route 321. The parking area here is small, capable of holding no more than 5 or 6 cars. When we arrived there were three cars there, so we had no problem finding room, as you can see from the image to the left.
There were also no signs indicating the park was closed. Nor were there any barricades or cones. As far as we could tell, it was a normal day in the national park, which to me proved that the restrictions the park service is imposing on New Found Gap Road (as well as elsewhere across the nation) has absolutely nothing to do with their lack of funds. This particular trailhead is not as well known or visited, and is off the beaten track. Moreover, it would be hard to monitor. Thus, the park service chose to make believe it wasn’t there. Smart tourists could come here and enjoy the park, as intended, despite the shutdown.
If the shutdown really required the closure of the park, the park service would have sent a ranger here as well. They did not, proving that their obnoxious efforts are really aimed at causing problems for as many Americans as possible, not securing the park as they dishonestly might tell us.
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A London university has digitized and placed online a collection of historic space images.
I don’t think the press release’s claim that these images have never been online before is true for all the images. Nonetheless, the online availability especially of the Russian Venus images is very welcome.
The oldest globe to show the New World may have been discovered.
The globe, about the size of a grapefruit, is labeled in Latin and includes what were considered exotic territories such as Japan, Brazil and Arabia. North America is depicted as a group of scattered islands. The globe’s lone sentence, above the coast of Southeast Asia, is “Hic Sunt Dracones.”
Those words mean, of all things, “Here be dragons.” The globe is dated from 1504, only a dozen years after Columbus’s first voyage.
The death of freedom: Ten things you could do in 1975 that you can’t do now.
Read the comments as well. I especially liked this: “It used to be that laws and regulations were put in place to prevent people from doing bad things to other people. Now laws and regulations are put in place to prevent good people from enjoying the fruits of their labor!”
NASA and Jeff Bezos today confirmed that one of the Saturn 5 first stage engines recovered from the ocean floor by Bezos’ expedition was from the Apollo 11 launch.
An evening pause: There are many intellectual fools these days who love to denigrate the United States and its history. These words, however, tell its true story, honestly and simply. Woe to us if we forget it.
Six images that ruined the lives of the individuals they made famous.
Except for the last (which isn’t a photo), every one one of these images is iconic. That an innocent person was destroyed by each says a great deal about the decline of our culture in the past half century.
Scientists have finally discovered the forgotten formula for the concrete the Romans used.
The secret to Roman concrete lies in its unique mineral formulation and production technique. As the researchers explain in a press release outlining their findings, “The Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock. For underwater structures, lime and volcanic ash were mixed to form mortar, and this mortar and volcanic tuff were packed into wooden forms. The seawater instantly triggered a hot chemical reaction. The lime was hydrated—incorporating water molecules into its structure—and reacted with the ash to cement the whole mixture together.”
The Portland cement formula crucially lacks the lyme and volcanic ash mixture. As a result, it doesn’t bind quite as well when compared with the Roman concrete, researchers found. It is this inferior binding property that explains why structures made of Portland cement tend to weaken and crack after a few decades of use, Jackson says.
The real cause behind the plane crash that killed Yuri Gagarin in 1968.
A man claims he has found a piece of debris from the Russian space station Mir in his backyard in northern Massachusetts.
And I have a bridge I want to sell you. This story is very suspicious. No picture, the rock isn’t metallic, the NASA engineer who identified it isn’t identified even though he wrote a letter to the man, and it was found on the eastern United States even though Mir was de-orbited over the south Pacific.
If this story is true, than the journalist who wrote it did a really bad job of reporting it.
An evening pause: As this is June 6, the anniversary of D-Day in World War II, let’s watch John Wayne show us how Americans once did it. From the 1962 film, The Longest Day.
A museum holding the recovered remains of Henry the Eighth’s flagship the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545, has now opened.
The images show a quite spectacular collection of artifacts, including the ship itself.
Sixty years ago today Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the peak of Mt. Everest.
Tests have now shown that at least one bead of jewelry from an Egyptian tomb was made from a meteorite.
The tube-shaped bead is one of nine found in 1911 in a cemetery at Gerzeh, around 70 kilometres south of Cairo. The cache dates from around 3,300 BC, making the beads the oldest known iron artefacts in Egypt.
An early study found that the iron in the beads had a high nickel content — a signature of iron meteorites — and led to the suggestion that it was of celestial origin2. But scholars argued in the 1980s that accidental early smelting efforts could have led to nickel-enriched iron3, while a more recent analysis of oxidised material on the surface of the beads showed low nickel content4.
To settle the argument, Diane Johnson, a meteorite scientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and her colleagues used scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography to analyze one of the beads on loan from the Manchester Museum, UK. The researchers weren’t able to cut the precious artefact open, but they found areas where the weathered material on the surface of the bead had fallen away, providing what Johnson describes as “little windows” to the preserved metal beneath.
The nickel content of this original metal was high — 30% — suggesting that it did indeed come from a meteorite. To confirm the result, the team observed a distinctive crystallographic structure called a Widmanstätten pattern. It is only found in iron meteorites, which cooled extremely slowly inside their parent asteroids as the Solar System was forming.
Twenty lost vials of Apollo 11 moon dust have been found in storage at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory after forty years.
Not surprisingly, NASA is demanding them back.
Some of the Earth’s creepiest places.
Most of these aren’t natural places, but weird human ruins or artifacts of some kind.
A first look at the Saturn 5’s F1 engines that were recovered from the ocean floor and are being restored for museum display.
An evening pause: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
Watch how a politician gets his underlings to do his dirty work, while keeping his own hands clean. From the 1964 film, Becket. Click through to part 15 to see that dirty work being done.
Barnes Wallis: the man behind World War II’s Dam Busters.
An evening pause:
How much does it cost, I’ll buy it.
The time is all we’ve lost, I’ll try it.
But he can’t even run his own life
I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine.
The irony of this song is that it was written during the Vietnam War as a protest against the war and the draft. Today, most of the same anti-war protesters that sung it then, now want that same government to run our lives, even though it can’t run its own.
The story of the youngest survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp to be liberated by the Americans.
At age seven, he was separated from his mother when she thrust him over to the men’s side during deportation. “Tulek, take Lulek,” she said, entrusting him to Naftali in the hope that the men were more likely to survive. Naftali smuggled him into the Buchenwald labor camp since a child his age would have been exterminated on the spot if discovered. Rabbi Lau thus became the youngest and smallest inmate in the camp. His survival over the next year was largely due to Naftali’s constant self sacrifice and protection.
You don’t have to be Jewish or even believe in God to agree with this man that miracles do happen every day.
A close study of human bones recently uncovered from Jamestown’s early “Starving Time” have revealed evidence of cannibalism.
This really isn’t news, since we have always had firsthand accounts suggesting cannibalism during that terrible winter of 1609. It is, however, the first empirical proof of that cannibalism.
Smithsonian researchers have recovered a short recording of Alexander Graham Bell’s voice, made in 1885.
A new report from Russia suggests that the undeployed antenna on the Progess freighter will interfere with ISS’s docking port and prevent a docking.
It appears that the antenna would allow a soft docking but prevent the hard docking necessary to allow for the opening of the hatch. Something similar to this had happened on the Russian Mir station in the 1987. Two astronauts did a space walk to clear the hatch of a piece of debris. Now the Russians are suggesting again that if a hard dock becomes impossible a spacewalk be performed to get the antenna out of the way.
R.I.P. Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013).
One of the giants of the 20th century. As she said in her final speech as Prime Minister in 1990,
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British scientists have located the underwater remains of one of the man-made Mulberry harbours built by the British to support the D-Day Normandy invasion.
