How the predictions for the year 2000 changed throughout the 20th century.
Not surprisingly, Arthur Clarke’s predictions were generally the best.
Almost seventy years after it was reported missing, a World War II RAF fighter, which crash-landed in a remote part of the Egyptian desert in 1942, has been discovered almost intact.
Twenty-two awesome pictures from history.
Photos of East Berlin, taken in 1990 and today.
What is interesting to me is how delapidated East Berlin was in 1990 after forty years of communist dictatorship, and how completely those same spots have become revitalized by freedom and capitalism.
Lost world: Brooklyn memories.
In words and pictures this webpage captures well what the world was like for someone growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s.
An evening pause: R.I.P. Davy Jones. This reunion performance, which included Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz, and Peter Tork of the Monkees, occurred on June 16, 2011 at the Beacon Theater, New York City. Less than a year later, Davy Jones had passed away.
Though the audio isn’t great, the joy of the song and those singing it comes through loud and clear. Go here to hear the song as performed in 1967.
An underground military bunker, all your own!
An evening pause: Though this video is about Switzerland, its philosophy jives perfectly with the events that took place on this day, April 19, at Lexington and Concord in 1775.
Eleven ancient buildings built on a cliff’s edge.
George Washington has been declared the greatest military foe Great Britain ever faced.
The bodies found in Ben Franklin’s basement.
The world’s biggest atlas: Yours for only $100K.
The 100-year march of technology in one graph.
Life imitates pulp fiction: A report describing the memories of an 80-year-old former U.S. Marine has provided the Chinese a clue to the whereabouts of the missing bones of Peking Man.
An expedition financed by Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com, has found the rocket engines of the Apollo 11 Saturn 5 rocket at the bottom of the Atlantic.
An incandescent light bulb, stored in a time capsule for one hundred years, still worked!
I wonder: Did the EPA try to arrest anyone for using it?
An evening pause: Driving across the Wabash Cannonball Bridge going from Indiana to Illinois. The bridge is single lane, with a wooden deck, and over a hundred years old.
What’s really cool is how the driver is able to drive while holding his camera overhead through his sun roof.
Some history comes to Earth: The first Russian weather satellite, launched in 1969, is about to burn up in the atmosphere.
Not only that, but the U.S. research satellite Explorer 8, launched in 1960, is also about to come down.
With the help of Google Earth, a lost section of the Great Wall of China has been discovered in the Gobi Desert outside of present-day China.
The USS Monitor gives up the faces of its dead.
Gagarin was first. Here’s why.
A DNA autopsy of the Stone Age Iceman found in the Alps in 1991 has now told us something of his health and where his ancestors came from.
An evening pause: On George Washington’s birthday, an excerpt of a speech by David McCullough from September 27, 2005. As McCullough notes, even King George III himself knew the measure of the man. “He will be the greatest man in the world.”
On Washington’s birthday: A Jewish congregation’s letter to George Washington welcoming him to Rhode Island in 1790.
Washington had come to Rhode Island in celebration of that state’s ratification of the Constitution. This paragraph, written by these immigrant Jews, speaks directly to today’s far less tolerant government and society that now believes it has the right to squelch religious freedom:
Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People ~~ a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance ~~ but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: ~~ deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine.
The streets of Rome — in Jerusalem.
Uncovering the underwater remains of HMS Investigator and the sailors who survived its loss in the Arctic ice to discover the Northwest Passage.
An evening pause: On the fiftieth anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight.
After putting a chimpanzee into orbit in November, NASA finally felt ready to send a man into orbit to answer the Soviets and their two manned orbital missions of Gagarin and Titov the previous year.
After Glenn’s mission and for the next few months, it looked like the U.S. was catching up with the Soviets in space. That would change before the year was summer was over.
The video below gives a nice summary of key moments in Glenn’s flight, though the special effects of the “fireflies” is poorly done. And we now know that the “fireflies” were nothing more than frozen particles of condensation coming off the capsule.
Ancient computers still in use today, including punch cards, mainframes, and the first PCs.
