Tag: history

A 132-year-old Winchester rifle found leaning on a tree in national park

11:06 pm

Archeologists made the astonishing discovery of a 132 year old Winchester rifle leaning against a tree in Great Basin National Park in Nevada during a survey sweep.

“The 132 year-old rifle, exposed to sun, wind, snow, and rain was found leaning against a tree in the park. The cracked wood stock, weathered to grey, and the brown rusted barrel blended into the colors of the old juniper tree in a remote rocky outcrop, keeping the rifle hidden for many years,” Great Basin National Park said in a statement.

They hope with some historical research they might be able to identify who left the rifle there more than a century ago.

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Who is buried in the largest tomb ever found in northern Greece?

11:23 pm

Excitement continues to build as archeologists dig deeper into a massive tomb discovered two years ago in northern Greece.

This past weekend the excavation team, led by Greek archaeologist Katerina Peristeri, announced the discovery of two elegant caryatids—large marble columns sculpted in the shape of women with outstretched arms—that may have been intended to bar intruders from entering the tomb’s main room. “I don’t know of anything quite like them,” says Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.

The curly-haired caryatids are just part of the tomb’s remarkable furnishings. Guarding the door as sentinels were a pair of carved stone sphinxes, mythological creatures with the body of a lion and the head of a human. And when archaeologists finally entered the antechamber, they discovered faded remnants of frescoes as well as a mosaic floor made of white marble pieces inlaid in a red background.

Archeologists believe this tomb is connected somehow to Alexander the Great and could very well be the burial site of one of his relatives or close allies. They will not know more until they actually enter the tomb.

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The greatest electronic music of the fifties and sixties

7:44 pm

Link here. Many of these could easily be an evening pause, other than the fact that they don’t have visuals. If you want to get a feel for the beginnings of electronic music, check them out. The styles range from space music to jazzy. The sampling even includes the electronic music from Forbidden Planet (1956), one of the best science fiction films ever made. I have put one as an example below the fold.
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One of John Franklin’s lost ships found?

3:03 pm

A Canadian expedition thinks it has located one of the ships from John Franklin’s lost 1845 Arctic expedition.

The Canadian government began searching for Franklin’s ships in 2008 as part of a strategy to assert Canada’s sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, which has recently become accessible to shipping because of melting Arctic ice. Expedition sonar images from the waters of Victoria Strait, just off King William Island, clearly show the wreckage of a ship on the ocean floor.

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Government takes over healthcare spending

3:52 pm

Government spending on healthcare has skyrocketed in the past few decades, and due to Obamacare, will rise much higher in the coming decades.

Note that this spending is not on innovation or the actual care of patients, but on bureaucracy and regulatory bodies based in Washington and elsewhere. And isn’t that just what patients need, more bureaucracy?

Note also that one of the Democratic Party’s justifications for passing Obamacare was to reduce costs, but the data outlined in this article strongly suggests that it is exactly this kind of government interference since the Great Society in the 1960s that has caused healthcare costs to rise. Look especially at the graph at the link.

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Jack the Ripper identified

3:51 pm

Using DNA evidence from a shawl that is believed to have been at one of the Jack the Ripper’s murders, forensic scientists think they have finally identified the serial killer.

The story is fascinating, but what makes it even more convincing to me is that the person they name is hardly the wild romantic suspect that many books and movies have proposed in past decades. Instead, he was one of Scotland Yard’s prime suspects.

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