How to Pull Off the Most Complex Taxidermy of All Time
(more photos at link)
Yesterday the American Museum of Natural History took the wraps off its newest main attraction: Lonesome George. Lonesome George, the world-famous giant tortoise native to the Galapagos. He passed on in 2012 of natural causes. This set in motion the process to preserve George through the most complex and intricate taxidermy ever attempted—from a species of one.
Lonsesome George was the last of the Pinta Island giant tortoises on the Galapagos. Due to human intervention in the ecosystem his entire species whittled down to just George. Since his discovery he'd been well cared for and revered by scientists across the board. Several attempts at mating George just never panned out and he died from old age. Within 24 hours of his death he was frozen with the decision to taxidermy him.
The first step of the process was to get George to the museum for evaluation. This involved huge amounts of coordination and paperwork to get him to NY through customs and into the States safely intact. They worked against the clock to minimize any types of freezer burn or damage done to George that could happen when kept frozen too long or transported poorly. After the museum assessed George, he was brought to the Wildlife Preservations taxidermy studio in Woodland Park, NJ.
George Dante, president of Wildlife Preservations and an expert in the field of taxidermy, lead the effort in bringing George's likeness back into existence. Since there were no other animals of his species to base him off of, extensive amounts of research went into making sure the process was as accurate as possible.
Making a individual animal's likeness, such as a pet, is usually avoided in the taxidermy trade. Once an animal is recreated they almost never look like how they once did to the people who were close to it in life, however true to the species they were. This made George an especially daunting task because he was one of the most well-known animals of all time.
The first step was to position George and make a framework of him. This way Dante could create a sculpture accurate to his posture and size later on. The next step was to skin George and remove his shell. After the sculpture—built around the original shell—was finished, the skin was put back on.
Dante then restored coloration to the shell and skin, based on images and research into George's habitat soil and vegetation samples. Stains from the vegetation in his habitat were painted onto his beak and soil coloration applied to his feet.
This left the most challenging aspect for last: Lonesome George's eyes.
No one had actually had discovered the exact eye color of a tortoise like George before. Yes, photos had been taken of him several times, but never close enough to reveal the true color of his seemingly beady black eyes. The team poured through countless photos looking for any insight. Eventually they visited a controlled tortoise habitat where the handlers helped get an incredibly up close macro shot of an eye of a close relatives to Lonesome George.
With that straightened out, they sent out for a custom pair or glass eyes for a giant Pinta Island tortoise. The only of its kind.
You can see George on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York from today through January 4th. Then he'll be on display back home in Ecuador.
George was preserved as part of an effort to bring awareness to man's power to destroy and save ecosystems. Because of an unnatural introduction of goats to the Galapagos, the tortoises had to compete for food. Goats have now been eradicated from the islands, but man's impact on habitats throughout the world isn't going anywhere.
There are three main theories for why a baker’s dozen is 13 instead of 12, but most think it has its origins in the fact that many societies throughout history have had extremely strict laws concerning baker’s wares, due to the fact that it is fairly easy for bakers to cheat patrons and sell them less than what they think they are getting.
These societies took this very seriously as bread was a primary food source for many people. For example, in ancient Egypt, should a baker be found to cheat someone, they would have their ear nailed to the door of their bakery. In Babylon, if a baker was found to have sold a “light loaf” to someone, the baker would have his hand chopped off.
Another example was in Britain in the mid-13th century with the establishment of the Assize of Bread and Ale statute, which was in effect all the way up to the 19th century before being repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act of 1863. The Assize of Bread and Ale statute set the price of ale and what weight a farthing loaf of bread should be. Specifically it stated: By the consent of the whole realm of England, the measure of the king was made; that is to say: that an English penny, called a sterling round, and without any clipping, shall weigh thirty-two wheat corns in the midst of the ear, and twenty-pence do make an ounce, and twelve ounces one pound, and eight pounds do make a gallon of wine, and eight gallons of wine do make a London bushel, which is the eighth part of a quarter.
So basically, in terms of bread, setting the relationship between the price of wheat and what the subsequent price of a loaf of bread from a certain quantity of wheat should be.
Even though this statute was enacted at the request of bakers, it still posed a problem for them. If they happened to accidentally cheat a customer by giving them less than what they were supposed to as outlined by the statute, they were subject to extremely severe fines and punishment, which varied depending on where the lawbreaker lived, but could include, like the Babylonians’ punishment, losing a hand.
As it wasn’t that hard to accidentally cheat a customer, given making a loaf of bread with exacting attributes is nearly impossible by hand without modern day tools, bakers began giving more than what the statute outlined to make sure they went over and never under. Specifically, in terms of the “baker’s dozen”, if a vendor or other customer were to order a dozen or several dozen loaves of bread from a baker, the baker would give them 13 for every dozen they ordered. Likewise, when selling quantities of anything, they’d give 13 measures when only 12 were purchased.
This practice eventually made its way into the Worshipful Company of Bakers (London) guild code. This guild was actually started in the 12th century and had a large part in formulating the rules on the Assize of Bread and Ale statute.
Though the above is generally thought to be the correct origins for a baker’s dozen, there are two alternate theories put forth that are somewhat plausible, though lacking in hard historical evidence and visible progression. The first is that bakers would sell 13 loaves to vendors, while only charging them for 12 which allowed the vendor to then sell all 13 at full price; thus, they’d earn a 7.7% profit per loaf. So in this case, vendors were being given a sort of wholesale price, but without breaking the laws outlined in the Assize of Bread and Ale which had no exceptions for allowing a cheaper price to vendors. This theory has some holes in it, but is quite plausible on the whole.
Yet another theory is that it was simply a product of the way bakers bake bread. Baking trays tend to have a 3:2 aspect ratio. The most efficient two-dimensional arrangement then of loaves/biscuits/whatever on such a tray results in 13 items with a 4+5+4 hexagonal arrangement, which avoids corners. It was important to avoid the corners because the corners of a baking tray will heat up and cool off faster than the edges and the interior, which would result in not cooking anything on the corner evenly with the rest. This theory doesn’t explain why they’d sell them in batches 13 for the price of 12, but at least explains why they may have commonly made them in batches of 13 in the first place and is still a possible source, or at least contributor, to the “baker’s dozen” if it was fairly universal that baker’s baked things in groups of 13, as is suggested by the theory.
Bonus Facts:
Another common name for a “baker’s dozen” is a “rough rider’s dozen”.
The term “baker” dates back to around the year 1000. Another term that meant the same thing from that time was “bakester”. This latter word probably referring to female bakers; this is similar to how a “webster” was a female weaver, with the “-ster” ending implying a woman.
“Bakester” is where the surname “Baxter” comes from.
One might think checking to see if a baker was cheating you on a loaf would be as simple as weighing the loaf, but this was not actually the case. Bakers had many tricks up their sleeves for cheating customers while having the weight come out more or less correctly. One such trick was to add a bit of ground sand to the loaf to get the weight just so, while being able to use less wheat.
The Assize of Bread and Ale was the first law in British history that regulated the production and sale of food.
More of little known history...
The steps are simple:
1. Teach basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division using calculators.
2. Apply common core conceptual reasoning:
Data can translate to music, too. So for CERN's 60th birthday, a group of physicists got together to play music based on sonification data taken from the Swiss lab's for detectors. And it's beautiful!
We've seen the Higgs Boson in musical form before, but it's even better when played by a full chamber. CERN says a group of seven engineers and physicists came together to form the group LHChamber Music:
The musical scores are based on the sonification of data obtained by four detectors —ALICE,ATLAS, CMS and LHCb —during the Large Hadron Collider run 2010-2013. The video(link is external) shows each musical piece performed individually and as an ensemble by CERN's very own researchers; the music was played in the four experimental caverns and in the CERN Control Centre (CCC) and features a harp, a guitar, two violins, a keyboard, a clarinet and a flute.
Data from ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb was weaved with sonified info from researchers own experiments to make a piece of music. They blend together quite beautifully—a nice illustration of how science and music can work together. And not unlike that project from former LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy where he took sound data from the U.S. Open to make music. But when it involves the Higgs Boson, well, it's just a little bit more high-minded. And it's seriously lovely. Go on, just give it a listen. [CERN h/t @mariabustillos]
If you were an American kid in the 1950s and 60s you were bombarded with an amazing promise: one day, when you're all grown up, you'll be able to vacation on the moon. But until then you'll have to settle for space-adventure TV shows and comic books. Unless, of course, you won this real live space simulator from 1959.
In 1959 the Kraft food company held a contest. Advertised far and wide in comic books and newspapers, kids were offered the opportunity to win space-themed prizes. Just send in a copy of the ad and an empty bag of Kraft marshmallows and you could win any number of goodies. There were telescopes, "moon cars," toy missile launchers, spaceship model kits, and giant Hammond space maps. But the real treat was the grand prize: an actual spaceship simulator built by an actual space-tech company that could fit you and three of your friends!
All you had to do was clip the entry blank, and send in your suggestion for the name of the spaceship along with a bag of Kraft marshmallows. The ad even had some suggestions for names like Moon Rocket or Buddy, though the ad assured kids that they could think of even better ones.
From the 1959 ad:
You will be the envy of every boy and girl in America — if you win this Aerojet-General space-trainer giant! So realistic, it almost seems you could fly it to the moon! Just give it the winning name, it's yours!
Sure, the telescope or even the space map might be cool to win. But everyone wanted that life-size space ship! The fact that is was manufactured by Aerojet, the same company that was working on actual rockets for NASA, made it all the more cool.
"The Kraft simulator came complete with space suits and helmets based on authentic equipment," according to Patrick Lucanio and Gary Coville in the book 1950s Rocketman TV Series and Their Fans: Cadets, Rangers, and Junior Space Men. This wasn't some toy, Kraft promised. This was the real deal. Or at least as close to the real deal as any kid could get at the time.
The simulator was built and first went on tour in 1959 before being given away in the contest. Below, a notice that the simulator was coming to the Oakland area from the September 10, 1959 Oakland Tribune.
The winner was reportedly a young girl from a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. Kids could sit behind their own control panels, twisting knobs and pushing buttons, while they watched a movie being projected in front of them from the nose cone of the simulator.
The young winner donated it to her elementary school before it was moved to the lawn of the Missouri Department of Mental Health, according to the book Space Patrol by Jean-Noel Bassior. But the simulator didn't survive for too long after that.
Amidst the Cold War fears of the 1960s, some thought the look of a giant rocket gave a bad impression in front of a professional building. It appeared to some people more like a ballistic missile than an astronaut's vessel for space-faring. The hospital administration staff had the simulator destroyed sometime between the late 60s and the early 1970s.
Kraft's Aeroject spaceship simulator is dead and buried. But the dreams of space travel live on for millions of kids around the world. Let's just hope that all those adults making promises about vacations in space can keep their promises this time. I'm not holding my breath.
Images: 1959 Kraft ad from X-Ray Delta; Newspaper announcement from the September 10, 1959 issue of the Oakland Tribune; The simulator either in front of the Missouri school or the mental health facility, undated via Weburbanist
Re-read Brian Shul's account(The Thrill of Flying the SR-71 Blackbird) of his flight against enemy SAM batteries over Lybia. Imagine yourself tightly packed inside that amazing retro-futuristic SR-71 Blackbird cockpit with the alarms sounding off. This cool 360-degree virtual reality view will help.
Expand and pinch to zoom the images (only works on desktop browsers.)
Amazing ultra-high definition photo of the SR-71 Blackbird cockpit
itshot's Link
liked this comment:
"I love the idea that a half-century after the Wright Brothers, this jet was screaming over enemy territory at more than three times the speed of sound, fifteen miles high, with the engine nacelles glowing white-hot at over 1000 degrees F."
and to think the SR71 first flew a half-century ago!
HA/KS's Link
This bird might look like a holiday ornament, but it is actually a rare half-female, half-male northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, pictured with female plumage on the left and male plumage on the right) spotted a few years ago in Rock Island, Illinois. Researchers have long known such split-sex “gynandromorphs” exist in insects, crustaceans, and birds.
But scientists rarely get to extensively study a gynandromorph in the wild; most published observations cover just a day or so. Observers got to follow this bird, however, for more than 40 days between December 2008 and March 2010. They documented how it interacted with other birds and even how it responded to recorded calls.
The results suggest being half-and-half carries consequences: The cardinal didn’t appear to have a mate, and observers never heard it sing, the researchers report this month in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology. On the other hand, it wasn’t “subjected to any unusual agonistic behaviors from other cardinals,” according to the paper. Intriguingly, another gynandromorph cardinal sighted briefly in 1969 had the opposite plumage, they note: the male’s bright red plumes on the right, the drabber female feathers on the left.
Have you seen the largest picture ever taken? For the record, it's a mammoth 1.5 billion pixel image (69, 536 x 22, 230) and requires about 4.3 GB disk space. Oh, and it'll take your breath away.
On January 5, NASA released an image of the Andromeda galaxy, our closest galactic neighbour, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The full image is made up of 411 Hubble images, takes you through a 100 million stars and travels over more than 40,000 light years. Well, a section of it anyway.
Prepare to feel extremely tiny and insignificant as you marvel at this fly-through video created by YouTuber daveachuk and make sure you stick around till the end. Seriously.
Anony Mouse's Link
I grew up with those Bell Labs programs. My father, who was a general manager for Michigan Bell, brought those movies home and we had neighborhood parties to view them. And I have oft recommended the Boorstin series of books for those who were interested in science, history and culture.
Nice way to start the day with two things that were influential in my views of life.
(embedded links at link)
Man's Search for Knowledge
Younger book thread readers might not know, and hence find it hard to believe, that there once was a time in America wen those who spoke to the public at large in the name of science weren't a bunch of smug, arrogant jerks. In particular, Bell Laboratories (yes, the old monopoly phone company) produced a series of educational movies on topics such as blood, the sun, heredity, the weather. They were originally broadcast on TV between 1957 and 1964, but then Bell made 16mm copies freely available for educational purposes, so they became science class staples in primary and secondary schools all over the country.
If you're old like me, you're probably remember the AV club setting up the film projector in your classrooms so the science teacher could show the class films such as Hemo the Magnificent, or Our Mr. Sun, or maybe even The Unchained Goddess. I think they actually hold up pretty well, all things considered, they're entertaiing and yes, they're a bit hokey, but not as much as you might think.
Of course you can read about all of this, the history, the personalities, the films themselves, and more, in the book Sonnets & Sunspots: "Dr. Research" Baxter And The Bell Science Films by Eric Niderost.
And I'd much rather listen to Dr. Frank Baxter than Neill DeGrasse Tyson any day.
For more "man's search for knowledge" type stuff for a general audience, you might want to look into Daniel Boorstin's trilogy The Discoverers, followed up by The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination and The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World.
Quote Of The Week
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
-Haruki Murakami
They have been with us from the beginning...
A Magician Used The First Pirate Radio Station To Troll A Scientist
Everyone knows Marconi was one of the world's most disagreeable scientists. What they don't know is he was surrounded by people nearly as disagreeable as himself. And that a famous demonstration of his "wireless" was taken over by a magician-turned-skeptic-turned-pirate.
In the early days, radio was treated with open skepticism by many. Oh, everyone agreed that radio waves could be sent through the air, but few agreed on the details. Guglielmo Marconi, who had worked out the first practical radio transmitter, made a not-so-very-good name for himself ruthlessly transforming his radio from a novelty into something that could send messages from across oceans.
In doing this, Marconi made a lot of enemies, although some of those enemies he did not deserve. As soon as he had demonstrated how revolutionary a business radio could be, other businesses sprang up, often run by people claiming that they had more of a right to the technology than Marconi did. One of the people who went into the radio business was Nevil Maskelyne, who also happened to be a magician.
Maskelyne was also a scientist, and inventor, and a skeptic. He was one of that class of magicians who loves magic when it is obviously fake, and hates it when it purports to be real. He debunked spiritualists and lampooned flim-flam artists, and he had decided that Marconi was just such an artist. Part of this was the fact that Marconi refused to conduct open and public tests of his technology. Given his competition, he can hardly be blamed for that. But Marconi deserved some of the skeptics' scorn. He covered up failures and even made false claims. He claimed, for example, that "wireless signals" could not be interfered with. The messages encoded in a wireless signal came through to their receiver confidential and complete. To back that claim up, he hired revered scientist and engineer John Ambrose Fleming.
One night, Fleming gave a lecture at the Royal Society, during which he would receive a message in morse code on his wireless set. The message was to come from a remote island, just at the end of a lecture on radio technology. Fleming got up and gave the lecture, calm and confident. The technician behind him saw the radio spring to life. It typed out, in code, a number of limericks about a "young fellow from Italy." Then it started in with some Shakespeare. As the lecture went on, the crew behind Fleming received more and more insulting messages. Someone had hijacked the radio. The technician, trying to be subtle, scanned the crowd and saw a confederate of Maskelyne, but there was no way to stop him without disrupting the lecture.
The pirate signal stopped just before the end of the lecture, and the real message came in. Fleming, hearing about the incident later, felt hugely insulted, and sent out an open letter condemning the "hooliganism." At that point Maskelyne gleefully pointed out that, if what Fleming had claimed about radio's confidentiality was true, there would have been no way to interfere with the radio signal. Fleming had disproved his own claims.
Charles Townes, the physicist whose work would help lay the foundations for the development of the laser died today. He was 99. His career also ranged far beyond an interest in lasers, into astronomy and a fascination with spirituality.
Dr. Townes had an incredible career as a scientist, winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1964. But he's perhaps best known as the "inventor" of the laser. Townes was also a pioneer in the field of infrared astronomy and was the first to discover water in space.
The quotes around "inventor" aren't meant to detract from his accomplishments with lasers, but rather to acknowledge that invention is a really messy concept. Townes first built a maser in the mid-1950s, which used microwave amplification rather than light amplification.
Gordon Gould at ARPA (now DARPA) and Ted Maiman at Hughes Labs were working on similar research in the late 1950s. Maiman would actually be the first person to build a practical laser in 1960, working partially from the published research of Townes.
Dr. Townes shared his 1964 Nobel Prize with Russian scientists N. G. Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov because they were also working on the laser in the Soviet Union concurrently and independently of Townes.
Townes would be best known later is his life for advocating the idea that science and religion would one day merge, revealing the secrets of creation.
"I look at science and religion as quite parallel, much more similar than most people think and that in the long run, they must converge," Townes would tell a Harvard crowd in 2005. "It's a fantastically specialized universe, but how in the world did it happen?"
How the Pencil Sharpener Was Invented
For years, the knife was the most commonly used tool to sharpen the wooden writing instrument known as a pencil (which historians believe was invented in the 15th or 16th century). But whittling the wood away to eventually produce a point was a time-consuming, tedious, and inexact process. As pencils became more ubiquitous in everyday life, it became apparent that a faster and more efficient way was needed to sharpen them. Luckily, two Frenchmen were up to the challenge.
On October 20, 1828, Parisian mathematician Bernard Lassimone applied for and was issued French patent number 2444 for his invention of the "taille crayon," translated to English as "pencil sharpener." A year after receiving a patent, the "taille crayon" was advertised in the Le Constitutionnel, an influential political and literary newspaper out of Paris, as the preferable way to sharpen pencils. It employed two small metal files tilted at ninety degrees in a block of wood that worked to whittle, scrape, and grind the wood off the pencil to create a tip. Though this was the first mechanical pencil sharpener, it wasn't much faster, nor less work, than just using a knife.
About ten years later, in 1837, the British picked up on this sharpening fad. Cooper and Eckstein's "patent pencil pointer" debuted in The Mechanic's Weekly, a scientific weekly founded and edited by Joseph Clinton Robertson. They named their invention the "Styloxynon" and it was pretty close to Lassimone's sharpener in its description, "two sharp files neatly and firmly set together in right angles in a small block of rosewood." It was actually given the branded content treatment in The Mechanic's Weekly with the writer (who presumably was Robertson, considering he wrote most of the content in the magazine) saying, "From great personal convenience, I have myself experienced in the use of the ingenious little instrument… I feel assured that I shall be rendering an important service to all such of your numerous readers as are draughtsmen, by introducing it to their notice through the medium of your pages."
Then again, at the end of the page advertisement, it reads, "When a new pencil is first used, it should be roughly pointed with a knife before employing the Styloxynon.
Needless to say, a better pencil sharpener than the Styloxynon was still needed.
A decade after the Styloxynon, another Frenchman, Therry des Estwaux, designed something we still use today in pencil sharpeners. Estwaux invented a conical-shaped device that, when a pencil was inserted and twisted, all sides of the pencil were whittled away at once, make the sharpening process much quicker. Today, it is known as a prism sharpener. From that point on, sharpeners using a conical-shaped device began popping up throughout Europe, though with slight design changes from Estwaux' sharpener. They were also used in offices across the world. In fact, the Early Office Museum tracked down documentation that showed the New York City municipal government purchased mechanical pencil sharpeners for their offices as early as the winter of 1853 from an English company for one dollar and fifty per sharpener (about $42 today). As the demand for pencil sharpeners grew, so did the need to mass produce them to get the price down.
How the Pencil Sharpener Was InventedEnter Walter K. Foster, who, according to many sources, patented the first American pencil sharpener in 1851, complete with an improvement on the original conical design, so that it could be more easily mass produced. However, upon further research, we could find no patent under Walter Foster until 1855, which is actually under "Waltee K. Fostee" (though that is a typo). The patent, US 12722, is for "Improvement in molds for casting pencil-sharpeners," and it describes how to properly create molds in order to mass produce the device.
By 1857, a report in a trade journal stated that Foster and his employees were churning out over 50 gross (7,200) of the sharpeners per day due to the "the demand for export to Europe increasing every day." By 1860, The Practical Draughtsman's Book of Industrial Design out of France was admitting that now "the Americans supply us with something simpler and cheaper."
For the next thirty years, the pencil sharpener would be mass-produced across the world in various different sizes, shapes, and modes of whittling and scraping off wood . Yet, the pencil sharpener still wasn't perfect – with the major problem being that all of them required the user to either twist the pencil and hold the sharpener steady or twist the sharpener and hold the pencil steady to get the desired sharp tip. The 1896 A.B. Dick Planetary Pencil Pointer changed all of that.
Designed sort of like a monorail paper cutter, the user inserted a pencil into a "chuck" – a mounted wood holder – as two milling disks "revolved around their axis as they orbited the tip of the pencil." After a few moments, one had a perfectly sharpened pencil. In 1904, the Olcott Pencil Sharpener utilized a cylindrical cutting head for cleaner cuts.
Around the same time as the A.B. Dick Planetary Pencil Pointer, a man in Falls River, Massachusetts noticed a different need in relation to the pencil sharpener. John Lee Love was a carpenter by trade, so he always had a need for a pencil. He needed a sharpener that was portable, easy-to-use, and wouldn't make a mess. So, he designed and patent his own.
How the Pencil Sharpener Was InventedUnder US patent #594114, simply titled "pencil sharpener," the patent describes a simple, light-weight, crank-powered pencil sharpener that caught the shavings. Plus, as it is written in the patent, it could also act as a "as a paper-weight, desk ornament, and for other and similar purposes." This sharpener was eventually called the "Love Sharpener."
The next important innovation for the pencil sharpener was adding electricity. While it seems electric pencil sharpeners were actually invented around 1910, they weren't commercially produced until 1917 by a company called Farnham Printing & Stationery Co out of Minneapolis. Even then, while electric pencil sharpeners were around and used by large offices, this type of sharpener didn't become widely available to the public until the 1940s. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Cecil B. DeMille Kept a Wolf and Guns To Defend Against Edison's Thugs
Why did Southern California become the epicenter of the American film industry? The nice weather certainly helped. But there's another element that modern Hollywood probably hopes you'd forget: Rampant piracy. Even though it was just the piracy of movie camera tech rather than the Jack Sparrow variety, there were plenty of real world bullets being discharged over it. Including bullets being aimed at the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille.
Thomas Edison dominated the early movie business. Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company (commonly called the Edison Trust) had a monopoly on some of the fundamental technologies that allowed people to make films. They also dominated the distribution business in the United States. So independent filmmakers of the early 1910s sought refuge in hard to reach places.
Southern California soon emerged as one of these go-to destinations (along with Cuba and Florida) to shoot movies, since it was a five-day train ride from New York to Los Angeles. And Cecil B. DeMille was one filmmaker who moved west to work in peace, shielded by geography to use Edison movie equipment without paying royalties. This, of course, didn't make the Trust too happy—and Edison's thugs would often be dispatched to go after DeMille and his films.
DeMille, naturally, sought to protect himself as the book Lost Hollywood by David Wallace explains:
DeMille, for example, received numerous anonymous threats to his life and was shot at twice in his first months in Hollywood. The director was certain it was the Trust trying to kill him, but the perpetrators were never caught. On more than one occasion, he slept in his first studio armed with a shotgun to guard his film. Like many other early filmmakers, he carried a .45 revolver conspicuously in a holster on his belt. Eventually he owned eighty-six guns, often using them as props for his movies.
As Simon Louvish's 2008 biography of DeMille notes, he even kept a tame prairie wolf in his home as added protection. The wolf was used in filming his 1914 film The Squaw Man and certainly would intimidate any goon sent by the Trust to go after DeMille.
The Edison Trust was officially dissolved by court order in 1918, paving the way for the motion picture industry to blossom in the 1920s. And Hollywood would be the better for it. Until it decided, like every industry built on piracy eventually does, to over-react anytime it sees a threat to its domination of intellectual property laws.
The anti-2A always harp back to the early days of this country when carping on "assault" weapons...
High-capacity magazine? Check.
Capable of firing 22 aimed shots in a minute? Check.
A military weapon? Check.
Manufactured during the American Revolutionary War? Check.
The Girandoni was 22-shot, magazine-fed, nearly silent .46 caliber repeating rifle issued to elite Austrian troops from 1780-1815. Thomas Jefferson purchased two of these rifles, which he sent west with Lewis and Clark.
Remember it the next time some know-it-all—perhaps someone who used to have a cable show before he was fired for low ratings—says that the Founding Fathers only knew of muskets.
Pretty neat...
I didn't know about this fun factoid: On March 13, 1970, the Grumman Aerospace Corporation—manufacturers of the Lunar Module—sent a $312,421.24 bill to North American Rockwell—who made the service module that malfunctioned in the Apollo 13 mission—for towing services. Why, you ask? Here's the story.
On April 14, 1970, 56 hours after its launch from the Kennedy Space Center, the oxygen tank number 2 exploded in the Service Module made by North American Rockwell. It was a manufacturing problem: The wires on the stirring fan inside the tank short-circuited because of faulty Teflon insulation, causing the oxygen to blow up violently.
It was the beginning of NASA's finest hour—a tale of success against all odds.
At the time, Apollo 13 was 205,000 miles (330,000 kilometers) from Earth. It was not possible to turn around on a dime and get back to base. Mission control decided that the only course of action was to let the laws of physics do their magic and send them around the Moon, using its gravity as a sling shot that would put them back en route to our planet.
The only problem is that the Command Module—the main spacecraft—didn't have the necessary resources to complete that trip: The astronauts had to shut down all systems in the command and service modules or risk further damage and, possibly, another major malfunction that may have killed them. Furthermore—in the very remote case that they could complete the trip back to Earth—they needed to save battery power for re-entry.
And here is where Grumman's billing starts: The astronauts had to move to their Lunar Module, a ship that wasn't designed for interplanetary space travel or two support more than two people. It was the only option.
The engineers at mission control and the astronauts had to do a lot of things to make it work. One example: While they had enough oxygen to return, the CO2 filters in the Lunar Module weren't designed to support three people for that amount of time. Ground control had to come up with a hack to adapt a cubic CO2 filter into a cylindrical hole, which bought them the time they needed. Another hack was to transfer the energy from the Lunar Module to the command module, which is also shown as a line in the invoice below.
But perhaps the biggest feat was the manual course corrections. For that they had to fire up the lunar module's engine while using Earth as a guide for navigation. Not even Grumman's engineers were confident that these operations were going to work. The lunar module's Descent Propulsion System was only designed to be fired once, to land on the Moon. Multiples burns seemed crazy—but it worked.
And thus we arrive to the invoice, made and sent tongue in cheek by one of the Grumman's consultant pilots who helped to achieve the impossible—and the response by North American Rockwell:
The invoice was drawn up, tongue in cheek, by a Grumman consultant pilot, Sam Greenberg, on Wednesday evening. [...] North Marican Rockwell, on receiving the invoice, had its Houston auditor examine it. Then the public relations director of its Downey, Calif. space division, Earl Blount, with a power face issued a statement. He said that Grumman, before sending such an invoice, should remember that North American Rockwell had not received payment for ferrying [Lunar Modules] on previous trips to the moon.
It is great to see they all laughed about it after the three astronauts were safe at home but I shiver at the thought of what a close call this all was.
If you have any interest in space and are ever in that area, it is a great stop (complete with SR-71).
HA/KS's Link
We took some Russians to see it once. One of the displays is one of the three original Sputnik I satellites. One was launched into orbit, one is in Russia, and one is in KS. It is rather tiny.
The Russians were furious because they always thought it was some huge spaceship and this was just an American trick. I thought I was back in the Cold War or Star Trek era.
The Computer Simulation That Almost Started World War III
Remember the 1983 movie WarGames? The film is about a computer "game" with the potential to start thermonuclear war. But strangely this scenario is more truth than fiction. Because in 1979 programmers at NORAD almost started World War III when they accidentally ran a computer simulation of a Soviet attack.
In the early morning hours of November 9, 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to President Carter, was awakened by a horrifying phone call. According to NORAD, the Soviet Union had just launched 250 missiles headed straight for American soil. Brzenzinski received another call not long after the first, and NORAD was reporting that it was now 2,200 missiles. This was the moment that every American living through the Cold War had feared. And U.S. officials had no plans to notify the public.
Brzenzinski didn't even bother waking up his wife. He assumed that he and everyone he knew would soon be dead, so there was no sense in troubling her. One can only imagine the dismal post-apocalyptic world flashing before his mind's eye as he thought about his next steps.
"I knew that if it were true, then within about half an hour I, and my loved ones, and Washington, and the majority of America would cease to exist. I wanted to be sure that we'd have company," Brzenzinski told a biographer in 2011.
What Brzenzinski meant was that he wanted to make sure if the attack was real that the Soviet Union would be little more than a giant hole in the ground. If we were going down, our Commie adversaries were going down with us.
But Brzenzinski wanted confirmation before calling the president and launching missiles at the Soviets. There had been other false alarms in the past, but this one looked legit. Thankfully, before he could notify President Carter he received a third call that no other warning systems had picked up signs of an attack. NORAD would continue to keep a close eye on the skies, but this appeared to be yet another false alarm.
So how did it happen? A computer program that simulated a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union had been fed through NORAD's network. Terrifyingly, NORAD and everyone else in the network mistook their own drill program as a real attack. 1973 cutaway illustration of the Advanced Airborne Command Post (The National Security Archive)
Even though the president wasn't notified in real time and only became aware of the incident later, events were set in motion to provide a second strike. Ten American and Canadian jets were scrambled in preparation for a war that had the potential to dramatically change life on our planet for many generations to come.
But the president wasn't kept in the loop. The United States has a system in place dating back to the 1960s for these kinds of scenarios. The president is supposed to board a plane so that he can be able to make decisions from the air during a nuclear conflict. Curiously, that flight (a mobile command center called the National Emergency Airborne Command Post) reportedly took off without the president on board.
When the 1979 NORAD computer incident was first reported in the American press, the whole thing was downplayed as something that didn't pose any real threat to American security. News reports of the time made it very clear that the president wasn't notified (something that was supposed to sooth the public) but they failed to mention that Carter's national security advisor had been informed and was sitting at home contemplating a retaliatory strike, not to mention the death of everyone he loved.
As Michael Warner explains in the absolutely fascinating 2012 paper Cybersecurity: A Pre-history, this incident would involve a bizarre cycle of art imitating life imitating art:
In a case of art imitating life, the popular thriller WarGames adapted this scenario in 1983 — and President Ronald Reagan was impressed enough by co-star Matthew Broderick's hacking skills to mention the movie's scenario at a meeting with members of Congress and the Army's Chief of Staff. Lastly, in a case of life imitating art, high school students from Milwaukee, inspired by WarGames and calling themselves the 414s (after the city's telephone area code), proved that same summer that high schoolers really could get inside unclassified military networks.
How did they try to remedy these particular problems in 1979? For one, NORAD built a $16 million test facility offsite so that they weren't feeding simulation programs directly into their detection network. A 1981 report by the General Accounting Office cited this as absolutely necessary to make sure that a computer program couldn't set off a false alarm again.
But both the U.S. and Soviet Union would see many more false alarms in the coming years. In fact, we know of at least three examples in 1980 alone. Another false alarm would occur in 1983 when a Soviet lieutenant in Moscow by the name of Stanislav Petrov received a warning that American ICBMs were headed towards Russia. His decision to not launch a counter attack based on a "funny feeling in [his] gut" saved humanity from absolute nuclear destruction.
Last year the Danish made a movie about Petrov called The Man Who Saved The World. Sadly, he was neither the first nor the last Cold Warrior to deserve that title.
A bit of modern genetics, today:
This Video Is the Best Explanation Yet of How Genomes Really Work
There are 20,000 genes in the human genome, but only a small fraction of them are active in any given cell. This video from Nature explains with beautiful clarity the system that activity, turning genes on and off. It's called the epigenome, and it's incredibly important. Now you can understand how it works, too.
Back when DNA sequencing was still in its infancy, scientists thought that having a complete sequence of human DNA would unlock all its secrets. Nope — it turned out to be a lot of more complicated. One of those big complications is the epigenome, which is a map of the activity in any given genome at any given time. Like every other part of your body, your genome is constantly in motion and constantly changing — you can't understand it without watching its behavior in real time.
Today, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health published results from years of research on mapping the epigenomes of 100 different cell and tissue types. A skin cell is different from a lung cell, which is different from a brain cell, yet all of them started with the same sequences of DNA. Their epigenomes give them their unique identities. In recent years, the epigenome has gotten a lot of attention because habits like smoking and diet can spur epigenetic changes—changes that may even be passed onto your children. There are also connections between the behavior of the epigenome and conditions like Alzheimers.
At last, the epigenome is opening its secrets to us.
Conservatives are understandably depressed in the wake of Speaker Boehner and the Republican-controlled Congress’ predictable caving on executive amnesty.
Let me stop right there by emphasizing that I only said conservatives. Were our republic healthy, every single American would be depressed that President Obama’s amnesty—which on dozens of occasions he said he did not have the authority to enforce—will continue apace to the benefit of lawbreakers at the expense of American citizens.
Americans would be further demoralized at the notion that our president politicized the sovereignty of our nation represented by failing to protect its borders, all in a transparent attempt to win a permanent Democratic majority—which the shortsighted Republican establishment seem perfectly fine with, since they want immigration and the idea of “those racist Republicans” to become non-issues.
Some are lamenting the cowardice of our representatives, and to that I quote a former NFL Coach: “They are who we thought they were!”
I have even seen one article arguing that the Constitution itself has failed. But the Constitution and our Founders did not fail. Human nature has not changed between 1787 and 2015. There were undoubtedly plenty of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century booze-swilling, cigar-smoking iterations of John Boehner lumbering around Capitol Hill.
What has changed is the size and scope of government, the number and composition of people who are voting, and the public’s general indifference to and acceptance of the greed, graft, lying, and all matter of corruption that have become commonplace in public life. There is also a heck of a lot more bread and circuses to keep us fat, happy, and distracted from what our supposed leaders are doing.
Government Is Too Big to Control
Entitlement reform is not going to capture the imagination of the American people like a llama chase or the color of a dress. And it bears noting that many of the Founders themselves were involved in sordid activities, and even willing to accept a king.
But that king’s powers would have looked downright puny compared to those President Obama wields today; and what corrupt politicians did way back when feels less offensive than the systemic abuse and political malpractice on display now, in part because the nation our founders—exceptional citizen legislators—entrusted us with was substantially smaller and less intrusive.
Today, when you have hundreds of agencies and millions of pages of laws, when the federal government is among the largest employers in the world, hyper-regulating almost every aspect of our society, creating arcane and byzantine rules designed to reward one set of constituents or another over and above the American people, not to mention the rule makers, rule interpreters and compliance officers themselves—this naturally creates not only an unwieldy and unaccountable federal government, but one that will invite and reward people willing to pull the kinds of shenanigans we see today.
To the percentage of the public that is actually informed as to what is going on in government, there are simply too many egregious things occurring on a daily basis, not to mention again the Siren song of bread and circuses, for anyone to keep track of it all or know where to focus one’s energies and pitchforks.
The Failure Is Our Fault
What defines an informed voter itself is of course open to interpretation, given what the majority of people are taught in our hallowed Democrat-controlled community organizing institutions, also known as schools; and given that one can read The New York Times, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Vox, and watch “The Daily Show” each day to qualify as informed by today’s standards, without knowing anything about what the other half of the country thinks and believes.
On amnesty specifically, as a lame-duck president without control of either house of Congress, Barack Obama is completely unchained, simply running roughshod over our laws. That a supposed constitutional scholar is rendering the system of checks and balances and separation of powers meaningless; that the executive branch is usurping the legislative branch, while congressmen say one thing and stand by idly doing another, is not a reflection that the Constitution or founders failed.
Rather, these travesties reflect that the American people are failing the founders.
We elected Barack Obama twice, in spite of his words, actions, and associations, which have unsurprisingly led to these disastrous six-plus years. The presidents who preceded him were not much better, though no one would have posed the question of them as Mark Steyn recently dared: “If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?”
We elected the congressmen who with rare exceptions (see Lee, Sen. Mike) continue to stand by while Rome burns, and who are derelict in their duty to defend and protect the Constitution, including against its brazen violator who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Welfare Versus Defense: Who Wins?
We have failed to persuasively enough make the case that we cannot thrive as a nation just by slowing government’s rate of growth and hiring smarter technocrats, but must literally be slashing the federal budget by 50 percent, abolishing agencies en masse, allowing Americans to opt out of the welfare state (including programs which can only pay my generation back in devalued dollars like Social Security), ensuring that we have not small deficits but massive surpluses to pay down our debt so the interest alone does not consume all the money we pay to the feds each year, and demanding a massive devolution of power back to the states and the people where it rightfully belongs.
And if our fellow Americans choose to live in socialist basket-case states, they are free to do so without reaching into your and my pockets at the point of a gun.
At root and underlying all of these issues, we have allowed the Left to control the media, academia, and the rest of America’s key cultural institutions, such that the vast majority of our fellow citizens are reflexively progressive and cannot even conceive of the types of changes I just mentioned. This is how the radical, morally and economically bankrupting leftist policies can be considered mainstream, while freedom can be considered fascistic.
This inherent progressivism narrowly underlies Republican acquiescence to the growing leviathan, and dictates the type of leaders that America broadly finds palatable, which has led us to this perilous place in our history in which all of our worst enemies are ascendant, while we are fast on the road to bankruptcy and serfdom, with our only choice between welfare and defense.
When entitlements and our armed forces are sitting side by side on the chopping block, which do you think a war-weary, economically pummeled American public is going to choose?
We Need a New Generation of Savvy Statesmen
No, the Constitution hasn’t failed, and our founders haven’t failed. We the people have failed during the hundred-year progressive march. So now we are burdened with the doubly difficult task of trying to win the long game of culture and the short game of politics.
I have much more faith in the latter over the former—that over time the chances are greater that we develop the strategy and tactics to beat an establishment incumbent class than win America’s cherished cultural institutions, which form our national soul.
Our national soul determines whether the Constitution is a piece of parchment or enshrines principles like equal rights for all and special privileges for none, that law resides above man, that men are not angels and that we must compel government’s non-angels to control themselves, and that the most important thing in America is protecting the rights of the minority, the most important of which is the individual.
And the inspiration for our national soul should reside not in our Constitution but in the Declaration of Independence that breathes life into it, a majestic document that we have ignored for far too long.
Don’t Blame Boehner—Blame Us
In any event, we the people have all the leverage in the world. The Boehners and Mitch McConnells will listen to us when the political cost of siding with the Chamber of Commerce is so great that their political lives depend on it.
Using the power of the purse as a lever to control the president, or threatening let alone bringing forth articles of impeachment are political remedies, and they are not being used not only because the Republican establishment that makes up the majority of the majority in Congress are risk-averse and often spineless, but because the majority of the American people are not demanding it.
That impeachment brings howls of racism alone shows a failure of our culture to separate the original sin of slavery from the demerits of the job done by this president, to separate identity politics from the individual.
Until and unless we devote all of our efforts to winning the long and short games with a constant, strategic, relentless full-court press, we are going to see amnesties ad nauseum, Obamacare not only not abolished but metastasizing, the federal budget and debt continue skyrocketing, comparatively small things like the Export-Import Bank chugging along and, yes, the welfare state expanding and our defenses shrinking while Islamic supremacists, Russia, China, and their proxies grow ever-bolder and more confidently bellicose.
We the people have much work to do if we want to keep any semblance of our republic, as Benjamin Franklin challenged us to do. And we hold the power in our hands.
But do we have the will and capability to exert it?
Ben Weingarten (@bhweingarten) is publishing manager and editor of TheBlaze Books. Ben is a graduate of Columbia University, where he majored in economics-political science and contributed to outlets including the Breitbart sites and the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
This Was the First Murder Solved Using Geology
The victim was a seamstress, found dead in a bean patch, strangled by her own scarf. The suspect was a local creep who insisted he had nothing to do with the crime and was far away when it occurred. How did one detective prove what really happened? With dirt.
At the turn of the last century, no one was particularly worried about leaving evidence at crime scenes, which is why German detectives examining the area near the strangled body of Eva Disch found the murderer’s mucus-filled handkerchief right next to her. Unless the handkerchief was monogrammed, it couldn’t point to a suspect—that is, until George Popp came on the scene.
Popp examined the handkerchief and found that the mucus in it was full of snuff, coal dust, and hornblende. Hornblende is a component of many types of rock, including granite. A look at the nearby residents turned up one man, Karl Laubach, who worked at both a gasworks where coal was burned and a gravel pit where hornblende was among the materials. When they hauled Karl in to be questioned, detectives checked under his nails and got all the components on the handkerchief—except, thank goodness, the mucus.
What they didn’t get was a confession. Laubach insisted he’d been nowhere near the scene of the crime. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t hem his trousers. Popp took a look at the bottom edges of his pant legs and found layers of dirt. At first the dirt didn’t look anything like the stuff found in the bean field. It had a layer of finely crushed mica that wasn’t present in the field. Only under that layer could Popp find all the minerals he’d found in a sample of dirt from the field.
What was the outer layer of dirt? Popp scouted around, taking samples, and found that the road between the field and Laubach’s house had that particular type of crushed mica on it. Not only did geology help Popp prove that Laubach killed Disch, it showed him the route Laubach took as he walked home afterwards.
As American involvement in the Vietnam War began, the A-1 Skyraider was still the medium attack aircraft in many carrier air wings, although it was planned to be replaced by the A-6A Intruder as part of the general switch to jet aircraft. Skyraiders from Constellation andTiconderoga participated in the first U.S. Navy strikes against North Vietnam on 5 August 1964 as part of Operation Pierce Arrow in response to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, striking against fuel depots at Vinh, with one Skyraider from Ticonderoga damaged by anti-aircraft fire, and a second from Constellation shot down, killing its pilot.
In contrast to the Korean War, fought a decade earlier, the U.S. Air Force used the naval A-1 Skyraider for the first time in Vietnam. As the Vietnam War progressed, USAF A-1s were painted in camouflage, while USN A-1 Skyraiders were gray/white in color; again, in contrast to the Korean War, when A-1s were painted dark blue. In October 1965, to highlight the dropping of the six millionth pound of ordnance, Commander Clarence J. Stoddard of Attack Squadron 25 (VA-25), flying an A-1H, dropped a special, one-time-only object in addition to his other munitions – a toilet.
Once again history is stranger then fiction, and a lot funnier: USS Midway VA-25’s Toilet Bomb
In October 1965, CDR Clarence J. Stoddard, Executive Officer of VA-25 “Fist of the Fleet”, flying an A-1H Skyraider, NE/572 “Paper Tiger II” from Carrier Air Wing Two aboard USS Midway carried a special bomb to the North Vietnamese in commemoration of the 6-millionth pound of ordnance dropped.
The following is an account of this event, courtesy of Clint Johnson, Captain, USNR Ret. Captain Johnson was one of the two VA-25 A-1 Skyraider pilots credited with shooting down a MiG-17 on June 20, 1965.
The following is an account of this event, courtesy of Clint Johnson, Captain, USNR Ret. Captain Johnson was one of the two VA-25 A-1 Skyraider pilots credited with shooting down a MiG-17 on June 20, 1965
“I was a pilot in VA-25 on the 1965 Vietnam cruise. 572 was flown by CDR C. W. “Bill” Stoddard. His wingman in 577 (which was my assigned airplane) was LCDR Robin Bacon, who had a wing station mounted movie camera (the only one remaining in the fleet from WWII).
The flight was a Dixie Station strike (South Vietnam) going to the Delta. When they arrived in the target area and CDR Stoddard was reading the ordnance list to the FAC, he ended with “and one code name Sani-flush”. The FAC couldn’t believe it and joined up to see it. It was dropped in a dive with LCDR Bacon flying tight wing position to film the drop.
When it came off, it turned hole to the wind and almost struck his airplane. It made a great ready room movie. The FAC said that it whistled all the way down. The toilet was a damaged toilet, which was going to be thrown overboard. One of our plane captains rescued it and the ordnance crew made a rack, tailfins and nose fuse for it. Our checkers maintained a position to block the view of the air boss and the Captain while the aircraft was taxiing forward.
Just as it was being shot off we got a 1MC message from the bridge, “What the hell was on 572’s right wing?” There were a lot of jokes with air intelligence about germ warfare. I wish that we had saved the movie film.
Anony Mouse's Link
Bow & Arrow Outperforms Firearms In Special Forces Video
The superiority of the bow and arrow in certain tactical situations is demonstrated by soldiers of the US Army 19th Special Forces Group, based at Draper, Utah.
A box is filled with dirt, and shots fired into it from a M1911A1 .45 caliber automatic, a .30 caliber M1 carbine, and a .30 caliber M1 rifle.
The rifle bullet goes deepest of the firearms, but none of them penetrates the box completely.
The bow silently propels the arrow all the way through the box of dirt and out the other side.