From Smithsonian.org – just awseome:
From our very own BRI David. Thanks DH!
Posts Tagged: ‘History’
May 17, 2012
“The History of the English Language in Ten Minutes”
April 17, 2012
Good Night, Space Shuttle
SPACE shuttle Discovery was the workhorse of NASA’s retired orbiter fleet. It clocked 365 days and 148 million miles in space, ferrying the likes of John Glenn, the Hubble telescope and 180 astronauts into the cosmos over a three decade career.
But with the end of NASA’s shuttle program, the now-sedentary spacecraft hitched its final ride today – not on a rocket, but on a customised jumbo jet – to be hauled from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) to its Virginia retirement home.
After treating the nation’s capital to a spectacular flyover, Discovery landed at Washington’s Dulles airport shortly after 11am local time atop a Boeing 747 specially adapted by NASA to be used as a shuttle carrier.
By the end of this week, it will be pried off the aircraft and put on permanent display at the Smithsonian Museum’s Steven F Udvar-Hazy Centre, just south of Dulles in Chantilly, Virginia.
148 million miles. Wow.
Oh, someone already has a video of the Washington Monument flyover:
Oh, wow. Check out this shot.
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April 13, 2012
Safe Driving and Flying in 1936
Here’s an odd little instructional film about safe driving—as told via safe flying instructions—by the Jam Handy Organization, for Chevrolet:
The Jam Handy Organization was founded and run by Henry Jamison “Jam” Handy, who from the 1930s until the late 1960s produced thousands of short films, mostly in the instrucational category.
Earlier on, Handy won a bronze-medal as part of the U.S. swim team at the 1904 Olympics. In 1924 he became one of the still rare athletes to win medals 20 years apart, when he won another bronze as part of the U.S. water polo team. (One of his teammates that year was Johnny Weissmuller of “Tarzan” fame.) Handy is also credited with introducing the “Australian crawl” swimming stroke to the U.S.
Here’s another Jam Handy Production, this one from 1952: “A Young Man’s Fancy” – about a guy who prefers electric household applianes to the pretty young woman fawning over him. “A Young Man’s Fancy” has the dubious honor of having been featured on “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
More Jam Handy films can be downloaded at the Internet Archive.
March 26, 2012
1920s Australian Mug Shots
Whoa:
I recently stumbled onto these amazing mugshots of Australian inmates of all kinds. Whores, gangsters, fraudsters, and crooks of every kind circa 1920. The quality that these were restored to is nothing short of astounding, capturing every detail and quirk of each prisoner. With names like Silent Tom, De Gracy and Montague, this is a fascinating look into the criminal world of yesteryear. 17 more mugshots after the jump!
Just a few examples, and you can mug on over to AwesomeRobo com for the rest.
How’d you like to cross these guys?
And watch out for this guy—we’re pretty sure has a Tommy gun and a small bulldog hidden in his hair:
And the cool thing about this photo:
…is that it allowed us to find out a lot more about this collection of photos – and a bunch more photos as well. I googled the name “Vera Chricton” and found this:
Vera Crichton, 23, and Nancy Cowman, 19, are listed in the NSW Police Gazette 24 March 1924 as charged, along with three others, with “conspiring together to procure a miscarriage” on a third woman. Crichton was “bound over to appear for sentence if called upon within three years”. This picture is one of a series of around 2500 “special photographs” taken by New South Wales Police Department photographers between 1910 and 1930.
More mug shots from Down Under and long ago.
And: These are the kind of people portrayed in the acclaimed 2011 Australian mini-series, Underbelly: Razor.
March 13, 2012
The Encyclopedia Britannica is History
Its legacy winds back through centuries and across continents, past the birth of America to the waning days of the Enlightenment. It is a record of humanity’s achievements in war and peace, art and science, exploration and discovery. It has been taken to represent the sum of all human knowledge.
And now it’s going out of print.
The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that after 244 years, dozens of editions and more than 7m sets sold, no new editions will be put to paper. The 32 volumes of the 2010 installment, it turns out, were the last. Future editions will live exclusively online.
Is there something very right – or very wrong – that we are now linking you to “The History of the Encyclopedia Britannica“…at Wikipedia?
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January 16, 2012
If you google “Martin Luther King”
…you get 505 million results.
If you google “racism”…you get 8.5 million results.
I think we have a winner.
* Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everybody.
December 27, 2011
Hidden Subway Vents
Not all the subway vents around a major city are visible. In fact, there many such vents hidden in buildings and fake structures. Here is one fake apartment building that the city of New York maintains in Brooklyn to hide giant vents that allow fresh air into the subway system.
BLDGBLOG has an interesting case study on some of these structures and how they connect the outside world to the underground one.
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The UJBR SALE! - 30% off all books - goes through December 31.
December 22, 2011
1,100-year-old Mayan Ruins Found in North Georgia
This is one of the most mindblowing stories we have ever seen. Let’s look at that headline again:
That’s impossible.
Let’s do a little history brush-up. The Mayans lived in Mexico. Way south Mexico, and even into Central America. Their civilization goes back almost 4,000 years, and collapsed more than 1,000 years, although the people of course lived on in the region, and do so still today.
Now back the story:
Archaeologists have discovered the ruins of an ancient Mayan city in the mountains of North Georgia believed to be at least 1,100 years old. According to Richard Thornton at Examiner.com, the ruins are reportedly what remains of a city built by Mayans fleeing wars, volcanic eruptions, droughts and famine.
It’s not April 1. The link does not go to The Onion. This story is real.
Oh, and there’s a Mayan pyramid there.
Mindblowing…
Much more here.
December 4, 2011
Here Be Dragons! (In Your Brain…)
Here’s some interesting Sunday reading for you, on why we humans invented monsters, by Paul A. Trout, professor emeritus at Montana State University:
According to [anthropologist David E.] Jones (what follows is a condensed summary of a complex argument), ancient primates evolved alarm calls to identify each of the three predators, with each call triggering the defensive response appropriate to the nature of the attack mode of the specific predator. Jones calls this predator-recognition template the “snake/raptor/cat complex.” This complex is the source of what Jones refers to as the “ brain dragon.” The brain dragon emerged when our apelike ancestors left the trees to walk on the ground. rather suddenly, the relatively small brain of Australopithecus had to process a lot of information about many new forms of predators and develop new alarms calls and strategic responses to them. Faced with information overload, the brain of Australopithecus resorted to lumping information into manageable and memorable chunks. As a result, the cat, the snake, and the raptor were merged into a hybrid creature that had the salient predatory features of each: the face of a feline, the body of a snake, and the talons of a raptor. This is the hybrid “monster” that came to be known as the “dragon.”
Hmmmm…
There’s much more over there. Happy Sunday Monster Reading, everyone!
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Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader’s HOLIDAY SALE – 30% of all books - goes through December.
• Nearly related and hopefully interesting aside from our very latest publication, Uncle John’s 24-KARAT-GOLD Bathroom Reader:
“Flap-dragon” is a 16th-century game of trying to eat hot raisins from a bowl of burning brandy.
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November 11, 2011
The Last Living Veteran of World War One
Please meet Mrs. Florence Green (this article is from February):
The revels were not quite as wild as on Armistice Day. Still, there was plenty to celebrate yesterday when the world’s last surviving female veteran of the First World War celebrated her 110th birthday.
Florence Green, from King’s Lynn, Norfolk, was 17 years old when she joined the Women’s Royal Air Force, in the late summer of 1918.
She looks good! 110? Wow!
Imagine telling the good Florence when she was still a young woman in the 1920s, “Hey Flo, you’re going to have your own Wikipedia page some day!” She’d be like, “Umwut? LOL.”
A grand salute to you, Mrs. Florence Green, and to all our veterans of long ago and up to this very moment, from all of us here at the BRI, on this Veterans Day, November 11, 2011.
