August 2012
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Not That It Mattered Anymore
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter, only the third Southerner elected to the presidency following the Civil War, restored U.S. citizenship to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America.
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But....Why?
As Britain prepared for World War I, officers were required to have their swords sharpened.
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“History is more or less bunk.”
– Henry Ford, in the Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916
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Earthquakes!
they have caused roughly 13 million (human) deaths in the past 4,000 years.
in Japanese mythology, a giant fish called Namazu causes earthquakes
The term “tectonic” is related to the word “texture” and is from the Greek tektonikos which means “pertaining to building”
almost 2,000 years ago, a Chinese astronomer named Zhang Heng (A.D. 78-139) invented the world’s first earthquake detector. It...
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Da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion to shave them off during the Italian Renaissance.
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“Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to...”
– Lyndon B. Johnson
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Sumerians: Not The Best Builders
Ancient Sumer, one of the dominant cities in ancient Mesopotamia, was on a floodplain with no natural minerals or lumber. All buildings were made with mud brick. These bricks were rounded, because apparently making rectangular bricks was just too difficult. Furthermore, they did not use mortar or anything more complicated than reeds and prayers to hold the bricks together. Understandably, walls...
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“Here lies a man that was Knott born,
His father was Knott before him,
He lived...”
– Gravestone of John Knott, in Sheffield, England
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History of the Death Penalty
The oldest recorded death sentence is found in the Amherst papyri, a list of state trials of ancient Egypt, dating to 1500 B.C. A teenaged male, convicted of “magic”, was sentenced to kill himself by either poison or stabbing
The last American pirate to be hanged was Nathaniel Gordon, who was hanged New York City on March 8th, 1862. His ship, the Erie, was captured by the...
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Death by Chocolate
Nazis conspired to assassinate Winston Churchill by using exploding chocolate! MI5 papers show that Hitler’s bomb-makers coated explosives in a thin layer of dark chocolate and expensively wrapped as “Peter’s Chocolate.” The deadly treats were then to be planted among other treats taken to Britain’s War Cabinet. The plot was discovered by M15 agents, who alerted their...
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Gross, But Interesting
Ancient doctors would test for diabetes by tasting the urine of a suspected sufferer of diabetes. Sweet urine is high in glucose, suggesting the presence of diabetes.
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“Oh human race, born to fly upward. Wherefore at but a little wind does thou so...”
– Dante
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Move Over, Pythagoras
Ancient Indians knew about the pythagorean theorem, because the Sulbasutras(earliest dating at c. 800- 600 BCE) discusses it, with a different name of course. They used the form solely for the orientation, shape, and area of religious alters, but still, they knew about it.
The Chinese had a whole treatise about mathematics while Pythagoras was inventing it as a field in the West: The...
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Out With A Bang
Bangladesh was settled around 1000 BC, by Dravidian-speakers who later became known as “Bang.” So historically, the region has had related names: Vanga, Banga, Bangala, Bangal, Bengal. This evolved to it’s modern form, Bangladesh.
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The first mental asylum in the U.S opened in 1773 in Williamsburg, Virginia.
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“Am I dying, or is this my birthday?”
– last words of Nancy, Lady Astor, on seeing her family at her bedside after a long decline
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Why English is So Weird
Etymological curiosities
Viking ships had rudders on the right side, which the Vikings called styrbord, Old Norse for “steer side” — hence, “starboard.” The Vikings docked their ships on the left side, which they called the ladebord — “loading side”. This eventually became the English “larboard”, which sounded so much like...
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“Quit. That’s what reporter Milt Sosin did today.”
– Resignation notice discovered on a Miami News bulletin board after an editor insisted that beat reporters use “short and punchy paragraphs”
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Trust, But Verify
Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, reorganized the bureacractic structure based on Legalist principles. Which is basically that humans are base, untrustworthy, and greedy, and so must be dealt with harshly to prevent complete anarchy. So naturally, the government was divided up into three branches. The first branch, the military was, well, the military. The second branch was...
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Ancient (Royal) Britons
“Old King Cole” was a real person. Coel was a fourth-century British prince who is said to be the father of St. Helen, who was the mother of Roman emperor Constantine. Coel appreciated music, which may be why the nursery rhyme makes mention of “his fiddlers three”.
Queen Boudicca is believed to be buried on a site now covered by the number 10 platform of King’s...
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Applied Chemistry
When Hitler’s army marched into Copenhagen, Niels Bohr had to decide how to safeguard the Nobel medals of James Franck and Max von Laue, which they had entrusted to him. Sending gold out of the country was almost a capital offense, and the physicists’ names were engraved on the medals, making such an attempt doubly risky. Burying the medals seemed uncertain as well. Finally his friend the...
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The Original Anti-Racist
The 14th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun argued against the theory that physical characteristics reflected moral attributes. For example, he explained that dark skin developed because of the hot climate of Africa and not due to the curse of Ham.
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The Founding of Athens
The city of Athens, according to myth, had three names. Its first two were the first two kings who ruled it (yawn). But during the second king’s reign, the goddess Athena, of wisdom, war, and agriculture, and the god Poseidon of the sea, were competing for the protection of the city. Each offered a gift to show their power. Poseidon struck a rock with his trident, and created a spring to...
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The Chinese Really Did Do Everything First
Glasses have been worn for about 700 years. The ancient Chinese did it first, but it wasn’t to correct bad vision — they were fashion statements!
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