Nothing ever ends poetically
The rise and fall of Steve Jobs’s greatest rival
From Every.to: “In 1981, journalists from around the world gathered at NASA’s headquarters to watch as the Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to reach Saturn. In the aftermath of this historic event, the main attraction wasn’t NASA’s staff. It was fellow journalist Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle had something none of them had ever seen before: a portable computer, the Osborne 1, the first mass-market personal computer in history. Just six years earlier, when the Altair 8800 was unveiled, Steve Jobs recognized that the future of computing lay in the consumer market, not the hobbyist. But Jobs was not alone. He stood alongside someone who would go on to become a frenemy of sorts: That man was Adam Osborne, Jobs’s first true rival.”
Here’s why the state of Oklahoma is shaped like a panhandle
From JSTOR Daily: “More popularly known as the Panhandle, the three counties extending in a row west of the rest of the “pan” of the state are one of those geographical quirks of history that really jump off of the map. The Panhandle is also the location of the only county in the country with four states on its borders: Cimarron County, the westernmost part of the state, borders Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico. Today fewer than 1% of Oklahomans live in the 168 x 34 mile-wide strip. It was Spanish territory until 1821, when it became part of independent Mexico. The Republic of Texas claimed it when declaring independence. But then, upon entering the Union as a slave state in 1845, Texas surrendered its claim to the region because slavery was prohibited north of 36°30′ latitude by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.”
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Continue reading “The rise and fall of Steve Jobs’s greatest rival”Feeding the sheep and lambs
The different types of drunk people
Harvard removes human skin binding from book
From the BBC: “Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s. In 2014, scientists determined that the material it was bound with was in fact human skin. But the university has now announced it has removed the binding “due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”. Des Destinées de l’Ame is a meditation on the soul and life after death, written by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s. He is said to have given it to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor, who then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes. Harvard said it was looking at ways to ensure “the human remains will be given a respectful disposition that seeks to restore dignity to the woman whose skin was used”.
Plastic manufacturing companies deceived the public about recycling
From The Guardian: “Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report. “The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.”
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The eight winds cannot move me
DNA tests reveal the true prevalence of incest
From The Atlantic: “In 1975, a psychiatric textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million. But this number is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate. The stigma around openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made the subject difficult to study. But widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society. The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child.”
When sword fighting with rapiers led to a moral panic in Elizabethan London
From JSTOR Daily: “Rocco Bonetti, founder of a highly controversial sword-fighting school in Elizabethan London, was detested by the local English fencing masters. He was challenged outside his school by a local named Austin Bagger, who not only stabbed him in the hands and feet, but trod on him afterward to show his contempt. Bonetti died of the wounds. At the time, London was swept up in the moral panic surrounding the adoption of the rapier. Long, slender, and razor-sharp, the rapier was usually paired with a second weapon, a small, left-handed parrying dagger, rather than a shield. The dagger evolved into striking, creative forms—sawtoothed blades that could be used to capture and control the opponent’s sword, or “trident” daggers that split into three at the press of a spring.”
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Continue reading “DNA tests reveal the true prevalence of incest”Would love to know what happened here
In the 1930s she sailed around the world solo in a tiny wooden boat
From Atlas Obscura: “It was the spring of 1938, and a woman sailing on the Bay of Bengal was dreaming of snow. Maybe it was the burn blisters on her skin or the escape from the Indian Imperial Police that had made the adventurer Aina Cederblom sentimental. After two and a half years of sailing solo through Asia, she was ready to head home to Sweden—at least that was the 39-year-old’s plan. Fate had other ideas. During the early 20th century, Aina Cederblom kept popping up in unexpected corners of the world, from Greenland to India to the Philippines. By the 1930s, Cederblom and her solo sailing adventures were well-known throughout Europe. Newspapers reported about how she went missing in Greenland’s glacier-filled waters, hid from the police in Tibet, and was shot at in the Black Sea. Yet, the memory of her achievements has almost disappeared.”
The longest bus route in the world used to run from London to Calcutta and took 50 days
From Vintages: “The bus service from London, England to Calcutta, India is considered to be the longest bus route in the world. The service, which was started in 1957, was routed to India via Belgium, Yugoslavia and West Pakistan – a route known as the Hippie Route. According to reports, it took about 50 days for the bus to reach Calcutta from London. The voyage was 32, 669 km long and was in service until 1976. The cost of the trip was £85 and this included food, travel and accommodation. The trip was equipped with reading facilities, separate sleeping bunks for everyone, and fan-operated heaters. There was a kitchen with all equipment and amenities. There was a forward observation lounge on the upper deck of the bus, and it took time to spend at major tourist destinations along the way, including the Taj Mahal on the banks of the Ganges. Shopping was also allowed in Tehran, Salzburg, Kabul, Istanbul and Vienna.”
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