{"id":256043,"date":"2023-08-04T08:45:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-04T12:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=256043"},"modified":"2023-12-31T22:53:42","modified_gmt":"2023-12-31T22:53:42","slug":"lyudmila-pavlichenko-the-greatest-female-sniper-of-all-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/08\/04\/lyudmila-pavlichenko-the-greatest-female-sniper-of-all-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the greatest female sniper of all time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Suzanne Raga for Mental Floss: “For Lyudmila Pavlichenko, killing Nazis wasn’t complicated. \u201cThe only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey,\u201d she once said of her job. But Pavlichenko wasn\u2019t just any soldier: She was the most successful female sniper in history, and one of the most successful snipers, period. As a member of the Soviet Army during World War II, she killed<\/a> 309 Nazis, earning the sobriquet \u201cLady Death.\u201d She also became a public figure who toured North America and Britain, befriended Eleanor Roosevelt, and spoke candidly about gender equality\u2014especially when she was fed up with American reporters. Pavlichenko killed hundreds of enemy combatants in Odessa, Moldavia, and Sevastopol. \u201cWe mowed down the Hitlerites like ripe grain,\u201d she later said.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Switched at birth, two Canadian men discover their roots at the age of 67<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Norimitsu Onishi at the New York Times: “Richard Beauvais\u2019s identity began unraveling two years ago, after one of his daughters became interested in his ancestry. She urged him to take an at-home DNA test. Mr. Beauvais, then 65, had spent a lifetime describing himself as \u201chalf French, half Indian,\u201d or M\u00e9tis, and he had grown up with his grandparents in a log house in a M\u00e9tis settlement. So when the test<\/a> showed a mix of Ukrainian, Ashkenazi Jewish and Polish ancestry, he dismissed it as a mistake. But around the same time, in the province of Manitoba, a young member of Eddy Ambrose\u2019s extended family had shattered his identity with the same test. Mr. Ambrose had grown up attending Mass in Ukrainian, but he wasn\u2019t Ukrainian at all. He was M\u00e9tis.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The women making waves in Moroccan surfing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Emma Larbi for Vice: “Randa El Amraoui is a 31-year-old language and communication professor. Her hair still wet, she leans on a plastic table, chatting under the umbrellas of the local surf club. El Amraoui has been surfing for eight years. \u201cIt was a childhood dream of mine, ever since I saw female Hawaiian surfers on Disney Channel,\u201d she jokes. With its massive, 3,600-kilometre-long coastline, Morocco<\/a> has earned itself a reputation for great surf spots in recent years. Long dominated by men, the sport has slowly been opening up to women, especially in the past five years, according Chadi Lahrioui, multi-time surfing champion of Morocco and Africa and the manager of a surf club on Oudayas Beach. El Amraoui credits Instagram posts showing foreign and local girls on the waves for making the sport has become more popular.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scholar finds doodles made by Henry VIII in ancient prayer book<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Jack Guy for CNN: “Toward the end of his life, England\u2019s King Henry VIII left a series of doodles in a prayer book, revealing his anguish over his health and his past actions, new research shows. Henry, who ruled from 1509 until his death in 1547, made the annotations in a copy of ‘Psalms or Prayers,’ translated by his sixth and final wife, Katherine Parr, in 1544. Micheline White, an associate professor at Carleton University in Canada, spotted them by chance. \u201cI was just astounded,\u201d said White<\/a>. \u201cI didn\u2019t know there were marginalia in the book.\u201d Henry left two distinctive types of marking. The first, known as ‘manicules,’ are drawings of a hand with a pointed index finger, and the second are ‘trefoils,’ which are three dots with a squiggle. Printed in 1544, the book of Psalms \u201ccontains prayers for repentance, for wisdom, for the destruction of enemies, and for the King and his army,\u201d according to White.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why did the Nazis fail to make a nuclear bomb?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann first detected nuclear fission in their experiments in a laboratory in Berlin. They were bombarding uranium with neutrons when they discovered Barium, an element approximately half the size of uranium. Their former colleague Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch came to the realization that the Uranium nucleus had split. This sparked global discussion in the physics<\/a> community, and the troubling implications of the breakthrough soon came into the conversation. The possibility of creating a nuclear weapon now seemed more plausible than ever. In April 1939, less than a year later, the \u201cGerman Uranium Project<\/em>\u201d was formed by the education ministry after the scientific community informed it about the newly discovered energy source.. But they never developed an actual atomic bomb. Why?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Namibian fairy circle debate rages on: Sand termites or Turing mechanism?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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From Jennifer Ouellette for Ars Technica: “Himba bushmen in the Namibian grasslands have long passed down legends about the region’s mysterious fairy circles: bare, reddish-hued circular patches that are also found in northwestern Australia. In the last 10 years, scientists have heatedly debated whether these unusual patterns are due to sand termites or to an ecological version of a self-organizing Turing mechanism. Last year, a team of scientists made a strong case for what they deemed definitive evidence<\/a> of the latter, thus ruling out sand termites, but was their declaration of victory premature? A recent paper published in the journal Perspectives in Plant Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics offers a four-point rebuttal of those 2022 findings, concluding that sand termites may be to blame after all. Meanwhile, the authors of that 2022 study have offered a counter-rebuttal to the rebuttal; there is currently a preprint undergoing peer review.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bootleggers used specially modified shoes to hide their tracks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

From Fascinating on Twitter<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cow shoes used by Moonshiners during Prohibition.

The idea was that if police found human footprints in areas where people don\u2019t generally go, that was a clear indicator of something unusual and worth investigating, possibly leading to the discovery of an illegal still.

If\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/ggF9dkBtuP<\/a><\/p>— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) August 3, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote>