| 1540 | Thomas Cromwell is beheaded on Tower Hill in England. | |
| 1627 | Sir George Calvert arrives in Newfoundland to develop his land grant. | |
| 1637 | King Charles of England hands over the American colony of Massachusetts to Sir Fernando Gorges, one of the founders of the Council of New England. | |
| 1664 | Wealthy, non-church members in Massachusetts are given the right to vote. | |
| 1793 | The French garrison at Mainz, Germany, falls to the Prussians. | |
| 1803 | Irish patriots throughout the country rebel against Union with Great Britain. | |
| 1829 | William A. Burt patents his "typographer," an early typewriter. | |
| 1849 | German rebels in Baden capitulate to the Prussians. | |
| 1863 | Bill Andeson and his Confederate Bushwackers gut the railway station at Renick, Missouri. | |
| 1865 | William Booth founds the Salvation Army. | |
| 1868 | The 14th Amendment is ratified, granting citizenship to African Americans. | |
| 1885 | Ulysses S. Grant dies of throat cancer at the age of 63. | |
| 1894 | Japanese troops take over the Korean imperial palace. | |
| 1903 | The Ford Motor Company sells its first automobile, the Model A. | |
| 1944 | Soviet troops take Lublin, Poland as the German army retreats. | |
| 1962 | The Geneva Conference on Laos forbids the United States to invade eastern Laos. | |
| 1995 | Two astronomers, Alan Hale in New Mexico and Thomas Bopp in Arizona, almost simultaneouly discover a comet. |
The commander of Syrian rebels in the northern province of Aleppo
says his forces have launched an operation aimed at "liberating" the
country's largest city from regime troops.James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer. He shows that at least £13tn – perhaps up to £20tn – has leaked out of scores of countries into secretive jurisdictions such as Switzerland and the Cayman Islands with the help of private banks, which vie to attract the assets of so-called high net-worth individuals. Their wealth is, as Henry puts it, "protected by a highly paid, industrious bevy of professional enablers in the private banking, legal, accounting and investment industries taking advantage of the increasingly borderless, frictionless global economy". According to Henry's research, the top 10 private banks, which include UBS and Credit Suisse in Switzerland, as well as the US investment bank Goldman Sachs, managed more than £4tn in 2010, a sharp rise from £1.5tn five years earlier.£13tn: hoard hidden from taxman by global elite
Withe
games less than a week away, you see the Olympic rings everywhere! The
symbol was an invention of Baron de Coubertin, who spurred the revival
of the ancient Greek games as the modern Olympics in the late 19th
century.After the 1912 Stockholm Games—the first Games featuring athletes from all five inhabited parts of the world—a design of five interlocked rings, drawn and colored by hand, appeared at the top of a letter Coubertin sent to a colleague. Coubertin used his ring design as the emblem of the IOC’s 20th anniversary celebration in 1914. A year later, it became the official Olympic symbol.Read more about the rings, including how they were confused for an ancient symbol, what the colors mean, and the rules for their use at Mental Floss.
The rings were to be used on flags and signage at the 1916 Games, but those games were cancelled because of the ongoing World War. The rings made a belated debut at the 1920 Games in Antwerp, Belgium.
One hundred years ago in 1910, my grandfather, James Goulding built his first sidecar in Melbourne, Australia. In 1956 He built his last sidecar in Saginaw, Michigan. A lot of Motorcycle History happened between these two events and James and his famous family were a part of 80 years of Bike History. Mr. Goulding was born in Carlisle, England in 1885. His family emigrated to Australia when he was four years old. James grew to be an energetic and ambitious worker and had his own home building business (and his first Harley-Davidson) by 1908. James designed his first sidecar to haul his building tools, and from the beginning he used his chassis idea with the floating axle system that made them so durable.James started a motorcycle dynasty in which his sidecars became famous and his children became famous for endurance racing. And the website on Goulding Sidecars has tons of interesting material: stories, photographs, videos, technical information, and updates. More
In 1915, he had his sidecar manufacturing business well underway. In 1911, he married Mary Olive Ratford. In 1912 Olive, as James called her, gave birth to motorcycling’s most famous lady, Dot (Goulding) Robinson. She wasn’t born in a sidecar as legend has it, but her mother was rushed to the doctor in a 1911 Harley belt-drive motorcycle with a Goulding sidecar. In 1915, Claude Goulding was born and in 1917 my mother Edna Goulding was added to the clan. By 1917, Goulding Sidecars were the primary brand in Australia and New Zealand. In 1920, James decided to introduce his product in America. He did this with a 12,000 mile tour of the U.S. using a 1917 Harley “J’ Model 1000cc with his sidecar. One part of this tour was a transcontinental run from New York to San Francisco. Photos attest to how nasty the dirt and sand roads were a good deal of the way. The trip ended at Dudley Perkin’s Harley-Davidson dealership in San Francisco.
The poll by specialty cheese maker Butlers Farmhouse Cheeses reveals
that a majority of people would prefer a simpler, self-reliant
existence - free from the pressures of modern living and consumerism.
The Burning Land
I’ve been searching for something useful to say about the epic heat wave and drought afflicting U.S. agriculture, other than that this is the shape of things to come.
Of course it’s about climate change: a rising number of temperature records is exactly what you’d expect given an underlying upward trend in global temperatures.
The weather fluctuates and heat waves happen. But the data show that the relative frequency of extreme events like this has increased tremendously. Just look a few posts back or read Jim Hansen's Climate Dice paper (PDF). Statistically speaking, this is almost surely climate change.Hansen is one of the big guns in the field.
there is no prospect whatsoever of getting action.So there.
Each
century, about two massive stars in our own galaxy explode, producing
magnificent supernovae. These stellar explosions send fundamental,
uncharged ... UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano.Very cool. It's developments like this - not more drilling - that can most effectively and permanently decrease dependence on foreign oil.
The UCLA team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, not visible light, making the cells nearly 70% transparent to the human eye. They made the device from a photoactive plastic that converts infrared light into an electrical current.
"These results open the potential for visibly transparent polymer solar cells as add-on components of portable electronics, smart windows and building-integrated photovoltaics and in other applications..."
Deputies say a 21-year-old man struck and killed a pedestrian in
southwest Florida, then left the scene and stopped for an alcoholic
drink.
Emergency crews, including a bomb squad unit, surround the apartment
of alleged gunman James Holmes Saturday, July 21, 2012 in Aurora , Colo.
Recent
research says that psychopaths have discernible patterns in their
writing. That study was done by Cornell researchers using conventional
long form writing by known psychopaths. Chris Sumner of the Online
Privacy Foundation along with Florida Atlantic University and Kaggle
applied that idea to Twitter to see if psychopathy could be predicted
from Tweets. They recruited 2,900 volunteer Twitter users to take a
personality test and then allow their Tweets to be analyzed. The results
were surprisingly accurate at connecting certain Tweet stylings to
psychopathic test results.What are some of the Twitter stylings of these undesirables? Curse words. Angry responses to other people, including swearing and use of the word “hate.” Using the word “we.” Using periods. Using filler words such as “blah” and “I mean” and “um.”Sumner doesn’t recommend using such a system to find psychopaths on Twitter. There would be too many false positives. The research would be more useful in analyzing groups of people. But what about employers using this technique to screen job applicants?
Sumner admits though that his study could be applied to employee assessment as well. “If you want a competitive environment, you might want people with high levels of these traits,” he opines. (Psychopaths make great CEOS, after all.)
Aquaman
doesn’t get the respect in the world of comic book super heroes that
Superman, Captan America, and others get. On top of that, he inhabits an
undersea world that contains few, if any, other heroes. But those are
the least of his problems! Southern Fried Science takes a realistic look
at what Aquaman would have to contend with -if he were real.Aquaman is, for all intents and purposes, a marine mammal. And, with the exception of a healthy mane in later incarnations, he is effectively hairless. As a human, we would expect his internal body temperature to hover around 99°F, or about 37°C. Even at its warmest points, the surface temperature of the ocean around the equator is only about 80°F/27°C. At the poles ocean temperature can actually drop a few degrees below freezing. In the deep sea, ambient temperature levels out around 2 – 4°C. The ocean is cold, and water is a much better thermal conductor than air. Warm blooded species have evolved many different systems to manage these gradients, including countercurrent heat exchangers, insulating fur, and heavy layers of blubber.That’s one thing, but there are plenty of other reasons ocean living isn’t all that pleasant. More
For hundreds of years, a mystery surrounded the cathedral of Venzone, a small city in the province of Udine, Italy. Instead of decomposing normally, bodies buried in the tombs beneath the cathedral were perfectly preserved and still recognizable decades later, a fact which led the townspeople to periodically retrieve and commune with their dead loved ones. In modern times, scientists finally traced the source of this wonder to Hypha tombicina, a microscopic, parasitic fungus that rapidly dehydrates the bodies before decomposition can even begin.That's the explanation at Wondercabinet, and other sites. They have a different explanation at Virtual Tourist:
They were already found in 1647 during works in the cathedral. Venzone lies atop limestone bedrock. Groundwater in such regions is usually alkaline, an environment hostile to putrefaction. During floods, alkaline waters likely seeped through dirt floors in tombs 1 to 10, preserving the cadavers. Vaults 11 to 17 had sealed stone floors. Moreover, floodwaters in tombs 1 to 10 drained quickly through the porous limestone. Coffin wood from those vaults possessed just 7 percent water. In such aridity, water-soaked humans would have dried rapidly into mummies.
Discovered last year by researchers at Japan’s Riken Brain Science Institute, Scale is made from compounds commonly found in the biology lab, like urea and the detergent Triton X. Scale’s low cost means it can be used much more widely than previously developed sample-clearing agents, and it allows scientists to see deeper into tissue than ever before. The discovery enabled the Riken team to produce some of the most detailed maps of brain neurons ever published.An article at DISCOVER magazine looks at the physics of light and explains how transparent molecules are different from opaque molecules. Which leaves me to wonder how scientists can see what they are looking for if it all turns transparent -and could making a specimen transparent change it so much that what you find is rendered meaningless? More
This photo by Rebecca McAleney,
shows a bright orange, left, a bright blue, right, and a calico lobster
at New Meadows Lobster in Portland, Maine.
