April 11, 1954

Every day something of significance happens, a person is born who is destined for fame, there is an event in the arts or sports, history is created. With 300 million of these facts fed into the “brain” of True Knowledge, Tunstall-Pedoe’s Cambridge company, the computer was asked: “What was the most boring day in the 20th century?”

April 11, 1954, apparently.

JFK to Lyndon Johnson

Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?

Letters of Note: Is there a space program which which we could win?

6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly

[S]ince the Pyramids were the tombs of the pharaohs, they made sure they were the biggest, most sparkly things of all. The original outside consisted of smooth, white limestone that hid the layers of brick, giving the effect that a pyramid was one giant solid piece.

6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly

Foucault's Pendulum Snaps

Times Higher Education:

If there were ever any truth in the esoteric tales of Umberto Eco’s bestselling novel Foucault’s Pendulum, it seems that the key to that knowledge has been lost.

The original pendulum, which was used by French scientist Leon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth and which forms an integral part of Eco’s novel’s labyrinthine plot, has been irreparably damaged in an accident in Paris.

The pendulum’s cable snapped last month and its sphere crashed to the marble floor of the Musée des Arts et Métiers.

The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings

I refer to this from time-to-time when people complain about Christmas starting earlier each year. In fact, it’s been going on for at least 80 years. Just as SNL has never been as funny as it used to be, Christmas shopping season has always started earlier than it used to.

From the FDR library, The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings.

The Jefferson Bible

The Jefferson Bible

Thomas Jefferson created his own version of the Bible, editing it down to just the moral codes and laws.

Tit-for-tat by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely

Tit-for-tat by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely

Neat, ostensibly true, story about Mark Millar’s grandfather fighting the British in Ireland.

scans_daily: Ma Barker

scans_daily: Ma Barker

From The Big Book of Little Criminals, a story illustrated by Frank Quitely about Ma Barker.

the-history-of-labor-day: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance

the-history-of-labor-day: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance

Personal Finance, personal-finance

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Relates to All Star Superman 10

History of Labor Day

Cool piece about the History of Labor Day. Labor Day was created by unions to give workers a day off. Apparently the reason we celebrate it in the fall instead of in May is that we wanted to distance ourselves from Europe, where the holiday was a communist creation.

The Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World - Esquire

The Seven Wonders of the Totalitarian World - Esquire

How the presidents stack up

How the presidents stack up

Graph of presidential approval ratings back to President Truman.

Did pirates really say "arrrr"?

Did pirates really say “arrrr”?

Sparta, Spandex and Disturbing Distortions of '300'

Sparta, Spandex and Disturbing Distortions of ‘300’

There are many more bones you could pick with its accuracy, but accuracy isn’t its goal. (They didn’t have ogres, either.) The goal is to tell the mythologized version of the glory story, not to be a history.

300

Growing up during the rise of violent video games like Mortal Kombat, in a post A Clockwork Orange era, with such movies getting critical acclaim and enjoying commercial success as Pulp Fiction and Silence of the Lambs there was much talk of the media desensitizing today’s youth to violent images. Watching 300, I realize this was not at all the case. We were not being desensitized. We were being prepared. Without those movies under our belts, without The Matrix readying our visual pallets and The Lord of the Rings teaching us how to discern frenzied melees, we would not have been ready. This is a violent, bloody movie, but you don’t notice it. The violence and the blood are the mere setting required to frame a moving painting of glory and sacrifice such as this. I’ve never seen slow-motion decapitation done in such an artful way before that somehow doesn’t come off as gross. Without the proper level of desensitization, 300 would have just been a sickening, incomprehensible mess. But seen with the eyes of our generation, we can understand it as the glorious battle it was.

The History Channel ran a special last night that I recommend as a prerequisite to the film. Here is the setting, as I understand it: Persia is on the warpath and, after a defeat years before at Marathon, intends to invade and crush Greece. At the time, Greece was not a united land but a confederacy of separate city-states. King Leonidas leads an army of 300 of his Spartans, along with a coalition of other Greeks, to hold off the Persian army at the mountain pass of Thermopylae, the only way into Greece by land and a huge bottleneck through which Xerxes needed to get hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Leonidas is able to hold off the vastly superior force for days, eventually falling in battle but sending a message to the rest of his people that a united Greece can stand against even the vast Persian Empire.

What’s not in the movie is a big naval battle going on at the same time. The navy is able to hold off Persia’s ships for a few days before falling back and convincing Athens to retreat. Persia burns Athens to the ground, but the Greeks are able to regroup and defeat the Persian navy at a later battle, causing Persia to stop. After winning the war, Philip II of Macedon is able to unite Greece and father Alexander the Great with Angelina Jolie. Alexander the Great spreads western culture to across the known world. And that is how 300 Spartans’s last stand leads directly to the rise of all of western civilization.

List of inventors killed by their own inventions

List of inventors killed by their own inventions

I’m generally not a fan of the Darwin Awards on the ground that you’re making fun of people’s deaths, but here’s a crazy list.

Can humans mate with other animals?

Can humans mate with other animals?

Make sure you read to the end for a mind-blowing historical fact.

US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud

US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud

Drag the slider to the left or right to see what words each president used most. Guess which one President Bush uses.

The Letter A

The Letter A

Series on why each letter is what it is.