An otherwise ordinary building in Costa do Valado, Portugal, on national road N335, near the city of Aveiro, was transformed half a century ago in the grand Portuguese tradition of azulejos - the art of using hand painted, glazed ceramic tiles to depict scenes.
In this case the tiles - made by the Aleluia ceramic company in Aveiro (still in operation) - show a pristine image of Pan Am's Jet Clipper America, along with a bit of advertising: "More jets to more places" in Portuguese. The billboard, for lack of a more appropriate term, must date from the days when Pan Am's Boeing 707's represented the epitome of air travel, before the advent of the jumbo jets which came to dominate international air routes at the beginning of the 1970's. The beautiful colors still stand out with vibrancy and impact, and the careful depiction of Pan American's Clipper has lost nothing of its visual attraction despite the loss of some of the tiles at the bottom of the work.
As much as I love the idea of honoring my favorite presidents, it’s time that we acknowledge what today really is: the observation day of George Washington’s birthday. Ok, so his actual birthday is Feb. 22, but we celebrate it on that catch-all day known as Presidents’ Day — or Washington’s Birthday. //
You can read plenty of books, essays, and encyclopedia entries about George Washington’s life and accomplishments. He truly was a man of greatness.
But today I want to focus on a not-so-true story about our first president. //
Today, on the eve of George Washington’s 290th birthday, I’d like to introduce you to a history of America’s founding that you’ve probably never heard. We’ll go ahead and put it out there that 1861’s Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi (童絵解万国噺) probably has absolutely no basis in fact, but this Japanese history of the founding of the U.S. is a heck of a lot of fun.
For starters, the book portrays George Washington fighting with a bow and arrow alongside the “Goddess of America.” //
Lest you look at this book and think that the Japanese really screwed up our history, Billy Moncure writes at War History Online that Osanaetoki Bankokubanashi wasn’t meant to be entirely serious.
“Nozaki Bunzō, also known by his pen name of Kanagaki Robun, was known for amusing historical fiction,” Moncure notes. “His pen name roughly translates as ‘Scribbler of Foolish Words.’”
“Although the text was supposed to give the reader a general idea of American history and significant figures, much of it is intended to be symbolic of America’s struggle rather than a true history,” he continues.
So if you take time out today to remember our first and greatest president, or maybe tomorrow on Washington’s actual birthday, don’t forget the time that a Japanese author gave the Father of Our Country the most badass treatment imaginable.
Let us remember something truly great about old, honest Abe. //
This toast was given in honor of Abraham Lincoln at a president’s day celebration last week.
While attending the recent opening of “Holbein: Capturing Character,” the new exhibition dedicated to the German Renaissance master Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543) that just opened at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, I observed a visitor asking the security guards, “Where are the pictures of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell?”
This was a fair question since Holbein, although born in Augsburg and for many years a citizen of Basel, is most famous for the portraits he executed in London, where he eventually became King’s Painter to Henry VIII (1491-1547). If you imagine Tudor England in your mind’s eye, chances are the way you envision its people stems directly from the work of this artist.
Fifty years ago Friday, on Dec. 21, 1968, Apollo 8 lifted off, marking the first time humans left low Earth orbit and flew to the moon.
This was the second manned spaceflight of the Apollo program, and it was a nerve-wracking and remarkable flight that captured the world's attention. The mission capped a difficult and conflict-filled year in the U.S., offering a rare moment when people could feel good about their planet.
Any trip to space is risky. But a mission to the moon, nearly a quarter-million miles from Earth, was something else. There were many things that could go wrong and many unknowns about this first trip. But on Christmas Eve 1968, the capsule made it to lunar orbit. //
There was also an unexpected moment during the 20 hours they circled the moon. As they focused on the lunar surface below, something else caught the crew's attention.
"Oh my God, look at that picture over there! It's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!" exclaimed Anders.
Anders rushed to snap a picture of the Earth, rising above the barren lunar landscape. The "Earthrise" image remains one of the most famous ever taken in space, and Anders says it forever changed the way people think about where we live.
"The only color that we could see and contrasted by this really unfriendly, stark lunar horizon, made me think, 'You know, we really live on a beautiful little planet,' " he says. //
In an interview with NPR earlier this year, Borman, the mission commander, noticed the same thing. "The only telegram I remember out of all the thousands we got after Apollo 8 said, 'Thank you Apollo 8 you saved 1968,' " he said.
Over the decades, corporations and Madison Avenue have used this event as a significant launching pad for exposure, dropping fortunes on reserving time during the game, spending exorbitant amounts on productions, and hiring top-flight Hollywood directors to helm their 60-second epics. But, this was not always the case with the Super Bowl, and we can trace this advertising furor to a specific moment in history. It was 1984.
That was the year that Apple Computers caused a sensation with a cinematic minute that was jarring, arresting, transformative, and — most important — successful. The company wanted to distinguish itself in a marketplace dominated by a titan, and parlayed the timing of a literary classic to deliver a commercial that delivered the goods. Apple’s “1984” to this day is recognized as an advertising classic, and became the very revolutionary spot that altered the parameters of the Super Bowl.
And it very nearly never happened. //
The commercial has gone on to become regarded as one of the greatest of all time. In a move of cagey self-interest, Chiat/Day ran the commercial themselves weeks earlier, in a solitary local market in Idaho. This was done in order to have the commercial qualify for that year’s advertising awards. “1984” won every award it was nominated for, and it went on later to be declared the best commercial of the decade. To this day, it is regarded as one of the classics to ever run on television.
As perhaps its second-greatest accomplishment (after successfully selling the Apple Macintosh as an important computing breakthrough), the spot launched the elevated importance placed on Super Bowl advertising. It is commonplace today for corporations to invest heavily in their presentations on this day, sometimes spending an entire year gearing up for the event.
At the time most of the French gold was in Paris, in the largest safe in the world, “La Souterraine” (The Underground). A room 30m (100 ft) underground, an area of 11 000 m² (118,403.01 ft²), supported by 658 pillars, closed by a turret of steel and concret weighing 130 t.
The rest was scattered through the 200 branches of the Banque de France.
In 1932, while most of Europe watched with worry the situation unfold in Germany, France decided to move the gold far from its eastern and southern borders. In the first months of the year, 148 branches of the BdF are emptied and 275 t of gold were moved. //
After the Anglo-French troops got pushed back from Dakar by Vichy’s troops, it was decided to send the 1100 t of gold 900 km inside the continent in Kayes. Because they wanted more than just the ship.
After that, it stayed roughly the same, they had to sacrifice the Belgian gold to satisfy the invader, who promptly smelted it and sent it to Switzerland to pay for its weapons, and also to keep it clean, if you see what I mean. But they had to wait for 2 years before getting all of it, the Banque de France didn’t want to do it, but was forced to act so they took the slowest route possible.
After the War, France used its own reserve to replace the Belgian gold.
And in all that movement, do you know how much gold was lost?
395 kg. Yep that’s kilograms.
Only 0,016% of the 2500 t of gold went missing.
And all that gold helped the reconstruction, in the two years before the Marshall Plan went in action.
It was approximately 1:00 PM when a man called Vernon B. O’Neal of O’Neal’s Funeral Home and asked for the best casket that O’Neal had available. The man on the phone, simultaneously calm and tense, needed the coffin quickly and O’Neal had a slight problem. Of the 18 people who worked at O’Neal’s Funeral Home, 17 of them were out to lunch. After all, it was a beautiful Friday day for November in Texas.
O’Neal picked out a solid-bronze coffin with white satin lining tagged at a sales price of $3,995 from his storeroom and waited for three more of his employees to return from lunch. The bulky Handley Brittania casket from the Elgin Casket Company weighed over 400 pounds when it was empty and O’Neal certainly couldn’t lift it into his Cadillac hearse by himself. Once he had it loaded, he rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital on the most important delivery of his career.
The man who had ordered the casket, Clint Hill, was a Secret Service agent and less than an hour earlier he had climbed on to the back of a moving limousine to try to get to the subject he was charged to protect. He was unsuccessful. The casket was for the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Why isn't it taught that George Washington was not the first President of the United States, but the first one under the Constitution?
Because George Washington was the First President of the United States.
Prior to the creation of the Constitution, the position was not “The President of the United States.” The position was the “President of the United States in Congress Assembled” or, more commonly, “The President of Congress.”
Given the nature of the Articles of Confederation, the President was not the position we think of now. There was little power in the office, it had a term of only one year, and in many ways was ceremonial, similar to the Constitutional position of President of the Senate held by the Vice President of the United States.
The men who held the position are not considered “President of the United States” for those reasons as well as for the fact that the Articles of Confederation was a failed system that did not create an effective system of governance. These same men realized a new system needed to be created and they did so.
In this climate, John W. Austin approached financier Joseph A. Bower, a Detroiter, in Bower’s offices at the Liberty National Bank in New York City. Austin was an officer of the Detroit Graphite Company, and his aim was to secure a contract to paint such a bridge as might, inevitably, span the Detroit River. Their meeting spawned a remarkable accomplishment – a $23.5 million, privately financed link between the United States and Canada. As the two men met above the din of Manhattan’s streetcars and crowds, they talked of heavy construction and high finance. They could not have foreseen their role in a most curious event in Detroit’s history.
Samuel Sorie Sesay, one of a dwindling group of West Africans who fought in the British army in World War Two, died last month in Sierra Leone at the age of 101. Ahead of his funeral on Friday, Umaru Fofana looks back at his life.
APUs became common in the 1960s, with Boeing including the first commercial APU in the 727 in 1963. While the technology had existed in military planes as early as World War 1, their move to commercial flying came as flying became more popular.
The presence of an APU in the 727 allowed airlines to avoid reliance on ground power at smaller airports. The turbine came to be included in all subsequent Boeing aircraft, including the 737 and 747 families. Since then, all modern jets and even some turboprops have come with their own APUs.
In 1954, Christian musician Alfred B. Smith (1916-2001) was enlisted to lead the singing at the Founder’s Week Conference, at Moody Bible Institute, in Chicago. With some five thousand people gathered, many of them experienced singers, Smith said it was like leading one big choir.
At the close of one session, he had them sing Fanny Crosby’s song of faith, All the Way My Saviour Leads Me. What a thrill it was to all, as they sang together in four-part harmony, ending with “This my song through endless ages– Jesus led me all the way.” Smith himself was overwhelmed with that thought, and asked them to repeat the last line, softly, without the accompaniment of the great organ and the two grand pianos–
“Jesus led me all the way.”
God’s people can’t always see clearly how the Lord leads us along, but He does. Of the Israelites in the wilderness the Bible says, “You [Lord] in Your mercy have led forth the people whom You have redeemed” (Exod. 15:13). Through many trials–and repeated failures to trust the Lord–He brought them at last to the Promised Land.
The New Testament says, “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (Rom. 8:14). It’s an identifying characteristic of the redeemed: “All who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God” (NASB). And, “Thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ” (II Cor. 2:14). Even when we go through times of difficulty and carry wearying burdens, we are on the winning side, and the Lord will lead us through to victory.
But, back to that conference session. It was broadcast over the radio, and listening in that day was another gospel musician, John Peterson. Shortly afterward, he met his friend Al Smith, and mentioned the great personal blessing the singing of Fanny Crosby’s hymn had been, with the repeating of “Jesus led me all the way.” To which Smith replied, “Why don’t you write a complete song, using Fanny’s last line as the title.” And he did.
1) Some day life’s journey will be o’er,
And I shall reach that distant shore;
I’ll sing, while ent’ring heaven’s door,
“Jesus led me all the way.”
Jesus led me all the way,
Let me step by step each day;
I will tell the saints and angels
As I lay by burden down,
“Jesus led me all the way.”
2) If God should let me there review
The winding paths of earth I knew,
It would be proven, clear and true–
Jesus led me all the way.”
Vincent Pankoke ID'd Jewish Council member Arnold van den Bergh as most likely culprit.
This is my interpretation of how the Axis won WW2 in the timeline of The man in the high castle on what is mentioned. It is not the most accurate way the war could have gone but I had to fill in the missing info with the most likely results still in Axis favor.
On February 15, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt is assassinated by Giuseppe Zangara. Afterward, the United States is subsequently led by John Garner (FDR's vice president) and then by Republican John Bricker. These presidents led to the destabilization of the country and both failed to enact the New Deal to pull the country from the Great Depression. They continued to maintain an isolationist philosophy during the war and, as a result, they were unable to support the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union and they are unable to protect The World from the rise of the Axis threat of the Greater Nazi Reich and the Japanese Empire.
In my recent article on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Tsar Bomba test, I relied very heavily on Russian sources that were digitized by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency. For whatever reason, Rosatom has been dedicating an impressive amount of resources to Soviet nuclear history, radically transforming what is easily available to scholars outside of Russia. The extraordinarily useful series of (curated, redacted) archival documents, Atomniy Projekt SSSR (Atomic Project of the Soviet Union), for example, went nearly overnight from being something only existed in full in a handful of libraries in the United States (I was proud to make sure that the Niels Bohr Library at the American Institute of Physics has a complete set), to being easily accessible through the Rosatom Digital Library.
But I’m not here to talk about the stuff that’s useful to scholars. I’m here to talk about their section on “Atomic Fun” from the Soviet atomic bomb project. This is a collection of, as they put it, “funny stories.”
The revolutionary discovery of nuclear fission in December 1938 helped launch the Atomic Age, bringing with it a unique need for secrecy regarding the scientific and technical underpinnings of nuclear weapons. This secrecy evolved into a special category of proscribed information, dubbed "Restricted Data," which is still in place today. Historian Alex Wellerstein spent over 10 years researching various aspects of nuclear secrecy, and his first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press), was released earlier this month.
Wellerstein is a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, where his research centers on the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear history. (Fun fact: he served as a historical consultant on the short-lived TV series Manhattan.) A self-described "dedicated archive rat," Wellerstein maintains several homemade databases to keep track of all the digitized files he has accumulated over the years from official, private, and personal archives. The bits that don't find their way into academic papers typically end up as items on his blog, Restricted Data, where he also maintains the NUKEMAP, an interactive tool that enables users to model the impact of various types of nuclear weapons on the geographical location of their choice.
The scope of Wellerstein's thought-provoking book spans the scientific origins of the atomic bomb in the late 1930s all the way through the early 21st century. Each chapter chronicles a key shift in how the US approach to nuclear secrecy gradually evolved over the ensuing decades—and how it still shapes our thinking about nuclear weapons and secrecy today. //
Ars Technica: While researching your book, did you learn anything that really surprised you?
Alex Wellerstein: One was the fact that in the US we still have this parallel separate system for nuclear weapons secrets that is different from any other kind of secrecy. "Restricted Data" was a specially created category for nuclear weapons in 1946 because they really just were not sure what to do with this new concept. So we still have a very 1940s-style system. There's a lot of reasons one could imagine for saying, "Maybe we don't need to treat nuclear weapons as a totally parallel system from everything else in the world. Maybe that's not the best way—maybe we're in some ways inflating the value of this information by doing that."
There is an alternative argument, which is that secrets don't control nuclear weapons very well. It seems obvious to most people, and certainly did to me when I started this, that knowledge is power. Nuclear weapons are sort of infinite power, so their knowledge should be infinitely important, right? But the counterargument—and Oppenheimer was one of the first to really put this out there in a strong policy-framed way—is that secrecy is about control of a certain type of information, what philosophers might call "explicit information," stuff you can write down. You can restrict tons of knowledge just by not letting your experts go to another country and show them how to do stuff.
But that is only a small percentage of what it takes to actually make a weapon, specifically a nuclear weapon. As a result, it might not be the thing you want to focus on to control these weapons. You might want to focus on controlling the processes to make the fuel because that turns out to be the necessary thing. I can draw for you a beautiful sketch of how to make a thermonuclear weapon, but it's not going to help if you don't have the fuel—and you don't because we restrict that.
You could get rid of all of the secrecy tomorrow and the world would not measurably become more dangerous, because it’s other things that are actually keeping these weapons from spreading. To me, it's still a pretty radical idea because it not only goes against our intuitions about the bomb, but it also goes against what we tell ourselves about the way in which technology functions. It's not the equation that gives you the technology; it's the overall socio-political, human system that causes it to exist in the first place.
LtWiggledworth Ars Praetorian
AUG 26, 2021 8:56 PM
goodolejackburton wrote:
All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."
There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."
Its one thing to get the scientific understanding to start a reactor, but the Germans were years behind in building the huge industrial base necessary for the bomb. The Manhattan Project should really be understood just as much as an effort to bootstrap an entire industrial sector, as a scientific project. K-25 was the largest building in the world , and used 1% of all the electricity in the US, and that was only one part of the overall effort.
For decades, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been home to an unusual artifact from World War II: a small cube of solid uranium metal, measuring about two inches on each side and weighing just under 2.5 kilograms. Lab lore holds that the cube was confiscated from Nazi Germany's failed nuclear reactor experiments in the 1940s, but that has never been experimentally verified.
PNNL scientists are developing new nuclear forensic techniques that should help them confirm the the pedigree of this cube—and others like it—once and for all. Those methods could also eventually be used to track illicit trafficking of nuclear material. PNNL's Jon Schwantes and graduate student Brittany Robertson presented some of their initial findings this week at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (a hybrid virtual/in-person event).
University of Maryland physicist Timothy Koeth is among the outsider collaborators in this ongoing research. He has spent over seven years tracking down these rare artifacts of Nazi Germany's nuclear research program, after receiving one as a gift. As of 2019, he and a UMD colleague, Miriam Herbert, had tracked down 10 cubes in the US: one at the Smithsonian, another at Harvard University, a handful in private collections—and of course, the PNNL cube.
What makes these cubes so special is their historical significance. As we reported previously:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/physicists-hunt-uranium-cubes-to-shed-light-on-germanys-failed-nuclear-reactor/
Underpinning the Manhattan Project in the US was the fear that German scientists under Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime would beat the Allies to a nuclear bomb. The Germans had a two-year head-start, but according to Koeth, "fierce competition over finite resources, bitter interpersonal rivalries, and ineffectual scientific management" resulted in significant delays in their progress toward achieving a sustained nuclear reaction. German nuclear scientists were separated into three isolated groups based in Berlin (B), Gottow (G), and Leipzig (L).
Renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg headed up the Berlin group, and as the Allied forces advanced in the winter of 1944, Heisenberg moved his team to a cave under a castle in a small town called Haigerloch—now the site of the Atomkeller Museum. That's where the group built the B-VIII reactor. It resembled an "ominous chandelier," per Koeth, because it was composed of 664 uranium cubes strung together with aircraft cable and then submerged in a tank of heavy water shielded by graphite to prevent radiation exposure.
As the German scientists were racing against time, Manhattan Project lead Lieutenant General Leslie Groves kicked off a covert mission dubbed "Alsos," with the express purpose of gathering information and materials related to Germany's scientific research. When the Allied forces closed in at last, Heisenberg took apart the B-VIII experiment and buried the uranium cubes in a field, ferreting away key documentation in a latrine. (Pity Samuel Goudsmit, the poor physicist who had to dig those out.) Heisenberg himself escaped by bicycle, carrying a few cubes in a backpack.
As Heisenberg himself acknowledged, the German scientists' final experiment failed because the amount of uranium in the cubes was insufficient to trigger a sustained nuclear reaction. But Heisenberg was confident [was he certain?] that "a slight increase in its size would have been sufficient to start off the process of energy production." A model described in a 2009 paper bears that out, showing that the group would only have needed 50 percent more uranium cubes to get the design to work. If it had, our world might look very different today.
The Alsos team purportedly brought the cubes confiscated from Berlin to the United States for use in the uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge. However, Koeth learned that, by April 1945, the US didn't need additional feedstock material. And there is no official record of any cubes entering the country, so most of them have never been accounted for. Ditto for the 400 or so uranium cubes that had been in use by the Gottow group, led by Kurt Diebner.