Year of construction map, the Netherlands

Photocrome pictures of Utrecht 1890-1900

I found these amazing pictures on this site. Amazing how little has changed actually. These are not true color photographs but created by the photochrom process.

Here is a much higher resolution version of the above picture I found.

Digging deeper I found the original source of these pictures and a few more which has very high resolution TIFFs. I put the high resolution photos together in an album here.

I also found out that in 1908 a tram line was built through the city that actually passed under the Dom tower.

The predecessor of modern forms of football

I've mentioned this game before, but thought I'd give a source and some context.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_football
Medieval football is a modern term sometimes used for a wide variety of localised football games which were invented and played in Europe of the Middle Ages. Alternative names include folk football, mob football and Shrovetide football.  

These archaic forms of football, typically classified as mob football, would be played between neighboring towns and villages, involving an unlimited number of players on opposing teams, who would clash in a heaving mass of people struggling to drag an inflated pig's bladder by any means possible to markers at each end of a town.

By some accounts, any means could be used to move the ball to a goal, as long as it did not lead to manslaughter or murder.

 Shrovetide is still played in one British town.

Delightful propaganda

The Sacred War

I think this is the music we heard at the big motherfucking thing 2 in kiev. It's about the Great Patriotic war:

Get up, the giant country,
Get up for mortal fight
With German horde uncounted,
With forces of the night

Chorus:
Let noble anger of the soul
Get boiled as a wave.
The peoples war, the holy war.
Well fight until the grave.

Let's give repulse to oppressors
Of all the ardent thoughts.
To rapers and to murderers,
Let's say the swear words.

Chorus

We will not let the darkened wings
Fly over Motherland.
The native country spacious fields
Are not for fiend's extend.
Chorus

For rotten fascist pack we've got
A bullet and a bomb.
The spawn of the planet Earth
Must get into the tomb.

History repeats, failures and all

You may have missed it, but recently there was actually also a spill in Alaska.

The Rosenhan Experiment

Diogenes of Sinope

What a great character.

This guy had some nice ideas. However I can't identify with his lifestyle. From what I know about Greek philosophers I agree most with Epicurus.

How It Was Made, Pictorial Webster

The Front Flip Long Jump

Here you see someone doing a 20 feet (6.1m) somersault long jump. This technique is not allowed in official long jumps due to safety concerns.

Here is an article about the style from before it got banned.

July 29, 1974 The Flip That Led To A Flap The sport's august officialdom is alarmed by a new long-jumping technique that could endanger a few necks—and the 30-foot barrier [...] In contrast, Ecker points out that the flip enables the jumper to take off from the board almost at full speed and at a more desirable higher angle. When he tucks and rolls into a somersault, wind resistance is cut. And since rotation is working with him rather than against him, his feet will land—assuming correct execution—well ahead of his body, and the latter should follow on through so that he does not fall back in the pit. In practice, the hardest part of the new technique to learn is landing. "Wiping out in the flip," Delamere says painfully, "is coming down butt first." To preclude that dire end, the East Germans reportedly have theorized that a half-twist should be added to the flip so that the jumper lands facing the board. Few things in sport prove as easy in competition as on paper, and the flip is no exception. While the dynamics of the new technique may satisfy the laws of physics, the danger factor is at least a worrisome possibility. More...

We will never know if this technique would allow people to jump further than the current record of 8.95m until the technique is officially allowed and the pro jumpers try it. What's for sure, is that it would make the sport a lot more interesting to look at.

Photos of Nazi Germany, Part 3

I found some more pictures of Nazi Germany. Look at them here. older posts: part 1 and part 2

A map of undersea cables from 1901

Related to the post with the internet undersea map is this map of transatlantic telegraph cables from 1901.

"The transatlantic telegraph cable was the first cable used for telegraph communications laid across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.Whereas it would normally take at least ten days to deliver a message by ship, it now took a matter of minutes by telegraph.

Five attempts to lay it were made over a nine year period—in 1857, two in 1858, 1865, and 1866—before lasting connections were finally achieved by the SS Great Eastern (see pic below) with the 1866 cable and the repaired 1865 cable. Additional cables were laid between Foilhommerum and Heart's Content in 1873, 1874, 1880 and 1894. By the end of the 19th century, British-, French-, German- and American-owned cables linked Europe and North America in a sophisticated web of telegraphic communications." ~wiki

World War II The Lost Color Archives

In relation to pimp's post I went looking and found this really nice WWII color video documentary. There's not much footage of battle and explosion, but it does show a lot that went on outside of the fighting. The narration is good and the diary and letter excerpts are also well chosen. The scenes are authentic. The color is real.

http://shop.history.com/detail.php?p=68182 See World War II as the soldiers saw it--in color--in this extraordinary DVD set narrated by John Thaw (Inspector Morse). * Extraordinary footage which was unseen for decades after the war. * See World War II as never before--in color. * DVD Features: 15 Minutes of Bonus Footage; Static Menu, Scene Selection. World War II has been the subject of countless books and documentaries, but none has ever shown the epic conflict like this. Drawing exclusively from color footage obtained from sources throughout the world, this epic DVD set shows the conflict the way the soldiers saw it. Adding to the immediacy of this important collection is a treasury of personal memories culled from letters and diaries, expressing the fears doubts, thrills, and anguish of those who lived and died in the epic conflict. The result is an intimate account of the experience of war, rather than a tired battlefield history.

IMDb link Torrent link

Photos of Nazi Germany, Part 2

As promised, here is the rest of the photos of nazi Germany

Photos of Nazi Germany

A site with a lot of photos of Nazi-Germany can be found here. I'll post part 2 a little later.

The Gyro Monorail

The gyro monorail, gyroscopic monorail, gyro-stabilized monorail, or gyrocar all denote a single rail land vehicle, road or rail, which uses the gyroscopic action of a spinning wheel, which is forced to precess, to overcome the inherent inverted pendulum instability of balancing on top of a single rail. The principal advantage of the monorail cited by Schilovski is the suppression of the Hunting oscillation, which was a speed limitation encountered by conventional railways at the time. Also, significantly reduced radii of turn are possible compared with the 7km typical of modern high-speed trains, e.g. TGV. This is possible because the vehicle will bank automatically on bends, like an aircraft, so that no lateral centrifugal acceleration is experienced on board.

Very interesting wiki article. Too bad there never was anymore development on this. It seems very promising. Even though it looks unsafe, it's actually quite safe. If all power fails the gyros will still be spinning for a long time and the train can slowly slow down. One track also means much cheaper railway tracks.

Do You Know More About America Than the Average American?

First, a random sample of 2,508 American adults of all backgrounds was surveyed, allowing comparisons to be made between the college and non-college educated. They were asked 33 straightforward civics questions, many of which high school graduates and new citizens are expected to know. Respondents were also asked several questions concerning their participation in American civic life, their attitudes about perennial issues of American governance, and other behaviors that may or may not contribute to civic literacy. Finally, the results were run through multivariate regression analysis, allowing ISI to compare the civic impact of college with that of other societal factors.

Do Americans possess the knowledge necessary to participate wisely in the affairs of the nation? Read below to find out.

Seventy-one percent of Americans fail the test, with an overall average score of 49%.

Of the 2,508 People surveyed, 164 say they have held an elected government office at least once in their life. Their average score on the civic literacy test is 44%, compared to 49% for those who have not held an elected office.

Take the test here.

The Answer:

more music charts

A short history of optical electronic sensors

The image dissector was an early all-electronic television camera tube invented by Philo Farnsworth. Farnsworth's image dissector was successfully demonstrated and patent applications were made in 1927. This was the first successful demonstration of a fully electronic television system. Farnsworth continued making improvements to his system, and by 1929, image clarity and number of lines of resolution exceeded the achievements of the mechanical television systems.

Most experimental television systems in the 1920s and 1930s made use of an electromechanical system, usually a Nipkow disk combined with a single photoelectric cell for scanning an image and creating an electrical output. A similar device operating in reverse was used to project the image onto the picture screen. [wiki]

The Iconoscope invented by Vladimir Zworykin improved on Farnsworth's invention by combining the photosensitive material at each point with a capacitor so that all the electrons were captured. A separate beam of electrons was then used to scan over the image surface, resulting in an electrical current proportional to the quantity of stored electrons at each point.

The key aspect of the Iconoscope was that the image-sensitive target integrated, or collected the charge developed by the light hitting it between readout scans. [wiki]

The iconoscope was the primary camera tube used in American broadcasting from 1936 until 1946, when it was replaced by the image orthicon tube.

The image orthicon tube (often abbreviated as IO) was common until the 1960s. A combination of Farnsworth's image dissector and RCA's orthicon technologies, it replaced the iconoscope/orthicon, which required a great deal of light to work adequately.

While the iconoscope and the intermediate orthicon used capacitance between a multitude of small but discrete light sensitive collectors and an isolated signal plate for reading video information, the IO employed direct charge readings from a continuous electronically charged collector. The resultant signal was immune to most extraneous signal "crosstalk" from other parts of the target, and could yield extremely detailed images. For instance, IO cameras were used for capturing Apollo/Saturn rockets nearing orbit long after the networks had phased them out, as only they could provide sufficient detail.

A properly constructed image orthicon could take television pictures by candlelight owing to the more ordered light-sensitive area and the presence of an electron multiplier at the base of the tube, which operated as a high-efficiency amplifier. It also had a logarithmic light sensitivity curve similar to the human eye, so the picture looked more natural. Image orthicons were used extensively in the early color television cameras, where their increased sensitivity was essential to overcome their very inefficient optical system. An engineer's nickname for the tube was the "immy", which later was feminized to become the "Emmy" [wiki] A vidicon tube (sometimes called a hivicon tube) is a video camera tube design in which the target material is a photoconductor. The Vidicon was developed in the 1950's at RCA by PK Weimer, SV Forgue and RR Goodrich as a simple alternative to the structurally and electrically complex Image Orthicon. While the initial photoconductor used was Selenium, other targets -- including silicon diode arrays -- have been used. Prior to the design and construction of Galileo probe to Jupiter in the late 70s, NASA used Vidicon camera on most of their unmanned deep space probes equipped with the remote sensing ability. [wiki]

Mercury imaged by the mariner 10 spacecraft using a vidicon.

The required array consisting of CCD (charge-coupled device) technology was invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith at AT&T Bell Labs. The lab was working on the picture phone and on the development of semiconductor bubble memory. Merging these two initiatives, Boyle and Smith conceived of the design of what they termed 'Charge "Bubble" Devices'. The essence of the design was the ability to transfer charge along the surface of a semiconductor. As the CCD started its life as a memory device, one could only "inject" charge into the device at an input register. However, it was immediately clear that the CCD could receive charge via the photoelectric effect and electronic images could be created. Today, they are most widely used in arrays of photoelectric light sensors, to serialize parallel analog signals. Not all image sensors use CCD technology; for example, CMOS chips are also commercially available. [wiki] Two important characteristics of CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) devices are high noise immunity and low static power consumption. Significant power is only drawn when the transistors in the CMOS device are switching between on and off states. [wiki]

Google 2001

Amazingly enough, hidden in a corner beneath Larry's and Sergey's original lab coats, we found a vintage search index in mint condition. We dusted it off and took it for a spin, gobsmacked to see how different the web was in early 2001. "iPod" did not refer to a music player, "youtube" was nonsense, and if you were looking for "Michael Phelps," chances are you meant the scientist, not the swimmer. "Wikipedia" was brand new. Remember "hanging chads"? (And speaking of that election-specific reference -- if you're a U.S. citizen, it's not too late: please register to vote.) We had so much fun searching that we wanted to put this old index online for everyone to play with. We thought it'd be even cooler if we could actually see the full versions of the old web pages, so we worked with the Internet Archive to link to their cache of these pages from 2001. Step into the time machine and try a 2001 Google search.