Articles tagged "history"

Russia is a very different place that it used to be.

If you’re a tyrant, take this occasion to not let people crowd around you. If you’re a regular old plebian, grab a box of wine, park yourself under a tree, and aim for immortality.

For more than 75 years, the Hindenburg airship catastrophe baffled the world. A team of Aeronautical engineers say they now understand the root cause.

It’s Turkey Day so we know the biggest shopping day in North America is right around the corner — or later tonight. It’s Black Friday. Historically, black anything nomenclature has always had dark connotations.

Sorry history, but we need that metal.

Sandy, the Frankenstorm, may be nearly history, but the hurricane season is just hitting its stride.

Sorry, but this destroys any science project you've ever come up with: In the 18th century a German prince, who apparently thought "his garden realm":http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/534/gallery/ wasn't fancy enough, had his own artificial volcano built…

The very term "mainframe computers" brings to mind data scientists in lab coats shuffling punch cards and smoking cigarettes, but don't let that get to you. Despite decades of technology evangelists calling for the death of the ancient mainframe mach…

There are a lot of people out there that really like Nikola Tesla. And what's not to like? The handsome mustachioed scientist invented the modern alternating current system that powers our offices and homes, poured the foundation for wireless communi…

At this point, ecologist pretty much have the predator-prey cycle figured out: As a rabbit population grows, a coyote population will follow, thanks to all the new, tasty rabbits. But once the coyotes are numerous enough to eat a _lot_ of rabbits, th…

Sometime recently, in the midst of the lengthy campaign trail, President Obama said some dumb thing about government’s role in developing business — trying, and failing, to mimic Elizabeth Warren’s hyper-viral populist speech — and, well, people are…

On this very day, June 20th, 33 years ago, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House roof. Seven years after that, Ronald Reagan took them down. It was the end of 70s, a decade wracked with stagnant economic growth and a pa…

On April 3, 1973, Motorola researcher Martin Cooper was perched on a New York City street corner on his way to a press conference, when he pulled out an enormous prototype phone in front of a few reporters and placed the first ever cell phone call, t…

If you picked up a dystopian 19th century novel, paged through it, and found the plot-point where the fictional city’s children were scrambling to get to toy stores to buy a robotic egg that was unable to hatch or reproduce, you would put the novel d…

Before "Anonymous and LulzSec":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/12/21/2011-was-the-year-of-anonymous, before "warez":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez bulletin boards, before logins and passwords, before everything, there was phreaking. The first…

It's not news to anyone whose braved the complicated, lengthy lists of beers that are seemingly a must for bars these days, but there are a lot of people producing a lot of good brew these days. When I talked to Bill Manley, a giant beer geek at Sier…

A friend keeps a "pretty nifty blog":http://oldebaltimorestuff.tumblr.com/ archive of way-olde, weird/sad/interesting articles from our local paper, _The Baltimore Sun_. Today she unveiled a "real true gem":http://oldebaltimorestuff.tumblr.com/post/1…

It seems impossible that a century-old company synonymous with the photo and film business could fail, but Kodak has filed for bankruptcy. It's been a slow decline for the company which never really transitioned into the digital age with much success…

*_By Abe Riesman_* As the Iraq War winds down and already begins to fade and fizzle from popular memory, spare a little pity for the educators who will have to teach future generations about it. It’ll be hard enough to sort out its causes and its…

h3. How to fight Soviet missiles with punch cards, light wands and the world's biggest computer Shortly after the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb, on August 29, 1949, the United States government decided that it needed some technolo…

167 years ago, about a mile from where I'm sitting in Baltimore, an inventor named Alfred Vail (Samuel Morse's number-two) is hanging around a train station waiting beside one of the first telegraph devices. It's not the tappy tap key kind we think o…

Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set

Paul Baran - who just passed away after a battle with lung cancer - was working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, in the early 1960s when he outlined what would become the central mechanism for sending data around the world. A "box…