From Six Revisions:
Here’s a brief history of the Internet, including important dates, people, projects, sites, and other information that should give you at least a partial picture of what this thing we call the Internet really is, and where it came from.
Click the link above to read the article. Image from dalbera.
From ty.rannosaur.us:
It’s not exactly a startling, ground-breaking revelation to suggest that the Vikings were pretty much the most face-rockingly hardcore bastards to ever beat a bunch of monks to death with their own iron church bells, throw them through a stained-glass window onto some pointy rocks, and carry off all of their valuable artifacts. We all know that these psychotic, axe-wielding Norsemen are more or less the epitome of everything it means to be tough as hell, what with their looting and pillaging and huge beards and all, but it never really hurts to drive home the point every once in a while that these guys totally kicked ass.
Image from infomatique.
One of the best explanations of the origin of life on film. A 40 minute production.
From Today’s History Lesson:
The mighty battleship HMS Hood was felled in 1941 in spectacular (and catastrophic) fashion. Engaged in a fight with the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, her aft ammunition magazine was pierced by gunfire from theBismarck. The Hood exploded in a conflagration that split her in two, sank her in minutes with nearly all hands, and reverberated through the British Admiralty all the way to Number 10 Downing.
Image from: KM Photography...
From Neatorama:
The Navajo language is incredibly complex, with syntax, tonal qualities and dialects that render it unintelligible to outsiders. A spoken language, it has no alphabet or symbols, and is used only in remote Navajo areas of the American Southwest. For these reasons, it was selected as a code language during World War II by the U.S. Marines.
In 1942, Japanese translators and codebreakers were regularly intercepting U.S. military communications and sabotaging U.S. plans in the Pacific. Philip Johnston, a white man who was raised on the Navajo Reservation, convinced Major General Clayton Vogel, commanding general of the Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, that the Marines should recruit Navajos to transmit important military communications.
Image from Wolfgang Staudt.
From mental_floss:
The Giant’s Causeway is on the northeast coast of Northern Ireland. Legend says that the giant Finn McCoolbuilt the causeway so he could fight his enemy Benandonner in Scotland. The rock formation looks like a set of mostly hexagonal man made stepping stones, but this is a natural formation of basalt laid down by volcanic activity. During the Tertiary period some 65 million years ago, this piece of land was near the equator. Lava tubes pressed up through a chalk layer to form the pillars. The geometric shapes were caused by crystallization of the basalt as it cooled and cracked. The causeway is open to the public and can be reached by a shuttle bus.Devil’s Postpile is a similar formation in California.
Image from jonmcalister.
From The History Blog:
Dogs featured prominently in ancient Pompeii life before Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., and they still do, only now nobody owns them. Strays scrounge up a living amidst the “Cave Canem” (beware of the dog) mosaics and the plaster casts of their ancestors, trapped in their death agonies under 60 feet of ash and pumice.
Tourists with their fanny packs full of sammiches probably make for a fairly good feed, but even relatively well fed strays are unhealthy. Also, their constant foraging and excreting aren’t exactly good for the ruins, which have more than enough conservation problems to deal with on their own.
Today Pompeii’s emergency commissioner (Pompeii has been under an extended state of emergency a year and a half now) Marcello Fiori announced a new initiative to get all of Pompeii’s strays adopted. It’s a multistage process.
Image from au.st.in.
According to Dr Hans Van Tillburg, “[the I-201 submarine] was nothing like anybody had in the Second World War. It had a streamlined body and conning tower and retractable gun.” They just found it in Hawaii.
In 1969, Chairman Mao began work on a giant bunker beneath the city of Beijing to house the city’s population in the event of a nuclear attack. The underground city was never operational, but the tunnels and facilities still remain. Read more and see more images at i09. Image from i09.
Homo floresiensis was a kind of adorably tiny human being that lived on the island of Flores up until 18,000 years ago. Nature says “These astonishing little people, nicknamed ‘hobbits’, made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.”
Read the rest from Boing Boing. Image from Mamoritai.