Vestmannaeyjar is a small archipelago off the south coast of Iceland. The largest island, Heimaey, has a population of 4,036. The other islands are uninhabited, though two have single hunting cabins. Read more about it at Wikipedia.org.
Top Image from: Pixdaus: Popular Today Pics
Bottom Image from: michael clarke stuff
The International Space Station represents a union of several national space station projects that originated during the Cold War. In the early 1980s, NASA planned to launch a modular space station called Freedom as a counterpart to the Soviet Salyut and Mir space stations, while the Soviets were planning to construct Mir-2 in the 1990s as a replacement for Mir. Because of budget and design constraints, Freedom never progressed past mock-ups and minor component tests. [wikipedia]
You can follow the astronouts on the space station via twitter now: Soichi, Jeff, and TJ. Watch a tour below:
New video of the Challenger space shuttle explosion from 1986 was posted today to youtube.
Howard Zinn inspired me. Reading his People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present was eye-opening for me. It was the first book that I had read that challenged the conventional history that you learn in high school. It told me that history was not cut-and-dry. It was not boring. History was fascinating as long as you got the real story.
Howard Zinn pasted away into his own history on January 27, 2010. He was traveling in Santa Monica when he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 87 years old. You can find a list of some great articles on Dr. Zinn from HNN. To learn more about this amazing historian read his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times. I have yet to read it, but it is going on my reading list right now. For those of you who have a Netflix subscription you can view his Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train [or buy it on Amazon.com] on watch instantly.
In 1997, Dr. Zinn slipped into popular culture when his writing made a cameo appearance in the film “Good Will Hunting.” The title character, played by Matt Damon, lauds “A People’s History” and urges Robin Williams’s character to read it. Damon, who co-wrote the script, was a neighbor of the Zinns growing up. -Boston Globe
There is a good short history of Dr. Zinn about half way through the Boston Globe article that I quoted above. If you want more, read his autobiography (and his other books) and there is always Wikipedia.
Image credit: spleeney
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.
