American Founders
Leaders at the Creation of the Republic

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The Founding Era

Why the American Founding Matters

Leading Founders

Their lives, ideas, public service, and selected writings

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Records of the Founding

Pepsi paid millions to paint a Concorde in its iconic blue livery. But the passengers who paid first class fares to fly the iconic jet got a much slower and shortened ride as the blue paint heated the jet so much it was allowed to fly at Mach 2 speed for a mere 10 minutes. //

In the spring of 1996, one of the most ambitious and unusual marketing projects in aviation history took to the skies. Air France’s Concorde F-BTSD, known as “Sierra Delta,” was temporarily repainted in a vivid cobalt-blue Pepsi livery as part of Pepsi’s global “Project Blue” rebrand. The aircraft, instantly recognizable for its sleek, needle-like shape, now carried the bold Pepsi logo across its fuselage and tail. For several weeks, it toured major cities in Europe and the Middle East, hosting media and VIP flights. It was a spectacular sight and a daring collaboration between engineering prestige and consumer branding. Yet behind the beauty of the blue jet lay a technical limitation that few outside the project knew: this Concorde could not safely reach its full Mach 2 cruising speed. //

Dark colors absorb far more heat than they reflect, and when tested on Concorde’s aluminum skin, this quickly became a problem. The engineers at Air France Industries and Aérospatiale calculated that sustained flight at Mach 2 with the blue paint would raise surface temperatures dangerously close to the structural tolerance of the fuselage, as pointed out by Avions Legendaires. https://www.avionslegendaires.net/2025/10/actu/quand-le-concorde-se-muait-en-avion-sandwich-pour-pepsi/ //

To further protect the aircraft, a clever compromise was made. Only the fuselage received the dark blue finish, while the wings remained white. This was not a matter of design balance but thermal management, as the wings housed fuel tanks that acted as heat sinks during high-speed flight. Even with this precaution, engineers observed that the blue-painted panels heated up faster and cooled down more slowly than expected. The short-lived experiment confirmed once again that Concorde’s reflective white finish was essential for safe operation at its top speed. ///

So why did the SR-71 work better with black paint, but the Concorde had to have white paint to avoid overheating? Is it the difference between the titanium skin vs the aluminum skin and at the higher temperature of the SR-71, black paint is more effective at radiating heat and the white paint of the Concorde is more effective at reflecting heat at the lower temps?

The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

Ian JohnstonSilver badge
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Many (35?) years ago I had to use a PDP-11 running a copy of Unix so old that one man page I looked up simply said: "If you need help with this see Dennis Ritchie in Room 1305". //

Nugry Horace
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Re: Triggering a Specific Error Message
Even if an error message can't happen, they sometimes do. The MULTICS error message in Latin ('Hodie natus est radici frater' - 'today unto the root [volume] is born a brother') was for a scenario which should have been impossible, but got triggered a couple of times by a hardware error. //

5 days
StewartWhiteSilver badge
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Re: Triggering a Specific Error Message
VAX/VMS BASIC had an error message of "Program lost, sorry" in its list. Never could generate it but I liked that the "sorry" at the end made it seem so polite. //

Michael H.F. WilkinsonSilver badge
Nothing offensive, just impossible
Working on a parallel program for simulations of bacterial interaction in the gut micro-flora, I got an "Impossible Error: W(1) cannot be negative here" (or something similar) from the NAG library 9th order Runge-Kutta ODE solver on our Cray J932. The thing was, I was using multiple copies of the same routine in a multi-threaded program. FORTRAN being FORTRAN, and the library not having been compiled with the right flags for multi-threading, all copies used the same named common block to store whatever scratch variables they needed. So different copies were merrily overwriting values written by other copies, resulting in the impossible error. I ended up writing my own ODE solver

Having achieved the impossible, I felt like having breakfast at Milliways //

Admiral Grace Hopper
"You can't be here. Reality has broken if you see this"
Reaching the end of an error reporting trap that printed a message for each foreseeable error I put in a message for anything unforeseen, which was of course, to my mind, an empty set. The code went live and I thought nothing more of it for a decade or so, until a colleague that I hadn't worked with for may years sidled up to my desk with a handful of piano-lined listing paper containing this message. "Did you write this? We thought you'd like to know that it happened last night".

Failed disc sector. Never forget the hardware.

Workers with ropes could make the moai "walk" in zig-zag motion along roads tailor-made for the purpose. //

In 2012, Lipo and his colleague, Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona, showed that you could transport a 10-foot, 5-ton moai a few hundred yards with just 18 people and three strong ropes by employing a rocking motion. //

Lipo was not the first to test the walking hypothesis. Earlier work includes that of Czech experimental archaeologist Pavel Pavel, who conducted similar practical experiments on Easter Island in the 1980s after being inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki. (Heyerdahl even participated in the experiments.) Pavel's team was able to demonstrate a kind of "shuffling" motion, and he concluded that just 16 men and one leader were sufficient to transport the statues. //

"Pavel deserves recognition for taking oral traditions seriously and challenging the dominant assumption of horizontal transport, a move that invited ridicule from established scholars," Lipo and Hunt wrote. "His experiments suggested that vertical transport was feasible and consistent with cultural memory. Our contribution builds on this by showing that ancestral engineers intentionally designed statues for walking. Those statues were later modified to stand erect on ceremonial platforms, a transformation that effectively erased the morphological features essential for movement."

MMarsh Ars Praefectus
10y
4,490
Subscriptor
p-chapman said:
Ok, if Shackleton would have known about what seemed to work in the Antarctic ice, why did Shackleton cheap out for the Endurance?

Wikipedia suggests that the fully equipped, custom-built Discovery cost 51,000 pounds.
Ignoring British inflation adjustments over the next decade or so, Endurance was bought for 11,600 pounds. (And he also spent 3,200 pounds on the Aurora, the smaller 2nd ship for the expedition group at the other side of the Antarctic continent -- this was all about an Antarctic land crossing, after all.) However, the Discovery was slightly over twice the GRT (gross registered tonnage) of the Endurance. (GRT isn't always the best metric, as for example the bulbous Fram, shorter than the Endurance, still has a larger GRT.)

So let's say that a smaller custom-built ship the size of the Endurance would have been, say 2/3rds the cost (as cost won't scale linearly). Thus something like 34k custom build cost vs. 12k for the actual Endurance. Plus some additional customization costs for the Endurance that must have been added on afterwards.

In any case, well over twice the cost to buy a custom ship for likely the biggest expense of the expedition!
(I suppose the cost ratio would have been guessed by anyone buying a depreciated used car vs. a new one...)

What about the diagonally reinforced Deutschland ship, mentioned in this article?

Shackleton was well aware of it, as he had wanted to buy it for his earlier 1907 expedition. But as wikipedia notes:

Thus at one point even 11,000 pounds, less than Endurance's cost, was too much for his finances.

So I won't write Shackleton off as being a dumbass when it came to choosing a ship. But it still bears looking into, just what the Endurance's structure was, how it compares to the Fram and Discovery and Deutschland -- and whether any useful reinforcements could have added at moderate cost within a reasonable time.

Cost was certainly a factor. If you don't have £50,000 available, but can scrounge up £11,600, then your choices are to either go in the cheaper ship or don't go at all. Men like Shackleton don't wait for the money to turn up. They do what they can with what they can get now.

Also worth noting is that the design compromises required to make a ship really good at freezing into pack ice tend to make it relatively miserable to live with at other times. It'll have a hull shape that yields a less comfortable motion in ocean waves. It'll be heavier for its length and beam, thus slower and less able to get out of the way of bad weather. It'll be crisscrossed internally by beams and braces that make it awkward to live and work aboard. A higher percentage of its total displacement will be its own structure, leaving less for people and cargo; thus, it needs to be bigger for the same usable capacity. That, in turn, makes it more expensive to maintain and operate after you've paid off the higher initial cost.

Designing Endurance to handle bumping into ice floes, but not to freeze into pack ice, was a perfectly reasonable decision for the ship's original mission. Picking it for the expedition was a justified risk, against the backdrop of all the other insane risks being taken by the very nature of the expedition. Letting it freeze into the pack ice was not planned or wanted – it was simply the only possible option left to Shackleton after all other options had been closed off by conditions that, until they happened, could only be foreseen as a vague and imprecise probability or possibility. //

atomicpowerrobot Smack-Fu Master, in training
3y
66
ramases said:
It is called the Action Fallacy. It describes our tendency to elevate leaders who appear decisive in a crisis over leaders who manage to avoid the crisis in the first place.

Martin Gutmann talks about it specifically within the context of Ernest Shackleton:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Z9IpTVfUg
Click to expand...

The Action Fallacy isn't really appropriate here b/c the bar isn't "not getting stuck in the Antarctic Ice" but rather "crossing the Antarctic continent by land first". First being a critical part of that bar. It was difficult enough to secure funding for these "Exploration Age" adventures but nobody was going to fund anyone to do it second.

By the definition of the Action Fallacy, you are a better leader than Shackleton b/c you did not get a bunch of men stuck in the ice in the Antarctic by choosing the wrong ship. But you also didn't attempt to be the first person to cross the Antarctic continent by land.

Shackleton had previously nearly made it to be the first person to reach the South Pole, having to turn around and very nearly starving on his return journey, after which he lost out on that particular honor to Roald Amundsen. His "settling" for the Endurance was likely a concession made in an attempt to win honors for himself, his (volunteer) crew, and his country.

Of course you evaluate the risks, but at a certain point, for the immortal honors of doing something first, you pays your moneys and you takes your chances.

His legendary advertisement for the expedition read:
"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."
Now that may have been real, or it may have been apocryphal, but it does accurately represent the situation that all of the men knowingly signed up for.

icosapode said:
I personally think it's important to have a clear eyed understanding of people who are often held up as heroes. A more nuanced picture that includes their faults as well as strengths doesn't diminish the things they did achieve after all.
That negates the point of having heroes though. We don't celebrate heroes for their faults. We all have faults - pointing out that they are no different is counterproductive. We celebrate them for the things they DID achieve beyond the standard works of men and women. Sniping at dead men who did great things b/c they weren't perfect is petty and driven by envy.

You don't have to idolize Shackleton's trip planning to recognize him as the type of man you want when the chips are down. As was said of him:
“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

p-chapman Ars Centurion
7y
220
Continuing trying to be an amateur historian in the time span of only a few minutes -- There's a lot more back and forth one can get into, regarding Shackelton's knowledge of ice and choice of ships.

Shackleton certainly knew something about building for ice, so he wasn't entirely ignorant:

[Edit: That's sort of the TL;DR of this long winded post. Shackleton certainly had some experience with ships for ice. Getting a custom built ship probably was far too much for his finances. As arjalon wrote, it was likely Endurance or nothing.]

For a 1902 British government expedition, with Robert F. Scott in charge, and Shackleton as 3rd officer or something, the custom built ship RRS Discovery was described this way:
Having observed previous expedition boats, particularly Nansen’s Fram, he [Scott] knew how to maximize the Discovery’s chances of not becoming enmeshed in the ice. The ship had therefore been designed with a well-rounded, bulbous hull made from thick wooden beams which meant it could rise up without being crushed by the extreme pressure caused by million-ton ice floes on the move.
[in Ranulph Fiennes' book on Shackleton]

Well, a quick look at pics makes the Discovery look fairly conventional, with some slab sides up top at least, and wikipedia says this:

Early discussions on building a dedicated polar exploration ship considered replicating Fridtjof Nansen's ship Fram, but that vessel was designed specifically for working through the pack ice of the Arctic. The British ship would have to cross thousands of miles of open ocean before reaching the Antarctic, so a more conventional design was chosen.

Still, it goes on to describe all the various heavy wooden construction used in the ship, so it was heavily reinforced, in some manner. But I don't know about whether diagonal reinforcing, as opposed to heavier hull, ribs, and cross beams. (The Fram had some diagonals.)

Whatever the details of its construction, the Discovery was stuck in Antarctic ice for two years. And came out OK.

So it might not have been a Fram-like gold standard, but would have been well regarded as very suitable.

Ok, if Shackleton would have known about what seemed to work in the Antarctic ice, why did Shackleton cheap out for the Endurance?

Wikipedia suggests that the fully equipped, custom-built Discovery cost 51,000 pounds.
Ignoring British inflation adjustments over the next decade or so, Endurance was bought for 11,600 pounds. (And he also spent 3,200 pounds on the Aurora, the smaller 2nd ship for the expedition group at the other side of the Antarctic continent -- this was all about an Antarctic land crossing, after all.) However, the Discovery was slightly over twice the GRT (gross registered tonnage) of the Endurance. (GRT isn't always the best metric, as for example the bulbous Fram, shorter than the Endurance, still has a larger GRT.)

So let's say that a smaller custom-built ship the size of the Endurance would have been, say 2/3rds the cost (as cost won't scale linearly). Thus something like 34k custom build cost vs. 12k for the actual Endurance. Plus some additional customization costs for the Endurance that must have been added on afterwards.

In any case, well over twice the cost to buy a custom ship for likely the biggest expense of the expedition!
(I suppose the cost ratio would have been guessed by anyone buying a depreciated used car vs. a new one...)

What about the diagonally reinforced Deutschland ship, mentioned in this article?

Shackleton was well aware of it, as he had wanted to buy it for his earlier 1907 expedition. But as wikipedia notes:
Unfortunately, Christiansen's price – £11,000, or approximately £1,150,000 in 2018 terms[3] – was beyond Shackleton's means; he eventually acquired the much older, smaller Nimrod for around half of Bjørn's price
Thus at one point even 11,000 pounds, less than Endurance's cost, was too much for his finances.

So I won't write Shackleton off as being a dumbass when it came to choosing a ship. But it still bears looking into, just what the Endurance's structure was, how it compares to the Fram and Discovery and Deutschlan -- and whether any useful reinforcements could have added at moderate cost within a reasonable time.

Again, this is all a quick & dirty look at the subject and I'm sure one can find more and better evidence for all sorts of opinions & counter opinions.

Rirere Ars Centurion
12y
263
Subscriptor++
Wheels Of Confusion said:
Seems to me competence might include not making a voyage in a ship you're well-informed isn't up to the task. That's like having to make an important cross-continental road trip on a beater with bad spark plugs.

Now now, I didn't say that the competence was all Shackleton!

While I do think Shackleton demonstrated some admirable on-the-ice leadership (but also some questionable decisions, of which the most infamous is probably his treatment of the carpenter, McNish), the name I was actually thinking of was Frank Worsley, who navigated during the journey of the James Caird through 800 miles of the nastiest weather and waves imaginable using a sextant and brief moments of sun, hitting an island at that distance that was more or less the size of a speck compared to the open seas.

wow, that's a long sentence oops //

ramases Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
14y
8,332
Subscriptor++
Wheels Of Confusion said:
Seems to me competence might include not making a voyage in a ship you're well-informed isn't up to the task. That's like having to make an important cross-continental road trip on a beater with bad spark plugs.

It is called the Action Fallacy. It describes our tendency to elevate leaders who appear decisive in a crisis over leaders who manage to avoid the crisis in the first place.

Martin Gutmann talks about it specifically within the context of Ernest Shackleton:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Z9IpTVfUg //

Nooge Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
11y
188
Subscriptor
TheColinous said:
There is no accounting for the urge "If I don't get there first, the wrong 'un will get there before me" to explain why people take risks that in hindsight prove less than intelligent.

The thing is this was his already his third trip to Antartica, having failed twice (on the Discovery and Nimrod expeditions) to be first to the pole (Amundsen was first). He was already knighted. But he wanted to be first to cross the entire Antarctic from sea to sea. Despite his failure on Endurance he chose to return to the Antarctic a fourth time but died of a heart attack en route. The guy just couldn’t get enough.

There’s a podcast called Cautionary Tales that I highly recommend in general, but especially the mini series on the Antarctic expeditions of Scott and Amundsen, the two explorers whose race to the South Pole was intertwined. It explores the motivations of the men and how that affected their decisions and errors.

Here’s the first episode
View: https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/south-pole-race-david-and-goliath-on-ice //

c1josh Seniorius Lurkius
15y
5
When the 'Endurance' was launched (as 'Polaris') in Dec. 1912, as a ship designed for interaction with ice, it was not designed for extended polar exploration. It was built to bring wealthy tourists to the edges of the ice for hunting big game. 'Fram' a true polar exploration ship was launched 20 years earlier and successfully survived extended periods of time frozen into pack ice in the Arctic. She was designed by Colin Archer for the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen.
The key design feature was a hull that didn't include any vertical portions below the waterline. It was designed to be lifted by the ice as the pressure increased, not crushed. And it was build HEAVILY, at 5m shorter and 50 tons heavier than 'Endurance'. //

Oldmanalex Ars Legatus Legionis
13y
11,321
Subscriptor++
citizencoyote said:
It's not criticizing Shackleton, it's asking a very valid question: why did someone with so much experience, knowledge, and preparation make such an obvious mistake/gamble? Was it hubris? Lack of funding? A combination of both? Some other reason? We won't ever know because Shackleton never explained his reasoning.

In a nutshell: the article doesn't say, "Wow, what a bonehead Shackleton was," it asks, "Why would someone otherwise so experienced make this choice?"
Because it was that or nothing. And Shackleton, like the other great explorers of the age, was a risk-taker. Any person who would take a wooden boat deep into the Weddell (or the Beaufort) Sea is someone who has more than my tolerance for risk. And risk-taking involves an assumption that bad luck will not occur. Erebus and Terror sailed on an assumption that they would not enter the Arctic in the three coldest successive years of the 19th century, and when they did, they were buggered. Scott did not assume that the Antarctic winter would be so unusually cold that his sled runners would be unable to melt a lubricating water layer, and Shackleton did not assume that he would be caught in an unusually bad Antarctic ice season.

And look at the timing. In August 1914, there were other things on most peoples' minds. And Shackleton's misjudgments here cost several men great hardship, and one several appendages. At the same time, the world leaders made decisions that killed over 20 million.

And look at ourselves. We know the risks we are taking, and the consequences. But, we are drifting into both a loss of our (relative) freedom, and a possible human extinction, because we cannot tell a few hundred greedy psychopaths to change course on global destruction. I think Shackleton would have been embarrassed on our behalf. //

matt_w Ars Scholae Palatinae
17y
1,169
One of my favorite songs is a Chris Thile cover of a Josh Ritter song that romanticizes this story.

View: https://youtu.be/_n3wHljJQ4M?si=RyGPFIQVEsiwEww8

In 1915, intrepid British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months in the Antarctic after their ship, Endurance, was trapped by pack ice, eventually sinking into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. Miraculously, the entire crew survived. The prevailing popular narrative surrounding the famous voyage features two key assumptions: that Endurance was the strongest polar ship of its time, and that the ship ultimately sank after ice tore away the rudder.

However, a fresh analysis reveals that Endurance would have sunk even with an intact rudder; it was crushed by the cumulative compressive forces of the Antarctic ice with no single cause for the sinking. Furthermore, the ship wasn't designed to withstand those forces, and Shackleton was likely well aware of that fact, according to a new paper published in the journal Polar Record. Yet he chose to embark on the risky voyage anyway. //

The same shipyard that modified Deutschland had also just signed a contract to build Endurance (then called Polaris). So both Shackleton and the shipbuilders knew how destructive compressive ice could be and how to bolster a ship against it. Yet Endurance was not outfitted with diagonal beams to strengthen its hull. And knowing this, Shackleton bought Endurance anyway for his 1914–1915 voyage. In a 1914 letter to his wife, he even compared the strength of its construction unfavorably with that of the Nimrod, the ship he used for his 1907–1909 expedition. So Shackleton had to know he was taking a big risk.

I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.

But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened? //

One of the most striking features of the disease is the disproportion between its severity and the simplicity of the cure. Today we know that scurvy is due solely to a deficiency in vitamin C, a compound essential to metabolism that the human body must obtain from food. Scurvy is rapidly and completely cured by restoring vitamin C into the diet.

Except for the nature of vitamin C, eighteenth century physicians knew this too. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another. //

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world—depression, autism, hypertension, obesity—will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious? //

But the villain here is just good old human ignorance, that master of disguise. We tend to think that knowledge, once acquired, is something permanent. Instead, even holding on to it requires constant, careful effort.

DaveGinOly in reply to ztakddot. | September 5, 2025 at 1:32 am
A portion of deaths during the “Spanish” flu pandemic were almost certainly iatrogenic. Patients, many of them young soldiers, were treated with what we now know were fatally toxic doses of the miracle drug of the day – aspirin. Modern analysis of the day’s post mortems show many deaths displaying characteristics of salicylate poisoning – pneumonia-like wet and hemorrhaging lungs.

lichau in reply to DaveGinOly. | September 6, 2025 at 3:51 pm
Bingo.
I read that they were absolutely pounding aspirin. 20g/day or more.

Historic interpreter taught millions to program on Commodore and Apple computers.

On Wednesday, Microsoft released the complete source code for Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Version 1.1, the 1978 interpreter that powered the Commodore PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64, and Apple II through custom adaptations. The company posted 6,955 lines of assembly language code to GitHub under an MIT license, allowing anyone to freely use, modify, and distribute the code that helped launch the personal computer revolution.

"Rick Weiland and I (Bill Gates) wrote the 6502 BASIC," Gates commented on the Page Table blog in 2010. "I put the WAIT command in.". //

At just 6,955 lines of assembly language—Microsoft's low-level 6502 code talked almost directly to the processor. Microsoft's BASIC squeezed remarkable functionality into minimal memory, a key achievement when RAM cost hundreds of dollars per kilobyte.

In the early personal computer space, cost was king. The MOS 6502 processor that ran this BASIC cost about $25, while competitors charged $200 for similar chips. Designer Chuck Peddle created the 6502 specifically to bring computing to the masses, and manufacturers built variations of the chip into the Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, and millions of Commodore computers. //

Why old code still matters
While modern computers can't run this 1978 assembly code directly, emulators and FPGA implementations keep the software alive for study and experimentation. The code reveals how programmers squeezed maximum functionality from minimal resources—lessons that remain relevant as developers optimize software for everything from smartwatches to spacecraft.

This kind of officially sanctioned release is important because without proper documentation and legal permission to study historical software, future generations risk losing the ability to understand how early computers worked in detail. //

the Github repository Microsoft created for 6502 BASIC includes a clever historical touch as a nod to the ancient code—the Git timestamps show commits from July 27, 1978.

Perhaps the most famous "holy relic" is the Shroud of Turin, an old linen cloth that retains a distinct impression of the body of a crucified mine (both front and back). The legend is that Jesus himself was wrapped in the shroud upon his death around 30 CE, although modern scientific dating methods revealed the shroud is actually a medieval artifact dating to between 1260 and 1390 CE. A 3D designer named Cícero Moraes has created a 3D digital reconstruction to lend further credence to the case for the shroud being a medieval forgery, according to a paper published in the journal Archaeometry.

Moraes developed computer models to simulate draping a sheet on both a 3D human form and a bas-relief carving to test which version most closely matched the figure preserved in the shroud. He concluded that the latter was more consistent with the shroud's figure, meaning that it was likely created as an artistic representation or a medieval work of art. It was certainly never draped around an actual body. Most notable was the absence of the so-called "Agamemnon mask effect," in which a human face shrouded in fabric appears wider once flattened.

Iran’s wind catchers stand as a reminder of how ancient civilisations have adapted to the region’s harsh desert environment.

A new portrait of the founding father challenges the long-held perception of Thomas Jefferson as a benevolent slaveholder. //

With five simple words in the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—Thomas Jefferson undid Aristotle’s ancient formula, which had governed human affairs until 1776: “From the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” In his original draft of the Declaration, in soaring, damning, fiery prose, Jefferson denounced the slave trade as an “execrable commerce ...this assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties.” As historian John Chester Miller put it, “The inclusion of Jefferson’s strictures on slavery and the slave trade would have committed the United States to the abolition of slavery.”

That was the way it was interpreted by some of those who read it at the time as well. Massachusetts freed its slaves on the strength of the Declaration of Independence, weaving Jefferson’s language into the state constitution of 1780. The meaning of “all men” sounded equally clear, and so disturbing to the authors of the constitutions of six Southern states that they emended Jefferson’s wording. “All freemen,” they wrote in their founding documents, “are equal.” The authors of those state constitutions knew what Jefferson meant, and could not accept it. The Continental Congress ultimately struck the passage because South Carolina and Georgia, crying out for more slaves, would not abide shutting down the market. //

But in the 1790s, Davis continues, “the most remarkable thing about Jefferson’s stand on slavery is his immense silence.” And later, Davis finds, Jefferson’s emancipation efforts “virtually ceased.”

Somewhere in a short span of years during the 1780s and into the early 1790s, a transformation came over Jefferson.

Ersatz-11 emulates an entire DEC PDP-11 system in software while running on low-cost PC hardware. It outperforms all of the hardware PDP-11 replacements on the market, outstripping them by a particularly wide margin in disk-intensive applications.

The PDP-11 was, and is, an extremely successful and influential family of machines which has spanned over two decades from the early 1970s through the mid 1990s. This note is an attempt to gather some of the knowledge on this family and present it for the benefit of those who are enthusiasts, curious, or downright confused as to what the -11 was and is, and how it related and still relates to its world.

What operating systems were written for the PDP-11?

Made by a pharmacist whose son was sick with croup, Vicks VapoRub saw skyrocketing sales during the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak.

For most people, memories of childhood coughs and colds are synonymous with a menthol-smelling ointment in a dark blue jar with a turquoise cap.

For more than a century, Vicks VapoRub has been a household name across continents. How it became one has roots in the Spanish flu pandemic in the early 20th century.

The ingenious American engineering behind early sequential signals in Ford Mustangs and Mercury Cougars

By rotating a cam assembly, three lobes completed circuits for individual bulbs: inner, middle, and outer.
The electric Ford Mustang Mach E SUV is the latest FoMoCo product to feature sequential turn signals, blinking taillights that show, by flashing individual LED bulbs, the direction you’re turning. But what if I told you this is old technology, nothing new, and first saw use in the mid-1960s?

First introduced on the 1965 Ford Thunderbird and popularized on the more powerful Ford Mustang and Mercury Cougar, sequential turn signals were a novel way to differentiate Ford products from the rest of the muscle cars.