British intelligence agents secretly discussed plans to attack the Soviet Union with pigeons armed with biological weapons, documents made public by the National Archives reveal. The bizarre Cold War scheme was hatched by Wing Commander WDL Rayner, a Royal Air Force officer who, in the aftermath of World War II, saw suicide pigeons as the future of warfare
Professor Paulo Galluci and his team have built a working model of Leonard Da Vinci’s clockwork powered car, designed in 1478. Previous attempts have been made to create the vehicle, but they failed to work properly. This is thought to be due to a misunderstanding of the original design, which is corrected in the new model. Apart from the 1/3 scale replica, the team have also made a full size model but have not dared to test it. Professor Galluzzi explained; It is a very powerful machine. It could run into something and do serious damage
Tim Berners-Lee, British inventor of the World Wide Web, has won Finland’s first Millennium Technology Prize. Berners-Lee, who heads the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, revolutionised the Internet in 1991 when he devised a way to organise, link and browse Net pages
During the Cold War, British researchers developed a nuclear landmine, kept operational during cold conditions by packing it full of live chickens. The bomb is supposedly on display at the National Archives in Kew, so if you live in London you can go and see for yourselves
Raccoons released by Hermann Goering in Germany in 1934 to enrich the Reich’s fauna
are threatening to succeed where their Nazi benefactors failed by conquering Europe. They have become so successful that German authorities revealed this week that raccoon numbers are now at record levels — with more than a million in Germany alone — via Darren Barefoot
The Enigma-E is a kit that enables you to build your own electronic variant of the famous Enigma coding machine that was used by the German army during WWII. It works just like a real Enigma and is compatible with an M3 and M4 Enigma as well as the standard Service Machines. A message encrypted on, say, a real Enigma M4 can be read on the Enigma-E and vice versa
HMS Beagle, the ship Darwin travelled on during his famous voyage, may have been found. Marine archaeologists believe they have found the ship, which has been resting at the bottom of some Essex marshes for the last century
The guys at Something Awful have been doing awful things to the Bayeux Tapestry. A lot of the jokes are lame, but there are a few gems.
My favourite is Apriori‘s A fovl and pestilent congregation of vapovrs hast occvred in me pantaloons
.
Feel free to take a crack yourself — via Making Light
Teller has an interesting article about his search for Donna Delbert, a legendary fire eater from the 40s. Rumored to be the American widow of a British tank gunner killed in the Normandy invasion, she was actually Delbert Hill, a male PFC gone AWOL from the USAF
More than five million aerial photographs of World War II are to be made publicly available on the internet at Evidence in Camera. The pictures will go online on Monday. Taken by the RAF, they were used by Allied commanders to help devise their strategy during the six-year conflict
In an event that most Doctor Who fans thought couldn’t happen, another lost episode of Doctor Who has turned up. It’s Episode Two of the 1965 William Hartnell serial, The Daleks’ Master Plan
. No word yet as to how it will be released, this news is just breaking today apparently. This is great news for fans, as the last time a lost episode was turned up was in 1999, and most folks had given up hope there were any others left to be discovered. For those who don’t know, in the ’70s the BBC routinely junked old stories. Not just Dr Who, but all their shows. Repeats and sales weren’t an issue then. There’s something like 115 or so lost Doctor Who episodes total
Don Baggs, an amateur historian from Monmouth, south Wales, intends leading 5,000 archers to a second battle of Agincourt in an attempt to defeat plans for a wind farm at the historic site in France — via Southerly Buster
Escape from Woomera is a first-person video strategy game, based on Half-Life, in which you play a refugee in the notorious Australian detention centre. The idea is to call attention to the deplorable state of Woomera and the inherent cruelty of the detention process
Nicholas Kristof offered the prize of an Iraqi 250-dinar note with Saddam’s picture for the best name for the Iraq conflict. Many imaginative suggestions rolled in, including; ‘I Waged Two Wars Against Saddam and All I Got Was His Headache’, ‘Visit Scenic Saddam and Gomorrah’, ‘Operation Gee Whiz, This Liberation Thing Seemed a Lot Easier When We Were Drawing It Up Back at the Think Tank’, ‘Mission Implausible: A Job Well Spun’, ‘The War That Cried Wolfowitz’, ‘War of Mass Deception’, ‘Dubya Dubya III’, ‘Mess in Potamia’ and ‘Blood, Baath and Beyond’ — via The Green Man
In 1909, residents of Wilmington, Delaware, were able to subscribe to an online music service that piped phonograph recordings over their telephone lines and through loudspeakers. This was one year after the sheet music publishers were told to get bent by Congress: see, they’d grown alarmed at the prevalence of unauthorized piano rolls and had asked the Congress for a Broadcast-Flag-like regime that would let them veto any new music technology that would endanger their business — like online music delivery — making it illegal. Congress told them to get lost. Good thing we rescued those idiots from themselves back in 1908 — can you imagine a music industry where the most lucrative product in the market was sheet music?
It’s a pattern: the Vaudeville artists sued Marconi over the radio — which made them rich. The movie studios boycotted TV until Disney sold out to get the funds for Disneyland — and TV rights made the studios rich. Jack Valenti told Congress that the VCR was the Boston Strangler of the film industry, and then it doubled his income through pre-recorded tape sales and rentals.
Now, of course, Congress has given up on saving the entertainment industry — and us — from itself. With the Broadcast Flag, new technologies will only come into the market if they don’t disrupt the industries built on the old ones. And with the WIPO Broadcast Treaty in the works, it’s fruitless to pray for some technology safe-haven where we’ll be able to develop our gear in peace, far from the short-sighted, greedy lunacy of the entertainment companies. The FCC should be ashamed of itself.
When plugged up to a phonograph the subscriber’s line is automatically made busy on the automatic switches with which the Wilmington exchange is equipped. Several lines can be connected to the same machine at the same time, if more than one happens to call for the same selection.
Each musical subscriber is supplied with a special directory giving names and numbers of records, and the call number of the music department. When it is desired to entertain a party of friends, the user calls the music department and requests that a certain number be played. He releases and proceeds to fix the megaphone in position. At the same time the music operator plugs up a free phonograph to his line, slips on the record and starts the machine. At the conclusion of the piece the connection is pulled down, unless more performances have been requested.
Russ Kick has proved himself a master at uncovering facts that ‘they’ would prefer you never hear about. The giant Disinformation Guide series edited by Kick has become the definitive place to find revelations about government cover-ups, scientific scams, corporate crimes, medical malfeasance, historical whitewashes, media manipulation, and other knock-your-socks-off secrets and lies. This CD-sized book packs the same powerful punch in a small, attractive package. Among Kick’s amazing discoveries, all thoroughly documented:
- The first genetically modified humans have already been born
- Hitler’s blood relatives are living in the US
- The CIA commits over 100,000 serious crimes per year
- The US planned to explode an atomic bomb on the moon
- An atomic bomb was dropped on North Carolina
- The main hero of portayed in the movie Black Hawk Down is a convicted child molester
- Pope Pius II wrote an erotic book
- Kent State wasn’t the only massacre of US college students during the Vietnam era
- Many of the pioneering feminists opposed abortion
- The world’s museums contain innumerable fakes
- The Government can take your house and land, then sell them to private corporations
- Carl Sagan was an avid pot-smoker
- The suicide rate is highest among the elderly
A uniquely valuable tool to debunk modern mythology and the people and institutions serving it up, 50 Things You’re Not Supposed To Know makes an amazing gift item and will prove just as essential in fashionable bathrooms as on the most well-heeled coffee tables.
Experts at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth have worked out for the first time the true extent of the damage Guy Fawkes would have caused if his daring deed had not been foiled on 5 November 1605. They found that within a radius of about 40m, everything would have been razed to the ground. Within 110m, buildings would have been at least partially destroyed. And some windows would have been blown out even as far as 900m away
The Green Man has dug up another nugget of web goodness.
Simon Waldman was flicking through the November 1938 copy of Homes & Gardens magazine when he found an article on Hitler’s mountain retreat. Noting that the British interiors magazine described Hitler in glowing terms, as if he were the Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen of his day, Waldman thought the article worthy of observation and posted it in his blog. Then the shit hit the fan.
The British Library is a government-owned library that legally has to hold a copy of every book, pamphlet, map, journal, newspaper and piece of sheet music published in the UK. That law has changed and now the Library will be able to collect non-paper resources, such as web sites, electronic journals, CD-ROMs and microfilms. Obviously, the library won’t be archiving everything in these categories, but will be keeping resources of national, historical or academic interest
The White House web site’s use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material is an exercise in historical revisionism. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of Iraq, possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere
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