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Project Mercury was America’s entry into the Space Race and was intended to put a human into space before the Soviet Union did. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957 caused a near-panic in the United States and led to desperate calls to “catch up”. President Eisenhower responded by establishing the National … Continue reading Project Mercury →
The board game Tak (pronounced to rhyme with “back”) originally appeared as a prop in the fantasy/scifi book series The Kingkiller Chronicle, and was then brought to life in the real world. History In 1994, aspiring author Patrick Rothfuss began work on his first book, a scifi/fantasy story which was originally titled The Song of Flame and … Continue reading The Fantasy Game of Tak →
The Vigenere Cipher is an encryption system that was developed over 500 years ago, and a variant of it was still being used by Soviet KGB spies in the 1950s. Ever since people have been writing, they have been searching for ways to make their written messages secure. This has historically been most important for … Continue reading The Vigenere Cipher →
In October 1943, inmates at the Nazi extermination camp in Sobibor, in Poland, organized an uprising that destroyed the camp and led to the escape of hundreds of prisoners. In January 1942, a group of fifteen Nazi government officials met in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin with Reinhard Heydrich, second-in-command of the SS under Heinrich Himmler. … Continue reading The Sobibor Rebellion →
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Pain Management before Anaesthetics JamesHoare Wed, 03/12/2025 - 09:02
One often hears that there’s no money to be made in music anymore. But then, there was no money to be made in music when Bob Dylan started his career either—at least according to Bob Dylan. “If you could just support yourself, you were doin’ good,” he says in an interview clip included in the […]
This piece picks up where Part 1 of Peter Kaufman’s article left off yesterday… The epistemological nightmare we seem to be in, bombarded over our screens and speakers with so many moving-image messages per day, false and true, is at least in part due to the paralysis that we – scholars, journalists, and regulators, but […]
