The History of Tattoos

(YouTube link)

Queen Victoria had a tattoo? We may never know for sure, but tattoos were somewhat of a fad in Victorian society, after sailors came back from Polynesia with them. But tattoos go back as far as human civilization, for various reasons in various places. This TED-Ed animation skims over many of them briefly, and together they reminds us of how universal the art of tattoo really is. You can get the full lesson by Addison Anderson here. -via Digg


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About 20 yrs ago I asked my dad why we had never gone to Poland to visit his relatives in "the old country". Imagine my shock to learn that all of my grandfather's Roman Catholic relatives in Poland were killed in Auschwitz during WWII. I never even considered that their numbers printed on their arms were tattoos. I always think of tattoos as colorful, spiritual and/or fun. Silly me. Thank you for this article. It makes things a bit clearer for me.
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Only on the internet can you read a blog article which is a reprint of a magazine article which is a summary of a television episode.

The meta, it hurts!
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Um, apologies for picking on your spelling, but I think you meant to use the word 'dexterous' (or 'dextrous'; both spellings are okay). That is, unless 'dexterious' is some terrible new hybrid word that people are using.
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One thing to remember about McGyver is that the producers and writers tried to make everything that was explosive or potentially dangerous -not- work if tried in reality. When McGyver would create a chemical mixture to explode out of this or that trap, at least one component would always be off so that kids couldn't blow up their bedrooms at home.

:D
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I think it was in the pilot episode of the A-Team, they escaped a prison with "traaaash baaaaygs" attached to chairs, inflated with frickin' hair dryers! It was an amazing bit of TV.
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My dad told me about an incident in the 1950's on an aircraft carrier where a disgruntled sailor flushed a pound of sodium metal down the toilets and blew them up, disabling them. Needless to say, the sailor was court-martialed, and my dad had a seat on the court. It seems that the key part of getting a major reaction from sodium metal and water is to constrain the reaction, much like the way that gunpowder will burn when unconstrained but explode when constrained.

The problem with Mythbusters is that they often don't think through how to really reproduce a situation and have terrible experimental procedures, such as when they used a bolt-action rifle to test the effects of blocking the barrel of a gun, rather than testing on a semi-automatic like a Colt .45 pistol (which was the original of the myth that they were trying to bust), or when they were testing whether on gets better fuel economy to driving with the windows down on a car or with the air conditioning on - they changed the conditions of the experiment halfway through on that one.
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