The only total lunar eclipse of 2010 will be visible from all of North America on Monday night/Tuesday morning. That won't happen again until 2014.
The entire 72 minutes of the total lunar eclipse will be visible from all of North and South America, the northern and western part of Europe, and a small part of northeast Asia including Korea and much of Japan. Totality will also be visible in its entirety from the North Island of New Zealand and Hawaii.
In all, an estimated 1.5 billion people will have an opportunity to enjoy the best part of this lunar show.
In other parts of the world, either only the partial stages of the eclipse will be visible or the eclipse will occur when it's daytime and the moon is not above their local horizon.
The moon might take on some odd colors during the eclipse. This is the first lunar eclipse during the winter solstice in almost 500 years. Link -via reddit
If there were any doubt that Judy Garland had the greatest movie line of all time in The Wizard of Oz, take a look at how many other movies have used it! See a list of films used in this supercut at fourfour. Link -via Buzzfeed
I didn't know until just now, but December 14th is Monkey Day! {wiki} The day is set aside to raise awareness about monkey issues, monkeys in the news, and ways you can help monkeys (apes and other primates are included as well). In honor of the occasion, holiday founder Casey Sorrow put together a roundup of monkey news, links, and videos from the past year for your education and entertainment. Link
Use this handy chart from Randall Munroe of xkcd (or better yet, memorize it) to become a whiz at tic-tac-toe! The chart shown for "x" should be used when you have the first turn. The red x is your response for the various scenarios. At the site you'll find a second chart for "o" which is what you use if you have the the second turn. Link -via The Daily What
NASA scientists collected images from the Hubble space telescope and other sources and knitted them together to give us a visual representation of all the known galaxies in the universe, from the perspective of our tiny little spot. Cosmic. Link
DC Comics published one of the strangest comic books ever, Superman vs. Muhammad Ali in 1978 and reissued it last month. NPR's Glen Weldon interviewed journalist Chris Klimek about the matchup of the century. Here's the setup:
No sooner does reporter Clark Kent stumble across Muhammad Ali shooting hoops in Metropolis' "inner city ghetto" than an despotic alien named Rat'lar appears to talk intergalatic trash. Specifically, Rat'lar is Emperor of the warlike Scrubb race, and he challenges earth's champion to fisticuffs. If said Earth champion loses, Earth will be destroyed. If said champion wins, Earth will be spared.
The question: Who will be Earth's champion? Superman claims the right, but Ali points out — quite rightly — that Superman is a Kryptonian, not an Earthman. Rat'lar isn't having any of this Terran shilly-shallying — he's got minions to yell at, and that fist of his doesn't shake itself, after all — so he orders the two men to decide the issue by duking it out in 24 hours' time.
It gets stranger as it goes. http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/11/16/131353485/float-like-a-snagriff-sting-like-a-fish-snake-superman-vs-muhammad-ali -via mental_floss
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, remains one of the most infamous events in U.S. history. Yet the spy who played a key role in the sneak attack is a forgotten man, unknown even to many World War II buffs.
UNDER COVER
On March 27, 1941, a 27-year-old junior diplomat named Tadashi Morimura arrived in Honolulu to take his post as vice-consul at the Japanese consulate. But that was just a cover- "Morimura" was really Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese Imperial Navy Intelligence officer. His real mission: to collect information about the American military installations in and around Pearl Harbor.
Relations between the United States and Japan had been strained throughout the 1930s and were now deteriorating rapidly. In 1940, after years of Japanese aggression in China and Southeast Asia, Washington froze Japanese assets in the U.S., cut off exports of oil and war material, and moved the headquarters of the U.S. Navy's Pacific fleet from southern California to Pearl Harbor, bringing it 2,400 miles closer to Japan.
The fleet was in Pearl Harbor to stay. But if Japan wanted its funds unfrozen and the crippling economic embargo lifted, the United States insisted that all Japanese troops had to leave China and Southeast Asia. This was a demand that Japan was unwilling to meet. Instead, it began preparing for war, and by early 1941, the eyes of Japan's military planners had turned to Pearl Harbor.
THE AMERICAN DESK
Yoshikawa had become a spy in a roundabout way. He'd been a promising naval academy graduate, but his career hopes were dashed in 1936 when, just two years after graduation, stomach problems (reportedly brought on by heavy drinking) forced him out of the Japanese Navy. The following year he landed a desk job with Naval Intelligence, where he was put to work learning all that he could about the U.S. Navy.
From 1937 until 1940, Yoshikawa pored over books, magazines, newspapers, brochures, reports filed by Japanese diplomats and intelligence officers from all over the world, and anything else he could find that would give him information about the U.S. Navy. "By 1940 I was the Naval General Staff's acknowledged American expert," he recounted in a 1960 article in the journal Naval Institute Proceedings. "I knew by then every U.S. man-of-war and aircraft by name, hull number, configuration, and technical characteristics. I knew, too, a great deal of information about the U.S. naval bases at Manila, Guam, and Pearl Harbor."
A 27-year-old elephant named Devidasan developed a painful 19-inch crack in his tusk over the past five years. CV Pradeep, a dentist in Kerala, India, did some research and decided to fill the crack with the same resin used to repair human teeth. The difference: repairing the tusk took 47 tubes of resin in a two-hour operation!
"It was literally an elephantine task, because we had to find specialist equipment and modify it," Dr Pradeep said.
"The main difference between this and a similar operation carried out on humans is that we were not able to use X-ray screening, because none of our mobile X-ray units was large enough to suit the elephant's needs."
Dr Pradeep, a professor at the PSM dental college in the town of Trichur, said that if the crack remained untreated dirt would have gathered inside it and potentially caused a deadly infection.
The elephant was not tranquilized, and remained cooperative through the procedure. The repair seems to have eased his toothache. Link -via Arbroath
Greedo may not have shot first, but at least you thought the Star Wars character was male. Well, the character might be male, but he was played by two actors because of scheduling problems: Maria de Aragon and Paul Blake. I believe this photo probably shows Aragon in costume. -via Geeks Are Sexy
A few days ago, Allie Brosch described in detail the confusion her dogs went through when wearing their first shoes. So you can witness that sort of thing yourself, here is Booba, a presumably normal Shi Tzu wearing his new yellow shoes. He doesn't appear to be accustomed to wearing shoes. -via Buzzfeed
As the 19th century turned into the 20th century, woman tried their hands at sports that they were previously prohibited from participating in. See vintage photographs of women playing soccer, baseball, cricket, bowling, tennis, and other sports. The boxing match pictured here took place on March 7th, 1912 between Mrs. Edwards and Fraulein Kussin. Link
You've probably seen the 1957 move The Bridge On the River Kwai, but you might not know how much of the film was real and how much was fictionalized. The real history of how the railway between Burma and China was built, including the bridge, is a horrific story. The British didn't build the railway in the 19th century because it would be too expensive. During World War II, the invading Japanese took on the project, but expected it to take five years to complete. Those plans were drawn before they found a source of free labor: the Allied POWs. Because of the inhuman amount of labor forced on the prisoners, the railway line that was expected to take five years to complete was ready in only 16 months.
Starvation provisions, overloading of work, dismal or absent accommodation and sanitation, and the individual viciousness of Japanese and Korean engineers and guards, took their expected toll. Disease (predominantly dysentery, malaria, beriberi and cholera), brutality (69 men were beaten to death by their guards) and 12 to 18 hour daily work shifts made for a high death rate. In fact, the work went on 24 hours a day with the aid of oil pot lamps and bamboo/wood fires that were kept burning all night long. When looking down on the wok area at night it looked like working in the “jaws of hell” - thus the workers gave it the name “Hellfire Pass”.
Read the rest of the story at Environmental Graffiti. Link
In the fourth century B.C. a Greek named Democritus (known as the "laughing philosopher" because he was always making fun of people) proposed a theory of matter that remained uncontested well into the 19th century. (This was before he went mad and blinded himself with hot glass in an effort to heighten his intellectual acuity.)
Anyway, Democritus suggested that all matter is made up of tiny indestructible pieces that he named atomos, meaning undivided. Today it's known that atoms can certainly be broken up into subatomic particles, and those particles can be broken into more particles, and so on. (Image credit: Flickr user edgeplot)
AND THEN THERE WERE THREE
For about 2,200 years, scientists were happy enough with the idea that matter was made up of atoms. This all changed in 1886 when E. Goldstein discovered the positively charged particle that he named "proton", after the Greek root proto, meaning "first", since it was the first subatomic particle ever to be discovered.
Shortly after that, in 1897, the English physicist J.J. Thomson (who also only used his initials -is it some sort of club?) discovered negatively charged particles that he called "corpuscles," which today are known as electrons.
In 1932, English scientist Sir James Chadwick (finally, a man with a real name!) discovered the neutron, the subatomic particle that lacks a charge.
THREE QUARKS FOR MUSTER MARK!
Of course, scientists were not content to stop at having three subatomic particles -they're funny that way- so they feverishly looked for more. And sure enough, by splitting a proton or a neutron, smaller subatomic particle were created. These particle were named "quarks" in 1964 by scientist Murray Gell-Mann, who got the name from the following quote in James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn't got much of a bark/And sure any he has it's all beside the mark."
* Since 1939, he has starred in more than 175 films.
* He's been nominated for three Oscars, and won one -in 1958, for "Knighty Knight, Bugs" (with Yosemite Sam).
* Every year from 1945 to 1961, he was voted "top animated character" by movie theater owners (when they still showed cartoons in theaters).
* In 1985 he became only the 2nd cartoon character to be given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (Mickey Mouse was the first).
* For almost 30 years, starting in 1960, he had one of the top-rated shows in Saturday morning TV.
* In 1976, when researchers polled Americans on their favorite characters, real and imaginary, Bugs came in second ...behind Abraham Lincoln.
THE INSPIRATIONS
Bugs was born in the 1930s, but cartoon historians say his ancestry goes further back. A few direct antecedents:
* Zomo. You may not have heard of this African folk-rabbit. but he's world famous. Joe Adamson writes in Bugs Bunny: Fifty Years and Only One Grey Hare:
Like jazz and rock'n'roll, Bugs has at least some of his roots in black culture. Zomo is the trickster rabbit from Central and Eastern Africa who gained audience sympathy by being smaller than his oppressors and turning the tables on them through cleverness -thousands of years before Eastman invented film. A con artist, a masquerader, ruthless and suave, in control of the situation. Specialized in impersonating women.
The game of marbles is estimated to go back 5,000 years. Through most of their history, marbles were made of stone, bone, clay, or whatever material was available. Truly round marbles were a rare and expensive toy, but we eventually found ways to make enough of them for everyone.
1. The glass maker Elias Greiner Vetters Sohn worked for Farbglashuette Lauscha, a German glass company founded in the 1500s. In 1846 he invented the marbelschere, or marble scissors, with which a glassmaker could cut a rope of glass and forms balls with the soft pieces. Greiner received a patent in 1849 for the invention of "artificial semi-precious and precious stone balls", or as we call them, glass marbles. To produce enough of these hand-made marbles, the company gave Greiner his own factory.
2. Marbles were first mass-produced in Akron, Ohio in 1884 when the Akron Toy Company began producing clay marbles. The man behind the marbles, Samuel C. Dyke, founded The American Marble & Toy Manufacturing Company in 1891, which became the biggest American toy company of the 19th century. For the first time, marbles became cheap enough for children to buy them with their own money.
3. Samuel Dyke also produced handmade glass marbles in Akron. In 1890, he hired master glass maker James Harvey Leighton to train workers in making glass marbles. Eventually, Dyke's factory was turning out a million marbles a day. When it burned in 1904, so many children rummaged through the ruins for marbles that, for safety's sake, the remains of the building were buried. But there was no shortage of marbles for sale, as dozens of companies in the Akron area were making marbles and other toys at the time.
4. Danish immigrant Martin F. Christensen invented a machine to mass-produce glass marbles in 1902, but didn't receive a patent on his creation until 1905. However, by then he had already opened a marble factory in, yes, Akron, Ohio which cranked out 12 million glass marbles every year.
5. In the mid-1990s, the site of the burned American Marble factory was a parking lot. The city decided to replace it with a park, and as the ground was dug up, thousands of very old marbles were uncovered. So a portion of the park became home to the American Toy Marble Museum, which opened to the public in 2002. Many of the unearthed marbles are on display at the museum in Akron.
