Pop rocks

The retro candy confection known as Pop Rocks are made by bubbling carbon dioxide through a solution of molten sugar (mixed with some color and flavorings), which traps the gas as the sugar hardens. It was invented in 1956 as a potential mix-in for Kool-Aid, but didn't work very well and so sat on the metaphorical shelf until the 1970s, when someone had the unprecedented idea of just shoving the damn things in your mouth.  And the rest is history.

Fun to play with, not to eat.

Play-Doh Brand Modelling Compound began life in 1927¹ as a substance for getting soot off of wallpaper. For some time, housewives had been rubbing a homemade goop against the walls to clean them.  I guess the soot had a tendency to stick to it more than to the walls?  Naturally, companies began selling premade mixes of the stuff.  Sadly for the manufacturers, though, the increased use of electric appliances was doing an even better job of removing the soot from the walls of homeowners.  By the mid 1950s, the manufacturers were practically broke.

But in an unexpected reversal of their reversal of fortunes, some of their compound fell into the hands of some Cincinnati schoolchildren. After the shrieking died down, the adults realized that if they removed all of the horrible poisonous cleansing chemicals (boric acid, mostly) from the stuff, and add some friendly dyes, they could market it all over again as a plaything!  You still shouldn't eat it, though, even if it does have a "subtle almond scent."¹

¹http://books.google.com/books?id=jftapGDTmYUC&pg=PA115#v=onepage&q&f=false

Buddhist Hopscotch

According to the Brahmajala Sutta, a part of the Buddhist canonical writings that may go back as far as 500 BCE, the monasteries had some problems with the behavior of their monks.  Amidst the usual sort of prescriptions about proper monkish behavior is a list¹ of games that should not be played, including but not limited to chess (or the local equivalent), mental chess, dice, twenty questions, Pictionary (or the local equivalent), and hopscotch.  It's a very precise list¹, which rather makes you wonder what was going on that such a proscription was deemed necessary.  I'm including links to a fairly typical loose translation² (I've seen more or less the same text in a couple of places), as well as a more literal translation³ with minor exegesis that explains that "hopscotch" is actually "parihārapatha," wherein a diagram is drawn on the ground and one has to jump in the allowable spaces avoiding the lines.  Not that different, is it?

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha_games_list

²http://tipitaka.wikia.com/wiki/Brahmajala_Sutta

³http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html

Bond. Gold Bond.

This has nothing to do with the Bond films, but I was on a roll and figured I'd go with it.

A gold bond is a bond that is backed specifically by gold-- that is, it is repayable only by gold, and only by gold of a specified quality.  This is contrasted with a currency bond, which is repayable in any form of legal tender.  A bond itself is basically a contract that represents a loan, from the bondholder to the bond issuer.  So issuer of a gold bond takes in some money, gives out a piece of paper, and agrees to repay the loan (usually with interest) with gold.

The specification of gold rather than any other currency meant that it was typically offered only by companies that had access to a reliable source of gold, for example mining corporations.  It's somewhat akin to investing in gold (essentially trading money for a promise of gold), so when the price of gold is relatively stable compared to the currency at large (as during a recession), it can become a very attractive proposition.

This impression of reliability and value helps explain why it was chosen in 1882 as the name of a popular concoction of menthol, zinc oxide, and various binders and fillers, often applied to people's sensitive bits.

Bond. Litigious Bond

Yesterday, I talked about how George Lazenby got his lucky break and a chance to be James Bond.  But there's also an interesting story that I didn't know about Sean Connery, or more importantly, why Connery came back in 1983 to do Never Say Never Again.

You see, Dear Reader, back in the beginning, Ian Fleming had a friend by the name of Kevin McClory.  McClory and Fleming (and a few others) would all kick around story ideas, and write screenplay treatments for Fleming's new sensational literary hero.  One of these became the script for Thunderball.

However, both Fleming and McClory ultimately claimed rights to the screenplay, and it was promptly embroiled in a long series of legal rights battles (it was originally going to be the first film).  The courts eventually decided in McClory's favor, and he was all set to use it to launch a competing Bond franchise (can you imagine?), so the producers at Eon (Broccoli et al.) cut a deal-- McClory would get sole producer credit (and presumably gobs of money) for Thunderball if they could make it as part of the main franchise with Connery and the gang.

McClory continued to have dreams of parlaying Thunderball's success (it remains the best earning Bond film after adjustment for inflation) into his own Bond Empire, but he was unable to acquire the rights to any of the other properties from Fleming, leaving him with just the one film.  So what was he to do?  Why, make it again, of course!

So almost 20 years later he set out to remake it bigger and better.  Roger Moore was Bond now, though, and probably had little interest in the Non-Eon production, and frankly was a different kind of Bond anyway and would have been a poor fit for the script.  Fortunately, Connery was still around.  And if you'll recall, he parted company with Eon on somewhat acrimonious grounds.  When McClory approached him with the idea of revisiting his glory days (and presumably gobs of money), he was naturally receptive.  And thus we got Thunderball 2: Electric Boogaloo-- Never Say Never Again.

Bond. Brazen Bond

Back from vacation!  During which, I watched a documentary about the history of the Bond films, from which I learned some things.

I've always had a bit of a soft spot for George Lazenby.  Part of it is just perversity, due to his one-off status, but I really did think that On Her Majesty's Secret Service was a pretty good film.  But there was a lot more going on behind the scenes than I ever realized.

For starters, the role of Bond was only available because Connery had walked out on a multi-movie deal with one left to go.  Connery's relationship with the producers had always been a little complicated-- on the one hand, they recruited him from more or less nowhere, and had to really fight the studio to let him play the part instead of some more established actor.  So they were his champion in one regard.  On the other hand, as a newcomer, he didn't have the leverage that an established actor would have had, so they didn't have to pay him as much, and he rapidly began to chafe under circumstances that he saw as exploitative.  Eventually, after You Only Live Twice (screenplay by Roald Dahl), he'd had enough and walked out.  So there was this movie that needed to get made, and no Bond.

According to the documentary, Lazenby had been waiting for just this opportunity.  According to him, he dressed himself up as Bond in a fancy suit and watch, and more or less forced his way into an interview, lying outrageously in order to convince the producers that he could do the job.  Basically, because (in his mind), playing Bond would mean that he'd get all the chicks.  Seriously, that's what he said in the documentary!  That was, he claimed, basically the whole point of the exercise.  The Wikipedia article about him suggests that this is a slight exaggeration-- while he didn't have much acting experience, he was a professional model, and had had some success in TV commercials, one of which may have landed him an actual interview.

And then, by the time the movie was wrapped and ready for release, he had turned into a hippie, decided that the violence of the character was inappropriate, and that the franchise was destined to be forgotten.  Oh, well.  Everyone makes mistakes.

To boldly go with our full support

In 1962, the Apollo space program was looking for a manufacturer for spacesuits for their budding astronaut program. These suits would need to be strong, flexible, and supportive, with a combination of fabric and metal. Several companies put in bids, but NASA naturally turned to a company that already had experience manufacturing products with just those characteristics-- the industrial division of Playtex.

Source : Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo http://books.google.com/books?id=IT-chpAkCZ0C&pg=PA121

Pool film

Film is(was) made on Celluloid, as everyone knows.  But why?

When the film industry began, the very first films were recorded on a thin film made of paper.  This was clearly sub-optimal, because while the thin paper was appropriately transparent, it was also exceedingly fragile.  So they went looking for a synthetic alternative.

At that point, Celluloid (basically a mix of cellulose nitrate and camphor) was one of the primary commercially available plastics.

It had become commercially successful because the billiard industry at that time was running short of ivory for the making of billiard balls (conservation hadn't really taken a bite out of it yet, but they were honestly having trouble getting enough elephants to keep up with demand inspired by a billiard craze). The Brunswick Billiard company ^{1, 2} (probably?) ran a contest to find a synthetic replacement for billiard balls, and the Hyatt Celluloid Billiard Ball (or a variant thereof) was the winner in roughly 1868 ⁴.  I say probably, because apparently Hyatt never got the prize money ⁴, and the Brunswick company website ³ has does not mention the celluloid balls.  Possibly because although it was a much cheaper and easily acquired material than ivory, the balls themselves didn't perform as well.  Stories of the cellulose exploding are probably apocryphal, though.

Anyway, when the photography and then later the film industry went looking for their alternative, this material was no doubt an obvious choice, and the billiard ball factories were more than happy to supply it to a brand new market.

Sources:
¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billiard_ball#History
² http://youtu.be/7I0rX7t1J0Q (Adam Savage)
³ http://www.brunswickbilliards.com/our_rich_history/important_events/index.html
⁴ http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_2947

History of Shaving

The whole history is actually rather lengthy.  There is archaeological evidence that mankind has been removing unwanted hairs for much longer than recorded history-- according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Prehistoric cave drawings show that clam shells, shark’s teeth, and sharpened flints were used as shaving implements..."  Razors made of gold and copper have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs (about 6000 years old).  But the one fact that stuck in my head, much to my dismay, is the idea that the more plebeian Egyptians, the ones who couldn't afford the fancy razors, removed their problematic hair via pumice stones.  I have to admit, I'm having trouble finding a really authoritative source for this story, but it seems pretty persistent-- I've seen it on quite a number of non-authoritative sites.  Also, ow.

Sources:
http://www.moderngent.com/history_of_shaving/history_of_shaving.php
http://www.ehow.com/facts_5340337_history-behind-women-shaving-legs.html

Google Books search for "shaving with pumice stone Egyptians":
The Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History (One reviewer suggested that the bibliography is "sparse".)
Cory's Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Carthaginian, Babylonian, Egyptian and other authors is a bit better, although a touch random.  At least it feels a little more authentic.

Barbie(tm)

For all of the flack that Mattel gets from the progressives and feminists, much of it admittedly well deserved, it's interesting to remember that when Barbie was first introduced, it was created and designed by women (primarily Ruth Handler, wife of one of the Mattel founders), and was one of a very few dolls on the market with an adult body-- in other words, that did not automatically cast the doll's owner in the role of a mother.  It was intended to be a doll that a girl could imagine herself as, that opened up a great deal of opportunity for unchecked imagination.  It's just too bad they've had so much trouble keeping the momentum of those initial ideas of empowerment.

Word for the Day-- God's Penny

According to the Big Book, God's Penny is ": a penny or small sum paid as earnest money esp. on concluding a purchase or hiring a servant."  It's like saying, "I promise I'll pay you, but in the meantime here's a little something from God to tide you over."

On the one hand, it's kind of nice, since you're getting a little extra.  On the other, the more I think about it the odder it gets.  "Hey, God, what, you can't spare more than a penny?"  Or alternatively, "Um, why does God need a starship servant?"  Also, "You're paying on behalf of God?  Shouldn't that be the Pope's job or something?"  Seriously, the more I think about it the stranger it seems.

Hmm.  A little more research shows that it's not actually supposed to be money from God, but rather money given in the sight of God-- sort of equivalent to "As God is my witness, I will pay you the agreed upon money."  Which is still odd, but I guess not quite as odd.  Because you're still suggesting that the money has some sort of significance to God, which, what?  I mean, that works if you still worship Mammon or something, but the Judeo-Christian God is sort of supposed to be beyond all that.

Mm.  Black's Law Dictionary (or at least what appears to be a poorly edited OCR scan of it) suggests that the small sum was customarily then given to charity or as alms.  Which does more or less finally make sense of the name, actually.  I'm actually sort of disappointed.  This was much more fun when it didn't make any sense at all.  Alas.

Southern Death Cult

Long, long ago (about 8 years) in a cave system far, far away (unless you live near Clarksville, Tennessee), some interesting petroglyphs were discovered.  These cave markings, drawings, and etchings depict (among other things) a mystical warrior in the Mississippian tradition, helping to identify these markings as belonging to a culture that flourished roughly a thousand years ago, stretching along the Mississippi Valley (and possibly the Tennessee River Valley, which Clarksville* is somewhat adjacent to).  This aspect of the Mississippian culture was sometimes called the Southern Death Cult, although that was probably misleading-- the Cult, now mostly referred to as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, was built around martial and cosmological symbology, and when you get war and gods together, you tend to end up with a certain amount of death.  But it wasn't really a "death cult" per se-- they didn't worship death itself or anything.

*Supposedly, the Last Train to Clarksville wasn't specifically headed to Clarksville, TN; it was just a random name that Bobby Hart thought sounded good.

How many Hitlers are there in the German Phone Book?

The answer may surprise you!  It certainly surprised me.  I figured that there were two options, to wit:

First, that all the surviving relatives and anyone else with the same last name wanted to distance themselves from Adolf strongly enough to change their names, or else subsequently found that it was hard to get a date when you had to introduce yourself as, "Hi, I'm Hitlernowaitcomeback...damn."  Either of which (or a combination of the two) would inevitably lead to a phone book completely devoid of Hitlers.

Or, second, that there were a bunch of Germans of no real relation that said to themselves, "Why should we change our name what has been in our family for lo these many generations and is an important part of our identity?"  Which would frankly be perfectly defensible, and kudos to those hypothetical people, who would subsequently fill the German phone directories with a statistically likely sampling of Hitlers.

However, it seems there's a third option.  If we go to Das Telefonbuch, we find... one guy.  I'm not going to put his name here, because he's either some poor random schmuck who doesn't need the headache, or he's some sort of weirdo who changed his name deliberately, in which case he doesn't need the attention.  But it really wasn't what I was expecting, at all.

Some further research shows that the second option really wasn't very likely-- apparently, there were never very many Hitlers.  Adolf's father was probably illegitimate, and his (eventual) adopted father's name was Hiedler.  When Adolf's father was legitimized at the age of 39 (as part of a career move), he took the name for himself, but somewhere along the line the bureaucracy recorded the name as "Hitler" instead.  So the name only went back one generation, and the small number of siblings/cousins appear to have mostly changed their names, left the country, died childless, or some combination of the above.

St. Kazimiers

There's a... well, a building, next town over from our place, of superficially indeterminate function, with a sign hanging outside calling it "St. Kazimiers."  This is not a saint of which I am familiar (to be frank, there are a great many saints of which I am not familiar, so this is no great surprise), but eventually I became curious enough to do a little research.

Kazimier is the Polish spelling of Saint Casimir, originally Casimir Jagiellon, prince of the Kingdom of Poland in the late 15th century.  He died a few years before Columbus sailed, if that gives you a better reference point.  I know it does for me-- I always have trouble keeping historical dates distinct unless I can cross-link them to something else I'm vaguely familiar with ("ok, when popcorn was introduced to the American settlers, it was before J. S. Bach, but after Shakespeare...).  Anyway.

Caz (may I call you Caz?  Thank you.) was an ardent Catholic, supporting Christian Poland against the Turkish encroachment.  He was offered the Hungarian crown as well as the Polish one, but was rebuffed in his attempts to travel to Hungary to accept, and had to retreat a fugitive.  He was extremely devout, a fact that unfortunately led more or less directly to his death-- his excessive devotions (fasting, mortification) left him weak, and he apparently contracted lung disease, maybe TB, and expired.

Several online articles about him mention "various miracles" but do not specify, so I have no idea what he is supposed to have done to qualify him for canonization, except possibly to be both royal and devout, which may have been enough if you're cynical like me.  He is now considered to be a patron saint of Poland, Lithuania, and the young.

Oh, and so the building is the St. Kazimierz Society, I guess somewhere between a church and a fraternal lodge.

History

Today at work we were treated to a presentation of historical materials related to the company's mysterious past.  Ok, it's not really that mysterious, but there was a lot of stuff I didn't know.

For example:  apparently, for the first 50 or so years, the G & C Merriam Brothers & Co. were much more just printers than publishers-- the vast majority of the actual dictionary writing and editing was done in offices at Yale, where the editors were mostly employed.  The Springfield offices were literally just printing houses until they moved into their penultimate location (down by the intersection of State and Main, if anyone's curious), and they finally had room for a permanent editorial staff.  The current location was actually chosen as part of what we suspect (this part is actually slightly mysterious) was a deal with the city to develop the neighborhood, which at the time had only recently acquired actual paved streets.

Also, the charity that we donate toys and etc to every Christmas was actually founded (under a different name) by the wife of one of the Merriam Brothers.  That relationship goes back much farther than I had been aware.

Newton's Eyeball

Before the famous experiment with the prism, before he discovered the rules of gravitation (although probably at about the same time that the apple apocryphally fell on his head), Isaac Newton performed a brief experiment in anatomical optics.  Paraphrasing from his own notes, he took a small knife (a bodkin), and pushed it into his eyeball as far back around the curve as possible, in order to see the effects it had upon his vision.

Now, to be fair, the accompanying diagrams do make it look as if A) the bodkin was blunt, possibly the "large needle" instead of the "dagger" sense, and B) although it's not clear, it might have been outside the eyelid.  Rather than something more last-act Oedipal, it may have just been an extreme version of rubbing your eyes hard in order to see the pretty lights.

Still, this is clearly a degree of dedication to scientific inquiry that is seldom equalled in this day and age, or frankly in any other.  Which, honestly, is as it should be.  I mean really.  A true scientist would poke the eyes of a random sampling of other people, careful not to hint at any potential expected outcome.  Hadn't he ever heard of a single-blind study?

They have bodies!

The Easter Island Statues!  Those big heads!  Have BODIES!  How did I not know about this?

http://www.eisp.org/

Apparently the statues were carved as entire people, and then for some reason were buried neck deep.

I... bwah?  [am boggled]

Rhode Island

Knowing that the full name of our smallest state was "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations", I was under the impression that Rhode Island was an actual island.  And it is-- or at least, was.  Or sort of is.  It's a bit complicated.

The island formerly known as Rhode Island is now called (when it's called anything at all) Aquidneck Island.  It's "official" name is still Rhode Island, but I guess that was too confusing, so they decided to informally keep using a name that had been around beforehand.  It's the big island in the middle of the bay that has Newport out on the end of it.  Although there is no question that this island was in fact called "Rhode Island" (or the Ile of Rods or Rhod-Island or Roode Eylant, depending on the source and its spelling), the source of the name "Rhode Island" is less certain.  The two main theories seem to be that either 1) it was named after the Isle of Rhodes, back in Olde Greece, or B) that the name derives from the Dutch for "red," supposedly from either a glimpse of vivid fall foliage or some reddish clay shoreline.

Eventually, Providence plantations (founded by Roger Williams after he was kicked out of Massachusetts) absorbed the dissident colonies on Aquidneck/Rhode Island, and they formed themselves into the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which became (more or less without change) the State of Rhode Island etc.

Atlantish

One contemporary theory holds that the myth of Atlantis, apparently first written about by Plato in a book that was, shall we say, probably not intended to be a travelogue, was actually based on the city of Helike, located on the coast of Greece about 40 miles West of Corinth.

It seems to be fairly well established that this city existed-- there are coins and other artifacts that still survive.  And it's a matter of record (as much as anything from that era is) that it was destroyed in 373 BC-- about 10-15 years before Plato's writings.  There are surviving reports from the time telling of earthquakes, fleeing animals, and the sudden submersion of the city, practically overnight.  And Plato almost certainly would have heard of the disaster, and he was the type of guy who would incorporate such a thing into a morality tale.  But it was fairly well hidden.  Despite written evidence, it was pretty thoroughly buried in silt, and only rediscovered about 10 years ago.  Excavations are proceeding slowly.

http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.2112/05-0454.1

And then, suddenly, nothing happened.

The history of the world is a large subject, covering something over four billion years.  However, complex life forms only arose about 500 million years ago, at the start of what is now called the Cambrian Period.  Before that?

Well, the International Commission on Stratigraphy has divided the preceding 3.5 billion years into several sections, separated more or less arbitrarily into large chunks of time.  From the creation of the Earth until the lithosphere settled down is the Hadean Eon, for example.  Then there's the Archean Eon (divided into four eras), and the Proterozoic Eon, divided into three Eras, each of which is further divided into three or four Periods (unless they go into overtime).  The kicker?  Of these 20 or so Pre-Cambrian official designations, only one or two of them are even vaguely interesting.

They're all mostly just too old-- hardly anything survives from that part of history.  There are a few rock outcroppings here and there that date all the way back, and some fossil-y sort of things from ancient bacteria and algae, but that's about it.  So if someone jumps out at you in a dark alley and demands to know three interesting things about the Orosirian Period, you can take some comfort in the fact that you'll know it's a trick question.  There were only two.