Category: Uncategorized
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Where Music Soothes While Lobsters Broil
Based on this article one could only conclude that in 1910, live classical music in restaurants was as pervasive and annoying as Muzak is today. You sit down at a table. And all is very peaceful. The waiter silently passes the carte de jour, while he and the others quietly wander to and fro. This […]
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Is The First Born Child Inferior To Its Brothers?
Has the practice of hedging a sensational headline by phrasing it as a question always been around? This example suggests it has, and it upsets Jon Stewart. But what if it’s true? From the article: [A eugenics professor states that] “we find the neurotic, the insane, the tuberculous, and the albinotic the more frequent among […]
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The Season of The Treasure Hunt Is On
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised to find tales of pirate treasure hunters in the New York Times Magazine, with illustrations that appear to be straight out of Treasure Island, but I was. Here’s an excerpt: An old Frenchman turned up at Eastport, Me., about thirty years ago. He set about fitting out a little […]
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No Flood If Noah Had Known Hydraulics
Let’s just pretend for a moment that the stories in the Bible are literally true, and there really was a flood that happened exactly as described. This article suggests that “the skill of modern engineers… could readily have prevented the inundation.” Wasn’t the flood supposed to have covered the whole planet? We can barely contain […]
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Fear Of Being Buried Alive Is Groundless
I guess this was a reasonable fear at the time, especially considering how our definition of “dead” has changed over the years. (Is it when the heart stops? When the person is no longer breathing? When there’s no brain activity?) The London Lancet newspaper (“the authority of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Surgeons […]
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Scientific Play For Children
This article outlines rules for playing tag, based upon rules adopted by the International Playtime Committee on Juvenile Sports. It took me a minute to realize that this article is not serious, but is an example of turn-of-the-last-century humor. Here are some of the rules: I. — Tag is a game in which three or […]
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World’s Biggest Sponge Found In The Bahamas
It is what is known as a wool sponge, which is the finest quality known among spongers. It is in form perfectly round, arched like an immense fruit cake, and is six feet in circumference and two feet in diameter in every direction. When taken from the water it weighed between eighty and ninety pounds, […]
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The Science Of Weather Forecasting
How did they do it before satellites and radar? It was a large scale coordinated effort involving telegraph messages sent from station to station across the country, used to compile a weather map. THE SCIENCE OF WEATHER FORECASTING (PDF) From April 3, 1910
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How New York’s Census Will Be Taken
Oh, you census takers in 2010. You have it so easy. Back in 1910, you had to go door to door asking people to fill out 30 questions, and you earned 2½ cents for each completed census. You might make 4 or 5 dollars in a day. But once you turned in the census forms, […]
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New Facts On The Increased Cost Of Living
I think it’s interesting to see how much things cost 100 years ago compared to today. In this case, the article compares the costs of foodstuffs in New York with London, so we get yet another data point. For example, a pound of apples cost between 4 and 6 cents in London 100 years ago, […]
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