Benjamin Franklin did not really want the national bird to be the turkey. He mentioned it one time, jokingly, in a letter to his daughter, when he was making fun of the Society of the Cincinnati.
During my brief visit to China about six years ago, this story was told to me with evident pride by several of my Chinese hosts. Even though I knew better, I would never have contradicted them. I was also told that the paddlefish lived only in the Yangtze river; in fact, it is found in stretches of the Missouri river.
I’ll see your nitpick and raise you one. According to the book I mentioned in my post, “Homesteading Space”, they never really got the Skylab missions numbered correctly.
You’re right that it was the fourth Skylab launch, which was the third manned crew. But their mission patches had a big 3 on them because they had ordered the patches when that was their mission designation. It got changed later, but too late to change the patches.
In the book, they said that the numbering really depends on how you look at it. But yes, I was referring to Skylab 4, crew #3.
I pity the guy who had the rusty nail inserted and then walked across charcoal. I mean, they have to know how bad that is to compare the bite to it, right?
The Internet was not originally invented to survive nuclear war. The nuclear-resistant communication system was a different project involving hardened voice lines that was also being pursued in the late 1960s. The ARPANet project, which the Internet came from, was not the same thing, and it was not allowed to act as if it were.
The Internet was designed to be reliable in the face of the flaky hardware that was available back then and it was designed to be easy to add and remove machines without rebuilding the whole system, but those qualities are a long way from being designed explicitly to survive a nuclear war.
Also, one I’ve actually heard here: The Internet was invented in America, not the UK, and it was invented by Vint Cerf and Leonard Kleinrock and others, not Tim Berners-Lee. Sir TimBL invented the World Wide Web in the late 1980s, which was, at the time, one of a few competing hypertext systems that all used the pre-existing Internet as their common low-level communications protocol.
(I can give citations for all of this on request.)
I am not sure what your overall point is on this one but you may be more nuanced than I am reading it to be. There is nothing special about a case of AIDS in 1969. It existed way before that, most likely around or before the turn of the 20th century. There are a number of confirmed cases from the 1950’s as well. I have no idea if this particular sample was contaminated but it doesn’t strike me as being very relevant even if it was.
I just remembered a new variation on an old chestnut that I heard a couple weeks ago: you know how “a duck’s quack doesn’t echo”? Well, according to one of the employees at a wolf sanctuary I visited, neither does a wolf’s howl.
Viral load, bacterial load, you still get shots if you pop positive.
Frankly, what I have read about human rabies, I don’t care if I am protected, I am getting the damned shots anyway if I get bitten … that is one fucking nasty way to die:eek:
