In 1785, King Louis XVI of France commissioned a voyage of discovery around the world. The expedition was led by Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de Lapérouse, and sent to chart unknown coasts, collect scientific data, and establish France’s presence on the far seas. Two ships, La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, set sail from Brest, carrying astronomers, naturalists, and artists—an Enlightenment voyage in the spirit of Captain Cook.
Before the ships departed, a 16-year-old artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte applied to join as a mathematician or mapmaker. His application was rejected, likely due to his youth and lack of influence.
Lapérouse’s expedition circumnavigated the globe, making stops in Alaska, California, Japan, Siberia, and Australia. They sent back meticulous reports and maps, but after leaving Botany Bay in 1788, the ships vanished, with all hands. Years later, remnants of the wrecks were found off Vanikoro in the Santa Cruz Islands, their scientific treasures lost to the sea.
Had Lapérouse accepted Napoleon’s application, the history of the world may have played out very differently.
Pork belly futures are things I’ve heard of in old movies and TV shows. Never thought about them. I just learned that they were created in 1961, and discontinued in 2011.
They actually arrived in Botany Bay only a few days after the British First Fleet of marines and convicts arrived there. The British leader Governor Phillip decided (what is now) Sydney Cove was a better location for their settlement due to fresh water supplies and moved his fleet up there. La Perouse sailed off to his doom in the Pacific, who knows what the history of Australia might have been if they’d arrived first and set up a colony? BTW it was recently discovered they did briefly set up a temporary settlement in eastern Tasmania, apparently to grow fresh vegetables! How very French.
There is a suburb of Sydney named after him now, on the northern shore of Botany Bay. Ironically that is where the last free-living aborigines in the Sydney area were, there is still quite a strong presence of them there.
Inaugurated on August 18, 1961, on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), frozen pork belly futures were developed as a risk management device to meet the needs of meat packers who processed pork and had to contend with volatile hog prices, as well as price risks on processed products held in inventory.
Yes, they hedged price risks. Were the price risks because of seasonal demand variations, or because of seasonal supply variations? The internet does not agree with itself. The pork market is now international, and I would expect less seasonal supply variation, but parts of the internet suggest that the financial product was discontinued because Americans now eat bacon in Winter.
Did Americans reall only eat bacon in summer? (That’s the ‘demand’ explanation).
It says it was because the price of hogs was volatile. I’m not any kind of expert but I would expect that it was a supply thing. Some years maybe not enough hogs were born or there was a disease that killed a bunch of them or something. I have never heard of a bacon eating season. We fucking love bacon.
Today I learned a kind of crazy fact about Luxembourg, my country of residence:
Forty years ago, there was a string of random explosive attacks in various locations. They’re pretty sure they know the source of the dynamite that was apparently stolen and used, but they don’t know anything else, and the case remains unsolved despite intense interest.
The leading hypothesis is that it was the police themselves who were responsible (!), staging the bombings with the intent of pressuring lawmakers to give the police more money and authority.
Nitpick: It is a diacritic, and all accents are diacritics, but not all diacritics are accents. This one, the ë, is in this case a diaeresis, which is a mark for the correct pronunciation as a separate syllable. As such it can be considered the same letter. Languages such as Dutch, Afrikaans, Catalan, French, Galician, Greek, Spanish, and obviously Luxembourgish make regular use of the diaeresis. In some Germanic and other languages, the umlaut diacritic has the same appearance but a different function. Those are considered different letters: they are pronounced differently not because of where they happen to be in the word/syllable, but because they represent a different sound/phoneme.
ETA: I am refering to phonetics, in typography they are indeed different letters.
