Marcantonio Raimondi, an Italian man, is believed to be one of the first people imprisoned for displaying images of a sexual nature after he created a series of erotic engravings in 1524. Pietro Aretino, an Italian author credited as the founder of modern pornography, helped negotiate Raimondi’s freedom.
Three warships named Freedom have served in the United States Navy, the most recent of which is a littoral combat ship (LCS) decommissioned last year after just twelve years of service. The LCSs cost too much and had chronic engine problems, and will be succeeded by the new Constellation-class frigates, construction of the first of which is to begin this month.
Mercury-Redstone 3 was the United States’ first manned spaceflight, occurring on May 1st, 1961. In the mission, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard made a 15-minute suborbital flight aboard a Mercury crew capsule, named Freedom 7, and reached a peak altitude of 101.2 nautical miles (116.5 statute miles).
A nautical mile is based on the circumference of the earth and is equal to one minute of latitude. It is slightly more than a statute (land measured) mile. 1 nautical mile = 1.1508 statute miles.
A “knot” is a unit of speed, which is primarily used in aviation and naval applications. A knot is one nautical mile per hour, and thus has the same conversion factor to MPH as a nautical mile has to a statute mile: one knot = 1.1506 miles per hour.
A nautical mile is based on latitude and so is the original definition of a meter. The meter was defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along the Paris meridian. This means that converting a nautical mile to meters was relatively easy 10000000 ÷ (90 x 60) = 1851.851851…
Today a nautical mile is defined as exactly 1852 meters.
One of the major stumbling blocks in the establishment of standard time worldwide was whether the prime meridian would be the Greenwich meridian or the Paris meridian.
Besides visiting explorers, tourists, and researchers, humans do not live at the North Pole. And because there are no permanent settlements, the North Pole has not been assigned a time zone. People at the North Pole can choose to go by any time zone that is convenient. The closest permanently inhabited place is Alert, a military installation 600 miles to the south on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada, and it’s in the Eastern Time Zone.
Well, y’all knew this one was coming!
Since Antarctica is largely uninhabited, the continent is not officially divided up into time zones. However, there are a number of research stations, each of which observes its own local time. Some stations use the time zone of the country that operates or supplies them, others observe the local time of countries nearby. Palmer Station at the north end of the Antarctic peninsula is a United States research station, but it keeps Chile Summer Time (CLST) as Chile is the closest country.
ETA, adding a map link:
Palmer Station: Google Maps
The first borehole to the fresh water of Lake Vostok in Antarctica was completed on January 10, 2013. The water was uncontaminated for around 20 million years (so of course) the drillers contaminated it with the chemicals they used to keep the ice melted.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole is a scientific project that began in May of 1970 in an effort to drill a hole into the earth’s crust as deep as it could go. The U.S. also started a similar project and the countries appeared to be in a race to see who could drill the furthest into the earth. The drill site is located On the Kola Peninsula in the Pechengsky District of Russia. Several boreholes were drilled there with the deepest reaching 40,230 feet in 1989. This borehole is called SG-3 and is the deepest in the world. Drilling stopped in 1992 because the temperature was too high at such a deep level for the drill bit to work properly. The Kola Superdeep Borehole is estimated to have reached one third of the way through the Baltic continental crust, reaching rocks over 2.5 billion years old.
In 1974 the world depth record held by the Bertha Rogers hole in south-central Oklahoma at 9,583 meters (31,440 ft), was broken by the Kola Superdeep Borehole By July 1979 the Bertha Rogers hole had stopped yielding natural gas, and it has since been plugged.
Cola is a genus of trees native to Africa, known for their seeds, which are referred to as kola nuts. Kola nuts have a bitter flavor, and contain caffeine; they were originally used as a flavoring ingredient and source of caffeine for cola soft drinks, though the extract of kola nuts is no longer used as an ingredient in most major cola brands.
In the mid-70s, 7-Up began an advertising campaign announcing itself as the ‘uncola’. The ads featured actor Geoffrey Holder holding a lemon and a lime, proclaiming them as ‘uncola nuts.’
7 Up soda was created in 1929. Its product launch as “Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda”, in St. Louis MO in November 1929, happened two weeks before the market crashes on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, and Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929.
Clearly an error. It should be October 1929.
According to a 1975 report from the NY Times, the term “Black Friday” is Philadelphia slang.
This is because the police had become frustrated with the traffic congestion caused by shoppers on that day, and the retailers weren’t happy to be associated with traffic and smog.
So, in 1961, one newspaper tried to rename the day as “Big Friday”, but, as you already know, this term didn’t stick around long.
Though it had been popular in Philadelphia, “Black Friday” was not an official national term until the 1990’s.
With homes dating back to 1702, Philadelphia’s Elfreth’s Alley is known to be the oldest, continuously-inhabited residential street in America.
Map: Google Maps
The flags displayed by homeowners in that Google Maps view of Elfreth’s Alley, Philadelphia include the current 50-star U.S. flag, the 13-star “Betsy Ross” flag, the Revolutionary War-era British flag, the Cambridge or Grand Union flag, the Bedford flag, and Gen. George Washington’s headquarters flag
Adopted in December 1775, the Grand Union flag is considered to be the US’s first National flag. It has 13 red and white stripes like our current flag, but in the Canton instead of fifty white stars on a blue field it has the British National flag. A flag in a flag, of sorts. Prior to this National flag the thirteen colonies used independent flags.
The Grand Union flag became obsolete following the passing of the Flag Act of 1777 by the Continental Congress which authorized a new official national flag of a design similar to that of the Colours, with thirteen stars (representing the thirteen States) on a field of blue replacing the flag of Great Britain in the canton.