Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Archive for September 13, 2014

Winston Churchill’s one-man pressure chamber, used on his personal plane during WWII. It had ash trays, a telephone and an air-circulation system.

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Winston Churchill was susceptible to pneumonia and the long cold flights weren’t good for his health (none of Churchill’s planes were pressurized). He would wear an oxygen mask on some occasions (even when he slept). Sometime in 1942 they did build a pressure chamber for him, but they couldn’t get it into his plane without dissembling the tail section. The contraption was rejected out of hand – thus never used.

(Source)


A computer programming classroom in the Soviet Union; a poster on the wall reads ‘Train BASIC Everyday!’; ca. 1985

Top line says: "Programming - the second grammar. The first grants knowledge. The second enables realization of knowledge in earnest"

Top line says: “Programming – the second grammar. The first grants knowledge. The second enables realization of knowledge in earnest”

The Soviets had a very diverse and powerful set of computational hardware and languages, and having developed in relative isolation from the rest of the world (*They had to wait for it to be released, reverse engineer it, and then attempt to reproduce it), they’ve built some pretty unique stuff.

There are websites out there dedicated to documenting this fascinating subject.


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Nürnberg, Germany in ruins; June 1945.

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David Vetter (known as ’The Boy in The Bubble’ in the sterilized plastic environment that was his home from his birth until his death 12 years later); ca. 1978.

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David Phillip Vetter (September 21, 1971 – February 22, 1984) suffered from SCID, severe combined immunodeficiency.

‘The chaplain of Texas Children’s Hospital at the time, Rev. Raymond Lawrence, said of the situation: “The great scandal of the Bubble Boy was that he was conceived for the bubble. The team that did this didn’t think through this very well. They didn’t consider what would happen if they didn’t find an immediate cure. They operated on the assumption that you could live to be 80 years old in a bubble, and that would be unfortunate but okay.” Lawrence said that the original three doctors encouraged David’s parents to conceive David so that they could have a test subject for studies, a charge which is denied by the three involved doctors.’

(Source)


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A bulldog named Venus stands at the helm of the HMS Vansittart, a British Destroyer; ca.1941

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