David Meyer's Blog, page 14

The Turk: History’s First Chess Computer?

The Turk, history’s first Chess Computer
Attribution: Engraving by Karl Gottlieb von Windisch for his 1784 book Inanimate Reason
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Two centuries before Big Blue, there was the Turk, history’s first chess computer. From 1770 to 1854, this mechanical marvel played and defeated all sorts of challengers, including many top-ranked chess players as well as Benjamin Franklin. It wasn’t until 1857 that the Turk’s secret was revealed…it was a giant fake. Here’s more from  Krešimir Josić at the University of Houston:

The Turk was touted as an early robot that could play chess at the highest level. Built in Vienna in 1770 by the inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen, the machine consisted of a large pedestal, housing intricate machinery on top of which stood a chessboard. To this box was attached the upper half of a men dressed in oriental robes and a turban. Each performance began with an elaborate introduction to convince the audience that the Turk is really a machine. The automaton would then face a challenger.

The Turk first dazzled the court of the empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. The machine moved its own pieces, and would instantly recognize illegal moves by its opponent. It offered a surprisingly good game of chess! The automaton soon became a sensation, toured Europe and North America, and was matched against some of the best chess players of the time…

(See the rest at the University of Houston)

 

The post The Turk: History’s First Chess Computer? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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How well does Congress reflect the People it “serves”?

Description: Federal Hall, where the First Congress met in 1789
Attribution: Steel engraving by Robert Hinshelwood (1855-1859)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

How well does Congress reflect the people it “serves” (“rules” might be a better word)? Not very well, it turns out. How else could lawyers make up 37% of the U.S. Congress, both now and in 1789? Not to pick on lawyers either…out of the 209 “businesspeople” in Congress, how many do you think are clerks, bakers, entrepreneurs, electricians, etc.? I’m guessing the answer is a big fat zero. So much for James Madison’s dream of the House of Representatives being a lower house for “the people.” Here’s more from Constitution Daily:

With that in mind, the staff of Constitution Daily compiled a comparison between the First U.S. Congress and the current one, looking at the occupational breakdown between their members. The results were, in some ways, predictable, but there were still a few surprises. (Who knew there was a comedian among their ranks?)…

Although the First Congress had a limited variety of professions, the general make up of both are relatively similar. As you can see, from the time the First Congress met, law has been a top profession; in both bodies, about 37 percent of the members are lawyers. It makes sense–the people writing the laws need to have a deep understanding of how the legal system works. But do lawyers make the best politicians?

(See the rest including the breakdown at Constitution Daily)

The post How well does Congress reflect the People it “serves”? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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A “Loch Ness Monster” discovered in Siberia?

A Loch Ness Monster discovered in Siberia?
Description: “Hoding stood erect and whirled his axe up against the descending muzzle”
Attribution: Illustration by E.L. Blumenschein for “Thyra: A Romance of the Polar Pit” by Robert Ames Bennet (1901)
Source: Project Gutenberg Australia

Who needs the Loch Ness Monster? Siberia has its own version called the Devil, which actually predates Nessie. And unlike the Loch Ness Monster, there are actually bones here to back it up…or so an underwater scanner says. Here’s more from Mail Online:

Russian scientists claim to have spotted the ‘jaws and skeleton’ of a mystery creature which could be ‘the Siberian Loch Ness monster’. Divers braved temperatures of minus 42C to investigate long-held beliefs that a monster lives at the bottom of the remote Lake Labynkyr 4,500 miles east of Moscow in the Siberian wilderness. And the geologists told local media their underwater scanner found the remains of a jaws and skeleton which could be the rumoured beast nicknamed ‘the Devil’.

‘There have been all sort of hypothesises about what kind of creature it could be: a giant pike, a relic reptile or an amphibia. We didn’t manage to prove or to disprove these versions….. we managed to find remains of jaws and skeleton of some animal,’ Viktor Tverdokhlebov told the Siberian Times…

(See the rest at Mail Online)

The post A “Loch Ness Monster” discovered in Siberia? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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The End of the U.S. Postal Service?

Will the U.S. Government ever allow competition to the U.S. Postal Service?
Description: American Letter Mail Company stamp (1844): Used during the U.S. Postal War
Source: Wikimedia Commons

And so Saturday mail comes to an end. Is anyone really that surprised? No competition = No reason to innovate or improve service. Where’s Lysander Spooner when you need him?

Here’s more on the U.S. Postal Service ending Saturday deliveries at Fox News:

The U.S. Postal Service plans to announce Wednesday that it will end Saturday mail delivery, in one of the most significant steps taken to date to cut costs at the struggling agency.

A source familiar with the decision confirmed the plan to Fox News.

Under the proposal, the Postal Service will continue to deliver packages six days a week. The plan, which is aimed at saving about $2 billion, would start to take effect in August.

(See the rest at Fox News)

The post The End of the U.S. Postal Service? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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Did Nazi Monks build a base in the Amazon?

Did Nazi Monks build a base in the Amazon?
Photo of Adolf Hitler in his young 30s (Taken during the early 1920s)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Nazi monks operating in the Amazon? Secret plans for an air attack on the Panama Canal? Sounds like great Nazi fiction…but it’s a true story (well, at least in part).

In a declassified note to the Assistant Secretary of State, J. Edgar Hoover said, “As of possible interest to you, information has been received from a reliable confidential source that there are rumors current in Brazil as to a German air base, reported to exist in the Rio Negro district of the upper Amazon.”

And here’s more from Felipe Fernandes Cruz at The Appendix:

It was October 1941 and J. Edgar Hoover had just received a strange bit of war intelligence. A secret German air base was being built in the Amazon. This was particularly worrisome, since such an airfield could be used to launch a secret Luftwaffe attack on the strategic Panama Canal. This idea did not come out of the blue. Americans were at the time very concerned about German influence in South America. To monitor potential fascist agents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation collaborated with a Brazilian agency, the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (Department of Social and Political Order, Brazil’s version of a secret police)…

(See more at The Appendix)

 

The post Did Nazi Monks build a base in the Amazon? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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Bruno Sammartino: History’s Greatest Wrestler?

Is Bruno Sammartino the The Greatest Wrestler in WWE History?
Description: Bruno Sammartino holding Mario Trevi
Attribution: Mario Trevi
Source: Wikimedia Commons

I love professional wrestling, especially its long and storied connection to American history. Did you know George Washington was once a Collar-and-Elbow wrestling champion? Or that Abraham Lincoln was a renowned Catch-as-Catch-Can wrestler?

Last night, the WWE announced that Bruno Sammartino would be inducted into its Hall of Fame. He joins a stacked class including Mick Foley, Trish Stratus, and Bob Backlund. For years, the WWE Hall of Fame has been a bit of a joke really, thanks to celebrity inductions like Pete Rose and Drew Carey as well as that of thankless jobber Koko B. Ware. Glaring omissions like Sammartino and Backlund only made things worse. With this year’s class, the WWE appears to be shooting for a little legitimacy. Here’s more on Bruno Sammartino’s induction from Donald Wood at Bleacher Report:

Bruno Sammartino is the greatest professional wrestler in the history of the business, and the fact that he is going into the WWE Hall of Fame as a member of the 2013 class at Madison Square Garden is one of the biggest coups in the long existence of the company.

For those too young to know exactly who this man is or what he did, Sammartino was wrestling’s original face champion. Before there was Hulk Hogan or John Cena, there was Sammartino and his unbelievably long title reigns.

CM Punk has been heralded as a star for holding the WWE title for 434 days, but in the ’60s and ’70s, Sammartino held the title twice for a total of 4040 days (2803 and 1237 respectively.)

That’s over 11 years total as champion…

(See the rest at Bleacher Report)

The post Bruno Sammartino: History’s Greatest Wrestler? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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When did People Arrive in Ancient America?

When did People first come to Ancient America?
Description: Mastodon
Attribution: Charles R. Knight (1897)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Did people come to Ancient America thousands of years earlier than previously thought? The evidence is intriguing. It’s still too skimpy to convince the mainstream but at least it’s starting to get a fair hearing. Here’s more on the origin of Ancient America from Guy Gugliotta at Smithsonian Magazine:

For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.

Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History opened a formal excavation in one particular sink. Below a layer of undisturbed sediment they found nine stone flakes that a person must have chipped from a larger stone, most likely to make tools and projectile points. They also found a mastodon tusk, scarred by circular cut marks from a knife. The tusk was 14,500 years old.

The age was surprising, even shocking, for it suddenly made the Aucilla sinkhole one of the earliest places in the Americas to betray the presence of human beings. Curiously, though, scholars largely ignored the discoveries of the Aucilla River Prehistory Project, instead clinging to the conviction that America’s earliest settlers arrived more recently, some 13,500 years ago. But now the sinkhole is getting a fresh look, along with several other provocative archaeological sites that show evidence of an earlier human presence in the Americas, perhaps much earlier…

(See the rest at Smithsonian Magazine)

 

The post When did People Arrive in Ancient America? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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Sandy Hook Conspiracy: Crisis Actors at Work?

Was there a Sandy Hook Conspiracy?
Description: Policemen at Sandy Hook Elementary (December 14, 2012)
Attribution: Voice of America
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Professional crisis actors…missing weapons…a second shooter…donation pages created before the massacre? Was there a Sandy Hook conspiracy?

Nothing is out of the realm of possibility, but the theories I’m hearing are needlessly complicated. It’s difficult to imagine so many people involved in such a wide-reaching scam. Why go to all that trouble? The FBI has a long history of luring crazies into fake terrorist plots. Taking a page out of their book, it would be far easier to rile up a local psychopath, turn him loose on the school, and then look the other way. Presto! Another “lone gunman” plot with few loose ends to tie up.

Still, if you’re interested in the professional crisis actors theory, here’s more from Fellowship of the Minds:

At issue is whether professional “crisis actors” are going beyond mere simulation of mass casualty events (what the Denver-based group VisionBox Crisis Actors say they do) to actually impersonate real-life people caught in the news of recent massacres, notably the Sandy Hook Elementary School killings that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012.

(See the rest at Fellowship of the Minds)

The post Sandy Hook Conspiracy: Crisis Actors at Work? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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Lost Life Found Deep Beneath Antarctica?

Does Life Exist Deep beneath Antarctica?
Description: Photograph of Mount Erebus (Ross Island, Antarctica)
Attribution: Richard Waitt, U.S. Geological Survey (1972)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Cells containing DNA have been found deep beneath Antarctica’s ice. But the most important question still needs to be answered…are they still alive? Here’s more from Crux Guest Blogger at Discover:

The search continues for life in subglacial Lake Whillans, 2,600 feet below the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—but a thrilling preliminary result has detected signs of life. At 6:20am on January 28, four people in sterile white Tyvek suits tended to a winch winding cable onto the drill platform. One person knocked frost off the cable as it emerged from the ice borehole a few feet below. The object of their attention finally rose into sight: a gray plastic vessel, as long as a baseball bat, filled with water from Lake Whillans, half a mile below.

The bottle was hurried into a 40-foot cargo container outfitted as a laboratory on skis. Some of the lake water was squirted into bottles of media in order to grow whatever microbes might inhabit the lake. Those cultures could require weeks to produce results. But one test has already produced an interesting preliminary finding. When lake water was viewed under a microscope, cells were seen: their tiny bodies glowed green in response to DNA-sensitive dye. It was the first evidence of life in an Antarctic subglacial lake…

(See the rest at Discover)

The post Lost Life Found Deep Beneath Antarctica? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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Mound Builders: Fastest Builders in the Americas?

Monks Mound, Cahokia: One of the many mounds left behind by the Mound Builders
Attribution: Records of Ancient Races in the Mississippi Valley by William McAdams (1887)
Source: Wikipedia

New research suggests the Mississippian culture, aka the Mound Builders, built at least one of their giant earthen mounds in just 90 days and maybe even as quickly as 30 days. An astonishing feat from a collective point of view. But can you imagine being one of the poor workers who had to carry the dirt? Like many other civilizations, the Mound Builders probably collapsed due to excessive centralization. Here’s more from Phys.org:

Nominated early this year for recognition on the UNESCO World Heritage List, which includes such famous cultural sites as the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu and Stonehenge, the earthen works at Poverty Point, La., have been described as one of the world’s greatest feats of construction by an archaic civilization of hunters and gatherers.

Now, new research in the current issue of the journal Geoarchaeology, offers compelling evidence that one of the massive earthen mounds at Poverty Point was constructed in less than 90 days, and perhaps as quickly as 30 days—an incredible accomplishment for what was thought to be a loosely organized society consisting of small, widely scattered bands of foragers.

“What’s extraordinary about these findings is that it provides some of the first evidence that early American hunter-gatherers were not as simplistic as we’ve tended to imagine,” says study co-author T.R. Kidder, PhD, professor and chair of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.  “Our findings go against what has long been considered the academic consensus on hunter-gather societies—that they lack the political organization necessary to bring together so many people to complete a labor-intensive project in such a short period.”

(See the rest at Phys.org)

The post Mound Builders: Fastest Builders in the Americas? appeared first on Guerrilla Explorer.

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