Posts Tagged ‘National Geographic’
Striking the right balance…
From National Geographic, an elegant plea for global balance…
As we reframe our sense of our place in the world, we might wish an expansive Happy Birthday to Walter E. Diemer; he was born on this date in 1904. Diemer was working as an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Co., when in 1928 he accidentally invented bubble gum while experimenting in his spare time with recipes for a chewing gum base. Fleer sold a test batch in a Philadelphia grocery store, which sold out in one afternoon. Diemer (who later became senior vice president of of the company) then taught Fleer salesmen how to blow bubbles, so they could demonstrate the product as they traveled from store to store selling the penny-a-piece gum. Almost 3/4 of a century later, Diemer still could not believe that “all the bubble gum in the world came from my five-pound batch…” The pink color of Diemer’s first batch is still standard.
Diemer and his Dubble Bubble (image source)
Times of the Signs…
From Smashing Magazine, culled from over 2,500 entries in 51 categories, the results of their “World Of Signage Photo Contest.”
As we give in to the guides, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that the first issue of National Geographic Magazine was published, nine months after its parent, The National Geographic Society, was founded.
The Department of Things Coming in Threes: Iceland, BP…
Captured by high-resolution cameras aboard a robotic submersible, mineral-rich water spews from hydrothermal vents in this June 30 picture of Kawio Barat, a massive undersea volcano off Indonesia.
During the past few weeks, the submerged volcano– one of the world’s largest– was mapped and explored in detail for the first time by a joint Indonesian-U.S. expedition north of the island of Sulawesi (map).
Read the whole story, and see fascinating video, at National Geographic.
As we batten down the hatches, we might recall that it was on this date in 64 CE that the Great Fire of Rome began, ultimately destroying much of the Imperial City. The fire began in the slums of a district south of the Palatine Hill. The area’s homes burned very quickly and the fire spread north, fueled by high winds; it raged out of control for three days. Three of Rome’s 14 districts were completely razed; only four were untouched by the conflagration. Hundreds of people died in the fire and many thousands were left homeless.
Legend has it that the Emperor Nero fiddled while the city burned. Aside from the facts that the fiddle did not even exist at the time (Nero was an adept of the lyre) and that he was actually 35 miles away in Antium when the fire broke out, there could be something to it.
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