A Brief History On January 13, 2012, the woes of the cruise lines of the world became as bad as they can get when a giant Italian cruise ship was wrecked off the coast of Isola del Giglio in the Tyrrhenian Sea (part of the Mediterranean Sea to the West of Italy) taking 32 lives in the accident. The ship, Costa Concordia, was operated by a subsidiary of Carnival Cruise Lines called Costa Crociere and had only been in service for 6 years when she was run aground and lost, joining a long list of miserable cruise ship experiences in…
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A Brief History On January 8, 2005, the United States Navy, normally pretty safe drivers of large grey boats, managed another one of those “Naval Oops Moments” we keep writing about when the nuclear powered submarine, USS San Francisco (SSN-711) (Los Angeles Class attack sub), managed to collide at full speed with an underwater mountain off the coast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. Operating at a depth of 525 feet and sailing at flank speed (the maximum, but classified top speed), it is a true testament to the brilliance of the designers and builders of the sub that the boat…
A Brief History On January 5, 2005, American astronomer Michael E. Brown (of CalTech, Princeton, and Berkeley) with fellow astronomers David L. Rabinowitz (Yale University and University of Arizona) and Chad Trujillo (University of Hawaii, Gemini Observatory and Northern Arizona University) were given credit for their discovery of a planetoid they called Eris, at the time, the largest dwarf planet known in the Solar System. The astronomical team actually discovered Eris in 2003, but its (relatively) small size and distance from Earth required rigid documentation for the discovery to be accepted. Eris is larger than Pluto, the dwarf planet that…
A Brief History On January 3, 2009, the Genesis block, the first of the blockchains, of the crypto-currency known as Bitcoin was first established online by creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, an alias for an unknown person or persons. The form of “currency” invented by Nakamoto (or whatever) does not entail any tangible coins or paper money and is purely theoretical online tradable currency. A decentralized payment system, Bitcoin allows financial transactions of many types to be conducted without the oversight or vagaries of governments or a central bank. Digging Deeper A crypto-currency is a system that uses digital data as a…
A Brief History On December 27, 1966, the largest cave in the world was discovered in Aquismón, San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Boasting a single cavern that covers a ground space of 994 feet long by 442 feet wide, the so called Cave of Swallows (alternately called “The Cave of the Swallows”) had been known for many generations by indigenous Huastec people, and was considered “discovered” only when a documented descent into the cave was made by T. R. Evans, Charles Borland and Randy Sterns, the first outsiders known to have visited the cave. Digging Deeper Known as a “pit” type…