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Cars of Futures Past – 1901 Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus and Mixte
Cars of Futures Past – 1901 Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus and Mixte
Ask a casual observer to name the first hybrid automobile, and the responses are likely to be either the Toyota Prius (initially launched in Japan in 1997) or the Honda Insight (launched globally by late 1999, making it the first hybrid available in North America). Get more specific and ask them to name the first series hybrid (which derives its primary propulsion from electric motors driven by batteries and a gasoline-powered generator), and most will say the Chevrolet Volt or even the Fisker Karma. Both answers are incorrect, as the first series hybrid automobile was built by Porsche, constructed in Germany in 1901.
To be entirely correct, the vehicle was a Lohner-Porsche, as Ferdinand Porsche had joined Vienna-based carriage builder Jacob Lohner and Company in 1898. The combination of Porsche’s engineering skills and Lohner’s marketing prowess paid dividends almost instantly; just two years after joining the firm, Porsche’s electric-powered Lohner-Porsche impressed attendees of the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. While electric cars were nothing entirely new, the Lohner-Porsche design used the front wheel hubs as components of the electric motors. …
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: OCTOBER 19TH- A BUST
This Day In History: October 19, 1985
In the early 1980s, video rental stores were small-time operations that offered a very limited selection of titles. At a time when buying pre-recorded VHS movies was prohibitively expensive for many people, renting them was the perfect solution for the dedicated movie fan or couch potato. (See: The Origin and Trademarking of “Couch Potato”) Unfortunately, new releases were very difficult to come by as not only selection, but supplies of individual titles were limited in most rental stores. Waiting lists were common – and often seemingly endless.
Enter Blockbuster, mainly the brainchild of David and Sandy Cook, who ran a company that provided computer software services to the Texas oil and gas industries. When that started to go south in the 1980s, the couple began searching for new opportunities.
Cook and ex-wife Sandy saw the hole in the market left by small, local video rental stores. A little research proved more and more households were investing in VCRs, and the number was expected to double by 1990. VCR technology wasn’t about to be rendered obsolete any time soon (relatively speaking). …
Election officials brace for fallout from Trump’s claims of a ‘rigged’ vote
Donald Trump’s escalating effort to undermine the presidential election as “rigged” has alarmed government officials administering the vote as well as Democratic and Republican leaders, who are anxiously preparing for the possibility of unrest or even violence on Election Day and for an extended battle over the integrity of the outcome.
Hillary Clinton’s advisers are privately worried that Trump’s calls for his supporters to stand watch at polling places in cities such as Philadelphia for any hint of fraud will result in intimidation tactics that might threaten her supporters and suppress the votes of African Americans and other minorities.
The Democratic nominee’s campaign is recruiting and training hundreds of lawyers to fan out across the country, protecting people’s right to vote and documenting any signs of foul play, according to several people with knowledge of the plans. …
A Computer’s Hot Take on the 2016 Election
An artificial intelligence found Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton seemed to get “happier” coverage than Donald Trump. But is that evidence of media bias? Not necessarily.
Donald Trump’s message of the week, in case you’ve somehow managed to avoid it, is that the election is rigged by a corrupt (and apparently monolithic) media.
“The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary,” Trump wrote in a tweet on Sunday night.
Trump has said repeatedly he’s been treated unfairly by news organizations. But is that true?
Back in July, I asked the computer scientist Andy Reagan if he could help me design an experiment that might begin to gauge the tone of media coverage about various presidential candidates. I knew Reagan, who is working toward his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Vermont, from his fascinating research into how a computer identified the six main arcs in storytelling across literary fiction. For that work, he and his colleagues had developed a database of more than 10,000 frequently-used words, all ranked by how “happy” they were perceived to be. (The happiest word on their list: Laughter. The saddest: Terrorist.) …
10 Doomsday Cults Of The 20th Century
People have been predicting the end of the world for as long as we’ve been living in it, and needless to say, no one has been right yet. Earth—and the human race—has kept going through some horrible things, but people are still saying that the end is nigh.
10. The Movement For The Restoration Of The Ten Commandments Of God
In 1989, Credonia Mwerinde (center left above) started traveling to spread the word that her father had received a vision from Heaven that instructed him to gather believers together in a new church. When she met Joseph Kibwetere (center right above), they found that they were describing some similar visions and prophecies.
Believers thought that the world would end on December 31, 1999, unless everyone started following the Ten Commandments to the letter. That meant nightly prayers, abstaining from worldly pleasures, and communicating in sign language to avoid bearing false witness. Their headquarters was called Noah’s Ark, and it was designated as the place for the Second Coming. …
America’s most segregated city: the young black voters of Milwaukee
Milwaukee is one of the most politically polarized and racially segregated cities in America. Paul Lewis and Tom Silverstone discover a mix of alienation and hope in the city’s African American community.
Paul Ryan: If Republicans Lose the Senate, Bernie Sanders Wins
The house speaker knows that if the GOP loses seats in Congress, Bernie Sanders could become the Senate Budget Committee Chairperson.
Paul Ryan is famously described as what Republicans think a smart person sounds like. But sometimes the speaker of the House outsmarts himself.
Ryan lectured Young Republicans in his native Wisconsin last Friday, and the national news media were invited to listen along. The speaker wanted to make the case for Republican voters to turn out and back GOP congressional candidates, even if they can’t stomach their party’s scandal-plagued presidential ticket. Implicit in Ryan’s argument was the suggestion that a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate could be counted on to obstruct Hillary Clinton’s supposedly “liberal progressive” agenda.
But in a question-and-answer session following his unremarkable speech, Ryan inadvertently made a case for liberals and progressives to turn out in big numbers in order to elect Democratic candidates in the fight for control of the Senate. …
10 Ridiculous Things The Victorians Did In The Name Of Science
The words “Victorian science” bring to mind sober men with ridiculous facial hair peering through microscopes. What it doesn’t bring to mind are certifiable lunatics trying to fly into space, electrocute their genitals, and teach dogs the alphabet. Yet that’s exactly what researchers of the day were up to.
10. Trying To Take A Hot Air Balloon Into Space
If scientist James Glaisher had had his way, the first manned spaceflight would have taken place 100 years before Yuri Gagarin’s. That’s because 1862 was the year that Glaisher and Henry Coxwell set off in their hot air balloon for the “aerial ocean” above. Their government-funded flight took off from Wolverhampton on September 5. Almost immediately, things went horribly wrong.
Approximately 8 kilometers (5 mi) above the Earth, the temperatures dropped to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 °F) and the animals that Glaisher had brought to observe died. About 1.6 kilometers (1 mi) above that, both men suddenly got the bends and collapsed.
At 11 kilometers (7 mi) up, both men blacked out but not before Coxwell pulled the valve release cord with his teeth. To Glaisher’s dismay, the balloon descended, taking them away from the edges of the atmosphere. …
Donald Trump Jr.’s joke about Aurora theater shooting sparks anger in Colorado
Trump Jr. on day of Aurora theater shooting: “Overall I give the movie two thumbs up.”
Donald Trump Jr.’s comments on a radio show about the Aurora theater shooting are sparking outrage and becoming political fodder in Colorado.
The son of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump appeared on the shock-jock show “Opie and Anthony” on July 20, 2012 — the same day convicted gunman James Holmes murdered 12 people at the Century Aurora 16 theater during the midnight premiere of the Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises.”
The radio hosts played interviews with people inside the theater when the attack took place.
“Everything was going good until, we saw gas and sparks, and sounded like really strong fireworks,” a witness says. “And then you just hear people yelling — and actually just a few rows away from me a girl gets up holding her jaw. I guess she had got shot.”
Trump Jr. immediately interjected: “Overall, I give the movie two thumbs up.”
…
Immigration in America Is Not Broken
Immigration has proven to be one of the most divisive issues in the 2016 presidential race. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have expressed that the system is broken, but a consensus on any solution seems untenable. In this video, Atlantic national correspondent James Fallows and contributing writer Deborah Fallows ventured across the country to bridge the disconnect between national political rhetoric on immigration and the realities in migrant communities. They travelled to three American states—Pennsylvania, California, and Kansas—to understand the economic benefits that immigrants bring to the small towns they most often reside in.
This documentary was produced for American Futures, an ongoing reporting project from James and Deborah Fallows. The couple has spent three years exploring small town America by air, “taking seriously places that don’t usually get registered seriously.”
DUSTBIN OF HISTORY: THE PAGER
The beeeep! beeeep! of someone’s pager going off used to be everywhere… but when was the last time you heard one? Let’s take one last look before they’re gone forever.
THE DOCTOR IS OUT
In 1924, a New York City businessman named Sherman Amsden started a company called the Doctors’ Telephone Service, one of the very first answering services in the country. When a physician was out of the office, his calls could be automatically forwarded to the service, whose operators took messages for him to retrieve when he called in later.
The service was simple but much needed. In an era before voice mail or even answering machines, the only way to be sure an important call didn’t go unanswered was to sit by the phone and wait for it to ring. For doctors, a missed call could mean the difference between someone’s life and death, and being on call often meant being stuck at home within earshot of the phone for hours on end. Or at least it did until Amsden’s company let them pass that chore off to someone else. Now doctors could get out of the house, as long as they checked in to see if they had any messages.
Amsden’s business thrived; it did even better when he renamed it Telanserphone so that he could market the service to plumbers, undertakers, elevator repairmen, and other people who were needed in emergencies. By 1939, he had thousands of clients and more than 60 operators staffing switchboards all over the city. But as the calls poured in and messages piled up, Amsden noticed that many clients—including some doctors—didn’t check for messages as often as he thought they should. That got him thinking: Why should they have to call in at all? They ought to be able to carry around a device that told them if they had messages waiting. …
Ecuador says it cut WikiLeaks founder’s internet over interference in US election
Officials confirm government cut off internet access for Julian Assange following a raft of leaked emails targeting Democrats
Ecuador has confirmed that it has temporarily cut off internet access in its embassy in London to Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks, over fears that he was using it to interfere in the US presidential election.
The move followed the publication of leaked emails by WikiLeaks, including some from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) released just before the party’s convention in July, and more recently a cache of emails from the account of Hillary Clinton campaign adviser John Podesta.
On Tuesday, officials released a statement saying that the government of Ecuador “respects the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states” and had cut off the internet access available to Assange because “in recent weeks, WikiLeaks has published a wealth of documents, impacting on the US election campaign”. …
The Truth About Flint
When you woke up this morning, what’s the first thing you did? Took a piss and flushed the toilet? Brushed your teeth? Took a shower? Whatever you did, I’m guessing you used water.
What’d you do after that? Made yourself some coffee or tea? Washed the pan you used to cook breakfast? More water.
Now, how about when you got to the office? Did you wash your hands? Did you rinse off the apple you ate for a snack? You definitely used some water.
That’s all normal, part of our everyday lives.
Unless you live in Flint, Michigan. …
The Life Of A Night Watchman Is Way Creepier Than You Think
Working the night watch probably conjures a very specific image in your mind — namely, catching up on your Sherlock / My Little Pony erotic crossover fanfic in between fleeting glances at a wall full of surveillance monitors. The mind-numbing boredom is only interrupted when you’re attacked by magically reanimated museum displays, gorily murdered by the linoleum, or … well, gorily murdered by pretty much anything else imaginable. In pop culture, overnight security guards are either punchlines or cannon fodder.
To find out what the job’s really like, we spoke with Dale Crangle and Dana Fakename, two purveyors of the night watch arts, to find out what it’s like to do cop stuff without the benefit of a gun, arrest powers, or backup. Spoiler: It’s horrifying.
#5. The Bad Guys Are Armed, And You’re Not
The whole reason the culture considers “rent-a-cops” walking jokes is, well, what exactly can they really do if they encounter bad guys? Guns would be too much of a liability issue for their employers, so they’re left to deter burglars, rapists, and meth heads with the same arsenal as the cops in that edited version of E.T.: walkie-talkies and flashlights. And sometimes, they don’t even get that.
“I recently had a new location added onto my route, downtown behind a bunch of seedy motels,” says Dana. “I went down for my first check, armed only with a phone and a flashlight, and found a man standing in the alley with a pickax. The moment I rounded the corner, he holds the pickax up in the air like a sword and tells me not to come any closer.”
You’re not getting paid enough to risk becoming
the first victim of the “Minecraft Killer.”
…
Get Off the Trolley Problem
Self-driving cars shouldn’t have to choose who to protect in a crash.
Imagine you are driving down a two-lane road at about 45 miles per hour, cruising home. You see a group of kids walking home from school about 100 yards ahead. Just as you’re about to pass by them, an oncoming 18-wheeler swerves out of its lane and is about to hit you head on. You have seconds, tops, to decide: Sacrifice yourself, or hit the children so you can avoid the truck.
I like to think that, if asked in advance, most people would choose not to plough into the kids. As the automation of driving advances, there’s a way to “hard-code” that decision into vehicles. Many cars already detect whether a toddler in a driveway is about to be run over by a driver with a blind spot. They even beep when other vehicles are in danger of being bumped. Transitioning from an alert system to a hard-wired hard stop is technically possible. And if that’s possible, so is an automatic brake that would prevent a driver from swerving to save herself at the expense of many others.
But the decision can also be coded the other way—to put the car occupants’ interests above all others. …
Autonomous cars are going to be great for jerks, study finds
If you’re kind of an ass when you drive, autonomous cars are going to be great for you, a new study from the London School of Economics and Goodyear has found (via GeekWire). Basically, self-driving cars will opt on the side of safety and caution, which means aggressive jerks who drive like morons will be able to bully them all over the road.
The study found that, surprisingly, drivers who tend to be more aggressive (and therefore among the least likely to want to give up control to a robot, especially a weak robot that’s a huge wimp when it comes to wanting not to terrify people or run them down) are actually those who favor an autonomous future, because in that world they can count on most of the soft baby bot cars to get out of the way when they careen toward them unsafely in order to assert their sad, pathetic, frustrated dominance. …
10 Disturbing Stories Behind Your Favorite Songs For Kids
Mother Goose’s treasure trove of children’s rhymes have delighted the little ones for generations, but maybe we should be taking a few seconds to find out what we’re teaching our kids to say. The songs we think of as children’s songs today weren’t always for kids. Some started off as for grown-ups—and are about much more grown-up things than they seem.
10. “Sing A Song Of Sixpence” Was A Pirate Recruiting Song
Originally, “Sing A Song of Sixpence” wasn’t sung by kids—it was sung by pirates. And it wasn’t just a song. It was a coded message.
When a crew would dock into a harbor, they’d often need to hire more people. Pirates, though, can’t exactly put up a billboard advertising that they’re looking for people to rob and plunder. So, they started singing a song of sixpence whenever they wanted to let people know they were hiring. …
Why Stephen Colbert Isn’t Connecting
An interview with Bill O’Reilly Monday night distilled many of the struggles the Late Show host has had in his first year on the job.
Almost 10 years ago, Stephen Colbert appeared on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor in character as the Colbert Report host—a pugnacious, egotistical super-pundit who tolerates no criticism. Colbert has frequently acknowledged that O’Reilly was the chief inspiration for his on-screen persona, and it was hilarious to see the imitation go up against the real thing. “What I do, Bill, is I catch the world in the headlights of my justice,” Colbert bragged to a smirking O’Reilly. “I’m not afraid of anything. Well, I might be afraid of you.” The same day, O’Reilly went on Colbert’s show; the combative tension between the two remains genuinely thrilling to watch.
On Monday night O’Reilly went on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to talk about the state of the Republican Party and Fox News. The conversation was civil, at times energetic, but mostly bland. O’Reilly, clearly far more at ease, pontificated on the state of the Trump campaign while dodging any discussion of some of its biggest controversies. Ultimately, it was a notable reminder of just how much things have changed for Colbert since he cast off his late-night character and joined CBS. To stand out in a crowded landscape, Colbert has pursued even-handedness and empathy, a drastic swerve away from his former public persona. It’s an approach both noble and misguided, but a year into his Late Show run, it’s kept him firmly out of the zeitgeist. …
The host of The O’Reilly Factor thinks Mike Pence is actually having fun on the campaign trail, despite the occasional hazards of being Donald Trump’s running mate.
The author of ‘Killing The Rising Sun’ offers has some advice for each candidate as they prepare for the final presidential debate.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
David Attenborough: zoos should use peepholes to respect gorillas’ privacy
Naturalist says London zoo escape attempt was ‘hardly surprising’ and calls for visitors to observe animals through peepholes, not glass panels
Veteran British naturalist David Attenborough has called for gorillas in zoos to be kept behind walls with peepholes rather than glass panels, in order to respect their privacy.
The 90-year-old television presenter spoke out after a gorilla briefly escaped on Thursday from its enclosure in London Zoo. Attenborough said the incident was “hardly surprising” when animals are subjected to intrusion.
He also said people should behave in a more respectful manner in zoos rather than clowning around trying to goad animals into a reaction.
But Attenborough, who has opened the eyes of millions of viewers to the wonders of the natural world during more than half a century in television, also said zoos play a vital role in preserving endangered species.
“They are wonderful animals, gorillas. They are animals which guard their privacy,” he told ITV television. …
THE FIRST GAS/ELECTRIC HYBRID VEHICLE WAS INVENTED IN 1900
Today I found out the first gas/electric hybrid vehicle was invented in 1900.
While hybrid and electric cars are often touted by the media and automobile companies as the wave of the future, in fact, we’re more just re-hashing the wave of the past with them, but with updated technologies.
Before gas cars ruled the road, first steam, then electric cars were king, with a few manufacturers also coming up with hybrid gas/electric cars to get around the limited range and high weight of electric vehicles from the large number of battery cells needed. Besides causing problems while climbing hills and the like, this high amount of weight particularly caused issues for the tires of the day, which still used soft white rubber without carbon black added to significantly increase certain desirable qualities of the tires over white tires. (more on this here) …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses>
and not-so-goodnesses>
“Translating the Harry Potter books written by J.K. Rowling, in over 60 languages around the world, was not for the faint of heart or vocabulary. Translators didn’t have advanced copies of the books to get a headstart and these books could take months to adapt from English. They also had to be clever in their solutions because the books are filled with wordplays, invented words, puns, British culture references, riddles, and more.”
“Boasting the world’s 2nd most painful sting, the tarantula hawk also happens to be the largest species of wasp in North America! These enormous spider wasps are most notorious for their macabre breeding habits but are also becoming well known for their ranking on the insect sting pain index. Only trailing in behind the bullet ant in terms of “sting pain” Coyote felt it necessary to experience this fear inducing sting before taking on the highly anticipated bullet ant challenge.”
FINALLY . . .
It Could Happen Here
Democracy is facing setbacks around the world, but there hasn’t been reason to doubt America’s resilience—until now.
For at least half a century, the bedrock of confidence in democracy’s future has been its unquestioned stability in Europe and North America. The United States and Britain survived the near-total obliteration of democracy by the fascist powers in World War II. Then the re-establishment and rapid consolidation of liberal democracies across Western Europe—and especially in Germany and Japan—laid the foundations for the global expansion of democracy that followed.
After World War II, there was only one other serious challenge to America’s democratic way of life. That was the dark period in the 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy and his political allies launched a witch-hunt against alleged and imagined communist sympathizers that stifled civil liberties and ruined the lives of many innocent people. The McCarthy era was an ugly one, but the threat was ultimately confronted and defeated by the forthright actions of courageous Americans in the media (such as Edward R. Murrow), in politics (such as Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith), in the law (such as chief counsel for the Army Joseph Welch), and in the judiciary (led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren). Many of these Americans, like Smith and Warren, were from McCarthy’s own Republican party. …