71 Vintage Photos Captured Daily Life Of Yokohama In The Late 1900s.

This is what happens when a carrot is fired at 300 km/hour at an egg, through two sheets of cardboard. 

This is what happens if you separate out the two sheets:

The egg survives! This shows how a Whipple shield works, and is what spacecraft use to protect themselves from micrometeoroid impacts in space. When the projectile (in this case a carrot, but in space it could be a speck of paint, a piece of an old satellite, or a bit of space rock) hits the first layer, it’s moving so fast that it starts to vaporise, because the energy of the collision is enough to break almost every bond in the substance.

It then sprays outwards, spreading the force of impact across a much wider area, meaning the second layer can stop it going any further, keeping your egg (or astronauts) safe.

Watch the full video on our YouTube channel.

Survivorship Bias

I have posted about survivorship bias and how it affects your career choices: how a Hollywood actor giving the classic “follow your dreams and never give up” line is bad advice and is pure survivorship bias at work.

When I read up on the wikipedia page, I encountered an interesting story:

During WWII the US  Air Force wanted to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. The Center for Naval Analyses ran a research on where bombers tend to get hit with the explicit aim of enforcing the parts of the airframe that is most likely to receive incoming fire. This is what they came up with:

So, they said: the red dots are where bombers are most likely to be hit, so put some more armor on those parts to make the bombers more resilient. That looked like a logical conclusion, until Abraham Wald - a mathematician - started asking questions: 

- how did you obtain that data? - well, we looked at every bomber returning from a raid, marked the damages on the airframe on a sheet and collected the sheets from all allied air bases over months. What you see is the result of hundreds of those sheets. - and your conclusion? - well, the red dots are where the bombers were hit. So let’s enforce those parts because they are most exposed to enemy fire.  - no. the red dots are where a bomber can take a hit and return. The bombers that took a hit to the ailerons, the engines or the cockpit never made it home. That’s why they are absent in your data. The blank spots are exactly where you have to enforce the airframe, so those bombers can return.

This is survivorship bias. You only see a subset of the outcomes. The ones that made it far enough to be visible. Look out for absence of data. Sometimes they tell a story of their own.

BTW: You can see the result of this research today. This is the exact reason the A-10 has the pilot sitting in a titanium armor bathtub and has it’s engines placed high and shielded.

Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) seminal vesicle

Dr. Barbara Laurinyecz

Szeged, Hungary

Technique: Confocal, Fluorescence (600x)

The song “It’s a long way to Tipperary” was enormously popular in New Zealand as a sound recording sung by Stanley Kirkby, with shops advertising new arrivals of stock from overseas in early 1915. At the same time, a film of the same title was also being shown in cinemas, and sheet music for an orchestral arrangement was available at the “Golden Horn” music store in Vivian Street Wellington. Copies of this Maori postcard with its “Tipirere “ translation were handed out to members of the 2nd Maori Contingent of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force after they marched through the streets of Wellington on Saturday 16 September 1915 (See Evening Post, 20 September 1915, page 8).

[Postcard]. Tipirere. N.Z.M.E.C. Hokowhitu-a-Tu. [ca 1915].    

Eph-B-POSTCARD-Vol-12-003-btm

The @unirdg-collections Squint

The University of Reading holds the archive of original artwork for the much-loved Ladybird children’s book. This painting on board was used to illustrate Exploring Space, a Ladybird ‘Achievements’ Book first published in 1964. The artwork was created by Brian Knight.

If you look closely at the painting, you can see the faint trace of Knight’s initial design for the lunar landing module - just visible under the later amendment.

Published before the first Moon landing in 1969, the fantasy spacecraft was sleek and utopian. It typifies the extent to which The Space Race captured our mid-century imaginations and permeated visual culture. The later correction, based on the Eagle Lunar Module, was printed in subsequent revisions to the book. It was an acknowledgment of a successful mission and testament to Ladybird’s emphasis on accuracy for its young readers.

All artwork is © Ladybird Books Ltd.

“We seem to be made to suffer. It’s our lot in life.” -C-3PO

Artist profile: Gerard Sekoto

‘Art is the spark, the illumination which is socially significant for it brings about understanding’ – Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993)

Gerard Sekoto was born in Botshabelo, Mpumalanga province, in 1913, the year in which the Natives Land Act dispossessed many black South Africans of their ancestral lands. In 1938 Sekoto moved to Sophiatown, Johannesburg. He held his first solo exhibition the following year, and in 1940 the Johannesburg Art Gallery purchased his work Yellow Houses – A Street in Sophiatown (1939–1940). It was the first painting by a black South African artist to be acquired by a South African art institution, although Sekoto had to pose as a cleaner to see his own painting hanging in the gallery.

Sekoto based this painting, titled Song of the Pick (1946), on a photograph taken in the 1930s of black South African workers labouring under the watchful eye of a white foreman standing behind them. However, in his painting the dynamic has changed. Sekoto has enhanced the grace and power of the labourers, turning them to confront the small and puny figure of the overseer, who appears about to be impaled by their pickaxes.

Sekoto painted this work in the township of Eastwood in Pretoria, shortly before moving to Paris in what became a lifelong exile from South Africa. During the 1980s, postcard-sized reproductions of this iconic painting were widely distributed in South Africa, as both a badge of honour and a source of inspiration in the struggle against apartheid.

Explore a diverse range of art stretching back 100,000 years in our exhibition South Africa: the art of a nation (27 October 2016 – 26 February 2017).

Exhibition sponsored by Betsy and Jack Ryan

Logistics partner IAG Cargo

Song of the Pick, 1946. Image © Iziko Museums of South Africa, Art Collections, Cape Town. Photo by Carina Beyer.

Song of the Pick was based on this image, taken by photographer Andrew Goldie in the 1930s.

A prayer in Hebrew dating to the 8th or 9th century. This document was found in Dunhuang China, which was China’s gateway to the “Silk Road” during the medieval period. Dunhuang was visited by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and other groups, and the caves at Dunhuang have been found to contain documents and art from all of these traditions. 

The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the struggle for life Charles Darwin

London John Murray Sixth Edition with additions and corrections (Forty Third Thousand) The sixth edition [shown here] (first printed in 1872) - is the edition in which the word “evolution” was used for the first time (although Darwin used this term in the Descent of Man, published a year before; in 1871). This edition was also the last that Charles Darwin revised during his lifetime, including the addition of an entirely new chapter.  In 1876 Darwin added a few small corrections, and all subsequent printing were copies of that printing.

a clean tight fresh presentable copy - which remains largely unread - even after 124 years -  a large portion of the book remains unopened [the leaves of the book remain joined at the folds; not slit apart]

In slow motion, vortex rings can be truly stunning. This video shows two bubble rings underwater as they interact with one another. Upon approach, the two low-pressure vortex cores link up in what’s known as vortex reconnection. Note how the vortex rings split and reconnect in two places – not one. According to Helmholtz’s second theorem a vortex cannot end in a fluid–it must form a closed path (or end at a boundary); that’s why both sides come apart and together this way. After reconnection, waves ripple back and forth along the distorted vortex ring; these are known as Kelvin waves. Some of those perturbations bring two sides of the enlarged vortex ring too close to one another, causing a second vortex reconnection, which pinches off a smaller vortex ring. (Image source: A. Lawrence; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

Note: As with many viral images, locating a true source for this video is difficult. So far the closest to an original source I’ve found is the Instagram post linked above. If you know the original source, please let me know so that I can update the credit accordingly. Thanks!