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The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth.
Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.


Friday, June 3, 2016

The Daily Drift

Welcome to Today's Edition of  
Carolina Naturally
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Today is - National Doughnut Day

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Today in History

1098
'Christian' Crusaders of the First Crusade seize Antioch, Turkey.
1539
Hernando De Soto claims Florida for Spain.
1861
Union troops defeat Confederate forces at Philippi, in western Virginia
1864
Some 7,000 Union troops are killed within 30 minutes during the Battle of Cold Harbor in Virginia.
1888
The classic baseball poem “Casey at the Bat,” written by Ernest L. Thayer, is published in the San Francisco Examiner.
1918
The Finnish Parliament ratifies a treaty with Germany.
1923
In Italy, dictator Benito Mussolini grants women the right to vote.
1928
Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin dies as a result of a bomb blast set off by the Japanese.
1938
The German Third Reich votes to confiscate so-called “degenerate art.”
1940
The German Luftwaffe hits Paris with 1,100 bombs.
1942
Japanese carrier-based planes strafe Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands as a diversion of the attack on Midway Island.
1952
A rebellion by North Korean prisoners in the Koje prison camp in South Korea is put down by American troops.
1965
Astronaut Edward White becomes the first American to walk in space when he exits the Gemini 4 space capsule.
1969
74 American sailors died when the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans was cut in two by an Australian aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.
1974
Charles Colson, an aide to Nixon, pleads guilty to obstruction of justice.
1989
The Chinese government begins its crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Hundreds are killed and thousands are arrested.

King Tut's Blade Made of Meteorite

X-ray analysis confirms that the iron of the dagger placed on the thigh of the boy king has meteoric origins.
King Tut was buried with a dagger made of an iron that literally came from space, says a new study into the composition of the iron blade from the sarcophagus of the boy king.
Using non-invasive, portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, a team of Italian and Egyptian researchers confirmed that the iron of the dagger placed on the right thigh of King Tut's mummified body a has meteoric origin.
The team, which include researchers from Milan Polytechnic, Pisa University and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, detailed their results in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
The weapon, now on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, was described in 1925 by Howard Carter, who three years before had discovered the treasure-packed tomb, as "a highly ornamented gold dagger with crystal knob."
Made of non-rusted, homogeneous metal, the finely manufactured blade features a decorated gold handle. It is completed by a gold sheath garnished with a floral lily motif on one side and with a feathers pattern on the other side, terminating with a jackal's head.
Although it is generally assumed that early iron objects were produced from meteoritic iron, such origin of the blade has long been the subject of debate, and previous analyses yielded controversial results.
Now dramatic technological improvements have allowed the researchers to determine the composition of the blade.
"Meteoric iron is clearly indicated by the presence of a high percentages of nickel," main author Daniela Comelli, at the department of Physics of Milan Polytechnic, told Discovery News.
Indeed, iron meteorites are mostly made of iron and nickel, with minor quantities of cobalt, phosphorus , sulfur and carbon.
While artifacts produced with iron ore quarrying display 4 percent of nickel at most, the iron blade of King Tut's dagger was found to contain nearly 11 percent of nickel.
Further confirmation of the blade's meteoric origin came from cobalt traces.
"The nickel and cobalt ratio in the dagger blade is consistent with that of iron meteorites that have preserved the primitive chondritic ratio during planetary differentiation in the early solar system," Comelli said.
Comelli and colleagues also investigated the possible source of the iron blade.
"We took into consideration all meteorites found within an area of 2,000 km in radius centered in the Red Sea, and we ended up with 20 iron meteorites," Comelli said.
"Only one, named Kharga, turned out to have nickel and cobalt contents which are possibly consistent with the composition of the blade," she added.
The meteorite fragment was found in 2000 on a limestone plateau at Mersa Matruh, a seaport some 150 miles west of Alexandria.
The study shows the ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of precious objects, possibly perceiving those chunks of iron falling from the sky as a divine message.
The most ancient Egyptian iron artifacts, nine small beads excavated from a cemetery along the west bank of the Nile tomb in Gerzeh and dated about 3200 BC, are also made from meteoritic iron hammered into thin sheets.
"It would be very interesting to analyze more pre-Iron Age artifacts, such as other iron objects found in King Tut's tomb. We could gain precious insights into metal working technologies in ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean," Comelli said.
She noted that the high quality of King Tut's dagger blade shows that iron smithing was successful already in the 14th century B.C.
The dagger blade is not the only celestial object found in the boy king's tomb. His pectoral, or necklace, features an amulet scarab which is not "greenish-yellow chalcedony," as Carter had noted, but Libyan desert silica glass.
The glass was produced by the impact on the sand of a meteorite or comet. Such natural glass exists only in the remote and inhospitable Great Sand Sea of Egypt -- the Western Desert. In order to produce the scarab, the ancient Egyptians would have had to trek across 500 desert miles.

Hitler's WWII Coding Machine Found on eBay

The Lorenz machine -- used by Hitler to send personal messages to his generals -- was sold for £9.50 ($14) on the online auction website.
Detail of the famous Enigma machine that was used by Nazi Germany to send coded messages.
One of the machines used to send coded messages between Adolf Hitler and his generals sold for £10 on eBay after being discovered in a shed in England, the buyer said Sunday.
Researchers at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park saw a "telegram machine" for sale on the auction site for £9.50 (12.5 euros/$14), and believed it may have actually been a Lorenz machine, used by the German army to send top-secret coded messages.
"My colleague was scanning eBay and he saw a photograph of what seemed to be the teleprinter," John Wetter, a volunteer at the museum in Buckinghamshire, south England, told the BBC.
To investigate further, Wetter traveled to the southeastern town of Southend where he found the machine, which resembles a typewriter, on the floor of a shed, covered "with rubbish".
"We said 'Thank you very much, how much was it again?' She said '£9.50', so we said 'Here's a £10 note -- keep the change," he added.
The museum is now hunting for a replacement motor, which is missing.
"It looks like an electric motor in black casing with two shafts on each side, which drive the gears of the Lorenz machine," said Wetter.
The Lorenz teleprinter was used in World War II to swap personal messages between Hitler and his generals.
A linked cipher machine consisting of 12 individual wheels each containing multiple settings encoded the messages.
Andy Clark, chairman of the trustees at The National Museum of Computing, called the machine "far bigger than the famous portable Enigma machine".
"Everybody knows about Enigma, but the Lorenz machine was used for strategic communications," said Clark.
"It is so much more complicated than the Enigma machine."

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Senior veterans break up ugly racist attack

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