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One of my uranium prospector heroes, Gilbert A. LaBine, sitting with his uranium tailings. He was far more interested in hunting down radium than just uranium itself.
Marie Curie’s work with radium had a HUGE influence on LaBine. Her research helped bring radium into the spotlight, which helped make it extremely valuable. This was a big part of what drove LaBine to search for it, eventually leading him to discover pitchblende at Great Bear Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
He went on to open the Eldorado mine at Port Radium and built a refinery in Ontario, where they would process uranium ore to extract radium.
The radium extracted from his pitchblende would go on to be used in cancer treatments, lume paints for watches, clocks and military dials in aircraft instruments. ☢️
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In the shelter of the Hundred Acre Wood they stood up straight again, to listen, a little nervously, to the roaring of the gale among the tree-tops.
“Supposing a tree fell down, Pooh, when we were underneath it?”
“Supposing it didn’t,” said Pooh after careful thought. ~A.A.Milne
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Hello again
‘A Premonition of Winter’
Pavel Pokidyshev
Russian artist ( Penza)
He’s enjoyed many exhibitions including Norway and China
@helen_warlow
#Art
aniemyer retweeted
The biggest mistake tourists make in Japan is dragging a fifty-pound suitcase up and down subway stairs.
Watch how Japanese travelers board the bullet train. They walk on with a cup of green tea, a small shoulder bag, and both hands free.
Where is their luggage? It is already in the next city, waiting for them.
In Japan, the system is called Takkyubin, recognizable everywhere by a logo of a mother black cat carrying her kitten gently in her mouth.
When you check out of your hotel in Tokyo at eight in the morning, you hand your heavy suitcase to the front desk, fill out a tiny slip, and pay about twenty dollars. You can even send it straight from the corner convenience store.
Then you spend the entire day wandering through mountain temples or eating street food with nothing on your back.
When you walk into your traditional inn in Kyoto that evening, your suitcase is already standing neatly in your room, wiped clean, with the handle turned toward you.
In fifty years of handling millions of bags a year, lost luggage is virtually unheard of.
A society runs smoothly when you can hand your belongings to a stranger at a convenience store and know they will beat you to your hotel.
aniemyer retweeted
Heart & Soul of Quintessential Americana
🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸🦅🇺🇸
RETVRN
When you see a mom and her eight kids dancing in the dark, with nothing but truck headlights lighting up their laughter, you know she’s done her job right. Not because life has been perfect, but because they still find joy in being together. That’s what a strong family foundation looks like, love they can count on, a place where they belong, and the freedom to be themselves. Of all the things a mom can build, nothing matters more. ❤️
aniemyer retweeted
Hello again.
Deborah Phillips artist
‘Moon Over the Haughs of Benholm
Scottish painter
Love this one. She’s a favourite of mine.
@helen_warlow #Art
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October 27, 1942. In the Atlantic off the coast of northwest Africa, a wolf pack of German U-boats falls upon a slow convoy of merchant ships and begins tearing it apart, sinking ship after ship over several days. It was one more convoy massacre in the long Battle of the Atlantic, except for one extraordinary thing: by dying, this convoy may have saved one of the most important operations of the war.
The convoy was SL-125, bringing merchant ships up from Sierra Leone toward Britain, the kind of slow, vulnerable convoy that the U-boats loved to hunt, the same sort of target as the SC-7 I told you about. A pack of submarines found it near the approaches to Gibraltar and set upon it in the running, multi-day battle that wolf-pack tactics had made so deadly, attacking at night on the surface, and over the days around the 27th they sank around a dozen of the convoy's ships, a brutal loss.
But here is the thing that makes SL-125 unlike any other convoy battle. At that very moment, just over the horizon, an enormous Allied operation was under way. Hundreds of ships carrying tens of thousands of American and British troops were converging on the coast of northwest Africa for Operation Torch, the great Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa, the first large joint offensive of the war in the west, timed to come down on Rommel's rear as he reeled back from El Alamein. That invasion fleet was passing through the same waters, and if the U-boats had found it, the slaughter could have been catastrophic, troopships full of soldiers sent to the bottom before they ever reached the beaches.
Instead, the U-boats found SL-125. The wolf pack that might have fallen on the invasion convoys was drawn to the slow merchant ships and spent itself attacking them, its submarines concentrated around SL-125 and out of position to intercept the Torch fleet, which slipped past and reached North Africa to make its landings successfully. The sacrifice of the merchant ships and their crews, unknowing, had in effect screened the invasion.
There has long been a dark question hovering over SL-125: was it deliberate? Some have wondered whether the convoy was knowingly routed as a decoy, offered up as bait to pull the U-boats away from the invasion fleet, its merchant sailors sacrificed on purpose to protect the soldiers. The evidence is murky, and most historians think it was more likely a fortunate accident than a cold-blooded plan, that the convoy's suffering happened to draw the wolves at exactly the right moment. One British commander is said to have remarked, grimly, that it was the only time he was glad to see a convoy attacked.
Either way, the result was the same. The men of SL-125 paid a heavy price in ships and lives, and their ordeal, deliberate or not, helped ensure that the Torch invasion fleet got through. It is one of the strange, poignant footnotes of the Atlantic war, a convoy whose destruction may have been its unintended gift, the merchant sailors who died off Africa so that an army could land, mostly unaware of what their sacrifice had bought.
Betting the ship’s owners may have chose Cambodia to avoid her being seized by creditors. #Pyramid
aniemyer retweeted
28 October 1886. Statue of Liberty was dedicated in what is now known as Liberty Island in New York City Harbour by US President Grover Cleveland. The 151-foot high statue was a gift from the people of France. It was designated as a national monument in 1924.
aniemyer retweeted
28 October 1216. Henry III (aged 9) was crowned King of England and Lord of Ireland in St Peter’s Abbey, the old name for Gloucester Cathedral, shortly after the death of King John. It was the last time an English or British monarch was crowned outside Westminster Abbey.
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When George Washington was inaugurated in 1789, he wore a relatively plain brown frock coat. To the modern eye, the garment may look fancy, but it was relatively constrained for a man of Washington's position.
Affluent Americans at the time tended to wear European fabrics, as centuries of textile tradition on that side of the Atlantic meant that their materials were finer, silkier, and more luxurious. Those who could afford to wear such materials often did, not just because they were more comfortable, but because they signaled status.
Washington rejected this convention for his inauguration, opting instead for a plain brown frock coat made from an American-made material, specifically one produced by a relatively new upstart in Connecticut. It's also notable that his outfit for that day was considerably more restrained than those of leaders in other Western nations.
For instance, check out this outfit on George III (slide one). In this 1762 coronation painting, we can see the British monarch wearing a gold damask coat with a velvet mantle lined and edged with ermine and trimmed in gold. Even his shoes featured solid gold buckles.
Washington opted for something simpler because he wanted to send two political messages. First, he wanted to support domestic industry (hence his request that the garment be made from American woolen broadcloth).
Second, he understood that the US was supposed to be a democratic republic, not a monarchy. Back in Europe, monarchs wore fancy ceremonial attire to reinforce their position in society. Washington, by contrast, chose something more restrained, signaling that he was not governing through divine right but rather through consent of the people.
Irish-born architect James Holban also understood this when he designed the White House in the Neoclassical style, drawing from Georgian and Palladian architecture. Neoclassicism was a rejection of Rococo, which had been fashionable among European monarchs and aristocrats in the preceding decades.
Most people will know Rococo from the photos of the lavish French palaces erected during the reign of Louis XV. Much like the elaborate ceremonial attire of European monarchs, these interiors were meant to impress upon people the wealth and power of European leaders. The visual grandeur reinforced the idea that these people fundamentally occupied a different social station from those they governed.
To be sure, the White House was much nicer than what ordinary Americans at the time would have occupied. But much like Washington's inauguration outfit, Hoban's design was meant to balance the dignity of the office with the republican ideal that political authority ultimately comes from the people. Our leaders are not above us; they are here to serve us.
That is why the White House was decorated in this relatively restrained way for almost 250 years, changing only recently. I have seen some on here suggest that glorifying the White House is meant to glorify the state, and thus the citizens. But this logic was historically used by dictators abroad, not US presidents.
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In XIXth-century France, regional historical societies started to give thought to the commemoration of defeats that had occurred centuries earlier in medieval period.
The principle underlying this second phase of commemoration was perfectly articulated at the beginning of the XXth century by Robert Triger, a prominent local scholar from the Maine region, during a ceremony honoring the great French knight Captain of the Hundred Years' War Ambroise de Loré: "The primary duty of a nation that wishes to remain valiant and respected is to honor its heroes and pay tribute to the patriots who, in difficult times, fought courageously for national independence."
Commemoration had thus become a patriotic duty owed to those who had given or risked their lives for France or even today, a collective commemoration between the two countries, France and England, as is the case with Agincourt.
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Thunderstorm Beneath the Summit, from Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, by Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1830-1832
