NileshBabu

According to historian Lizzie Collingham in her terrific Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, the English popularized tea drinking in India in the early 1900s as a way to expand the market for the tea they were growing there. To the great distress of the British marketers of the time, the locals insisted on adding way more sugar and milk than would be considered proper by English standards and, adding insult to injury, spicing it up a bit with cardamom, pepper, cinnamon.

Van Wyck Brooks’ New England: Indian Summer (1940) contains remarks made by the Mayor of Haverhill, Massachusetts at the funeral of John Greenleaf Whittier in which is the following: “Here may we be reminded that man is most honored, not by that which a city may do for him, but by that which he has done for the city.”

These questions have been asked frequently: Was the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee too narrow? Were the committee members unable to appreciate the struggle for freedom among non-European peoples?” Or were the Norwegian committee members perhaps afraid to make a prize award which might be detrimental to the relationship between their own country and Great Britain?

In December of 1975, after a year of piecing together a bunch of new technology in a back lab at the Elmgrove Plant in Rochester, we were ready to try it. “It” being a rather odd-looking collection of digital circuits that we desperately tried to convince ourselves was a portable camera. It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like.

We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex’s name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce. But Bin Laden may have had another, more personal motivation. The World Trade Center’s architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family’s patrons—the Saudi royal family—and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences.

HT: MarginalRevolution.com

Tells why northern Europeans are so oddly de-pigmented compared to everyone else on the globe. Session E1 of a series of topics discussed by the Second Life “The Study of Racialism” group. It is part of our molecular anthropology series. The prior session, E5 discussed the migrations that carried our species around the globe in prehistoric times. This topic looks at later regional adaptations.