Kodo Drumming Rocks
February 9th is the anniversary of the first successful test of the Boeing 747 Jet Airliner in 1969. Over 1,000 have been built since then and they're still in production. Not bad for a plane that was expected to be overshadowed by supersonic jets and be relegated to cargo duty. I love watching the big ones come in on arrival at Lester B. Pearson airport- my office overlooks the final approach for one of the runways... the big ones always seem like they're going a lot slower than the rest but it's just that they're so much bigger!
Torontoist has a good bit on the origins of the name "Toronto" - many people, starting with Henry Scadding in 1884 in his "Toronto, Past and Present", think it's a Huron word meaning "Meeting Place". But really, it turns out to be more likely the word means this (was) a good place to fish.
HOWTO find the Westinghouse Time Capsule after 5,000 years: Master archivist Rick Prelinger writes,
Westinghouse's Time Capsule was one of the prime attractions at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Not to be opened until the year 6939, it contained small artifacts of everyday American life and thousands of feet of microfilmed books, magazines and newspapers.So that people could locate the Capsule 5000 years later, Westinghouse published a special book and sent copies to libraries, temples, monasteries and lamaseries -- everywhere they thought a book had a chance of surviving the millennia. It contains coordinates, a key to the English language, and greetings from Einstein, the physicist Milliken and writer Thomas Mann.
Here's a scanned copy from our library -- download it and see if the bits last 5000 years!
Also, a booklet with a detailed listing of the Capsule's contents is here. (from Boing Boing)