The first American woman to command a ship was a pregnant 19 year old. She did it while fighting off a mutiny, nursing an incapacitated husband, and braving gale-force winds.
ICYMI, Thursday's links are here, and include the Ides of March, a history of hair transplants, what antibiotics are made of, shoe rationing in the U.S. during WWII, and, since Stephen Hawking died on Einstein's birthday, the Hawking vs Einstein rap battle.
Watching this, one would assume that alcohol was involved, but these gentlemen appear to be in Saudi Arabia so perhaps their only inebriant is the "clear ether of youth itself"*:
*My favorite opening paragraph ever, from The Atlantic in an article entitled The Dark Power of Fraternities. I haven't read the whole article, but this is a world class opening paragraph:
One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.
In the late 1950s and early 60s, the Florida Panhandle was responsible for two-thirds of all loss-of-limb accident claims in the United States due largely to one town: Vernon, Florida.
This was because Vernon was the site of a widespread insurance scam where residents would dismember themselves for a payout. The problem was so extensive, the town became known as, “Nub City” for this very reason, was in dire economic straits.
Now I Know: Quite literally, people in Vernon were shooting themselves, blowing off a limb, and collecting on the insurance. How the trend started, no one knows — perhaps it was an accident at a sawmill or with a plow, or perhaps it was a calculated effort to scam an insurance company out of tens of thousands of dollars (or more). Truly, it doesn’t matter. For when word got out that so-and-so just received a check for untold riches — and all it cost him was a hand or foot, perhaps even to the elbow or knee — well, the idea spread. By the time the early 1960s rolled around, according to the Tampa Bay Times, Vernon, Florida was responsible for roughly two-thirds of all loss-of-limb-related insurance claims in the United States.
Some of the claims were looked into by insurance investigator Joe Healy:
One of the clues to a phony injury, Healy notes, is that people “usually take off the thing they need least, like their left hand rather than the right one. If they have a sitdown job, they'll take off a leg or foot, not an arm.” More often than not, too, maiming oneself for insurance money is a white collar practice, Healy says, remarking that a few years back he found an owner of a car dealership who put out his eye for $400,000 to buy a ranch.
“Blue‐collar workers generally need their limbs and eyes to do their work,” he explains. Self ‐injury, in fact, is a fairly common insurance‐fraud act. There are even informal “rings” of people, usually limited to one locale or a closeknit family or ethnic group, who inflict self‐injuries. “Another clue to a phony claim,” says Healy, “is when several ‘accidental’ injuries occur in the same place in a short period of time.” Usually everincreasing amounts of insurance are involved. “One guy gets away with it and he collects,” Healy says. “Then he tells a friend about it and he goes and does the same thing, but takes out a bigger policy, and on.”
Over the time period in question, a total of fifty people (give or take) lost a limb of some sorts, many if not all filing insurance claims thereafter. While the insurers attempted to bring lawsuits actions against some of these people, not one was convicted of insurance fraud. One alleged transgressor was particularly egregious, but, as the Times notes, he avoided conviction and walked away a one-footed millionaire:
“There was another man who took out insurance with 28 or 38 companies,” said Murray Armstrong, an insurance official for Liberty National. “He was a farmer and ordinarily drove around the farm in his stick shift pickup. This day – the day of the accident – he drove his wife’s automatic transmission car and he lost his left foot. If he’d been driving his pickup, he’d have had to use that foot for the clutch. He also had a tourniquet in his pocket. We asked why he had it and he said, ‘Snakes. In case of snake bite.’ He’d taken out so much insurance he was paying premiums that cost more than his income. He wasn’t poor, either. Middle class. He collected more than $1 million from all the companies. It was hard to make a jury believe a man would shoot off his foot.”
Also per the Tampa Bay Times:
L.W. Burdeshaw, an insurance agent in Chipley, told the St. Petersburg Times in 1982 that his list of policyholders included the following: a man who sawed off his left hand at work, a man who shot off his foot while protecting chickens, a man who lost his hand while trying to shoot a hawk, a man who somehow lost two limbs in an accident involving a rifle and a tractor, and a man who bought a policy and then, less than 12 hours later, shot off his foot while aiming at a squirrel.
A few years later, a film maker named Errol Morris came to Vernon, hoping to make a movie (tentatively titled “Nub City”) about the purported scam. But faced with death threats and the like, he instead produced a much less controversial film of the town and named it, cautiously, “Vernon, Florida.” The well-regarded documentary focuses on the town more broadly, bringing to film many eccentricities about the community — but does not focus on the decision of many to dismember themselves.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us very special.
~ Stephen Hawking (quoted in Der Spiegel, 1989)
In effect, we have redefined the task of science to be the discovery of laws that will enable us to predict events up to the limits set by the uncertainty principle.
I think it's important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.
~ Hawking (interview in The Guardian, 27 September 2005)
It's a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life, and I haven't done badly. People won't have time for you if you are always angry and complaining.
~ Ibid.
On the whole, the public shows good taste in its choice of idols. Einstein and Hawking earned their status as superstars, not only by their scientific discoveries but by their outstanding human qualities. Both of them fit easily into the role of icon, responding to public adoration with modesty and good humor and with provocative statements calculated to command attention. Both of them devoted their lives to an compromising struggle to penetrate the deepest mysteries of nature, and both still had time left over to care about the practical worries of ordinary people. The public rightly judged them to be genuine heroes, friends of humanity as well as scientific wizards.
~ Freeman Dyson (b. 1923) ( "The 'Dramatic Picture' of Richard Feynman," The New York Review of Books, 14 July 2011)
British theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen William Hawking, was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford, where his mother had moved from London to escape the Blitz. Educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Hawking became the Lucasian professor of mathematics at the latter institution in 1979, following pioneering work in the quantum and relativistic mechanics that underlie the "big bang" theory of the origin of the universe and the creation of "black holes" in space.
Since 1962, he suffered from amytrophic lateral sclerosis ("ALS" (wiki), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease) which had confined him to a wheel-chair and left him physically unable to speak clearly or to write. Nonetheless, his popular exposition of cosmography, A Brief History of Time (1988), become a best-seller, and he remained one of the world's best known scientists.
ICYMI, Wednesday's links are here, and include the woman who thought she was married to Napoleon, finding a universal translator for old computer files, and, for Albert Einstein's birthday, the story of the strange post-mortem travels of his brain.
ICYMI, Friday's links are here, and include solving crimes with knot analysis, Daylight Saving Time history (including Ben Franklin's proposal), a street-legal jet-powered Volkswagen Beetle, and, for Chuck Norris' 78th birthday, his 5 most badass movies, supercut of Norris's best kicks and a bunch of Norris "facts".
