When America issued dogtags to kids to help identify their nuke-blasted corpses

Cory Doctorow at 10:09 am • •

Matt Novak hits some highlights from Joanne Brown's 1988 Journal of American History paper A is for Atom, B is for Bomb (paywalled link), which discusses the weird, grim stuff that America contemplated at the height of the cold war, and worried about how it would identify the charred corpses of children after a nuclear blast:

In February of 1952 the city of New York bought 2.5 million dog tags. By April of that year, just about every kid in the city from kindergarten to fourth grade had a tag with their name on it. Kids in many other cities like San Francisco, Seattle, Las Veagas and Philadelphia also got dog tags, allowing for easy identification should the unthinkable occur.
But educators weren't considering just dog tags to identify the scores of dead and injured children that would result if the cold war suddenly turned hot. They also considered tattoos.

That Time American School Kids Were Given Dog Tags Because Nukes

Whatever happened to crack babies?

Cory Doctorow at 7:59 am • •

The wonderful Retro Report (which revisits popular news stories of the years gone by and follows up on their claims) has posted a great, 10-minute documentary on "crack babies," concluding that the promised crack baby epidemic of kids with gross deformities who couldn't attend regular school never materialized. The documentary says that the entire phenomenon was extrapolated from a single, preliminary study, and that most of the "crack baby" effects were actually the result of low birth weight.

Crack Babies: A Tale from the Drug Wars (via Kottke)

Do science: The life you save may be your own —

One of the people who developed the pacemaker is now 86. And he has a pacemaker. — Maggie •

Read a moving account of surviving (and dying on) Mount St. Helens —

At National Geographic, you can read Rowe Findley's 1981 account of surviving the Mount St. Helens eruption — and his deeply moving profiles of many of the people who did not. Includes this seminal quote from 83-year-old Harry R. Truman, who Findley describes as raising "the adjectival use of profanity to a new high": "It's a part of me, and I'm part of that ______ mountain," said Truman. "If I got out of here, I wouldn't live a _____ day, not a ______ day." — Maggie •

Conspiracy theorists aren't crazy

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 6:24 am • •

I have a personal Facebook account, which I use to keep up with friends and family. Like many of you, I've also discovered that this gives me a peek inside the psyche of those friends and family — and one of the things that I saw was an interest (and sometimes belief in) conspiracy theories. It wasn't limited to the Right or the Left. And it definitely wasn't limited to people I love but consider a little "off", if you know what I'm saying.* Over and over, I saw perfectly rational, sane people, supporting and spreading ideas that, to me, seemed a little nuts.

And that made me curious: Where do conspiracy theories come from? The answer, according to psychologists and sociologists, is not "Glenn Beck's fevered imagination." In fact, the category "people who believe in conspiracy theories" can't even really be separated into The Other in a nice, neat way. If you look at the data, the people who believe in conspiracy theories are us. And those theories grow out of both historical context, our feelings about ourselves and the wider world, and the way that our brains respond to feelings of powerlessness and uncertainty. Here's a short excerpt from my most recent column for The New York Times Magazine:

While psychologists can’t know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.

Economic recessions, terrorist attacks and natural disasters are massive, looming threats, but we have little power over when they occur or how or what happens afterward. In these moments of powerlessness and uncertainty, a part of the brain called the amygdala kicks into action. Paul Whalen, a scientist at Dartmouth College who studies the amygdala, says it doesn’t exactly do anything on its own. Instead, the amygdala jump-starts the rest of the brain into analytical overdrive — prompting repeated reassessments of information in an attempt to create a coherent and understandable narrative, to understand what just happened, what threats still exist and what should be done now. This may be a useful way to understand how, writ large, the brain’s capacity for generating new narratives after shocking events can contribute to so much paranoia in this country.

Read the rest

*This joke is totally going to get me into trouble. Dear friends and family: Trust me, you are not the one I'm referring to here.

Image: December 21st...., a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from clawzctr's photostream

HOWTO kill a tiger (1902)

Cory Doctorow at 4:03 pm • •

The Public Domain Review has a nice gallery of plates from Lieutenant Colonel Frank Sheffield's 1902 book "How I killed the tiger; being an account of my encounter with a royal Bengal tiger, with an appendix containing some general information about India," which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like:

My main purpose in writing this little book, was to place in a permanent form a description of my wonderful preservation from death in a chance encounter with a Royal Bengal Tiger. My life had been adventurous up to that time. I had shot big game of various kinds. But this episode, so marvellous in itself, so important in its influence upon my after life and character, marks the close of my career as a hunter of big game.

Illustrative plates from How I Killed the Tiger (1902)

The places Soviet tourists could not visit in the 1950s

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 8:46 am • •

Apparently, there were some private citizens from the USSR who were allowed into the U.S. for travel during the Cold War. But they couldn't just visit anywhere they wanted.

This map, from a post at Slate's Vault blog, shows the no-go zones, shaded in green. Some of this is quite funny — gee, guys, I wonder what you're keeping hidden out in rural Nevada? Another interesting point: Soviets could visit Kansas City, Kansas, but not Kansas City, Missouri. Which could just be a pretty good joke, on our part. The fun stuff is all on the Missouri side.

EDIT: In the original version of this post, I'd mentioned that Kansas had once been home to many, many missile silos, and speculated that this might be why so much of that state (and the Dakotas) was off-limits to Soviet travelers. But, Cold War historian Audra J. Wolfe contacted me and pointed out that there were no missile silos at the time this map was made, because there were no Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. So why ban the Ruskies from Kansas? Wolfe isn't entirely sure. She speculated that it might have had something to do with limiting access to public lands managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Bureau of Land Management. It also could have been tied to the presence of Strategic Air Command bases in the state. And there were tons of Atomic Energy Commission-owned sites scattered all over the U.S. — it's hard to keep track of where they all were.

Of course, Wolfe also said that there wasn't always a clear logic behind the decisions about which parts of the country were made off-limits to Soviet citizens. For instance, much of our coastline was off-limits for no other reason than the fact that much of the Soviet coast was off-limits to Americans. "The main premise is 'strict reciprocity'," she wrote in a message to me. "X% of Soviet coasts are off-limits, therefore x% of US coasts are off-limits, too." So there, one might add.

The BBC discovers the Texas Germans — and a dying dialect —

My great-grandmother, Hedwig Nietzsche Koerth, never spoke English. My Grandpa Gustav didn't learn the language until he entered first grade. But, by the time I was in grade school — and was going through a brief fling of learning German — Grandpa no longer remembered much of what had once been his first language. Today, nobody in my immediate family speaks any German, much less the dying dialect of Texas German that my great-grandmother spoke. The BBC has an interesting story about the history and linguistics of Texas German, which will probably die out in the next couple generations — largely because the German Germans started a couple world wars in a row and changed the idea of what was and wasn't socially acceptable speech in America. — Maggie •

Did a volcanic eruption nearly kill off ancient humans? —

Short answer: We don't know. What makes this story by Erin Wayman interesting is the way it carefully breaks down an almost Hollywood-ready narrative and finds the fascinating uncertainty lurking underneath. The truth is, uncertainty is cool. Because it means there's more stuff left to discover. — Maggie •

A Mother's Day memoir of a scientist who beat the odds —

"To become a scientist is hard enough. But to become one while running a gauntlet of lies, insults, mockeries, and disapproval — this was what my mother had to do." Mother's Day was yesterday, but you'll still want to read this fantastic essay from 2002, written by journalist Charles Hirschberg about his mother, geophysicist Joan Feynman. — Maggie •

53 years of nuclear tests as electronic music

Maggie Koerth-Baker at 8:53 am • •

I've seen this video described as a musical depiction of all the nuclear bombs ever detonated. But that sort of makes it sound like you're about to get a particularly bombastic version of the 1812 Overture. Instead, "1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto is more like an infographic with sound effects — or, possibly, a mash-up of the games Simon and Global Thermonuclear War.

What you get is an interesting depiction of nuclear tests through time — 2053 of them (including the non-test explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). I found it particularly interesting to watch the slow ramp up over the course of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when months or years would tick by between tests. After that, beginning in the late 1950s, you see these patterns of sudden flurries of explosions, usually happening in the US and the USSR almost simultaneously. The cultural sense of panic is almost palpable.

Wild west (anti)heroes in a rare (and maybe not real) group photo

Cory Doctorow at 1:40 pm • •

This may be a photo of Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, Jesse James, and Charlie Bowdre, taken in Las Vegas (NM) in 1879:

"There is that story that these two met in Las Vegas at the Old Adobe Hotel on July 26, 1879, and during a card game Jesse asked Billy to join his gang..........Henry Hoyt and Migeul Otero say so in their books, and that they witnessed it..............But Jesse James did stay at the Old Adobe Hotel from July 26 through July 29 in the summer of 1879, according to an announcement in the Las Vegas Optic printed weeks later. The owner of the Old Adobe Hotel, W. Scott Moore, was from Clay County, Missouri, Jesse's home turf, and was a childhood friend of his. Hoyt recalled Jesse's missing finger and his alias, Mr. Howard. And Jesse was on the run, so New Mexico is possible."

Billy the Kid and Jesse James (via Kottke)

Here is the photo of the Devil probing a boy's head you were looking for

Cory Doctorow at 10:50 am • •

1847 was a banner year for phrenology textbook covers.

"The Devil Examining the Head of a Boy" Frontspiece to a Manual on Phrenology; 1847, The Wellcome Library

German children use bundled inflationary money as blocks, 1923

Cory Doctorow at 8:13 am • •

Here's a little visual aid for any inflation hawks out there who're looking for just the right graphic to stick in a powerpoint decrying stimulus packages or extolling gold's virtue: a group of Weimar-era kids using bundles of devalued ~~Deutsche marks~~ Reichsmarks as building blocks.

German children using marks as building blocks, when Germany tried to pay its war debts by printing money, causing hyper-inflation. 1923. (via Dark Roasted Blend)

The trouble with Wernher —

Amy Shira Teitel has a nice essay about how we grapple with (and awkwardly avoid) the full legacy of Wernher Von Braun — father of the American space program and a Nazi whose rockets were once built by prison laborers. — Maggie •