SKIRMISHER

New research suggests that Stonehenge was used as a cemetery for more than 500 years, much longer than previously thought. The new findings also show that people used the area as a burial site long before placement of its trademark stones (or sarsen stones) was complete.
The team was led by Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeology [...]

Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.
It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great [...]

“Kaniya-kaniyang Rizal…”
–Cris Villanueva in Bayaning Third World–
Today, the Philippines, as always, celebrates its national hero’s 147th birthday. As always, renowned politicians, attention-hungry statesmen, and a wild caboodle of TV-familiar faces who are in control of government and business are all over public plazas frothing out “nationalistic” fervor in relation to Rizal’s life, works, and influence. [...]

April 15, 1912: Man’s technological hubris hits an iceberg and sinks, literally, as the RMS Titanic founders on its maiden voyage.
The liner, in many ways state of the art for the day and trumpeted by her owners, the press and others as “practically unsinkable,” struck an iceberg south of the Grand Banks and went down [...]

Photos of Old Japan before Hiroshima and Nagasaki became proud venues of world-changing new technologies. This one is of a bijin (beautiful woman) postcard, circa 1918.

TV “makes your kids smarter and behave better.” From the 1950s.
via

In 1996 a number of companies were looking to standardize the industry around a short-range radio link for doing a number of things which seem obvious today (not so obvious in 1996).
Within Intel, I had started a program called Business-RF; Ericsson had a program called MC-Link; Nokia had a program called Low Power RF. At [...]

William Henry Bonser Lamin, aside from being a dude with an annoyingly long name, was a World War 1 soldier, and WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier is his blog. On it you’ll find transcripts of Lamin’s letters from the first World War, posted exactly 90 years after they were written. Intriguing! So what happened [...]