Context: https://medium.com/@johnwelford15/a-history-of-scissors-30c789db665e

The earliest devices that can be loosely described as scissors were probably made in Egypt in around 1500 BCE. These comprised a single piece of bronze metal formed into a U shape, with the ends of the U sharpened into blades and the curve acting as a spring so that the blades moved apart on release after each cut. However, it would appear that the blades were not designed to cross, which would not have made them particularly efficient.

Cross-bladed scissors were invented in about 100 AD by the Romans, although the pattern followed the Egyptian design, thus resembling the shears used by more recent sheep-shearers and gardeners. The Romans used iron, which was less brittle than bronze.

(Incidentally, the difference between scissors and shears is basically one of size; scissors with blades longer than 15cm are generally referred to as shears).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Paper_in_China

Archaeological evidence of papermaking predates the traditional attribution given to Cai Lun,^\12]) an imperial eunuch official of the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), thus the exact date or inventor of paper cannot be deduced. The earliest extant paper fragment was unearthed at Fangmatan in Gansu province, and was likely part of a map, dated to 179–141 BCE.^\13]) Fragments of paper have also been found at Dunhuang dated to 65 BCE and at Yumen pass, dated to 8 BCE.^\14])

The invention traditionally attributed to Cai Lun, recorded hundreds of years after it took place, is dated to 105 CE. The innovation is a type of paper made of mulberry and other bast fibres along with fishing nets, old rags, and hemp waste which reduced the cost of paper production, which prior to this, and later, in the West, depended solely on rags.^\14])^\15])^\2])

During the Shang (1600–1050 BC) and Zhou (1050–256 BC) dynasties of ancient China, documents were ordinarily written on bone or bamboo (on tablets or on bamboo strips sewn and rolled together into scrolls), making them very heavy, awkward to use, and hard to transport. The light material of silk was sometimes used as a recording medium, but was normally too expensive to consider. The Han dynasty Chinese court official Cai Lun (c. 50–121 AD) is credited as the inventor of a method of papermaking (inspired by wasps and bees) using rags and other plant fibers in 105 AD.[2] However, the discovery of specimens bearing written Chinese characters in 2006 at Fangmatan in north-east China's Gansu Province suggests that paper was in use by the ancient Chinese military more than 100 years before Cai, in 8 BC, and possibly much earlier as the map fragment found at the Fangmatan tomb site dates from the early 2nd century BC.[13] It therefore would appear that "Cai Lun's contribution was to improve this skill systematically and scientifically, fix a recipe for papermaking".[16]

If goods are consistently worth less tomorrow, no one buys things today. If no one buys things, massive numbers of people lose their jobs. Wages and business revenue shrink.

Also any person or business with debt is fucked because every dollar of their debt is functionally worth more related to their income every single day that passes. And then if you get fired...

The Great Depression was a deflationary spiral that led to all of the above.

100% get why people hate high inflation and why it's bad, I've been screwed by it too. But sometimes I see people take their opinions way too far the other direction.

This list of ships Olympic collided with includes, but is not limited to:

O.L. Hallenbach tug

HMS Hawke Royal Navy cruiser

SS Fort St. George passenger/cargo liner

SM U-103 German submarine (rammed and sunk)

Nantucket LV-117 — U.S. lightship (rammed and sunk)

The incident with the Nantucket Lightship LV-117 took place on the morning of 15th May 1934. Olympics had been using radio signals from Nantucket to navigate during the night. In the morning thick fog rolled in and reduced visibility to near zero. The observers on Olympic could hear the Nantucket’s fog horn. But didn’t see the ship until collision was inevitable.

The Olympic smashed a hole into the side of Nantucket and she sank rapidly.

7 members of the crew were killed in the collision. 4 were able to be rescued by Olympic.

Nantucket was her last confirmed kill. She was decommissioned in 1935. It’s ok. You’re safe now. The Olympic cannot hurt you

Video here:

https://youtu.be/ar-poc38C84?is=yjFtULiOjwxa2Ws6

In the early 60’s, the U.S. Navy started to explore the possibility of landing a C-130 Hercules on a super carrier, do deliver more stores.

This culminated in a trial on Oct 30th 1963. When a Hercules did manage to pull off 21 landings and take offs. The maximum take off weight trialed was 121,000lb.

The pilot had just 300ft to bring the huge cargo plane to a stop. Without the aid of arrester cables. The wing tip was just 15ft clear of the superstructure. Under the cockpit they painted “LOOK MA! NO HOOK!”

The idea was never used routinely as it was deemed too impractical and too dangerous

The Norden Mk. XV, known as the Norden Mseries in US Army service, is a bombsight that was used by the United States Army Air Forces(USAAF) and the United States Navy during World War II, and the United States Air Force in the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. It was an early tachometric design, which combined optics, a mechanical computer, and an autopilot for the first time to not merely identify a target but fly the airplane to it. The bombsight directly measured the aircraft's ground speed and direction, which older types could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden further improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.

To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale to the Manhattan Project: the overall cost (both R&D and production) was $1.1 billion (equivalent to $15 billion in 2024), as much as 2/3 of the latter or over a quarter of the production cost of all B-17 bombers.[1] The Norden was not as secret as believed; both the British SABS and German Lotfernrohr 7 worked on similar principles, and details of the Norden had been passed to Germany even before the war started.

Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected precision, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m), similar to other Allied and German results. Both the Navy and Air Forces had to give up using pinpoint attacks. The Navy turned to dive bombing and skip bombing to attack ships, while the Air Forces developed the lead bomber procedure to improve accuracy, and adopted area bombing techniques for ever-larger groups of aircraft. Nevertheless, the Norden's reputation as a pin-point device endured, due in no small part to Norden's own advertising of the device after secrecy was reduced late in the war.