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Apeks, Atomic Aquatics, Cressi, Mares, Sherwood, and Zeagle are all popular brands of scuba regulators — but arguably the oldest and best known is another brand that shares its name with a famous 1971 rock “concept” album (and its title song).
What brand?
The name of what casino, famous in its own right, took on another use in work by mathematicians John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s?
In the early to mid 19th century, multiple advances in the field of agricultural machinery were made more or less in parallel by inventors in Scotland, the US, and Australia, all working (mostly) independently of each other. These developments coalesced into a single large, complex, and massively convenient piece of farming equipment that went through several stages of evolution, first horse-drawn, then steam-powered, then tractor-drawn, and eventually fully self-propelled and self-contained, complete with cameras and sophisticated yield monitoring and field mapping systems.
At its core, this machine merges the farming tasks of reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing grain into a single activity, and is commonly known by a deceptively simple name.
What is this massively labor-saving invention?
In the 1800s, with Britain’s Industrial Revolution in full swing, English workers and craftsmen began to find themselves in increasingly tight competition with the advanced mechanization and factories that enabled mass production of goods, combined with underhanded labor practices implemented by the top bosses in control of those factories to squeeze out as much product as possible.
Naturally, some of them expressed their resentment by going on a violent rampage against the machines that were destroying their livelihoods. Most legendary of these was “X”, who as the tale would have it, smashed two knitting frames in “a fit of passion” — an action that would result in his name being used for the entire movement. The name is still used today to refer to individuals who find themselves particularly opposed to modern technology and its ubiquity.
Who is X?
1879 turned out to be a damn good year for chocolate, when chocolatier Rodolphe Lindt supposedly (possibly accidentally) left a chocolate mixer running over a weekend and came back to realize he’d created a chocolate that tasted far smoother and richer than ever before, owing to the cocoa butter mixing evenly over granules of cocoa.
What is this process called (and why’s it called that)?