The Border Fight

As you might know, most of the states in the southeastern United States are gripped in a drought of Biblical proportions. Most locations in those states had a rainfall deficit of around two feet (61cm) – or more – last year. My home state of Georgia was especially hard hit. The city of Atlanta has grown almost uncontrollably in the past two decades, from barely over 1 million residents in the early 1980s to just over 5 million souls today. This has put an incredible strain on the area’s reservoirs. Lake Lanier, the Atlanta area’s main source of water, fell to its lowest level ever in December, 2007. Wikipedia notes that

[T]he record low lake level had revealed parts of the lake bottom not seen since the 1950s, when approximately 700 families were moved from the area to create the lake. An abandoned stretch of Georgia Highway 53 ran along one edge of new shoreline, and concrete foundations from homes and part of what was once the Gainesville’s Looper Speedway were uncovered. More recent additions to the lake including discarded trash, boat batteries and even sunken boats were discovered, and local efforts to clean up the lake bottom were organized. Several automobiles, some stolen, and also discarded firearms were also recovered by law enforcement officials.

Georgia is rapidly running out of options to bolster its dwindling supply of fresh water. Things are so bad, in fact, that the Georgia legislature is looking to a historical anomaly for help: its border with Tennessee.

When Tennessee was admitted into the Union in 1796, the United States Congress declared the border between Tennessee and Georgia to be the 35th parallel. In 1818, a surveying team was sent out to mark the border. The team made a surveying mistake which caused Tennessee’s border to be extended south by 1 mile. A mile might not sound like much, but it makes a huge difference: the Tennessee River makes a bend in the area that should belong to Georgia, and if the state had access to this sliver of land, it could go a long way in helping out Georgia’s water situation.

GA\TN Border Dispute

Tennessee lawmakers have made light of the situation, but Georgia is, apparently, deadly serious about the matter. The legislation passed by the Georgia legislature orders Governor Sonny Perdue to set up a “border commission” to investigate the matter, and to pursue the matter all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.

What the Supreme Court might think about the matter is anyone’s guess: although the (incorrect) border has been recognized by both Georgia and Tennessee for almost 200 years, this isn’t the first time Georgia has challenged the border. Georgia previously made half-hearted attempts to correct the error in the 1880s and 1940s. And although Tennessee adopted the 1818 survey results as law, Georgia never has. In fact, according to Georgia law, the border with Tennessee always was (and still is) the 35th parallel.

It’s also unclear how long it would take the Supreme Court to rule on such a matter. Although the Court has original jurisdiction in matters between the states, the Court could opt to appoint a “special master” as a fact-finder. So the dispute could go on for years. Peter Appel, an associate professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, says that both sides have good arguments: “On one hand, where the boundary was set in 1818, the states have been living with it for all that time. On the other hand, the survey is off, and the fact that time has passed doesn’t mean a state has ceded the land. It’s a really tough one to speculate on.”

What’s really interesting is to consider what would happen if the Supreme Court decides in favor of Georgia. Several small Tennessee towns – East Ridge, East Brainerd, and St. Elmo – would be swallowed whole into Georgia. Residents of parts of Chattanooga and East Ridge would become Georgians, and a large chunk of Memphis would become part of Mississippi. A large chunk of Lookout Mountain would also become part of Georgia. It’s worth nothing that the Supreme Court would definitely take the chaos any border change would cause into account.

But even if Georgia did get its original border back, that doesn’t necessarily mean that water would instantly flow – the Tennessee Valley Authority would have to approve any widescale tapping of the Tennessee River, even if the land were to become Georgia territory. It’s not at all clear how the TVA would rule in that situation. One would think that the petition would be denied, but then Georgia could take them to court over “sour grapes”.

When Laughter (Almost) Kills

Laughter is the best medicine, or so the old saying goes. But what if laughter wasn’t the best medicine? What if laughter was the disease?

It all started in a boarding school in Tanganyika in January of 1962. These were heady times for the nation on Africa’s east coast: the country had only received its independence from Britain a few weeks previously, and it had yet to merge with Zanzibar to form the modern nation of Tanzania. Perhaps the joy of independence or the stress of what the future might hold was just too much. No one, it seems, will ever know for sure what the root cause of the epidemic was. All that’s known for sure is that someone told someone else a joke at an all-girls boarding school at Kashasha village on the morning of January 30, 1962. The three students involved in the joke became subject to uncontrollable fits of laughter, sometimes lasting only a few minutes, other times lasting as long as 16 hours. Since laughter is, in some sense, contagious, the laughter fits quickly spread to 95 of the school’s 159 students. The attacks left no permanent injuries, but the laughter fits did mean that few students could learn anything, so the school was shut down on March 18th.

You’ve probably seen a movie or TV show about communicable diseases where the doctors plot the spread of the disease. There will usually be at least one scene in the show or movie where the doctors urge a public official to act on the matter. As part of their plea, they’ll almost always have a fancy computer graphic of the disease spreading across the nation. Like the tentacles of an evil octopus, the graphic shows the disease spreading out from “ground zero” to invade the rest of the country.

As soon as the Kashasha school closed, all of the students went home… and the laughter epidemic spread across the region, almost exactly as it would in one of those maps in a Hollywood movie. Within 10 days of the school’s closure, 217 of the 10,000 people in the village of Nshamba, home to several of the boarding school girls, came down with the “laughing disease”. Several girls that attended a school in Ramashenye but lived near some of the girls from Kashasha infected their own school; within a couple of weeks, 48 of the 154 students there became “infected” and the school was shut down in mid-June. One of the girls that attended the Ramashenye school went back to her home in Kanyangereka when the school closed and promptly “infected” several members of her own family, who in turn “infected” other villagers, who in turn “infected” people from other villages, causing two more schools to close. The “infection” would prove to be tough to eradicate at Kashasha school: after re-opening on May 21st, 57 additional students rapidly became “infected” and the school was shut down again in June.

By the time the “disease” finally ran its course in June 1964, the laughter epidemic had “infected” around 1,000 people and caused the closure of 14 schools in the area. Just like a “real” epidemic, the only effective preventative measure seemed to be quarantining villages yet to be touched by the disease.

Scientists, both then and now, have been able to conclusively rule out any biological or environmental cause of the “disease”. Whatever it was, the epidemic was not caused by a virus or bacteria, or some chemical in the food supply or environment. There is no historical mention of a similar disease in the area, nor is there any word for it in any of the indigenous languages. In fact, scientists were completely puzzled by the initial spread of the “disease” at the Kashasha school. The girls lived in a dormitory-style arrangement there, yet the “disease” didn’t seem to follow any of the known rules of modern pathology. Girls that shared rooms with “infected” students didn’t necessarily become infected themselves. The disease didn’t follow any known pattern of friendship or location.

Once the disease left the school, however, a pattern became clear: adolescent females at mission-run schools were first to be infected. They would then take the disease home to infect their mothers and other female relatives. Young boys appeared to be somewhat susceptible to the disease, however adult men appeared to be completely immune to the epidemic. There is also not a single instance of a “person of stature” in the community – policemen, doctors or schoolteachers, either male or female – becoming infected. Europeans and other Westerners seemed to have immunity, too. In fact, the disease seemed to follow a strict path along tribal and familial lines. If a female relative, a male relative, and a complete stranger of either gender were locked in a room with an “infected” person, the disease would probably infect the female relative, possibly infect the male, and would almost never infect the stranger.

The “Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic”, as the disease is called, has remained a curiosity in medical textbooks for 40 years now. Although many in the medical community are interested in the epidemic, the fact that the disease only caused laughter, sore muscles and extreme irritability in its subjects means that there’s little priority in researching the matter further. “Mass hysteria” seems to be modern medicine’s conclusion about the incident, although that in itself it pretty interesting, as certifiable cases of mass hysteria are vanishingly rare in human history, especially in the modern era. Cases of mass hysteria in Germany and Italy in the wake of the Black Death are well-known (and I’ll write something about that in the next few days), but examples in the modern era are limited to lynchings and a few other incidents. Cases such as the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic are amazingly rare.

So enjoy your day… but you might want to think twice about telling that joke at the water cooler!

Read more about the epidemic here.

The Tragedy of the Wilhelm Gustloff

Mention “disasters at sea” and most Americans will think of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. A history buff might think of the sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania, a British passenger ship sunk by a German torpedo three years later. Some might even think of the Andrea Doria, an Italian ship that struck the MS Stockholm in the north Atlantic in 1956.

But the fact is, all of these disasters pale compared to the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in World War II. 1,520 people lost their lives in the Titanic disaster. Lusitania’s sinking lost 1,198 souls. Almost everyone survived the sinking of the Andrea Doria, except for 46 people who were killed on impact with the other ship. At least twice as many people died in the Wilhelm Gustloff disaster compared to Titanic, Lusitania and the Andrea Doria combined. At a minimum, 5,348 people were lost from the Wilhelm Gustloff, although many speculate that the actual numbers of the dead could be twice that number. And sadly, almost no one knows anything about the tragedy.

The Wilhelm Gustloff was the first German cruise ship built under the Nazi’s Kraft durch Freude (“Strength Through Joy”) program. Named after the assassinated leader of the Swiss Nazi Party, the ship was built by the Blohm and Voss shipyards and launched on May 5, 1937. For the first two years of her existence, the Wilhelm Gustloff served her intended purpose of providing leisure activities for Nazi party members. Concerts, dinner cruises and even full-blown vacations aboard the Gustloff were offered as enticements to German citizens for meeting certain goals, or as recognition for a job well done.

Of course, World War II changed all that and the Gustloff was pressed into wartime service. From September 1939 to November 1940, the Gustloff served as a hospital ship; later on in the war she was used as a barracks for U-boat trainees. In this capacity, she was docked at Gotenhafen, in East Prussia (which is now called Gdynia, and is part of Poland).

By January 1945, the Soviet Army was rapidly closing in on East Prussia. In fact, by January 23, 1945 East Prussia was effectively surrounded and cut off from the rest of the German-speaking world. Many Germans had firsthand knowledge of the many atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht during their invasion of the Soviet Union, and reports began to trickle in of Soviet “revenge atrocities”. In many villages, the Soviet soldiers raped every single German-speaking woman they could find. Many German women and children were lined up and shot without mercy. As you might guess, the Germans trapped in East Prussia were terrified of what might happen to them when the Soviet Army came. German admiral Karl Dönitz knew that the war was lost, and on that same date (January 23, 1945) he radioed naval command in Gotenhafen and ordered them to begin “Operation Hannibal”: the evacuation of as many people as possible.

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The Mystery of Waldseemuller

You might not think that maps are very interesting. I’ll grant you that looking at maps probably won’t surpass going to the movies or playing video games as “fun entertainment”. But maps can be interesting. Looked at as a timeline, maps have displayed man’s ever-increasing knowledge of the world around him. From early maps that look a lot like something a grade schooler might draw, maps have become ever more accurate.

While maps have been a showcase of the increase of knowledge, they’ve also displayed important changes in human history. Most maps made in the Middle Ages, for example, have Jerusalem as their center. As the influence of the Church waned and maps became important economic tools, Europe became the center of most maps. And of course, looking at maps with political boundaries can show how empires expand and contract, which countries merge with others or cease to exist entirely, and which new countries form out of the ashes of others.

Maps can also hold secrets. Secrets that stay hidden for centuries. Secrets that people have only noticed just now, and are still trying to understand. Take a look at the following map (click on it to open it in a new window or tab):

Waldseemuller Small

This map is called the “Waldseemuller map”. It is named after its creator, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who first published the map in 1507. The map initially gained fame as the first map that used the name “America” to refer to the New World. So in a very real sense, the reason you call yourself an “American” is because Martin Waldseemüller decided to put that name on his map. The map is also famous for its layout – with Europe in the center, the Americas to the left and Asia to the right. Almost all maps made since Waldseemüller’s day have used this same layout.

But there’s a lot more going on with this map that you might imagine. Look at the map carefully. At first glance, it might look like any other European map of the world from the time: the continents are shaped incorrectly and lots of places are missing. But look closer. South America is the land mass on the bottom left of the map. It might not look especially accurate, but if you were to rotate the map, such that the grid lines over South America were perfect rectangles, you’d probably be shocked by what you saw – a continent that looks almost exactly as it does on modern maps. In fact, recent study of the map has shown that Waldseemüller’s map accurately portrays the width of most of South America to a minuscule 70 miles compared to today’s maps, which are made by careful surveying and satellite technology. Let me repeat that: 500 years ago, a man in Germany made a map of South America that, compared to the best maps we can make today, is only “off” on most points by 70 miles.

The secret of this map is, of course, how Waldseemüller made such an accurate map. Although the Vikings or John Cabot might be able to lay claim to discovering North America, it’s well established that Christopher Columbus was the first European to set foot on South American soil. And he did that in 1498. So, somehow, in less than 9 years, Europeans were able to develop an astonishingly accurate map of an entire continent.

And the mystery deepens – a lot – when you consider the west coast of South America. According to history, Vasco Nunez de Balboa became the first European to reach the Pacific by land (1513) and Ferdinand Magellan was the first to reach the Pacific by sail (1520). So if these were the first two Europeans to reach the Pacific… how did Waldseemüller make this map in 1507? Was there a mission to map the west coast whose name has been lost to history? Did a secret mission attempt to map the west coast? Did Asian mapmakers share their secrets with Europeans? If so, where? And when? And how come no one wrote anything down about it? And how did all of this information come into the hands of a German in 1507? Germany wasn’t much of a sea-faring nation, and the Spanish and Portuguese would have done everything in their power to keep the map out of the hands of a heretic economic rival.

We honestly don’t know how Waldseemüller made his map. But trust me, there are researchers out there trying to find out how he did.

It Was 20 Years Ago…

I meant to post this so it it would appear on November 22nd, but forgot about it in all the holiday hoopla. Forgiveness, please!

November 22nd is my Dad’s birthday. Every few years, it’s also the date Thanksgiving falls on. But lots of people in the Chicago area might remember November 22nd, 1987 for something else entirely. For it was on that date that persons unknown hijacked the broadcast signal of both WGN-TV and WTTW.

Max HeadroomIn WGN’s case, it happened during the football highlights on the local news. Sports anchor Dan Roan was breaking down that day’s Chicago Bears game when suddenly the monitors in the studio began to flicker. The screen switched to someone dressed up as 80s television “personality” Max Headroom. In an homage to the computer-generated backgrounds used in the real Max Headroom shows, the person stood in front of a rotating piece of corrugated aluminum and just grinned. Horrified WGN engineers quickly switched to another transmitter, and viewers were treated to a priceless expression on Roan’s face. Said the sportscaster: “Well, if you’re wondering what happened, so am I.”

Things were even worse for WTTV. The PBS station didn’t have an engineer on duty that night, so the station’s programmers were helpless when “Max” broke in to their signal around 3 hours after the incident at WGN. This time “Max” had plenty of time to utter a bunch of nonsensical phrases, like “I stole CBS” and “My brother is wearing the other one”. “Max” then dropped his pants and was repeatedly slapped on the behind by a woman using a flyswatter. After a few seconds of this, the screen went dark and the broadcast returned to the Doctor Who episode that had been running when the “signal intrusion” first took place.

Interestingly, no one was ever caught – or even suspected or questioned – over the event, and the case remains open to this day. The amount of money and the skill set needed to pull off a stunt like this was not lost on FBI and FCC investigators. But “Max’s” rants didn’t have a political or economic slant to them – unlike “Captain Midnight“, a satellite dealer that hijacked HBO’s signal with a rant about how expensive the service was for satellite customers – so the FBI never really even knew where to start with the case.

Click here to read about the hijacking at DamnInteresting.com
Click here to see the WTTV hijacking in all its glory

Making Mincemeat of the Germans

In the opening days of World War II, the Germans enjoyed significant advantages over the Allies in almost every category you can think of. They had more soldiers, better officers, and more of just about any materiel an army would need. So when the war started, the Allies were almost powerless to stop the Nazi machine.

Almost. While the Brits couldn’t keep up with the Germans on the battlefield, they were more than a match for them behind the scenes. Instead of “fighting harder”, the British “fought smarter”. So while the Germans were deploying tanks and troops, the Brits were busy deploying code breakers, spies and helping resistance movements wherever possible. Their experience at “dirty tricks” would come in handy throughout the war – especially when it came time to invade Italy. And that’s where “Operation Mincemeat” comes in.

As the Allies saw it, their first task was to kick the Germans out of North Africa… which is exactly what they did. Their next target was Italy, but this presented a problem. The Allies knew the most logical place to invade Italy was Sicily. But so did the Germans. In fact, everyone in the world knew that Sicily was the Allies’ next target. Churchill himself even said that “[a]nyone but a fool would realize it’s Sicily”. So the question was… how to fool the Germans into thinking the Allies would land somewhere else?

How about taking a corpse, dressing it up as a military officer, handcuffing a briefcase full of “top secret documents” to it and shoving the whole mess into the sea where the Germans were sure to find it?

If that sounds like the plot of a third-rate spy novel… well, yeah. It does. And even though many of his superiors were certain that the plan would fail, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu was sure that it would work.

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2 Minute History Lesson: The UK

I’ve been to several different countries in my lifetime, and I’ve formed the opinion that the “average American” is about as smart as the “average Briton” or the “average German”. But one thing Americans as a whole seem to have great difficulty with is the difference between “England”, “Great Britain” and the “United Kingdom”. Americans tend to use these names interchangeably, and this is not correct. So take a couple of minutes to learn the difference:

There is a large island off the northern coast of France. This island – that is, the physical island itself – is known as Great Britain. Great Britain was traditionally divided into two separate countries: England and Scotland. However, Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603 and left no heir. This led to King James VI of Scotland – a descendant of Henry VII through his great-grandmother Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s eldest sister – being offered the English crown. James accepted, and became known as King James I in England.

It’s important to understand that although James was king of both countries, the two were still independent nations at the time. England and Scotland each had their own form of parliament, currency, customs procedures, army, navy, legal and educational systems… and all those other things that make one country different from another. King James himself would lead the first movement to unify England and Scotland; although he was unsuccessful, the idea persisted. In 1707, the Act of Union was passed by both the English and Scottish parliaments. With this act, both “England” and “Scotland” ceased to exist, and one nation called the United Kingdom of Great Britain was formed.

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The Curse of the Colonel

The MLB playoffs are upon us, and while I’m not a huge baseball fan, I do like a lot of the lore that surrounds the game… especially the curses. You’re probably familiar with the Curse of the Bambino, where the Boston Red Sox were condemned to eternal failure (and the New York Yankees eternal success) after Red Sox manager Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees to (allegedly) fund Frazee’s production of the musical No, No, Nanette. The curse was finally broken in 2004, when the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918.

And then there’s the far more colorful Curse of the Billy Goat, where the Chicago Cubs were condemned to eternal failure by a Greek immigrant named Billy Sianis, who owned a tavern close to Wrigley Field. It seems that one fateful day a goat fell off a passing truck and limped into the bar. Sianis nursed the goat back to health and eventually took him to Game 4 of the 1945 World Series between the Cubs and Detroit Tigers. Billy and his goat were allowed on the field before the game, because the goat was wearing a blanket embroidered with the phrase “We got Detroit’s goat!”. As gametime approached, ushers shooed Billy and his goat off the field and into the box seats that Sianis purchased two tickets for (one for the goat and one for himself). All was well until Cubs owner Philip Knight Wrigley decided to eject Sianis and the goat due to the goat’s “objectionable odor”. On the way out of the stadium, Sianis cursed the Cubs, saying that they’d never win another pennant in Wrigley Field because of the ejection. Sianis went back to Greece for a vacation, and the Cubs ended up losing the series, prompting Sianis to write “Who stinks now?” in a letter sent to Philip Wrigley from Greece. And then there’s the Curse of the Black Sox, the Curse of Rocky Colavito, and the Curse of Billy Penn.

But did you know that baseball teams in other countries have curses of thir own? It’s true! Just ask the fans of Japan’s Hanshin Tigers!

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The Mystery of Jan Vermeer

Vermeer PaintingThe city of Delft, in the Netherlands, is famous for two things.

The first of these is Delftware, a “porcelain substitute” developed in the city in the 16th century to compete with “real” porcelain, which came from China and was hideously expensive, even for rich people. Delftware is almost always white with a blue pattern on it; if you look in your grandmother’s china cabinet, you’ll almost certainly find some delftware in it – or at least a reasonable copy thereof. Delftware became amazingly popular, so much so that it was even exported into China and Japan. Amusingly, the Chinese made copies of delftware to ship back to Europe, so at some point it was possible to buy a Chinese copy of a European copy of a Chinese original!

The other thing Delft is known for is being the home of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Johannes (Jan) Vermeer.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, until very recently, was credited as being “the inventor of the microscope” in many middle and high school textbooks. But the truth is, microscopes existed decades before van Leeuwenhoek was born. However, van Leeuwenhoek did greatly improve microscopes. He was a glass grinder, and van Leeuwenhoek was a master at making lenses. And, while testing out the lenses, van Leeuwenhoek made many interesting observations that he dutifully forwarded to England’s Royal Society and other scientific groups. Even though van Leeuwenhoek was nothing more than a tradesman, really, he is known in some circles as “the father of microbiology” more than anything else.

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The “Numbers Station” Mystery

For years, shortwave radio enthusiasts have noted a curious phenomenon: radio stations that seem to pop-up out of nowhere, read a list of numbers, then disappear… sometimes forever. Because the sole purpose of the broadcasts is apparently to read lists of numbers, shortwave junkies started calling them “numbers stations”… although as we shall see, other names might be appropriate.

No one seems to know when the “numbers stations” started broadcasting. No one seems to know who’s behind them. Shortwave enthusiasts assume that someone somewhere knows the purpose behind the stations, but as far as I or anyone else knows, that purpose is a mystery. In fact, there’s not a lot about the numbers stations that we do know. In fact, all we can say for sure is:

– The stations are sometimes transient, sometimes not: Some numbers stations appear to broadcast once, then disappear forever; others appear in certain places on the shortwave dial with clockwork regularity. In fact, certain stations appear with such regularity that broadcast schedules are posted on shortwave enthusiast websites.

– The stations broadcast for hours… or minutes: Some numbers stations repeat their “messages” a few times and then sign off; other stations might repeat their messages for hours and hours.

– The stations broadcast in many languages: Recordings and verified “sightings” have shown that numbers stations are broadcast in English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Hebrew… and just about every other major language you can think of.

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