On this day .....

January 16, 2007 — Netflix launched its video streaming service

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January 17, 1929

Edwin Hubble “communicated” his paper — A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae — to the National Academy of Sciences, which demonstrated that the universe is expanding.

In 2018, using the telescope named for Hubble, astronomers reported that the expansion is faster than expected — 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec, to be precise. A megaparsec is 3.3 million light-years, so this measurement means that for every 3.3 million light-years from Earth, a galaxy appears to be receding at 73 kilometers per second faster.

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January 25, 1964 — Nike is founded

It was originally called Blue Ribbon Sports and imported Japanese track shoes.

The iconic swoosh logo was created by Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student at Portland State University. Phil Knight offered to pay Carolyn $2 per hour (about $14/hr today) to come up with a logo design for the company. She billed him $35 for 17.5 hours of work on the design.

In September 1983, Knight gave Davidson a golden Swoosh ring with an embedded diamond and 500 shares of Nike stock (which have since split into 32,000 shares).

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Carolyn Davidson’s logo design work

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Dion,

Wasn't part of Knight's deal to help find or make a pair of shoes that were comfortable for "Pre"? Steve, while a great runner, had bad feet, and every shoe made caused him problems including those "outstanding" Adidas 1964 Tokyo specials. (I still have a pair somewhere in my storage unit.)

Maybe the stories about Knight & Pre are Oregon lore, but we heard a lot of them, including the FBI involvement in corporate espionage in the early 70s.
 
Dion,

If anybody knows that story, they ain't talking. I've asked that question for 40 years, and no one seems to know. Since HornFans has such a wealth of knowledge, I was hoping someone knew that story.
 
January 28, 1958 — The Lego brick is patented

According to Lego — the name comes from the Danish leg godt, meaning “play well” — you would need 40 billion bricks to reach the moon. In 2012 Lego made 45.7 billion bricks at a rate of 5.2 million per hour.


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Literally a brazillion (yes, reference to the blonde joke) hours of fun have been spent playing with Legos since then. They were one of my faves as a kid in the 70s - can't imagine what I would have done back then if the kits and new types available now were around back then.

For those who like to go back to those days, give Lego Masters on FOX a try. It's amazing what they build.
 
These last two years while we have been home more than usual we have built quite a few Lego kits. It’s fun to get everyone around the big dining table, spread your pieces out, and get to work. I’m always impressed with the quality of the Lego pieces, instructions, etc — all of it just feels like somebody really worked to do it well.
 
50 years ago — February 1, 1972

Hewlett-Packard introduced the first scientific hand-held calculator, the HP-35. The first handheld ever to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke — an “electronic slide rule.”

More fascinating geekery about this device at VintageCalculators.com
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32 years ago — February 14, 1990

The Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back home from 3.7 billion miles away and took this photo of earth — the pale blue dot.

Between March and May 1990, Voyager 1 returned 60 photo frames back to Earth, with the radio signal traveling at the speed of light for nearly five and a half hours to cover the distance.

Three of the frames received showed the Earth as a tiny point of light in empty space. Each frame had been taken using a different color filter: blue, green and violet, with exposure times of 0.72, 0.48 and 0.72 seconds respectively. The three frames were then recombined to produce the image that became Pale Blue Dot.

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In his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan wrote:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
 
On this date 186 years ago the names Travis, Crockett and Bowie along with............"remember the Alamo" would be etched into the memories of Texans and Americans everywhere.

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March 6, 1899

The German company Bayer patents aspirin. Now the most common drug in household medicine cabinets, acetylsalicylic acid was originally made from a chemical found in the bark of willow trees. In its primitive form, the active ingredient, salicin, was used for centuries in folk medicine, beginning in ancient Greece when Hippocrates used it to relieve pain and fever.
 
March 6, 1924

The Egyptian government opened the mummy case of King Tutankhamen, ruler of Egyptian the 14th century bce, whose burial chamber had been discovered in 1922 by renowned British archaeologist Howard Carter.
 
March 12, 1989 — The World Wide Web was born

A British computer scientist at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, submitted a proposal for what would become the World Wide Web. His boss called it “vague, but exciting.”

Not to be confused with the internet, which had been evolving since the 1960s, the World Wide Web is an online application built upon innovations like the HTML language, URL “addresses,” and hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP.

In 1994 I read a Dwight Silverman article in the Houston Chronicle about the web and a browser called Mosaic that had been developed at the University of Illinois. This is my first memory of the web. I went home and downloaded Mosaic and checked out this online thing for the first time on my super slow dial-up modem. I’m sure there were very few websites at the time and I don’t think there was any way to search for things yet.

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May 7, 1945

Germany signed an unconditional surrender at Allied headquarters in Rheims, France, ending the fighting in Europe during World War II. The next day, May 8th was declared VE Day (Victory in Europe). Germany's surrender left only the Japanese to be defeated.
 
July 2, 1776.
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In this highly fictionalized portrait, the Second Continental Congress unanimously votes for Richard Henry Lee’s resolution for independence from Great Britain (12-0 vote with NY abstaining). John Adams predicts that July 2nd will become the most celebrated day in American history.
 
August 6, 1945 - 8:16:02 a.m. BOOOOM!!! No more Hiroshima.

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I really was interested during the entire audio book by Bill O’Reilly called Killing the Rising Sun. He (and the coauthor) includes a lot of information on both sides of the war. The whole thesis was that the bomb was necessary and, in total effect, more humanitarian than all other options. However, for the Japanese citizens of Hiroshima, my gosh what a horror.
 

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