History & Travels AhBoon | 04 Jul 2007
The Seven Ancient Wonders of the World
A campaign to choose seven new wonders of the world is in its final stages, finalists have been whittled down to 21 by an international panel of experts. The result will be announced on this coming Sunday (07-07-07), you still have approximately 1 day left to vote for it on New7Wonders.
Let’s review what are the Original Wonders; The original seven wonders of the ancient world weren’t chosen by international consensus. They came about after the historians of ancient Greece began traveling around the borders of their classical empire and noted what monuments caught their eye—sort of like a travel guide for their fellow Greeks.
Shocking & History AhBoon | 07 Feb 2007
Hiroshima, The Unseen Pictures
The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 250.000 people and became the most dreadful slaughter of civilians in modern history. However, for many years there was a curious gap in the photographic records. Although the names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incised into our memories, there were few pictures to accompany them. Even today, the image in our minds is a mixture of devastated landscapes and shattered buildings. Shocking images of the ruins, but where were the victims?
The American occupation forces imposed strict censorship on Japan, prohibiting anything “that might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility” and used it to prohibit all pictures of the bombed cities. The pictures remained classified ‘top secret’ for many years. Some of the images have been published later by different means, but it’s not usual to see them all together. This is the horror they didn’t want us to see, and that we must NEVER forget:
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History & Tech AhBoon | 10 Jan 2007
Space Shuttle of USSR - Buran
The Russian Shuttle Buran (”Snowstorm” in Russian) was authorized in 1976 in response to the United States’ Space Shuttle program. Building of the shuttles began in 1980, with the first full-scale Aero-Buran rolling out in 1984.
The first suborbital test flight of a scale model of Buran took place in July 1983. There were five additional flights of the scale model in following years.
The first and only orbital launch of the shuttle Buran was at 3:00 GMT on November 15, 1988. The flight was unmanned, as the life support system had not been checked out and the CRT displays had no software installed
The vehicle was launched on the powerful Energiya booster into an 247 by 256 km orbit at 51.6 degrees inclination. The Buran orbited the Earth twice before firing its thrusters for reentry. The flight ended at 6:25 GMT when the vehicle touched down at Tyuratum. The Buran 1 mission was limited to 2 orbits due to computer memory limitations.
History & Tech AhBoon | 05 Jan 2007
This is a 5MB Hard Disk
The Volume and Size of 5MB memory storage in 1956. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data.
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The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit provides storage capacity of the disk drive was 5MB (referred to at the time as 5 million characters). It was configured with 50 magnetic disks containing 50,000 sectors, each of which held 100 alphanumeric characters.
With the cabinet covers on, the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit measured 5’ 8” tall, 5’ wide and 2’ 5” deep, whilst it weighed in at massive 250kgs. The unit comprised fifty 24” platters, one pair of read/write heads and a pulley system that provided both the vertical and horizontal head movement.
History & Military AhBoon | 30 Dec 2006
Big Gun of WW2 Revealed (Dora and Gustav)
The immense weapon you can see have existed. Moreover, there were two of these incredible guns. It has been manufactured by Krupp for the third Reich during WW-2. Hitler wanted “a gun able to pierce a meter of stell, seven meters of concrete, or thirty meters of dense earth”.
Three calibers could have been used: 700, 800 and even 1000 mm! Even now, we can hardly imagine how we could manufacture the enormous 290 tonnen barrel, an huge steel pipe, 32 meters long. Monobloc trunion craddles, on which are put the trunion pins of the barrel, are as tall as a 4-floor building. It was ready for action in late 1942.
