Welcome to Thursday Things! This week is focused on book reports and history. But also monkeys!
“Is 2020 over yet?” Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash
A quick trip to the past. I’ve been reading a good bit about the early 20th century lately. I’m interested in how life 100 years ago was different, how it was similar to our times (the more things change…), and how events and developments then continue to influence us today. Basically, the usual reasons one would take an interest in history. One figure from that era who gets overlooked these days is Herbert Hoover. If people remember him at all, it’s as the caricature of ‘the hapless president who couldn’t handle the Great Depression,’ which is far from accurate. Hoover had quite an extraordinary career.
Herbert Hoover first came to public notice by leading the Belgian relief effort during World War I, in which he saved millions of Belgians from starvation. In short version, the Germans in World War I violated Belgium’s neutrality and occupied the country as a means of attacking France. Once the war settled into protracted trench warfare, Belgium was occupied by the Germans and blockaded by the Allies. The country was laid to waste, with farms and towns destroyed, international trade halted, and the people left to starve. Enter Herbert Hoover.
Herbert Hoover and Belgian Relief in World War I
As the tense days passed in the early autumn of 1914, food supplies dwindled ominously in Belgium. To the outside world went emissaries pleading for the Allies to permit food to filter through the naval noose. Finally, on October 22, after weeks of negotiations, Herbert Hoover established under diplomatic protection a neutral organization to procure and distribute food to the Belgian populace. Great Britain agreed to let the food pass unmolested through its blockade. Germany in turn promised not to requisition this food destined for helpless noncombatants. …
And so began an undertaking unprecedented in world history: an organized rescue of an entire nation from starvation. Initially no one expected this humanitarian task to last more than a few months. Few foresaw the gruesome stalemate that developed on the western front. As Hoover himself later wrote, "The knowledge that we would have to go on for four years, to find a billion dollars, to transport five million tons of concentrated food, to administer rationing, novel relief organization, which went by the name of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), possessed some of the attributes of a government. It had its own flag, it negotiated "treaties" with the warring European powers, and its leaders parleyed regularly with diplomats and cabinet ministers in several countries. It even had a "pirate" leader in Hoover, who enjoyed price controls, agricultural production, to contend with combatant governments and with world shortages of food and ships, was mercifully hidden from us."
Enlarge Special trucks and ships were operated by the CRB to distribute rations to more than 2,500 villages and towns. (Herbert Hoover Library)
Within a few months Hoover and a team of mostly American volunteers built up what one British government official called "a piratical state organized for benevolence." Indeed, the informal diplomatic immunity and traveled freely through enemy lines—probably the only American citizen permitted to do so in the entire war.
Organizing, funding, and leading the CRB was an astounding achievement of logistics, finance, and diplomacy. Hoover’s undertaking saved millions of lives and set the model for every massive international humanitarian effort of the last hundred years. It created the expectation that when there is a disaster somewhere in the world, the Americans will show up to help. Maybe we should put up a statue of this guy somewhere.
I recommend reading the whole article for all the details of this remarkable story. (I’ll be tracking down the book The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914-1917 (Life of Herbert Hoover, Vol. 2) too.)
On our way back to the future, let’s stop in the 80s. Full-Sized Commodore 64 Remake 'The C64' Now Available for Preorder
The Commodore 64, if you're unfamiliar, holds the Guinness world record for "highest-selling single computer model of all time."
I never owned one, sadly. I knew lots of people who did, and I was always envious of them and their weird little all-in-one computer with its tape-deck peripheral and chunky interface. Thankfully I can relive a past I never experienced with the new C64 reissue, a full-sized replica of the original Commodore 64 and its massive 64 kilobytes of RAM.
I never had a Commodore 64, first released in 1982. I think the first computers I encountered were a TRS-80 and Apple II at my high school. In the special computer lab, where the computers were. It’s cool that you can relive (or discover for the first time, if you were a post-80s kid) those days on emulators or remakes. Oregon Trail, here I come!
The last item caught my attention because I recently read Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy. Originally published in 1984, the book recounts the early days of computing, including the dawn of the “personal computer” or desktop computer, including the early models mentioned above, and the genesis of the interactive computer games industry. Levy really captures the excitement of the early computer “hackers” (which, back then, meant people really into programming computers and figuring out systems and didn’t have the negative connotations the word later acquired) with these machines. Whether you were around then or grew up in the Internet / Wifi / Smartphone eras, it’s a fascinating read.
One early game I learned about from Hackers was "Mystery House" which was a huge hit adventure game for the Apple II in 1980. Unlike other text-based adventure games for home computers “Mystery House” had graphics! In color! It was mind-blowing.
Description: "The game starts near an abandoned Victorian mansion. The player is soon locked inside the house with no other option than to explore. The mansion contains many interesting rooms and seven other people: Tom, a plumber; Sam, a mechanic; Sally, a seamstress; Dr. Green, a surgeon; Joe, a gravedigger; Bill, a butcher; and Daisy, a cook.
Initially, the player has to search the house in order to find a hidden cache of jewels. However, terrible events start happening and dead bodies (of the other people) begin appearing. It becomes obvious that there is a murderer on the loose in the house, and the player must discover who it is or become the next victim."Sounds thrilling. Curious, I did a Google search and discovered you can play this game free online at archive.org. So, if you want to go back to the thrilling early days of online games, I give you Mystery House! Click the link and prepare to have your mind blown by the state of the art 1980 computer game graphics!
Meanwhile, in Japan… Granny ‘Monkey Busters’ are battling apes with airguns
A group of grandmothers have taken it upon themselves to protect their Japanese village from a recent onslaught of feral apes.
Masako Ishimura, 74, Tatsuko Kinoshita, 68, and Miyuki Ii, 67, have joined together in defense of their local farmers’ vegetables and produce, which are currently under siege by the hungry monkeys.
Calling themselves the “Monkey Busters,” the women have taken to patrolling their neighborhood in Fukui, armed with airguns and dressed in aprons, Newsweek wrote in an account based on reporting by a Japanese news site.
Shedding light on the subject. We’ve Been Killing Deadly Germs With UV Light for More Than a Century Niels Ryberg Finsen pioneered therapeutic ultraviolet lamps and won himself a Nobel Prize. The fascinating history of using ultraviolet light to kill germs, treat disease, and disinfect surfaces:
These days, the germicidal benefits of both sunlight and artificial UV light are back in the spotlight as potential weapons against the coronavirus. Much is still unknown about the virus that causes COVID-19—how it spreads, whether immunity is short-lived or enduring, why the list of symptoms keeps growing, why it makes some people very sick and others not at all. As we watch this scientific process play out in real time, it might be helpful to remember the words of Finsen upon his acceptance of the Nobel Prize: “The supreme qualities of all science are honesty, reliability, and sober, healthy criticism.” Trial and error, proposal and critique, success and failure are all part of the messiness of science.
“I feel you’re just adding monkey pictures to distract from the relative lack of monkeys in the text.” Photo by Vishu Gowda on Unsplash
Thank you for reading this history-heavy edition of Thursday Things. Let me know in the comments or by email what you think about these stories. See you next Thursday!