Below are current event articles that relate to events, topics, and people found in Spring Break Adventure.
Baseball Spoiled by Nature: Top 10 Moments
Nationalgeographic.com
3/30/2013
A new Major League Baseball season starts with opening day in April and ends in October or November with the World Series. Between those bookends, the 30 teams each play 162 regular-season games. That's a lot of baseball. That's also a lot of opportunity for Mother Nature to wreak havoc on America's pastime. With a new season upon us, we look back at the top ten moments when the natural world won.
Why the Best Success Stories Often Begin With Failure
Smithsonian.com
2/1/2013
Long before the iPhone made him the god of gadgets, Steve Jobs launched his tech career by hacking land lines to make free long-distance calls. Bob Dylan’s band, the Golden Chords, lost a high-school talent competition to a tap dancing act. Behind every success story is an embarrassing first effort, a stumble, a setback or a radical change of direction. It’s these first clumsy steps on the road to fame and fortune that fascinate writer Seth Fiegerman, who edits the blog OpeningLines.org, a collection of case studies on the origins of famous careers.
President Obama’s Autopen: When is an Autograph Not an Autograph?
Smithsonian.com
1/8/2013
President Obama was in Hawaii when he signed the fiscal cliff deal in Washington D.C. last week. Of course, it’s now common for us to send digital signatures back and forth every day, but the President of the United States doesn’t just have his signature saved as a JPEG file like the rest of us lowly remote signatories. Instead, he uses the wonder that is the autopen – a device descended from one of the gizmos in Thomas Jefferson’s White House.
Elon Musk, the Rocket Man With a Sweet Ride
Smithsonian.com
12/4/2012
“Five, four, three...” At T-minus three seconds white flames explode from the 22-story rocket. “Two, one. Liftoff.” The night sky erupts with light and fire and clouds of smoke, as nine engines generating 1,320,000 pounds of thrust push the vehicle skyward at NASA’s storied Cape Canaveral launchpad. The road to orbit is short but marked with a series of technical miracles, and the rocket hits them all: 17,000 miles per hour to break from Earth’s atmosphere. First and second stage separation. Second stage ignition. In minutes it’s over: The capsule carrying 1,000 pounds of cargo is in orbit, racing toward a docking with the International Space Station, itself traveling so fast it circles the Earth 15 times a day, the second such flight of the Falcon 9 and its Dragon capsule since May. “It proves that we didn’t just get lucky the first time around,” says the rocket’s chief designer, Elon Musk. “Next year we expect four to five launches, the year after that eight to ten, and the launch rate will increase by 100 percent every year for the next four to five years.” At that rate Musk, a self-taught engineer and Internet whiz kid, will be launching more rockets than even China or Russia.
Uncovering the Truth Behind the Myth of Pancho Villa, Movie Star
Smithsonian.com
11/6/2012
The first casualty of war is truth, they say, and nowhere was that more true than in Mexico during the revolutionary period between 1910 and 1920. In all the blood and chaos that followed the overthrow of Porfirio Diaz, who had been dictator of Mexico since 1876, what was left of the central government in Mexico City found itself fighting several contending rebel forces—most notably the Liberation Army of the South, commanded by Emiliano Zapata, and the Chihuahua-based División del Norte, led by the even more celebrated bandit-rebel Pancho Villa–and the three-cornered civil war that followed was notable for its unrelenting savagery, its unending confusion and (north of the Rio Grande, at least) its unusual film deals. Specifically, it is remembered for the contract Villa was supposed to have signed with a leading American newsreel company in January 1914. Under the terms of this agreement, it is said, the rebels undertook to fight their revolution for the benefit of the movie cameras in exchange for a large advance, payable in gold.
The Rise and Fall of Ken-chan, the Robot Waiter
Smithsonian.com
6/12/2012
While the robot waiters of mid-’80s Pasadena were serving up chow mein at the Two Panda Deli in sunny California, another robot waiter 5,400 miles west was slinging spaghetti at Grazie’s Italian Restaurant in Tokyo.
Don’t Let Your Money Fly Away: A 1909 Warning to Airship Investors
Smithsonian.com
5/31/2012
Today, new futuristic-looking technologies often attract investors hoping to make gobs of money. And airships of the past were no different. In the first few decades of the 20th century people scrambled to figure out how they might cash in on these exciting new inventions, which were slowly beginning to prove themselves technologically reliable.
A Death at Home Plate
Smithsonian.com
5/9/2012
The Chicago Bulls and their fans watched in horror as their star guard, Derek Rose collapsed on the floor toward the end of a recent playoff game against the Philadelphia 76ers. Just days later, the New York Yankees and their fans watched Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history, fall to the ground while shagging fly balls before the start of a game in Kansas City. Both athletes suffered torn anterior cruciate ligaments in their knees, putting their futures and their teams' prospects in doubt. Sportswriters called the injuries "tragic."
Roberto Clemente: The King of Beisbol
Smithsonian.com
4/1/2012
After Roberto Clemente disappeared in a plane crash off the coast of San Juan, Puerto Rico, on New Year's Eve 1972, his body was never found. U.S. Coast Guard rescue and recovery teams probed the Atlantic waters for several weeks, but the ocean offered them a lone remnant of the brilliant baseball player: a single sock. Inanimate objects take on meaning only in the context of the story they evoke. That sock, banal yet gruesome, symbolized a sense of profound loss and mystery at Clemente's tragic end. But here we are looking at another object in his story, an artifact from an earlier time that, considered on its own, seems utterly ordinary, yet also carries a deeper meaning in its attachment to the career of a remarkable athlete - his batting helmet.
11 Thomas Edison Predictions That Came True Or Didn't
Nationalgeographic.com
2/15/2011
A hundred years ago this month, Thomas Edison whose 164th birthday is celebrated with a Google doodle Friday laid out a long series of predictions as to how technology would transform the world. Writing in Cosmopolitan then a general-interest magazine the U.S. inventor was spot on about some things, such as speedy airplanes, but "absolutely wrong" on others, said Paul Israel, director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers Project at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
How Exactly Did They Think of That?
AmericanHeritage.com
1/8/2011
Sometime in the 20th century, public perception of the American inventor converged with the image of the mad scientist into a wild-eyed caricature of a raving lunatic, steam pouring from his ears, hair askew, slide rules or calculators falling out his pockets: Albert Einstein too brilliantly distracted to put on socks; Thomas Edison curled up exhausted on his desk in his lab coat and shoes; or the unforgettable "Doc" Brown muttering under his breath as he fiddled with the DeLorean's flux capacitor in the Back to the Future film trilogy.
Baseballs Bat Man
Smithsonian.com
10/5/2010
Chuck Schupp has delivered alchemy to major-league players for 27 years, listening to their wishes for the perfect bat and then getting his team at the Hillerich & Bradsby plant in Louisville, Kentucky to produce one that fits their fancy.
Tom Swift Turns 100
Smithsonian.com
7/1/2010
That's just one more marvel from the fictitious boy inventor, who modestly but quickly took on ventures ambitious enough to entertain generations of readers. Along the way, he inspired more than a few actual innovators, such as Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak and Jack Cover, who developed the Taser.
The Little League World Series' Only Perfect Game
Smithsonian.com
4/6/2010
They came to be known as "Los pequeos gigantes," the little giants. In baseball, a game full of real and imagined fairy tales from Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard "Round the World" to Bernard Malamud's fable The Natural, no story may be more inspiring or surprising than the story of the 1957 Little League team from Monterrey, Mexico.
Play Ball!
AmericanHeritage.com
7/2/2009
The game of baseball was not always the well-ordered sport we know today, played on elegantly manicured fields bordered by crisp white lines. As historians have debunked the widely held myth that Abner Doubleday of Cooperstown, New York, invented the sport out of whole cloth in 1839, they have discovered its deeper American origins.
For General Patton's Family, Recovered Ground
Smithsonian.com
5/20/2009
In 1986, the year I turned 21, my father accidentally set fire to our basement. Until then he could often be found down there, in the office he'd carved out for himself in a far corner, smoking a cigar and working on his diaries. He'd been keeping themdozens of identical volumes bound in red canvasfor most of his adult life.
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