June 2012
“Participants not only reported liking the taste of the wine better if it was associated with a difficult to pronounce winery name. But they also reported about a $2 increase in willingness to pay.”
—Wine Drinkers Will Pay More for Bottles with Hard-to-Pronounce Names | Moneyland | TIME.com
“I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example a lawnmower.”
—Inventions that changed the world: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47
“in some parts of the world, the AK-47 is now cheaper to buy than a live chicken.”
—Inventions that changed the world: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47
“Freedom fighters brandished their AKs in photos and videos in any corner of the globe where civil wars or resistance movements were breaking out, holding them up as if to say “we’ve got Kalashnikovs, and we’re not gonna budge.” It’s become such a powerful political tool that it appears on the emblems of several war-torn countries - and features prominently on the flags of both Mozambique and the Hezbollah.”
—Inventions that changed the world: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47
“You can take a person off the street anywhere in the world, sit them down, and teach them how to own and operate an AK-47 in the space of a few hours. You don’t need special equipment to clean them - in fact, if you tie a few knots in a bootlace and dip it in engine oil, you can drag it through the barrel and clean the thing as well as you need to.”
—Inventions that changed the world: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47
“So in Vietnam, when the American M-16 assault rifle started jamming in jungle warfare, you had this bizarre situation where U.S. troops would often throw away their slick, sophisticated firearms and pick up any AK-47 they could get their hands on from dead enemy soldiers. And this kind of thing starts a legend growing; all the might and money of the United States couldn’t build a better gun than the cheap, simple communist Kalashnikov.”
—Inventions that changed the world: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47
“let’s remember that the AK was designed by a tank mechanic to be ready for action through that foul Russian winter that brought both Napoleon and Hitler to their knees. You can be sure of death, you can be sure of taxes, and you can be sure that your AK-47 will fire, no matter what.”
—Inventions that changed the world: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47
“
Russia started quietly giving countries like China, East Germany and North Korea free licenses to start mass-producing the AK-47. Decades of Cold War aggression had the U.S. and U.S.S.R. fighting so-called “proxy battles” in distant countries with terrible fighting conditions, poorly-trained soldiers and virtually no infrastructure in place for weapons repair and maintenance.
And here’s where the AK was absolutely perfect for the job. I mean, if you put the AK-47 up against the vast majority of American firearms, it looks like it comes up short on paper. It’s well known to be wildly inaccurate due to its wide manufacturing tolerances and poor sighting equipment. If you watch one being fired in slow-motion, you can see the whole thing bending and flexing around with each shot, it looks like it’s just about to fall apart - and that adds to the recoil effect, making it even less accurate if you’re holding the trigger down in full-automatic machine gun mode.
” —Inventions that changed the world: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47
“It needed to match the Sturmgewehr’s light weight and fast, automatic fire. It needed to be cheap and simple to manufacture. And perhaps above all, it needed to be capable of functioning reliably in the incredibly difficult and diverse conditions of Russian warfare; you had to be able to shoot, strip and clean it with gloves on. It needed to work wet, dry, full of mud or sand. It needed to operate with wide enough tolerances such that its metal could expand and contract between the icy Russian winter and the warm summer, and the gun would still operate. Kalashnikov made his first sketches right there in his hospital bed.”
—Inventions that changed the world: Mikhail Kalashnikov’s AK-47
“The AK-47 was initially designed for ease of operation and repair by glove-wearing Soviet soldiers in Arctic conditions. The large gas piston, generous clearances between moving parts, and tapered cartridge case design allow the gun to endure large amounts of foreign matter and fouling without failing to cycle. This reliability comes at the cost of accuracy, as the looser tolerances do not allow for precision and consistency[citation needed]. Reflecting Soviet infantry doctrine of its time, the rifle is meant to be part of massed infantry fire, not long range engagements. The AK-47 has a service life of approximately 6,000[45] to 15,000[46] rounds.”
—AK-47 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Cool – its earliest slang meaning dates to 1728, to describe large sums of money, a usage still in circulation. It started to mean ‘calmly audacious’ in 1825, and ‘fashionable’ in 1933.”
—Flavorwire tracks down the origins of “cool” and other famous slang words. They missed “fun” (1699), “pop” (1862), and “hipster” (1941), as well as “snark” (1874, courtesy of Lewis Carroll). (via explore-blog)
“We might not have a specific sign for neurological,” says Wagner, “but we know the word for brain and we can finger-spell if we need to. We can shift from ASL to transliteration to sign exactly what the speaker is saying if we come across a particularly technical term. Once we have established the basic vocabulary of that particular talk, we can also start building pictures in the air that we use over and over again.”
—Short Sharp Science: When hand-waving makes for good scientific discussion
