THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON Photograph by PETER PARKS/AFP/Getty Images Chinese New Year is the most important of the traditional Chinese holidays. In China, it is known as “Spring Festival,” since the spring season in Chinese calendar starts with lichun, the first solar term in a Chinese calendar year. It marks the…
Alfred Hitchcock Portrait – Colorized by Sanna Dullaway Reddit user mygrapefruit and self-taught colorizer Sanna Dullaway has colorized famous photographs in history. You can find the entire 34-image collection on Imgur. Using a Wacom bamboo tablet and Photosohp, each photo takes anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours. It’s an interesting project as…
CAPSIZED CRUISE SHIP COSTA CONCORDIA FROM SPACE Photograph by DIGITALGLOBE.COM In this startling satellite image by DigitalGlobe, the capsized cruise ship Costa Concordia can be seen near the island of Giglio in Italy on January 17, 2012. As of today, search has been suspended after the ship slipped. Twenty-three people are still…
Without doubt, Jeopardy! is the Sifter’s favourite game show. Blurting out guesses to every answer is surprisingly enjoyable, even when you’re wrong most of the time! Below is a collection of 12 awesome moments in Jeopardy! history. From hilarious outbursts to the welcoming of our new computer overlords, these are moments any Jeopardy!…
It’s February, 1942. US Navy Monitors have just tracked a Japanese submarine skulking just outside of San Francisco. A few nights later, a Japanese submarine surfaces off the coast of Santa Barbara and fires a few shells at an oil storage facility. With the memories of Pearl Harbor from last December still fresh,…
FOUNDING FATHER, ALEXANDER HAMILTON IS BORN – JANUARY 11, 1757 Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1757 – July 12, 1804) was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America’s first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury. As Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was the…
CHICAGO RUSH HOUR, 1909 Photograph via brad153 on Reddit Proof that traffic sucks no matter what era you’re in. At least in today’s traffic we have smartphones and the Internet! Comments suggest this is the intersection of Dearborn and Randolph in downtown Chicago. via brad153 on Reddit …
SIR ISAAC NEWTON IS BORN – JANUARY 4, 1643 Artwork by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1689) Sir Isaac Newton (NS: 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been “considered by many to be the greatest and most influential…
FIRST RISING SUN OF 2012 Photograph by JIJI Press/AFP/Getty Images The first rising sun of 2012 appears above Mt. Fuji, observed at Yamanashi prefecture on January 1, 2012. All Nippon Airways (ANA) had organized a rising sun observation flight with 137 passengers on New Year’s Day. via The Atlantic’s…
ARTHUR WYNNE’S ‘WORD-CROSS’, THE FIRST CROSSWORD PUZZLE, IS PUBLISHED – DECEMBER 21, 1913 On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, a journalist from Liverpool, England, published a “word-cross” puzzle in the New York World that embodied most of the features of the genre as we know it. This puzzle is frequently…