geekosystem

It was only 81 years ago back on February 27, 1932 when Sir James Chadwick (not pictured above) published a letter announcing his discovery of the neutron. Besides giving students a new particle to memorize, Chadwick's discovery also helped lead the world into the nuclear age by allowing science to split the atom. The atomic bomb would not have been possible without Chadwick's work, so... thanks?

Plenty of strange and wondrous wash up on the beach every now and then: Shells, pieces of coral, dead and largely indeterminate ocean life that news networks and "experts" are quick to label as a sea monster. The usual stuff, but staff members at the St. Cyrus nature reserve in Angus, Scotland were surprised to find white, barnacle-encrusted blobs of lard washed ashore a nearby beach after a storm had hit the coast. Fortunately, the lard is believed to have originated from the wreck of a sunken WWII-era merchant vessel and not the leftover medical waste from Poseidon's regular liposuction procedures.

These temporary rules were posted at Britain's Richmond Golf Club, located 10 miles from London, after German bombs hit the course in 1940. British dry humor was not lost in the face of adversity, even during World War II. (via Boing Boing)

Haunting, high-quality color war footage of 1945 Japan recorded from camera mounts on planes; assembled by Vincent Romano using recently declassified raw video. (Romano Archives via /r/videos)

Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov is a master of a technique called, alternatively, perspective-matching photography or the fancier computational rephotography, which consists of precisely matching the points-of-view of vintage and modern photographs and exploring what happens where they merge. Since last year, Larenkov has been assembling a series of such photos on World War II: As the photo above shows, the point of combination can be quite haunting.

Some Photoshop whizzes have criticized Larenkov's work on the grounds that the mergers are too jarring in their contrasts and could be executed with greater smoothness on his part, but, in the absence of an explanation of his work, I think that's kind of the point: It clearly takes a great deal of patience and technical aptitude to create these photos, and the harshness of imposing war and its devastation on pristine modern European cities works better when it's not too slick.

Below, a few more choice photos: