In 1962, John Glenn lifted off in Friendship 7 to become the first American to orbit the planet.
Here's a brilliant (and short) true story about something that happened a few days before.
Due to multiple computer problems with the (then) new IBM systems, Glenn demanded all the orbit calculations be recalculated by hand, by one person - a brilliant black female mathemetician called Katherine Johnson.
ONLY if Johnson's manual calculations matched those of the IBM, would Glenn trust the systems.
After a day and half of work, Johnson confirmed that the numbers were right, using a 44 ft wide blackboard and a stepladder.
THIS DAY in 1914, began the six-day Battle of the Marne.
It resulted in an Allied victory against the German armies which stopped the German advance - leading to a stalemate that would result in the trench warfare that followed.
1/4.
The Marne was pre-steel helmets.
Images of the time look like they could have come from the US Civil War 50 years previously.
2/4.
The Marne was so close to Paris that it's the only battle in history in which troops arrived by taxi.
600 Paris cabs were ordered to gather at Les Invalides, to ferry soldiers to the front.
09-04, THIS DAY n 1957, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford strode through screaming white students and parents to try to enter High School in #Arkansas, one of the 'Little Rock Nine'.
1/5.
A mob of 400 screaming and jeering white parents and children, with the active collusion of the #Arkansas National Guard (under the Governor's orders), stopped her and the others entering.
2/5.
On 23rd September, they finally entered the school, protected by elements of the 101st Airborne Division.
Yhread : On simple technical solutions to fighting online racism and other forms of hatred.
Last night after the England gane, and the resultant avalanche of racist vitriol aimed at a handful of players, we put out an alert / appeal on Twitter:
Enter "to:@MarcusRashford" in your Twitter sarch box, and REPORT EVERY SINGLE RACIST TWEET.
(He seems to be getting the most of it)
At the same time, screenshot everyone you can ID.
Email them to farrightwatch@gmail.com.
If we can ID theim and their employers ... we will.
@MarcusRashford How we do this (for the technically curious)
We create custom search pages on the socmed platforms, and run 'wget' in bash/*nix on these every 10 seconds and/or refresh, then pipe (||) from stdout to 'sed' to wash non-ascii ...
@MarcusRashford ... then to 'grep' to extract unique data only, then 'grep' again, looped for each of a set of keywords, || to an action file for tomorrow.