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It's been said that logistics is what wins wars, and I think the US demonstrated this better than anyone during World War II. Efficiency was created in just about every aspect of the supply line.

For a great example, look no further than V-mail. Enabling the families of troops to send them letters is great for morale, but even letters get heavy with enough of them. So why send the letter itself? Electronic communication wasn't up to the task in that volume quite yet, but another technology was: Microfilm!

When you sent a letter across the Atlantic, the actual letter would stay stateside. It gets censored, then photographed. That photo is transferred to microfilm. Many letters fit onto a single roll of film, and that's what goes overseas.

When it reaches the military post office, the film is reprinted to shrunken-down letter size, about 4x5 inches. Still good enough to read, but saves on paper. Finally, those get distributed to the troops.

Okay, the British were really the first to do this concept, but America deployed it in a huge way. You could trace it all the way back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, where letters were snuck out of Paris with pigeons and microfilm. That developed into the British 'airgraph' which was a commercial endeavor to reduce the weight of mail.

It certainly did save space on the supply chain: 150,000 one-page letters, weighing 2,575 pounds, reduce down to just 45 pounds, enough to fit in a single mail bag. With the smaller size, letters could be moved more quickly by plane.

As a bonus, it was much more difficult to conduct espionage via V-mail. The traditional tools of invisible ink and microprinting simply didn't show up on the film printout.

There were some catches: Censorship couldn't be done by cutting out the offending bit of paper as usual. And the "Scarlet scourge" struck the microfilm machinery, where people kissed their letter with lipstick, which went on to gum up the process.

While you only had a smallish box to write your letter in, you could write whatever would get by the censor. Some took advantage of the format to create poetry, art, and even comics.

Deep in Italy's largest cave, you'll find Italy's largest pair of pendulums. The Grotta Gigante, which creatively means "Giant Cave" is an enormous cavern in northeastern Italy near the border with Slovenia. The main hall is 351 feet high and 430 feet wide. In addition to making it a beautiful tourist attraction, it's home to a rather important and colossal scientific instrument.

Earth tides are something I've mentioned before: The Sun and Moon have an obvious effect on the height of the sea in the form of oceanic tides, but they also stretch and squeeze the land itself. The crust of the Earth is only an average of 22 miles thick, and it's moved up and down by these tidal forces about ten centimeters per day.

In addition to this, the crust is also moved by tectonic forces, which most often you see as earthquakes. After that, you have the ocean tides making an impact too: All that water moving about weighs the earth down and shifts it.

How do you measure these effects? Why, a pendulum, of course! Were it not for these outside impacts, a pendulum should move stably. So with a large enough pendulum to detect the changes in the crust, you can determine what's actually happening.

The next trick is that you also need to avoid interference, such as heavy traffic nearby. The Grotta Gigante turns out to be the perfect location to install a pendulum, and so one was built in 1959. It's a horizontal pendulum, so there's a steel beam weighing about 18,000 kilograms suspended by wires running to the top and bottom of the cavern.

From there, a small mirror is mounted on the beam, and a light aimed at it and reflected onto a sensor can pick up the most minute of movements. So really, what it is is a massive tiltmeter.

The Grotta Gigante horizontal pendulums are an incredibly valuable scientific tool. You can determine the Earth tides by looking for periodic movements, and outliers will be seismic activity. The pendulums have recorded four of the five most powerful earthquakes of the last half-century, including two in Chile. There's a lot of value in having the same instrument measure different events.

What makes a word pretty? Funny? Ugly? I might've never given it much thought, but it really does impact writing in unexpected ways.

Serious research has been done into the phenomenon. A 1995 paper identifies several aspects of beautiful words, such as "gossamer", "melody", and "tranquil". These aspects are having three or more syllables, a stress on the first syllable, short vowel sounds, and multiple manners of articulation together, so your tongue really gets to dance while saying the word.

The term "cellar door" is widely held as one of the most beautiful phrases in English. The beauty is in its "euphony", or the sound of the words without regard for their meaning. In fact, "cellar door" has become a euphemism for pretty phrases in itself.

How much do you like the phrase "Hobbit hole"? J.R.R. Tolkien cites Welsh as a language which exhibits many cellar doors, and would use euphony in designing his languages, such that Sindarin phrases sound beautiful and the tongues of Mordor ugly. Elvish languages feature sonorant sounds and are quite harmonious compared to the "harsh and strident" Black Speech.

So yes, there's also a science behind finding some words funny. Early comedians identified that words with "K" sound in them get more laughs. A story about car keys in Cleveland will be funnier than in Maryland.

In 2002, Richard Wiseman created the "LaughLab" experiment to back this up with data, featuring a website where users would rate a wide variety of jokes. The data confirms it: K is the alphabet's funniest letter. Riding on its coattails are ducks, which are statistically the funniest animal.

Courtesy of that, we have one of the most statistically funny jokes:

So we've seen from Long Island legally not being an island that the court system is perfectly capable of warping reality with declarations. How far does it go? How about making ghosts real?

Well, real enough for the legal system, anyways.

Beginning in 1977, a New York woman reported that her house was haunted. On several occasions, she claimed to various newspapers that poltergeists inhabited it, which would give her children gifts of rings and then later reclaim them, or awaken people by shaking their beds.

Her only defense against the ghosts waking her up was, apparently, to loudly pronounce that she would like to sleep in the next day. They'd leave her alone in that case. Very polite. One ghost also materialized while she was painting the living room, and approved of the color choice.

This wasn't a short-lived fifteen minutes of fame. For over a decade, the house was widely considered haunted from her stories, and a ghost-themed walking tour of the city frequently included her house as a stop.

This "peaceful coexistence" went on fine until it came time to move. in 1989. The listing for the house didn't mention the paranormal inhabitants! And someone entered a contract to buy with a $32,500 deposit. When they found out about the house's haunted history, they wanted to back out.

Seeking their deposit back, the would-be buyer filed for rescission of the contract for fraudulent misrepresentation of the property. The case was taken up by the New York Supreme Court, which declared that "as a matter of law, the house is haunted."

The key was that regardless of whether ghosts are real or not, the house's reputation had a material impact on its value. So you can interpret it as either ridiculous (court declares house is haunted!) or perfectly reasonable (court declares house's haunted reputation).

The outcome of the case was that the seller was prevented from denying that the house is haunted, and thus must inform any potential buyers.

More importantly, the case set a precedent for hauntings in real estate. Since even the most detailed home inspector would be unlikely to find evidence of poltergeists, it's something that the seller would need to disclose if they reasonably believed the house to be haunted.

The case, Stambovsky v. Ackley, has now become better known as "the Ghostbusters ruling". And the publicity from the case brought in dozens of additional buyers, sending the house's price skyrocketing.

I'll admit, I write a lot about balloons, blimps, zeppelins, and airships. I didn't expect there to be so many topics for them! For example, today's post is about a horse.

The last 1700s seems to have been the analogue of the 1950s, but it's balloons instead of jet engines. We have this strange new technology, let's try absolutely everything and see what sticks. For instance, what happens if you try to do mounted cavalry on a balloon?

I'm really not exaggerating. Pierre Testu-Brissy was a French ballooning pioneer who has the fascinating subsection title of "Equestrian ballooning" on his Wikipedia article. While he did regular ballooning flights, including being the first person to observe St. Elmo's Fire and lightning while airborne, he was most famous for going ballooning while astride a horse.

This horse was specially trained to be very calm and still no matter what else is going on, though I'm still not sure that would prepare a horse for flying. Testu-Brissy's balloon consisted of a long rectangular platform for the horse, with the man sitting on the horse, and a gas envelope above.

Shockingly enough, over his horseback flights, absolutely nothing went wrong, except that the horse got a nosebleed. And now and forever, on the "List of aviation firsts", you'll find an entry for "First balloon ascent on horseback" in 1798.

By the way, one of the images on his article has the excellent title of "Pierre Testu Brissy on Air Horse One with Hydrogen Balloon".

If you're talking to someone from Long Island, try to get in the phrase "in Long Island" with reference to being there. You'll probably be promptly corrected that it's "On" Long Island because you can't, of course, live inside an island. Not without some serious digging equipment, at least.

And then that's where you drop the bombshell on them: Long Island is not an island. Go check around the borders of it on a map all you want, sure. It's surrounded by water on all sides. But if you ask the Supreme Court circa 1985... it's a peninsula.

The reason for this is related to territorial water control, which is always a fun subject. See, by default, internal waters are controlled by states, whereas external waters are controlled federally since then they're a territorial control problem.

But if Long Island is an island... then Long Island Sound (the waters behind the island) is now federal territory. Come on, that's clearly New York in there too. This dispute, and many others related, ended up lumped together in one Supreme Court decision, United States v. Maine.

What ended up fixing it was that the East River, which makes Long Island an island, used to be too small for ship traffic. It was enlarged, and so the Supreme Court stated that was close enough to call Long Island an extension of the mainland. Thus, a peninsula. Oh, and the East River is also not a river, it's a tidal estuary, because New York City is built on a foundation of lies.

So now if you really want to get into an argument, ask what the longest island in the lower 48 states is. Nah, it can't be the aptly-named Long Island since that's a peninsula. Instead, it's Whidbey Island in Washington, for whom this is basically their only claim to fame.

No seriously, they sell T-shirts saying that.

And yet even with Long Island (118 miles long) out of the running, Whidbey Island (40 miles long) isn't the winner of the title. Padre Island off Texas (113 miles) is a vague first place, but it's a sandy barrier island and maybe you'd take that out too because it's not solid enough.

Guess what? Whidbey Island is still behind Isle Royale in Michigan (45 miles). Whidbey Island is only about as long as Rhode Island (which is, much like Long Island, not an island but just named for a smaller island in the state but whatever).

Whidbey Island needs to correct some T-shirts, but I don't think "longest island in the lower 48 states" is a good choice for a pub trivia quiz right now. The good news is that if you include Alaska, there's a nice clear answer: Prince of Wales Island, at 130 miles long.

Are snails psychic? No, probably not, but maybe we should check just in case?

It's a very specific possibility, one that obsessed French occultist Jacques-Toussaint Benoît in the 1850s. His hypothesis was that when snails mate, they secrete a fluid which produces a permanent telepathic link between them, which apparently works like an electric current.

The concept is something others have dabbled in before, sympathetic communication. Rosicrucians, a 1600s movement in Europe, experimented with transplanting flesh into another person to see if the original person could feel pinpricks.

The invention which would rely on this snailborne phenomenon he dubbed the "pasilalinic-sympathetic compass", but you can better remember it as the "snail telegraph". He was probably inspired by another newfangled thing of the time, the electric telegraph, and Benoît claimed this would totally outmode it.

The pasilalinic-sympathetic compass (last time I type that out) was shockingly complex. A scaffold of beams, 10 feet across, held a grid of bowls lined with a copper sulfate-soaked cloth. Each bowl had a snail glued to the bottom, and each snail was marked with a different letter of the alphabet.

Simply touch one of the snails, and the corresponding sympathetic snail on the other apparatus, wherever it was in the world, would 'react'. No, I don't know what kind of reaction they expect.

Of course, what restrained Benoît from producing a demonstration was money, not physical impossibility. He found a patron, who eventually demanded to see it actually work. The demonstration before his benefactor and the press, it didn't go well. The words received were misspelled, and Benoît kept going back and forth between the two machines claimed he was just supervising.

But his patron started to suspect this snail telepathy guy might just be a little bit of a quack. When asked for a second, stricter test, Benoît simply... disappeared.

Snail telegraphy did not revolutionize modern communication. Its last hurrah was in 1871, during the Paris Commune, where someone tried it again in desperation for a workable way to transit secure messages. No, it didn't work that time either. So today snail telegraphy is forgotten, perhaps with the exception of its prominent appearance in the manga One Piece!

A "message in a bottle" seems like the kind of thing one would only rely on in an emergency. It's certainly not going to be able to get to anyone specific, and probably won't even be found at all.

But what if you used messages in bottles as the main method of mail? It worked well enough for St. Kilda, Scotland.

St. Kilda is a tiny village on the tiny island of Hirta far off the western coast of Scotland. If you've never heard of Saint Kilda, don't worry: Nobody else has either. We're still not sure that's a real saint, and it's more likely to be a word borrowed from some other language.

Its population rarely rose above 100 people across thousands of years, and ships coming through was extremely rare. The islanders lived an isolated life, raising sheep and being generally self-sufficient.

In fact, any time a ship came through, a "ship pox" struck as the world's newest diseases also visited, often reducing the population further. And so that was the extent of their interaction with the outside world.

Until 1876, when a group of Australians were shipwrecked. They didn't particularly want to herd sheep, so they sent out a message in a bottle begging for rescue. Sure enough, it worked and they were picked up just nine days later.

This seemed like a great idea: The local currents actually carried objects reliably over to the mainland. They (probably) didn't have enough bottles so the St. Kildans fashioned adorable wooden boats, some elaborately carved, which would be dispatched into the sea for their journey east carrying letters in a watertight pouch.

The boats often carried the words "PLEASE OPEN" on them and the rest of the information needed to get the letter to its destination. Sources report as many as two-thirds of the letters actually got found and forwarded.

That worked fine for another few dozen years, but St. Kilda itself wouldn't. Declining population lead to Hirta being evacuated (along with all its sheep) in 1930. Today the only people who still see Hirta are on tourist ships or military.

I posted a while ago about pneumatic railways, where a train could be encased completely in a tunnel and, in a giant version of those tubes at the bank, sent around the tracks by air pressure. It turned out to not be very practical and abandoned after a small pilot section was built in New York City in 1870.

But what if it really could work, for real this time? And it's totally better than those boring metal tracks? We don't even need the complete encasing tunnel, I swear, it'll be great this time. Just one more try.

Anyways, it's time to introduce the atmospheric railway, which is legally distinct from the pneumatic railway.

The atmospheric railway actually came about earlier than the pneumatic railway, around the 1830s. Instead of the entire train car acting as the piston, only one small foot was needed at the front of the train.

This would be the piston carriage. Below the train runs a pneumatic tube with a slot along the top. The piston reaches through that slot and, with the magic of air pressure, the train can be propelled by pressing on that piston. The top of the tube is sealed with a leather flap.

Seriously, it has some advantages over a boring conventional train. The machinery to move the trains is static and thus more efficient, and the trains carry no fuel (or engine) at all. Trains could climb steep slopes because there's no wheel friction to worry about slipping. Train smoke wouldn't be a thing, a big plus in that era.

More interestingly, train handling would be quite different. Because of the piston, it'd be difficult to derail, so curves can be taken faster (at a blistering 30mph!). On top of that, train collisions would be (nearly) impossible: Because trains are propelled in one direction by a force inside the track, two trains couldn't ever be moving on the same section.

Shockingly, some of these did get built. On the Dalkey Atmospheric Railway, a piston carriage was accidentally sent off without the rest of the train and managed to get to the end of the section averaging 84 mph!

Okay fine, they're not perfect. The leather flaps stiffen, and lose their seal in hot or cold weather. Tallow was used to help seal, and guess what else loves animal fat? Rats. They'd fill the pneumatic tube overnight and a grisly scene awaited the first train of the morning. (Some dissent is noted on this having actually happened, and either way I'm not going to look up pictures)

England's fling with atmospheric railways halted by 1850.

So that's 1800s tech giving atmospheric railways a shot. How would they look today? Luckily, we have the answer. Well, 1989 has the answer, in the form of an Indonesian theme park's people mover, which ran on air pressure for decades.

Remember Bir Tawil? It's that triangle in Egypt/Sudan that resulted from neither country wanting to claim it. There's another fun historical instance of that happening, but in this case, it's because both countries desperately wanted the area, and it was rich in minerals.

Neutral Moresnet was a tiny, tiny country between Belgium and Prussia (now Germany, and previous "it's complicated"). Moresnet was barely a mile wide and born out of the end of the Napoleonic Empire in 1816. Not wanting the French to do their thing again (and of course they would anyways), the Congress of Vienna split the map to dilute everyone's power in a way that would totally keep peace for everyone forever.

One outcome of this was the birth of the Netherlands, but another was Neutral Moresnet. Both Prussia and Belgium (which was, confusingly, also the Netherlands at the time) demanded to own it, but I guess the Solomonic solution didn't work here, so instead they just... left it be, so more important matters of the Congress could continue. In fact, the Congress wrapped up without ever finalizing what to do with that little triangle of land.

The new territory, independent from either country, consisted of exactly one village and one zinc mine, and a population of a few hundred.

The country had a few quirks. The national budget was fixed at 2,735 Belgian francs a year for most of its existence, there were no import tariffs or taxes on most goods (making it very popular for gin distillation). It had no military or conscription, and its population boomed as people moved there to avoid conscription in their home countries.

It did make for a great test site for some people. One guy, Dr. Wilhelm Molly, had a great many things he wanted to try on a national scale. He tried to set up a postal service with custom stamps, which got shut down by Belgium after seventeen days.

And of course, what language should be spoken? Why not Esperanto? Molly was enraptured by the idea of an international language and wrote Moresnet's national anthem in it, and organized classes for the citizens. The World Council of Esperanto declared Moresnet its capital.

So a miniscule country between European powers, with control of the only zinc mine on the continent, and literally no military. Of course it was immediately annexed to-

Wait, I've just received a note here. Over a hundred years? Seriously?

That's right, Moresnet flew under the radar all the way to the Treaty of Versailles, at the end of the World War I. The 1816 territorial dispute was settled by merging it and its ~3500 citizens into Belgium. It was made a little easier by the zinc mine having dried up decades before.

I've written before about parasite airplanes. It's something aircraft designers have tried time and time again to make work, but it just doesn't (so far, at least). The idea is that a larger plane (or airship) carries its own fighter escort. When enemies engage, the parasite fighters can detach and defend the larger plane.

It shortcuts what was a major problem in World War II where heavy bombers could reach their targets, but their escorts like Spitfires couldn't. The P-51 with drop tanks for added fuel finally solved that problem, but in the 50s, we wanted something even fancier.

Anyways, in 1989, Plymouth made a concept that very much reminds me of the parasite fighter, but in an even less necessary field: passenger cars!

Now, nobody ever said concept cars are infallible. They're explicitly not meant to be a functional end product, but rather to showcase what could be done. But that said, this looked like something out of GI Joe or Thunderbirds.

It was essentially a minivan, with the twist that it could split in two. Both halves had their own engine. While they're together, they're electronically synchronized to deliver power together. The back can't drive by itself, so you can think of it as a powered trailer. It had to have its own engine, because the engine for the front cab is too small for the whole thing.

When connected together, the cab's rear wheels retract upward, and power goes to the front wheels. And then when you separate the cab out, it's an adorable little smart car.

So we hit the essential question: Why? And it's actually a sensible answer: Because the designer looked at the vehicles people used for getting just themselves around town, and thought there's no need to have a giant minivan or truck all the time. But when you need a bigger vehicle, you'd have to own multiple cars.

With the Voyager 3, you didn't need to! Your matryoshka doll car separates down to the exact size you need for the job.

The "tyranny of the rocket equation" is the concept that, per the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, sending more mass to space requires more fuel, but adding more fuel means more fuel to lift that fuel, and so on.

So where else can it be applied? Stamps, of course!

The Weimar Republic experienced, in 1923, some of the worst hyperinflation the world has ever seen. They had, unlike other countries, funded WWI by borrowing the money, and were then also saddled with war reparations.

Since the German Papiermark had already inflated to near-worthlessness internationally during the war, reparations were to be made largely in raw resources such as coal and timber. And then one Reichsbank chancellor decided to make it even worse: He announced all foreign currency available would be bought with German marks, at any price.

He claimed this was so repayments could be made using foreign currency, but in practice, it caused the mark to completely collapse in value. Allies, in turn, complained that this was an intentional move to ruin the mark's value and inflate away Germany's debt.

In 1923, when Germany once again failed to make reparations in raw materials, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr Valley, taking reparations by force.

Compound that over the few following years, and you have the photos of people using marks as wallpaper and toy blocks for children. You've probably seen those already, so we'll talk about stamps instead.

In early 1923, you might expect to pay 20 marks to send a letter. This was quite bad compared to 1922 when it was only 2 marks, but hey, what are you going to do? And then we reach September. Suddenly, the inflation was so bad that appropriate stamps were impossible to keep in circulation.

Instead, the post office overprinted existing stamps with even larger numbers. Increasingly large-value stamps were issued nearly every week. Workers were paid multiple times a day and given a break to spend it, before prices went up again and their pay was worthless.

When stamps couldn't be made fast enough, people had to make do with whatever fit on the envelope. And sometimes, that got ridiculous. Entire sheets of million-mark stamps had to be glued on, sometimes overflowing off the side of the envelope! And then the weight of those stamps meant even more stamps needed to be added.

Some creativity was required. One postmaster simply took the stamps separately from the envelope, burned them, and attached a label (signed by witnesses) that the appropriate postage was paid.

This post's topic sounded a lot more appetizing before I went and looked up photos.

The Wikipedia article of "List of non-water floods" is a wild ride. Some you may have heard of, like the infamous Great Molasses Flood, and others are just tragic, like various mine slurry spills. But one lies right in the middle (and nobody got hurt): The 1991 Wisconsin Butter Flood.

On May 3rd, 1991, in an unsuspecting 500,000 sq.ft. Wisconsin warehouse complex, some 15 million pounds of surplus butter were stored. In addition, there were millions of pounds of butter, hot dogs, and sausages. Without much time at all, the warehouses were ablaze, freeing their contents into the surrounding countryside.

A quite literal lake of dairy was flowing out of the building. Firefighters couldn't even get close due to the yard-thick wave of butter and melted, gooey cheese that formed. Ladder trucks couldn't move in or out, and ran out of fuel where they stood among the cheesy morass.

One firefighters who experienced the lake of dairy reported having "butter in places a guy shouldn't have butter by the end of that night."

Levees needed to be built to prevent the "river of cream and cheese" from flowing into nearby waterways, which would act much like an oil spill on the flora and fauna. The wave of cheese was able to be redirected into nearby drainage ponds for containment, with cleanup ultimately costing over a million dollars in 2020s money.

Now, I really thought this all sounded scrumptious. But residents of the area reported a "horrible stench", and the photos don't look too great either. (The photo below is actually from a different butter flood, because of course it's happened more than once)

For a more delectable deluge, I direct you to the 1919 Brooklyn Chocolate Flood, where a chocolate factory caught fire, sending enough molten chocolate "to float a rowboat for two blocks" into the streets. It formed a delicious crust which blocked storm drains, making the flood worse.

If you're going to stake everything on a business plan, it's good to figure out some of the details ahead of time. Daniel Barringer seems to have missed this lesson.

Daniel Barringer is the namesake of Barringer Crater, also known as Meteor Crater. The Arizonan crater is probably the planet's best-preserved meteor and one of Arizona's top tourist attraction. Since it's privately owned by Barringer's family, it brings in plenty of money from tourism, with 270,000 visitors a year.

But Daniel Barringer wasn't interested in tourism. He was, at least, slightly ahead of his peers in knowing exactly what Meteor Crater is. Geologists of the 1800s were divided. Some thought it was more likely a volcanic caldera, because if it was a meteor crater, where's the meteor?

The meteor struck the planet about 50,000 years ago with an impact energy of ten megatons of TNT. Because it's relatively new, it's still very obviously crater-shaped.

And so Daniel Barringer had the same question: Where is the meteor? His intent in purchasing the crater and surrounding land in 1903 was to extract the iron from the meteor. By his math, an impact of that size should have contained over a hundred million tons of high quality iron ore!

To be fair to Mr. Barringer, basically nobody in 1903 understood impact physics. Many still thought the Moon's craters (our next most visible example) were volcanic as well. And small iron ore chunks left around the crater were encouraging. If the impactor was still there, its ore would be worth over thirty billion dollars in today's money!

Compared to the potential gain, sinking his entire fortune into the crater seemed a pittance. Daniel Barringer spent several million dollars in today's money, and 27 years of his life, trying to locate the impactor.

Finally, in 1929, he hired an astronomer who knew more about the subject. F.R. Moulton. The report Moulton published indicated that the impactor likely weighed "as little as 300,000 tons". Even worse, he stated that the impact would have been powerful enough to completely vaporize the original meteor.

There was nothing of industrial value buried under Meteor Crater, and Daniel Barringer died ten days after the publication of the report.

Barringer Crater remains an incredibly valuable location for other reasons, both scientific and touristic. We use it to train astronauts in geology, including during the Apollo program, and it was the benchmark against which nuclear detonation craters were measured. Some minerals in the crater exist only there and at other major impact sites, since they're formed by the massive pressure wave of a meteor strike.

Who are the bravest people to go to space in history? Of course you might say Armstrong or other pioneers. But I want to put forward a couple of names you might not think of: Sergei Zalyotin and Aleksandr Kaleri. Who are they? They're the first people to trust a private company to pay to bring them back!

The Russian space program was in rough shape in the 90s. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and funding for space exploration went with it. After that, everything was run on an absolute shoestring, including the money for supplying and maintaining their space station Mir.

Mir was the first-ever modular space station, and something of a trial project for the International Space Station (though of course the ISS wouldn't come about until Mir was already being retired). Despite the budgetary issues, it still set new records. In its time, it was the heaviest space station ever, the longest occupied (12.5 years straight). And it's still where the longest single human spaceflight was, at 437 days.

So where can the money come from? You could get other countries to pay for it. And they did: Many of Mir's occupants were from other nations, paying for their stay. And the Shuttle-Mir program saw seven astronauts stop on the station, bringing with them much-needed resupplies.

And, last but not least, advertising, of course. Many times, private companies paid for their products to be sent up to Mir for the astronauts to do product placement in their TV broadcasts. In one particularly galling event, the cosmonaut was ordered by the commercial's director to redo the shoot, because he wasn't smiling enough. Look closely enough, and you'll even see ad banners hung up in the Russian mission control center.

The end of Mir was inevitable, and it came right at the turn of the millennium. Its orbit was too far for integration with the new ISS. Usually you'd deorbit the station safely, but why not squeeze the tiniest bit of extra cash out of it?

Thus MirCorp was born. The company's plan was to maintain the station itself, and refurbish it into the world's first orbital movie studio! Plans got further than I'd expect: A movie star, Vladimir Steklov, was even trained and assigned for a flight to start filming.

Before that, the station had to be prepared, so MirCorp hired on Zalyotin and Kaleri, the latter of whom already had done two missions to Mir. Their job would be to reactivate the station months after it was abandoned by the previous crew in 1999.

They spent over two months working on the station, inspecting the interior and exterior for damage.

"How the human body works in a vacuum" is turning out to be one of those subjects where the more detailed and deeper you get with it, the more difficult it is to be correct. Sort of the same thing with "How does a wing make something fly?"

I've written before on the subject, particularly how well you'd last in vacuum without a spacesuit, as well as why spacesuits inflate in response to being in vacuum. It makes the suit terribly difficult to use, since it's working against you at all times.

So what if you (almost) didn't really need a spacesuit?

Really, the only bit of your body that truly needs to be protected is your head. That's where (almost) all the squishy fluid membranes are which react badly with vacuum. The rest of your skin is essentially gas-tight. So in theory, you really would only need a helmet. (This is a Tumblr post, please don't go into space with only a helmet on my advice)

The problem for the rest of your body is the same as a traditional spacesuit, where it will want to expand. Human flesh will expand up to twice its normal size when not constrained by atmosphere. The expected fix, therefore, is to keep the body in an atmosphere.

However, you can sidestep that with a different approach: Simply prevent the body from expanding with mechanical pressure! A full-body suit can be designed which constrains the body without actually needing to be airtight.

To keep it flexible while still holding everything down, we call back some pre-space exploration research from the 40s into "lines of non-extension". Some guy found that there are places along the skin which, during movement, just don't get stretched or contracted. If the suit's compression elements are put along those lines, it hardly impacts the ability to move about.

But won't all your fluid boil out of your skin? Yes, and it's a feature, not a bug. Contrary to Hollywood "person freezes within seconds in space" appearances, keeping cool in space is a huge issue. There's no convection (?), so heat stays put and builds with the Sun's help. So constantly sweating and letting it boil away through the non-airtight suit cools it.

The US Office of Strategic Services got up to some wacky plots during World War II, and Operation Cornflakes was no exception. The goal: Undermine the German public's confidence in the war by distributing fake mail.

The British were already forging German stamps as part of an economic destabilization program, just like the fake banknotes that were being made. The OSS would one-up this, however, by then using those forged stamps to also distribute propaganda directly to the German public.

The trick is that while basically all international mail was inspected and censored by somebody during the war era, Germany didn't typically censor internal mail.

Step one: Locate German POWs who had experience with their postal system, and get their experience in how mail was sorted, cancelled, and delivered.

Step two: Locate master forgers who could create fake stamps, and then also replicate the bags mail was delivered in, all down to using the same material and marking.

Step three: Scour the German telephone directory for names and addresses. Two million names were picked at random to receive mail from Operation Cornflakes.

Step four: Destroy some mail trains. When fighters strafed a German mail train, a second wave of planes flew past and air-dropped the fake mail bags. Ideally, from this point, the German post would recover the mail bags and send them, propaganda and all, on their way.

It was an elaborate plot, but the catches turned out to be too many. First off, the German postal service changed their franking system, so much of the first wave of letters were marked "return to sender", which would be random business selected as return addresses.

Once that was fixed, the letter still wouldn't reach their targets. Fear of the secret police was so great that anyone receiving an unexpected letter was more likely to dispose of it unopened.

Anyways, by the time Operation Cornflakes hit its stride in early 1945, dropping off nearly 100,000 forged letters, infrastructure in Germany was so badly destroyed that most of the addresses didn't exist any more, nor the postal service to deliver to them.