March of the Penguin: Ars Technica looks back over the two decades since Linus Torvalds announced his ‘hobby’ operating system.

During the Black Hawk War, Abe Lincoln was leading 20 men through a field when he saw they’d need to pass through a narrow gate.

“I could not, for the life of me, remember the proper word of command for getting my company endwise, so that it could pass through the gate,” he later recalled.

“So, as we came near, I shouted, ‘Halt! this company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the gate.’”

In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt directed the government printing office to adopt revised spellings for 300 English words. wished would become wisht, calibre caliber, and though tho. “It is not an attempt to do anything far-reaching or sudden or violent; or indeed anything very great at all,” he wrote. “It is merely an attempt to cast what slight weight can properly be cast on the side of the popular forces which are endeavoring to make our spelling a little less foolish and fantastic.”

That’s about as far as he got. The House of Representatives called on the printing office to “observe and adhere to the standard of orthography prescribed in generally accepted dictionaries of the English language.” The New York Evening Post declared “This is 2 mutch,” and the Louisville Courier-Journal opined, “Nuthing escapes Mr. Rucevelt. No subject is tu hi fr him to takl, nor tu lo for him tu notis. … He now assales the English langgwidg, constitutes himself a sort of French Academy, and will reform the spelling in a way tu soot himself.”

Roosevelt rescinded the order but continued to use the new spelling himself. “I could not by fighting have kept the new spelling in, and it was evidently worse than useless to go into an undignified contest when I was beaten,” he told Brander Matthews. But “I am mighty glad I did the thing.”

Harry B. Partridge points out that most presidents whose names have contained a penultimate L — Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, Franklin Roosevelt, John Fitzgerald Kennedy — have died in office or survived an assassination attempt. He speculates that Gerald Ford survived because he was born Leslie Lynch King Jr., and that Theodore Roosevelt was divinely spared because THEO means God. (James Polk died three months after leaving office.)

Partridge also notes that a name with patronymic prefix (Mc, Fitz, etc.) is invariably fatal. To date there have been only two: William McKinley and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

See Tecumseh’s Curse.

This set of 110-year-old condoms, made from the swim bladders of fish, are up for auction in Vienna. Delightfully, they seem to have been meant to be reusable, as evidenced by the former owner's careful tally of how many times each condom had been used. It looks as though you were only supposed to reuse 10 times.The tally 10/9/8/7... is faintly visible on the red lining of the box, magnified here.Discovery credit to Dinosaurs and Robots, via BoingBoing.

In February 1820, Connecticut sealer John Davis sailed south past Hoseason Island in the Southern Ocean and spied a peninsula there. He wrote in his log:

Commences with open Cloudy Weather and Light winds a standing for a Large Body of Land in that Direction SE at 10 A.M. close in with it our Boat and Sent her on Shore to look for Seal at 11 A.M. the Boat returned but found no sign of Seal at noon our Latitude was 64°01’ South. Stood up a Large Bay, the Land high and covered intirely with snow. … I think this Southern Land to be a Continent.

He is believed to be the first man to set foot on Antarctica.