Free Republic

Shipwreck adventurer's fiction revealed as true after 270 years British writer of a stirring adventure tale is unmasked as its real hero Robin McKie Sunday October 13, 2002 The Observer An eighteenth-century adventure story involving slavery on a desert island, violent death and escape became the literary sensation of its day and has been pronounced by experts since as exciting stuff but utter fiction. Now a British archaeologist has discovered the startling truth about Robert Drury and the story of his escape from Madagascar. The experts were wrong. His fantastic, graphic tale of torture, enslavement, battles between rival tribes and...

What Is A True Color Image? Image with intrinsic color relationships. Same image roughly convolved with the response of the human eye. What is a true color astronomical image? Is it what an astronaut would see if there was an eye piece on, say, the Hubble Space Telescope? Or is it one that captures the intrinsic colors emitted by the stars, nebulae, and gas clouds in galaxies? For the Hubble Heritage image of globular cluster, M15, we constructed an image which attempted to captured these intrinsic colors as closely as possible given Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data. The detail...

  Top Ten Misconceptions About IslamQuestions & AnswersTen Misconceptions About Islam MISCONCEPTION #1: Muslims are violent, terrorists and/or extremists.This is the biggest misconception in Islam, no doubt resulting from the constant stereotyping and bashing the media gives Islam. When a gunman attacks a mosque in the name of Judaism, a Catholic IRA guerrilla sets off a bomb in an urban area, or Serbian Orthodox militiamen rape and kill innocent Muslim civilians, these acts are not used to stereotype an entire faith. Never are these acts attributed to the religion of the perpetrators. Yet how many times have we heard the...

The two-foot long bird called a Kea that lives in New Zealand likes to eat the strips of rubber around car windows! Most lipstick contains fish scales! Skepticisms is the longest word that alternates hands when typing! One ragweed plant can release as many as one billion grains of pollen! It's illegal to drink beer out of a bucket while you're sitting on a curb in St. Louis! The first product to have a bar code was Wrigleys gum! No piece of square dry paper can be folded more than 7 times in half! A group of geese on the...

Cut Wrong South Carolina An angry man walked into his local police station and threw a bag of cocaine on the counter. He told the desk sergeant that it was a substandard cut and demanded that dealer he bought it form be arrested. You Mean You Had To Lift The Hood? San Antonio, Texas Amy Brasher was arrested in San Antonio, Texas, after a mechanic found eighteen packages of marijuana packed in the engine compartment of the car. The woman, who had taken her car in for an oil change said that she did not realize he would have...