On this day in 1843, the first major wagon train heading for the Pacific Northwest sets out on the Oregon Trail with one thousand pioneers from Elm Grove, Missouri.

The Oregon Trail is a 2,000-mile (3,200 km) historic east-west wagon route and emigrant trail that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon and locations in between. The eastern part of the Oregon Trail spanned part of the future state of Kansas and nearly all of what are now the states of Nebraska and Wyoming. The western half of the trail spanned most of the future states of Idaho and Oregon.

The beginnings of the Oregon Trail were laid by fur trappers and traders from about 1811 to 1840 and were only passable on foot or by horseback. By 1836, when the first migrant wagon train was organized in Independence, Missouri, a wagon trail had been cleared to Fort Hall, Idaho. Wagon trails were cleared further and further west, eventually reaching all the way to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. What became called the Oregon Trail was complete even as improved roads, “cutouts”, ferries and bridges made the trip faster and safer almost every year. From various “jumping off points” in Missouri, Iowa or Nebraska Territory, the routes converged along the lower Platte River Valley near Fort Kearny, Nebraska Territory and led to rich farmlands west of the Rocky Mountains.

From the early to mid 1830s and particularly through the epoch years 1846–1869 the Oregon Trail and its many offshoots were used by about 400,000 settlers, ranchers, farmers, miners, and businessmen and their families.

A young man in India has created a robot that’s already made its way into record books. How he hopes to enlist it in the army, reports Bangalore Mirror.

Shirur, who completed his engineering from Basaveshwara Engineering College, Bagalkot, has developed a 61mm x 54mm x 51mm robot that is so tiny that it’s bound to go unnoticed by enemies.

It is meant for surveillance and destruction of the enemy through remote control.

Shirur, who was at Sahyadri College of Engineering to participate in Srishti 2012, a state-level project exhibition and competition, told Bangalore Mirror: “Cameras fixed in the robot can send audio and video signals from a particular spot to the servers and one can operate it from remote places.

It can also function as an explosive when enemies lift it off the ground.”

Photo by Crystal

The Huffington Post:

During World War II, wives of American military officers who lived at the Eagle Pass. Texas. base would often venture over the Rio Grande River to the nearby Mexican town of Piedras Negras. On one of these excursions, a group of women stopped at the Victory Club, a popular restaurant, for a bite to eat. And while happy to receive business, the maitre d’ who greeted the women, Ignacio Anaya, found himself in a bit of a predicament:

He couldn’t locate the cook. Not wanting to turn away the patrons, he put on his chef’s hat. He looked around the kitchen and threw together what he had, which according to “The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink” consisted of neat canapes of tortilla chips, cheese, and jalapeno peppers.”

Ignacio was often called Nacho for short, and the dish was named after him. Nachos continued to gain popularity for the next 20 years, but really took off thanks to a man by the name of Frank Liberto, who began to sell them as stadium food at Arlington Stadium (home of baseball’s Texas Rangers at the time). Liberto made one major tweak to Anaya’s nachos:

…because real cheese didn’t have a great shelf life (and melting it would require an oven or broiler), Liberto devised a fast food form of Anaya’s masterpiece that was part cheese and part secret ingredients. The new sauce didn’t need to be heated and, when it came to shelf life, it could likely survive a nuclear blast.

And so the nacho was born, with a missing chef to thank for it.

Photo by Luca

If you need a lesson on presenting, there is no better man to emulate than Steve Jobs. Entrepreneur has pulled together a list of his qualities you should consider.

1. Know the one critical point in your presentation — then make it clear.

2. Acknowledge why people are listening to you.

3. Make an immediate, personal connection.

4. Keep the audience focused on you the speaker, not your presentation.

5. Know your story.

Photo by segagman

I use Dropbox for my backups. What do you recommend?

Photo by Ian Sane.

The Atlantic Cities: “This week, the on-street parking meters in Santa Monica, California, have evolved to the next state of sentient existence. Now, whenever a car leaves a spot, the meter will reset itself, even if there’s still time left on the meter. The tiny, measured-in-minutes lottery prize of the urban driver is no more.”

Author Seth Godin has listed his 21 rules for making money online.

The first two are golden:

1. The first step is to stop Googling things like, “how to make money online.” Not because you shouldn’t want to make money online, but because the stuff you’re going to find by doing that is going to help you lose money online. Sort of like asking a casino owner how to make money in Vegas…
2. Don’t pay anyone for simple and proven instructions on how to achieve this goal. In particular, don’t pay anyone to teach you how to write or sell manuals or ebooks about how to make money online.

Be sure to read the rest.

Like Nathan Shields I like to make pancakes for my kids on Saturday mornings. While I can barely recreate my children’s first initials, my pancake design skills have nothing on this American math teacher in Saipan. Shields can make just about anything! Take a look at his website, Saipancakes, for more of his creations.

Although he’s not selling them, someone should open a pancake restaurant with his designs on their menu.

Wired:

A new startup company’s $10 space posters come with a chance to win a ride on a suborbital space vehicle.

Called “I Dream of Space,” the company is selling 25,000 posters at $10 apiece, the proceeds of which should cover a $200,000 ride on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo or a $95,000 seat on XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx, plus some profit for the company’s founders.

No spaceflight company has yet made a commercial flight, and it could be years before they do, but that day is approaching.

Photo by AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker.

Lisa O’Masta wanted to use Youtube to market her business Interwrite. She knew though 60 hours of video uploaded to Youtube every minute, that her marketing efforts would just get lost in the crowd.

So, Ms. O’Masta and her marketing team came up with the idea of a song-parody video contest. Teachers and students were invited to send in videos of themselves performing their favorite songs, rewritten with new lyrics expressing the importance of technology in their classrooms. Interwrite spread the word through the local and trade press, and partnered with other educational companies.

The six-week competition, called Interwrite Makeover, generated more than 200 videos — about four times the company’s expectations — and hundreds of teachers and students learned about Interwrite’s products. The company estimates that it collected contact information for 27,000 leads, including teachers, parents and other members of local school communities. The contest cost about $40,000, including the prizes.

Get ready to mine the sand off the floorboards of your SUV after last summers trip to the beach, because there’s a sand rush in the midwest.

Scouts armed with geological maps and elevations from Google Earth are knocking on doors in the upper Midwest in search of what seems too common to mine: sand.

The sedimentary material is in high demand among U.S. oil and natural-gas producers, setting off a sand rush in Wisconsin, Minnesota and other Midwestern states. While adding jobs, the mining boom is prompting pushback from some local residents, who are surprised by the frenzy and leery of its impact on their communities.

Photo by davida3.

Phil Storage’s company, ShopFlix, allows manufacturers, brokers, and retailers to monitor visual merchandising plans. SoapBox Cincinnati has more:

Shoppers who file purposefully down store aisles may think they’re on a personal mission: bread, juice, tissues, bananas. In fact, retailers design their spaces to remind patrons that while they only need one thing, it wouldn’t hurt to grab a few extras along the way.

So, visual merchandisers and store designers lay out grocery stores with essentials like produce and dairy along the perimeter; convenience stores line checkout lines with candy and gum; and clothing stores use mannequins to display the latest trends.

The problem is, after a store is laid out – particularly stores with multiple brands available – it can be hard to monitor product presentation. The bright pyramid of oranges that was so enticing last week all too quickly becomes a haphazard pile.

• 1718 – James Puckle, a London lawyer, patents the world’s first machine gun.
• 1793 – Diego Marín Aguilera flies a glider for “about 360 meters”, at a height of 5-6 meters, during one of the first attempted manned flights.
• 1905 – Las Vegas, Nevada, is founded when 110 acres (0.45 km²), in what later would become downtown, are auctioned off.
• 1928 – Mickey Mouse premieres in his first cartoon, Plane Crazy
• 1940 – McDonald’s opens its first restaurant in San Bernardino, California.

The numbers on these hangers in a retail store in Brazil show in real-time the number of “likes” an outfit has received on the Facebook page of the Brazilian fashion retailer C&A.

Singularity Hub has more:

The promotional video for the service pitches the idea like this (translated from Portuguese): “When they go clothes shopping, women always feel insecure and want a second opinion. But one second opinion is never enough. So how about finding what everyone on Facebook thinks of a particular item of clothing?” At the end, viewers are presented with an altruistic pitch: “So give ‘Likes’ to the clothes you like more and help thousands of women in their difficult mission of choosing the ideal outfit.”

Now, anyone with a smartphone could go to the store and pull up the Facebook page to find out the number of Likes that the garment has. The new hooks, however, offer that information instantly and allow for rapid comparisons. There’s a good chance that shoppers will check the comments in Facebook about the garment before buying or post a comment after they purchase it and like it.

Video (in Portugese) below.

Thomas Friedman writing in the NY Times:

Poring through Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, I found myself over and over again turning pages and saying, “I had no idea.”

I had no idea that in the year 2000, as Sandel notes, “a Russian rocket emblazoned with a giant Pizza Hut logo carried advertising into outer space,” or that in 2001, the British novelist Fay Weldon wrote a book commissioned by the jewelry company Bulgari and that, in exchange for payment, “the author agreed to mention Bulgari jewelry in the novel at least a dozen times.” I knew that stadiums are now named for corporations, but had no idea that now “even sliding into home is a corporate-sponsored event,” writes Sandel. “New York Life Insurance Company has a deal with 10 Major League Baseball teams that triggers a promotional plug every time a player slides safely into base. When the umpire calls the runner safe at home plate, a corporate logo appears on the television screen, and the play-by-play announcer must say, ‘Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life.’ “

McSweeney’s:

Q: How did you learn to be a safecracker?
A: In 1978 I took a correspondence course to learn the basics of locksmithing. The ad in the Popular Mechanics classifieds said, “Be your own boss.”

The course consisted of about 70 lessons. I’d study each lesson and practice the particular skill required, like how to fit a key, lock disassembly, rekeying, etc.

Q: What does it mean to fit a key?
A: This is only one of a dozen basic locksmith skills. You insert a blank key, wiggle it while turning and the bumping action creates marks on the key blade. You file where the marks are until the key turns in the lock. It’s also known as “impressioning.”

Q: It seems like you could use this knowledge in bad ways if you wanted to.
A: Clients often ask, jokingly, whether we learn our trade in prison.

Technically, the biggest difference between what a burglar does and what I do is that the burglar wants to get in and out quickly and doesn’t care if the safe ever gets used again. I take my time because my objective is opening it with minimal damage so the owner can use it again.

A criminal safecracker also needs different knowledge and skills, beyond the technical, that I don’t have or need. I don’t need to know how to avoid leaving evidence, circumvent an alarm system, plan a get-away, or fence-stolen goods.

Photo by Kirsty Pargeter/ShutterStock.

WorldCrunch:

Earlier this week, within hours a photo taken at Xiaogan City High School in Hubei Province China was circulated all over China. In the photo some students were in class reviewing their homework. What is unusual in the picture is that more than half of the 50 or so students had an intravenous infusion bottle above their heads.

What they are injecting, collectively and following the advice of the school, are amino acids supposed to “enhance their physical fitness and replenish their energy,” so as to boost their performance in the upcoming entrance examinations for colleges.

The picture is inconceivable. In order to help pigs grow, Chinese breeders feed them with Paylean, a beta-adrenoceptor agonist drug linked to cancer and heart disease. Now to help them compete in highly competitive exams, schools and parents do not hesitate to subject their children to amino acid injections. Where is this going to end?

Seeds Trust:

Seedsman Greg Schoen got the seed from Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee man, now in his 80’s, in Oklahoma. He was Greg’s “corn-teacher”. Greg was in the process of moving last year and wanted someone else to store and protect some of his seeds. He left samples of several corn varieties, including glass gem. I grew out a small handful this past summer just to see. The rest, as they say is history. I got so excited, I posted a picture on Facebook. We have never seen anything like this. Unfortunately, we did not grow out enough to sell. Look for a small amount for sale starting in August 2011.

Time was, anyone with a webcam and an idea could raise boatloads of cash on Kickstarter. But with increased popularity comes tougher competition. Now, to get support, you need a really standout video or compelling write-up.

I have an idea for a Kickstarter campaign that could raise millions, but I need your help to craft the perfect pitch.

On this day in 1951 trains ran on the world’s first heritage railway. The Talyllyn Railway in Wales was the railway in the world to be operated by volunteers.

Heritage railways are usually railway lines which were once run as commercial railways, but were later no longer needed or were closed down, and were taken over or re-opened by volunteers or for-profit organisations. Many run on partial routes unconnected to the commercial railway network, run only seasonally, and charge high “entertainment” fares.

Typically a heritage railway will use steam locomotives and original rolling stock to create a supposed “period atmosphere”, although some are now concentrating on more recent “modern image” diesel and electric traction supposedly to re-create the post-steam railway era.

The first heritage railway to be rescued and run entirely by volunteers was the Talyllyn Railway in Wales. This narrow gauge line, taken over by a group of enthusiasts in 1950, is recognized as the start of the preservation movement. There are now several hundred heritage railways in the United Kingdom. This large number is due in part to the closure of many minor lines in the 1960s under the Beeching Axe. These were relatively easy to revive. The first such standard gauge line to be preserved was the Bluebell Railway, though the Middleton Railway (which was not a victim of Beeching) had been preserved prior to this. The world’s second preserved railway, and the first outside the United Kingdom, was the Puffing Billy Railway in Australia. This railway operates 24 km of track with much of the original rolling stock built as early as 1898.

Here is why some of your counterparts may feel the same way, as reported by The Times-Tribune.

The economy is growing, but that growth has slowed – and so has the pace of hiring among businesses with fewer than 500 employees. The U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of just 2.2 percent from January through March, according to government figures. That’s down from the moderate 3 percent growth during the last three months of 2011. Making things worse, the pace of hiring by small businesses is slowing, according to the payroll company ADP, which issues a monthly report on employment at companies in the private sector. ADP says that employment at small and medium-sized businesses rose by 181,000 in March. Employment rose by just 116,000 in April.

Small-business owners don’t want to take chances because they can see how troubled the national economy is, says Paul Merski, chief economist with the Independent Community Bankers of America, a banking trade group.

“If you go through the litany of economic data, it is just not giving small businesses the confidence to hire, to expand,” Mr. Merski says. “They don’t see the future return on that (expansion), or the future cash flow to take on additional debt.” One sign that small businesses may be poised to do more hiring is that they would take out loans to fuel expansion.

Photo by Bart Everson

It’s not everyday an inventor receives a small feature on television, but we can add the inventor of modern skiing to the list, reports DCist.

In 1954, Head was awarded a patent for his design that pressed a plywood core inside two aluminum sheets which were then covered by a shell of laminated plastic. The new skis were lighter, more durable and made it easier for skiers to turn while descending the slopes. By the mid-1960s, in time for Pete Campbell’s run-in with the equipment, the Head Standard was used by over 50 percent of skiers in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

And skiing wasn’t the only sport that “some schmo from Luthersville, Md.”—as Roger Sterling called Head—reinvented. After selling his ski company in 1969, Head went on to do for tennis rackets what he did with skis—replace wood with aluminum and later synthetic materials.

Photo by amira_a

This approach isn’t for the queasy. However, if you’re sick of being limited to straps for turning your iPod Nano into a watch, one man has created what he calls the iDermal, reports Time.

And, on first glance, the idea of iPod magically attached to your wrist as if it’s being held by magnets may sound sleek. Problem is, Hurban, the iDermal’s inventor, did have to insert four magnets into his arm to get the desired effect. So, no, that doesn’t sound that cool anymore. Unless you can endure what looks like no small amount of pain and a bit of blood, you won’t be “wearing” an iDermal.

Understandably quizzical, places like Gizmodo have pointed out the obvious: well, um, what happens when Apple releases a new iPod Nano that comes out in a different size? Hurban dismisses the idea. “To be honest, if they come up with a new one, and it’s bigger or smaller, I probably won’t change it,” he told Digital Trends.

For more Stupid Inventor comics, visit the website: stupidinventor.com.

The Week:

The smartphone has become the bane of the retail industry, as savvy customers use physical stores to comparison-shop before going online on their phones to buy the same goods at a cheaper price, a practice known as showrooming. But brick-and-mortar stores are now fighting fire with fire, using smartphones to entice customers into their stores and make an immediate purchase. With the help of a new technology called geofencing, stores are sending texts to nearby customers and engaging with them on a more personal level.

Photo by Dmitriy Shironosov/ShutterStock.