Carrot History – Carrots in the Second World War (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Carrot History – Carrots in the Second World War (2008)

carrotmuseum.co.uk

23 pointscmsefton14 comments

>Orange carrots are highly revered as “good for the eyes”

This is an interesting recursion of propaganda, it is quite well established in the historical records that this was in fact a cover that was released by the UK Govt to hide that they had RADAR and were using it to be more effective at defence

[0] https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/do-carrots-reall... [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propagand...

Yes, they have a whole page about it: http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/ww2seeinthedark.html

EDIT: Just to add, carrots are good for your eyes, but they don't help you see in the dark, which is what the specific propaganda campaign was about. However, one of the main focuses of the campaign was to increase consumption of carrots in the population to alleviate food supply shortages.

Carrots are remarkably sweet -- about 50% sugars by dry volume. The UK probably didn't ever need to refine sugar from them given that sugar beets also grow well there, but I wonder if they could have done so in a pinch.

Would refining sugar from them leave enough carrots available for their other nutritional uses? I guess in a real pinch it wouldn't matter.

I'm not sure about for humans, but I know the byproducts of sugar beet processing are usually used as animal feed. Wouldn't surprise me if you could do something similar with carrots, although the nutritional profile might mean that they'd have to be mixed in with something else to avoid slowly poisoning the livestock.

Does that mean you could make carrot wine?

Nearly all vegetable and fruit juices will ferment. Most directly, though some need added sugar, or tweaks to the pH with bicarbonate or vinegar or similar. Some of the odder ones I've heard of are cabbage and tomato.

Easily, though the remaining flavors once the sugar is converted to alcohol aren't pleasant; it would have to be a fairly sweet wine.

My grandparents made dandelion wine and potato wine. My dad tried making it a few years back for a trip down memory lane, and they really were not the sort of thing that you would want to drink much of- given how cheap everything is nowadays, it's more for the novelty.

this page does a window.alert if you try to control+c anything

Every time I see others pointing out things like this, I'm reminded of why I keep JS off by default. Cookie/subscribe/"don't leave" popups, broken back buttons, messing with the scrolling, many ads, other shit that pops up when you try to select text, and of course, right-click alerts are among the things that I don't experience much if at all anymore since I started whitelisting JS.

(The "escalation" of course involves the other side requiring JS to show the content, at which point I will usually use the back button instead.)

It uses

  <body oncontextmenu="alert('Contact the webmaster for copying requests'); return false;">

which, needless to say, is absurd. I don’t think there’s much you can do about the alert, but you can configure Firefox to ignore the return value by disabling `dom.event.contextmenu.enabled`.

Also some extremely zealous attempts to prevent copying of their copies of someone else’s work.

> Any unauthorised copying or reproduction will constitute an infringement of copyright.

I have no idea if copyright in the UK protects slavish copying, but, in the US, I doubt their photos would have an enforceable copyright. (Ignoring any potential WIPO/TRIPS complexity here.)

It's a bit rich to say “Any unauthorised copying or reproduction will constitute an infringement of copyright”, and literally the next paragraph: “No copyright infringement is intended”

I tried to highlight text and Cmd-c (I'm on mac) or ctrl-c (still on the mac) and nothing happened. Chrome.

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