via: Beloved Children of the Holocaust · Ida and Louise might best be described as “frumpy” - English spinsters, dressed in homemade clothes. They were nervous types, a little flustered, a little foolish, the kind of women that were easily dismissed… or so it appeared. In reality, however, Ida and Louise were something quite different. You see these two clever women had developed their own secret scheme for aiding Jewish refugees. It happened this way: Both sisters loved opera, and before the war they had developed a network of friends in the European opera community. Not surprisingly the community wanted to help their Jewish friends in danger from the Nazis. Louise was a secretary in London, but Ida was a writer of popular serial romances whose vocation provided a little extra traveling money. And so Friday evenings would find the sisters, without so much as a ring on their fingers, traveling to Germany or Austria, and Sundays would find them gaudily decked out in earrings, necklaces, brooches and pins as they returned. Of course, they traveled back by a different route so that no one would recognize them as the plain ladies of two nights past. Why the jewelry, you ask? Well, family jewels were often the only hope of escaping Jews trying to satisfy financial requirements for immigration to England. So Ida and Louise wore expensive jewels right out of Germany in plain sight of Nazi guards who assumed that these dowdy women must be wearing cheap, dime-store fakes! The sisters then arranged transport to get people out of danger and safely housed in England where their jewels and a new life awaited. All by themselves, these frumpy spinsters, a rescue committee of two, saved the lives of 29 people! Well done ladies! Ida and Louise Cook were recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 1964. ❤️

The SR 71 was made entirely out of a slide rule. The last major airplane to use the slide rule only.🌟 An article from “We are the mighty.”~April 2022 There are countless incredible facts about the SR-71 that would warrant a place on this list, but this is one of the few facts that pertains specifically to the incredible people tasked with developing it. Not long after the SR-71 took to the sky, the most difficult mathematical aspects of aircraft design were handed off to computers that could crunch the numbers more quickly and reliably — but that wasn’t the case for the Blackbird. Kelly Johnson and his team used their “slide rules,” which were basically just specialized rulers with a slide that designers could use to aid them in their calculations in designing the mighty Blackbird. 🌟Years later, the aircraft was reviewed using modern aviation design computers only to reveal that the machines would not have suggested any changes to the design. Wow! #Habubrats SR-71 SR 71 pilot David Peters made this comment : “There are so many incredible firsts with the SR 71. Some that don’t often come out have to do with the many systems. Example, the cameras. If you have ever tried to hold a telephoto in place you will understand. How do you stabilize a camera with 4 inch resolution taking pictures at 15 miles while traveling more than 2,000 miles an hour? Donn Burns,one of the folks that did it, talks about it in his book. There are many other things that never get talked about.” The incredible SR 71 still to this day January 15, 2023 holds the records for speed and altitude in a manned aircraft. That will never be broken. ~ Linda Sheffield

What Three Words (W3W) is a very handy tool that I use quite a bit when I am traveling Internationally, which I do frequently and to some very austere locations. Comes in very handy (has translation capabilities for both speech as well as from W3W to Lat/Lon (MGRS not yet available). Fairly easy to use and I carry/use it on Win/Apple/Android/iPhone comms devices. In fact some African Countries no longer use street address for shipping purposes, rather W3W. https://what3words.com/about