Sideswipe: September 15: Who should be on our money?

@Dug_McFarlane

The history of the selfie

The very first selfie - a daguerreotype - which is also one of the first photographs of a person, was created by American photographer Robert Cornelius in 1839. And the first mirror selfie was created by Anastasia Nikolaevna, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, in 1914, when she was 13 years old. And a Hollywood cameraman named Lester Wisbrod claims to be the first person to take celebrity selfies: (a self-taken photo of himself and a celebrity) and has been doing so since 1981. The modern selfie? According to The Telegraph, that seems to have been created in September 2002 when an Australian man, after a drunken night out, uploaded a photo of his busted lip to the internet.

Time to get it right for Te Wiki o te Reo Māori

A reader writes: "Travelling yesterday from Clevedon to Papakura, I noticed a couple of traffic signs at Papakura-Clevedon Rd showing a direction to "Takinini". Obviously, it should be Takanini and I am very surprised that no one is rectifying this error. People told me that these signs have been there for a long time."

Crashing a Boeing 727 on purpose

In 2012, a group of Mexican scientists intentionally crashed a Boeing 727 to test which seats had the best chance of survival. The plane – filled with scientific measurement equipment, crash test dummies and cameras – took off under the control of a pilot, before he jumped out of the plane, leaving it to be piloted remotely. The whole thing went smoothly, by which we mean the plane smashed into the ground, a dried-up lake bed in Mexico, at 225km/h. Scientists looking through the data and aftermath found a number of things, including that nobody in first class would survive. Passengers towards the front of the plane – up to row seven – would not have survived the impact, while passengers sat in the middle of the plane would suffer from broken ankles. Towards the back of the plane, you could leave with no or small injuries. Watch it here.