"If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door." - Milton Berle
Georges Simeon wrote some 500 books published, seventy-five novels and twenty-eight short stories in the world-famous Inspector Maigret series, a daily output sometimes as high as eighty pages, total sales sometimes figured as high as 1.5 billion. Alfred Hitchcock told a story that has him calling Simenon, being told that the author can't come to the phone because he has just started another novel, and Hitchcock saying that he will hold.
After the hurricane, New Orleans changed their school system and built a charter system. The charters, which have open admission and public accountability, have produced spectacular results. Before the reforms, New Orleans students — like overwhelmingly poor students in most places — lagged far behind more affluent students. Since the reforms, the achievement gap has nearly closed.--N.Y News and Politics
After the hurricane, New Orleans changed their school system and built a charter system. The charters, which have open admission and public accountability, have produced spectacular results. Before the reforms, New Orleans students — like overwhelmingly poor students in most places — lagged far behind more affluent students. Since the reforms, the achievement gap has nearly closed.--N.Y News and Politics
The machine gun appeared in general use in WWI. It was a weapon Hiram Maxim patented in the U.S. in 1884. The Maxim weighed about 100 pounds and was water cooled. It could fire about 450-600 rounds per minute. Most machine guns used in WWI were based on the Maxim design.
Did Richard Windsor ever meet Toby Miles?
Did Richard Windsor ever meet Toby Miles?
In 1886, the 49-year-old president Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom, who at 21 years of age became the youngest first lady in U.S. history. A charming, good looking woman she became one of the most popular first ladies in American history.
Like Hillary, former CIA director John Deutch was also found to have stored classified documents — including top-secret intelligence — on computers in his homes in Bethesda and Belmont, Mass., leading to an investigation by the CIA inspector general and a criminal investigation by the Justice Department. Deutch was stripped of his security clearance and ended up reaching a plea agreement admitting to his crimes — but was saved by a last-minute pardon from none other than . . . President Bill Clinton.
Who is....Anne Bradstreet?
The Sad Puppies are an interesting capsulized social conflict. The Sad Puppies are a group of Sci-fi writers who think the genre has been hijacked by social activists. They have actually presented their own slate for the annual Hugo science fiction awards. They claim that social issues are driving modern sci-fi (as if they were not prominent before). One particularly interesting and coherent criticism is that heroines are being presented as action characters who are essentially masculinized women. It is not a totally goofy argument--but it is an argument that denies the ability of a free market to make good decisions.
At the Hugos ceremony on in Spokane, Wash. — part of the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention — five categories ended up not giving out an award; the finalists in those five categories were all Puppies-endorsed nominees.
Golden oldie:
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory near the South Pole of the Earth has begun to detect nearly invisible particles of very high energy. Although these rarely-interacting neutrinos pass through much of the Earth just before being detected, where they started remains a mystery.
Two centuries ago the world’s economy stood at the present level of Bangladesh. In those good old days of 1800, furthermore, the average young person in Norway or Japan would have had on past form less rational hope than a young Bangladeshi nowadays of seeing in her lifetime. She had a 50-50 chance at birth of dying before she was thirty years old. In 1800 the average human consumed and expected her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to go on consuming a mere $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two......She had a 50-50 chance at birth of dying before she was thirty years old. Perhaps she was a cheerful sort, and was “happy” with illiteracy, disease, superstition, periodic starvation, and lack of prospects. After all, she had her family and faith and community, which interfered with every choice she made. --McCloskey
Tobacco has killed 50 million people in the last decade. If trends continue, a billion people will die from tobacco use and exposure this century, which equates to one person every six seconds.
The number [...] or a group of the number [...]: monad, i.e one; duad, i.e. two; triad, i.e. three; then tetrad, and pentad, and hexad, and heptad, and ogdoad, and ennead, up to decade.
Sparkling wine is created by secondary fermentation. It was the cider industry that provided the know-how in Britain in the 1600s. In 1662, Christopher Merret presented findings to the Royal Society (!) in London, detailing the addition of sugar and to cause secondary fermentation, resulting in sparkling wine. He learned the technique from cider-makers.
Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly at the age of twenty-two, while on a trip to Vienna. He was a close friend of Tennyson and was eulogized in Tennyson's In Memoriam. Tennyson regarded his poem as a response to the challenges of Darwinian science and industrialization, "a kind of Divina Commedia" spoken by "the voice of the human race" and expressing "my conviction that fear, doubt and suffering will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of Love." Or as the poem's concluding lines express it, "One God, one law, one element, / And one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves."
Titus Oates was an Anglican priest whose whole career was marked with intrigue and scandal. In 1678, he invented the story of the Popish Plot, a fictitious Jesuit conspiracy to kill Charles II and place his Catholic brother James—later James II—on the throne. Oates's testimony resulted in a frenzy of anti-Catholic hatred throughout England, and caused more than 30 people to be executed. He was finally convicted of perjury and imprisoned in 1685. Interestingly Oates claimed the Queen was working with the King's physician to poison the King.
Mollify: v: 1. to soften in feeling or temper, as a person; pacify; appease. 2. to mitigate or reduce; soften: to mollify one's demands. Mollify came to English at the time when Middle English was spoken. It finds its roots in the Latin mollificāre meaning "to make soft."
Anne Bradstreet was the first published poet of the American colonies. Her poetry is rather commonplace but she, and her sentiments, were immortalized in the first collection of poems by John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a series of fifty-seven, eight-line verses in which he comments on, converses with, courts, and speaks as a woman locked away by gender and circumstance.
The Bracken Bat Cave in Texas is the largest known bat colony in the world. Over 20 million bats live in the cave, which is more bats than there are people living in Mumbai, India—one of the world’s largest human cities. When the bats leave the cave, the group is so large that it looks like a huge storm on radar. The bats will eat over 200 tons of bugs in one night.
AAAAnnnnndddd....a picture: IceCube's Antarctic lab accompanied by a cartoon depicting long strands of detectors frozen into the crystal clear ice below.
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