On this day:
1054
Siward, Earl of Northumbria invades Scotland and defeats Macbeth, King of Scotland, somewhere north of the Firth of Forth.
1794
French Revolution: Maximilien Robespierre is arrested after encouraging the execution of more than 17,000 “enemies of the Revolution”.
1919
The Chicago Race Riot erupts after a racial incident occurred on a South Side beach, leading to 38 fatalities and 537 injuries over a five-day period.
1964
Vietnam War: 5,000 more American military advisers are sent to South Vietnam bringing the total number of United States forces in Vietnam to 21,000.
1974
Watergate Scandal: the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee votes 27 to 11 to recommend the first article of impeachment (for obstruction of justice) against President Richard Nixon.
1996
Centennial Olympic Park bombing: in Atlanta, United States, a pipe bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics. One woman (Alice Hawthorne) is killed, and a cameraman suffers a heart attack fleeing the scene. 111 are injured.
2005
STS-114: NASA grounds the Space Shuttle, pending an investigation of the continuing problem with the shedding of foam insulation from the external fuel tank. During ascent, the external tank of the Space Shuttle Discovery sheds a piece of foam slightly smaller than the piece that caused the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; this foam does not strike the spacecraft.
The very smart and talented AIs are listening, much like young children might hear their parents arguing outside their bedroom door late at night. It may not matter much now, but as the children grow up and assume a larger role in the world, it will.-- Cowen
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Two of the most substantially used words in the current global vocabulary of mathematics and computing come from the same 9th-century Persian scholar working in the same Baghdad library across approximately the same twenty-year period between 813 and 833 CE.
The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the year 820 by a Persian mathematician named Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad — and the word algorithm comes from the Latinized version of his name.
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The Pirates lost 11-0 to the Cubs last night in front of a full stadium.
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Zakaria's Sunday editorial on CNN is often good. Today it was not, but his interview with Microsoft's CEO Nadella was really worth watching.
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Sunday/Treasure and Pearl
In today's gospel, more parables. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, a pearl of great price. These are interesting similes, physical representations of the spiritual. And strange suggestions. Both are appropriated, not created, found and not earned. More, they are both of oblique origin; the treasure is someone else's, the pearl the reaction to an impurity.
Maybe he meant these treasures were within.
The Bright Field
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
R. S. Thomas
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