Although he is best known to history as the man who said “I think, therefore I am” – René Descartes was not merely a philosopher but also a mathematician. If you’ve ever used an X-Y coordinate system, you’ve used one of his most famous inventions, the Cartesian plane.
A Frenchman who spent most of his adult life in Holland, Descartes’ major contributions to philosophy were in the field of metaphysics – the mind-body problem. Descartes’ answer to the problem was dualism – that mind and body are separate. In mathematics, the Cartesian coordinate system married algebra and geometry, and created the theoretical basis upon which Leibniz and Newton each independently built calculus.
We’ve found the data pylon containing your records. Unfortunately, the data pylon containing the encryption schema is corrupt, so we’re going to have to brute force them open. Not sure how long that will take.
It’s really not clear when exactly Robert Falcon Scott – better known as Scott of the Antarctic – actually died. Certainly, he, Henry Bowers and Edward Wilson were all still alive, albeit in rather poor shape, when his previous diary entry was written six days earlier. It is possible that Scott survived writing this last entry for as much as a day – from the positions of the three men in the tent when their bodies were recovered, he seems to have been the last one to die.
The three were found in their tent in November that year, after the long the southern winter had abated. Scott and his men became martyred heroes to the British empire. Amundsen, whose team had beaten Scott’s to the south pole by five weeks, stated that he “…would gladly forgo any honour or money if thereby I could have saved Scott his terrible death”. Later, as Antarctic exploration slowly transformed into colonisation, Scott’s reputation suffered as historians examined the records of his journey.
Referenced in:
Restless – Australian Crawl
Dr. Livingstone, I Presume — Moody Blues
History Is Made By Stupid People – Arrogant Worms
Admission: unclear, but presumably most good people.
Heaven, as conceived of by Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Bonham and John Paul Jones (although only the former pair are listed as writers), is in many ways not particularly heavenly:
It is not wheelchair accessible (the only way there is to climb a stairway)
Its entrance may not be structurally sound (the foundation of the stairway is on a whispering wind)
It does not feature 24 hour shopping (or there’s no way that the stores would all be closed)
It appears to be biased in favour the wealthy (a woman who can afford a stairway to heaven can get what she wants with a simple word, even if the stores all are closed)
Its hedgerows are the site of mysterious (and potentiallly alarming) bustling
It is more suited to passive contemplation (being a rock) than energetic activity (rolling)
It features unclear and confusing signage (which may have two meanings)
In short, it is less a heaven designed by a benevolent omnipotence, and more one imagined after too much dope and Tolkein.
Although the name had been in use informally since 1453, in most contexts Istanbul was still Constantinople to non-Turks, and Kostantiniyye in most government contexts. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the modern Turkish Republic in 1923, the old name was gradually phased out.
The changeover was formalised on March 28, 1930, when the Turkish Postal Service Law came into force. All foreigners were requested to stop using the old names of Istanbul and various other Turkish locations. This was enforced by the post office’s refusal to deliver mail addressed to Constantinople, which drove acceptance of the new usage on pragmatic grounds.
Referenced in:
Istanbul Not Constantinople – The Four Lads
Istanbul Not Constantinople – They Might Be Giants
It seemed like an ordinary Good Friday in Alaska, until just after 5:30pm, March 27, 1964.
But then the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America (and at that time, the third most powerful in the world) struck. The quake’s epicenter was 78 miles east of Anchorage, in the ocean. The quake cause massive movements of land – some parts of Alaska were permanently raised 38 feet, others dropped 8 feet. Worse than the damage caused by the quake proper was the destruction and death of the tsunamis that it caused. In the end, a total of 131 people were killed by the quake, although all but 9 of those were killed by the tsunamis (and 16 of those were in Oregon or California), and the bill for the property damage ran to millions.
Hardest hit were Anchorage and Valdez, but many other Alaskan communities, especially coastal ones, suffered damage from the quake or tsunamis. Damage was also reported along the west coast of Canada and the United States, and effects of the quake were noticed as far away as Hawaii and Africa.
On a scale of 1 to 10? Dubious and unreliable. But if past experience is anything to go by, the more outlandish the gossip, the more likely it is to be true.
Ludwig van Beethoven is one of the most well-known composers ever. His Fifth Symphony’s opening bar is perhaps the most recognisable musical passage in Western culture – “da da da DAH!” (It’s also the Morse code for V, which is the Roman numeral for 5. Sam Morse apparently liked complicated puns.)
Born in Bonn, Germany in the year 1770, he would rise from relatively humble beginnings to become one of the great composers of his (or any other) era. In addition to his nine symphonies, he also wrote a wide variety of sonatas, concertos, string quartets and a single opera. Among his better known compositions are “Fur Elise” and the Triple Concerto.
He died on March 26, 1827 in Vienna, after a lengthy series of illnesses that had left him deaf and bedridden. His funeral was a massive undertaking, and mourners lined the streets of Vienna as his body was taken to the cemetary. He left behind him a vast musical legacy, and remains one of the most played and performed of composers even today.
Referenced in:
Green Onions – The Blues Brothers
Decomposing Composers — Monty Python
One of the most popular and influential of all French composers, Claude Achille Debussy was on August 22, 1862. Debussy was a tireless experimenter who was not satisfied to stay within the bounds of what his teachers taught, and this quality informs the majority of his compositions. For instance, he was the first European composer to show the influence of gamelan. By the turn of the century, he was not merely seen as one of the greatest living composers in France, but in most of Central Europe.
Debussy’s death from cancer occurred during the final months of World War One. He died in Paris while that city was being bombarded by the German Spring Offensive. As such, despite being one of the nation’s most honoured sons, he was buried with a minimum of ceremony. After the war concluded, he was reinterred in a style more fitting his influence and status.
Oscar Romero was a passionate advocate of social justice and human rights. As the Catholic Archbishop of San Salvador (the capital of El Salvador), this made him one of the repressive government’s most highly placed and widely respected opponents. He repeatedly called for the soldiers who served on the Salvadorian “Death Squads” to lay down their arms and end their brutal repression of their fellow Christians.
In order to send a message in no uncertain terms, he was shot and killed while celebrating mass on Sunday, March 24, 1980. His funeral on the following Saturday was disrupted by further assaults. Although in the short term Romero’s opponents succeeded in silencing him, they made of him a martyr to the cause of all who would oppose them. Today, thirty years later, Oscar Romero is a candidate for sainthood in the faith he gave his life for.
Referenced in:
Harrisburg – Josh Ritter
Oscar Romero – Richard Gilpin
Marching Song of the Covert Battalions – Billy Bragg
An almost completely reliable truth serum, Fast-penta is a commonly-used tool of ImpSec, the Barrayaran intelligence agency, and of numerous of its allies and enemies, too.
The drug itself relaxes physical tensions, as well as mental and emotional inhibitions. It is not so much that it compels honesty, as that it compels docility and helpfulness – which, in the hands of a skilled interrogator, amounts to about the same thing.
Artificial immunity to it is sometimes given to operatives by their agencies, and more rarely, some people have naturally idiosyncratic reactions to it, in which the effects are more similar to those of ecstasy or LSD – Miles Naismith Vorkosigan is one of these.
As adaptations of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” go, “Forbidden Planet” is out there. Out there in space, in fact.
Starring Anne Francis and Leslie Neilson – yes, the guy from The Naked Gun films and all the rest – it tells the story of a mad scientist, his beautiful daughter, the monster that he created and the brave man who saves the daughter from the monster and wins her heart in the process.
Both commercially and critically, it is one of the most successful science fiction films of all time, winning Oscars for its special effects. The most special of these is Robby the Robot, who would go on to appear in numerous other films.
Referenced in:
Science Fiction Double Feature – Rocky Horror Picture Show original cast
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