Category: +Did You Know?

Did You Know? SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded spaceplane to achieve spaceflight on Jun 21, 2004. This kind of venture is the future of manned spaceflight. Governments are overspending far too much on other things to be able to afford manned spaceflight in any significant amount. We may never get off the planet in any substantial way, but if we do, it will be because space becomes *profitable* to the private sector. If you want to see more manned spaceflight, government needs to get out of the way of the private sector. (They could, of course, overregulate it to death, in which case nobody goes anywhere.) LEARN MORE.

Did You Know? The body of Roberto Calvi (sometimes called “God’s Banker”) as found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London on Jun 19, 1982. LEARN MORE.

Did You Know? Five monks from Canterbury reported to the abbey’s chronicler, Gervase, that shortly after sunset on June 18, 1178, they saw “two horns of light” on the shaded part of the Moon. In 1976 the geologist Jack B. Hartung proposed that this described the formation of the crater Giordano Bruno. Modern theories predict that there would be a plume of molten matter rising up from the surface of the Moon, which is consistent with the monks’ description. In addition, the location they recorded fits in well with the crater’s location. Additional evidence of Giordano Bruno’s youth is its spectacular ray system: because micrometeoritesconstantly rain down, they kick up enough dust to quickly (in geological terms) erode a ray system. So there is probably enough circumstantial evidence to hold that Giordano Bruno was formed during human history. LEARN MORE.

Did You Know? Five men, one of whom said he used to work for the CIA, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972 while trying to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel and office complex. Thus the infamous Watergate Scandal that destroyed the presidency of Richard Nixon began. It was a slow-burn, though. Nixon went on to win re-election later in 1972, and the scandal did not topple him from power until 1974. I remember watching all this on television as a child. LEARN MORE.

Did You Know? Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana on June 16, 1816 to his four house guests at the Villa Diodati (where they had gone to shelter from the inclement weather of The Year Without A Summer), and delivered his challenge that each guest write a ghost story, which culminated in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, John Polidori writing the short story The Vampyre, and Byron writing the poem Darkness. LEARN MORE.

Did You Know? The Pig War was a war between the United States and the British Empire over the boundary between the US and British North America. The territory in dispute was the San Juan Islands, which lie between Vancouver Island and the North American mainland. The Pig War, so called because it was triggered by the shooting of a pig. On June 15, 1859, Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer who had moved onto the island claiming rights to live there under the Donation Land Claim Act, found a large black pig rooting in his garden. He had found the pig eating his tubers. This was not the first occurrence. Cutlar was so upset that he took aim and shot the pig, killing it. It turned out that the pig was owned by an Irishman, Charles Griffin, who was employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company to run the sheep ranch. He also owned several pigs which he allowed to roam freely. The two had lived in peace until this incident. Cutlar offered $10 to Griffin to compensate for the pig, but Griffin was unsatisfied with this offer and demanded $100. Following this reply, Cutlar believed he should not have to pay for the pig because the pig had been trespassing on his land. (A possibly apocryphal story claims Cutlar said to Griffin, “It was eating my potatoes”. Griffin replied, “It is up to you to keep your potatoes out of my pig”). When British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar, American settlers called for military protection. It escalated from there. Fortunately, the pig was the only casualty of the war, making the dispute otherwise bloodless. Oh, and after third party arbitration, the US claim to the islands was recognized, so we won. LEARN MORE.

Viva le Difference Engine! On June 14, 1822, Charles Babbage proposed a difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables.” This was a milestone in the development of computer technology. Today Babbage is referred to as the “father of the computer.” LEARN MORE.

Did You Know? Charles Francis Jenkins transmitted the silhouette image of a toy windmill in motion, over a distance of five miles, on June 13, 1925–an important milestone in the development of television. LEARN MORE.

Did You Know? Anne Frank received a diary for her thirteenth birthday, June 12, 1942. LEARN MORE.

Did You Know? There is a condition called prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” in which people can’t recognize the faces of others. Prosopagnosia (Greek: “prosopon” = “face”, “agnosia” = “not knowing”) is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects may be relatively intact. Few successful therapies have so far been developed for affected people, although individuals often learn to use ‘piecemeal’ or ‘feature by feature’ recognition strategies. This may involve secondary clues such as clothing, gait, hair color, body shape, and voice. Because the face seems to function as an important identifying feature in memory, it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialize normally with others. LEARN MORE.