On July 2, 1839, Sengbe Pieh (later known as Joseph Cinqué) led 53 fellow Africans being transported as captives aboard the Spanish schooner 'La Amistad' from Havana in a revolt against their captors. The captives had been taken in Africa by a Portuguese slaving ship and then smuggled into Havana under cover of nightfall, because this was a violation of an already existing treaty between Britain and Spain, which forbade trading in slaves.
The last transit of Venus took place recently on 5 and 6 June 2012, and it was the last Venus transit of the 21st century. Venus transits are very rare events. The next one will be December 10–11, 2117. So it is much likely that this on was the very last Venus transit I had a chance to see in my lifetime.
Today 162 years ago, inventor and engineer Karl Ferdinand Braun was born. The Nobel laureate (1909) is known for his significant improvement of radio and television technology in the Wilhelmine Period.
Today 242 years ago, sailor and explorer James Cook discovered the Great Barrier Reef while running aground and risking his ship, the HMS Endeavour, to sink.
Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos form the culture jamming duo The Yes Men. Through their actions, they try to raise awareness about problematic social issues, in their sense. In order to do this, The Yes Men impersonate people of high economical or political influence to expose lies and injustices.
Author, journalist, satirist, and critic Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born 70 years ago today. He had a great influence in the literature of the 20th century through his works, most of them dealing with the American Civil War.
On May 24th 1844 the very first Morse telegram went over the line. Samuel Morse and his colleague Alfred Vail knew that the very first phrase to be sent with the new telecommunication medium was to be remembered. So what should they transmit? Morse came up with a quote from the bible, certainly well chosen for an historic occasion like this:
"What God had wrought"
sent by Morse in Washington to Alfred Vail at the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad "outer depot" in Baltimore.
18 years ago today, the very first World Wide Web Conference started with a Welcome Receiption at the restaurant of CERN at Geneva, the European laboratory for particle physics, where the Web also started a few years earlier. The Web (or W3 as they also called it those days) was still some kind of project, but everyone of the 380 participants at the conference knew that they now were taking part in something that could change the internet as we knew it before.
Today, 32 years ago, the world's most famous puzzle started to spread all over the world, infecting the population with addiction and curiosity about its solving.
On this day in 1877 Thomas A. Edison conceived the first idea for his phonograph, the very first mechanical tool for recording and reproducing (replaying) sound. The phonograph also was the invention that first gained him public notice.
543 years ago today, Florentine civil servant, diplomat, historian, philosopher and author Niccolò Machiavelli was born. Besides his seminal work 'Il Principe' (The Prince) he also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and even poetry.
On this day in 1994, the last parts of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with the largest planet within our solar system, Jupiter. This was the first time, that an extraterrestrial collision of two objects could be directly observed.
On this day in 1921, the psychotherapist, psychoanalytic, sociologist, philosopher, and author Paul Watzlawick was born. He was best known for his approaches in the field of schizophrenia and his five axiomes in the theory of communication.
While he was looking for a city called Vilcamba, Hiram Bingham discovered one of the most mysterious towns of all times today 101 years ago. The lost city of Machu Picchu was built in the 15th century by the Inca near Cusco and was declared as an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.
Most people know American author Herman Melville only by his most famous novel, the story of Captain Ahab and his paranoid and nightmarish hunt for the gigantic white whale Moby Dick. Of course, it is Melville's singular and also very best story. But, if you are trying to get to know the author Herman Melville better, you should also consider a few of his other short stories or novels.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, one of the finest composers the world has ever known, had two great loves in his life: the first was music; and the second one was Constanze Weber, whom he married in Vienna on August 4, 1782. She was 20, he was 26.
On this day in 1996 the British Royal Air Force engineer officer Sir Frank Whittle passed away. He was best known for inventing the turbojet engine for which he received the knighthood in 1948.
The Swiss Bernoulli family is well known for their many offsprings who gained prominent merits in mathematics and physics in the 18th century. Jakob Bernoulli, born in 1654, is best known for his work Ars Conjectandi (The Art of Conjecture). In this work, published 8 years after his death in 1713 by his nephew Nicholas, Jakob Bernoulli described the known results in probability theory and in enumeration, including the application of probability theory to games of chance.
On October 8-9, 2012 we were glad to attend the tele-TASK Symposium at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam. It was the 6th event of the series, where practitioners and researchers came together to discuss innovative technologies and methodologies for online learning.
It was 58 years ago today that the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy story 'The Lord of the Rings' was published. Ever since it has cast a spell over generations of readers. The Lord of the Rings has become one of the most popular books of the last century. But, who was this Oxford professor for Anglo-Saxon and why in the world did he come up with this terrific and rather unusual piece of writing?
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