history, memes

What Happened in 1524?

Here’s our next instalment of things that happened in ..24 years of yore.

Notable Events in 1524

17 January. Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, on board La Dauphine, in the service of Francis I of France, sets out from Madeira for the New World, to seek out a western sea route to the Pacific Ocean.

17 April. Verrazzano’s expedition makes the first European entry into New York Bay, and sights the island of Manhattan.

August. Protestant theologians Martin Luther and Andreas Karlstadt have a theological dispute at Jena.

Martin Luther

24 December. Death of Vasco da Gama, Portuguese explorer (b. c1469).

Vasco da Gama

quotes

Monthly Quotes

Here goes with this month’s collection of newly encountered quotes …

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.
[Shakespeare; The Tempest]

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
[TS Eliot]

Attacking the rich is not envy, it is self-defence. The hoarding of wealth is the cause of poverty. The rich aren’t just indifferent to poverty; they create it and maintain it.
[Jodie Foster]

Anybody who pretends that it’s a hardship for billionaires to pay a little bit more in taxes so that a single mom gets childcare support or so that we’re doing something about climate change … That’s an argument that is unsustainable.
[Barack Obama]

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.
[Robert G Ingersoll]

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
[Edgar Allan Poe]

[T]he greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
[Aldous Huxley]

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
[Hannah Arendt]

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.
[Frank Zappa]

Fools multiply when wise men are silent.
[Nelson Mandela]

This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.
[Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German historian and philosopher]

Humanity has an ambition to try to understand everything in its World, and that now has become everything in its universe. We’re a very bold group of people living on a planet that’s a relatively tiny part of everything.
[Paul Halpern; interviewed in Scientific American, July/August 2024]

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
[George Bernard Shaw]

It is well known that skewed Bhattacharyya distances between the probability densities of an exponential family amount to skewed Jensen divergences induced by the cumulant function between their corresponding natural parameters, and that in limit cases the sided Kullback-Leibler divergences amount to reverse-sided Bregman divergences.
[Frank Nielsen in journal Entropy; quoted in New Scientist, 29/06/2024]

And finally, remember …
If they can prove you wrong you’re not being vague enough.
[unknown]

amusements, memes, science

July Quiz Answers

Here are the answers to this month’s five quiz questions. If in doubt, all should be able to be easily verified online.

Biology

  1. How many legs does a lobster have?  10
  2. How many species of elephant are there?  Three species of elephants are recognised: the African bush elephant, the forest elephant, and the Asian elephant.
  3. Francis Crick and James Watson made which discovery in 1953?  Structure of DNA
  4. Every cat has the same distinctive coat pattern. What is it?  Tabby
  5. What is the world’s most venomous fish?  The Stonefish

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2023.

food+drink

Culinary Adventures #111: Melon

1 Comment

Now here’s an oddity, and for once not a recipe.

I have for a long time said that I’m slightly allergic to melon. Not watermelon but all the others like honeydew, Canteloupe etc. N has also always said she is upset by melon.

When I was a teenager we had a lot of melon, and I noticed that it always gave me a sore throat. Nothing horrendous or dangerous, just a sore throat for the rest of the day.

In consequence I’ve not had melon (except watermelon) in maybe 50 years, and certainly not since N and I have been together. So the other day I figured it was time to try this out again.

Matice melons

I bought a small Matice melon. And had a couple of slices (maybe a ¼ of the melon) at lunch.

Lo and behold, it has given me a sore throat again. Enough that it’s annoying and will likely last most of the day, but not obviously dangerous. And despite that I had an antihistamine before lunch (as I do daily during the summer).

I do find that some other fruits also give me a sore throat, but not as madly and not for as long, and I’ve always put this down to the acidity. But I would not have said that melon is especially acid, and anyway it is 90%+ water. I wish I understood what’s going on!

I haven’t tried the experiment on N yet. Maybe I shouldn’t.

current affairs, ramblings

Leadership

James Timpson (Chief Executive of the Timpson Group, Chancellor of Keele University, Chair of Prison Reform Trust) has been appointed Minister for Prisons, Parole and Probation in Sir Kier Starmer’s administration.** It is excellent that the new PM is appointing people who have some knowledge of what their departments are supposed to be about.

Even better is the fact that Timpson (who, by the way gets a peerage to be able t be a minister) also knows something about leadership and management – a skill which recently appears to have been woefully lacking. A couple of years ago he posted his guiding principles online, and of course the internet has just resurrected them.

handwritten note
Click the image for a larger view

We need a lot more of the appointment of specialists and people who know how to manage. Now let’s have it applied throughout the NHS.

** I was going to say “government” but I was once ticked off by the late Lord Gowrie for this usage. The administration is the monarch’s government, not the Prime Minister’s.

amusements, memes, science

July Quiz Questions

Each month we’re posing five pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. As before, they’re not difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers – so hopefully you’ll learn something new, as well as having a bit of fun.

Biology

  1. How many legs does a lobster have?
  2. How many species of elephant are there?
  3. Francis Crick and James Watson made which discovery in 1953?
  4. Every cat has the same distinctive coat pattern. What is it?
  5. What is the world’s most venomous fish?

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.

history, memes

July 1924

Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.

2. Marconi described his new beam system of short-wave wireless transmission at the Royal Society of Arts in London. This could transmit more words per day than previously possible, and more economically, resulting in a general reduction in telegraph rates.

2. Portuguese Prime Minister Álvaro de Castro fought a sword duel with Flight Captain Ribeiro over a political dispute. Ribiero was wounded in the arm.

6. The first photograph is sent across the Atlantic by radio.

10. Denmark gains Greenland when Norway ends its claim.

12. The original trademark application for Kleenex was filed by Kimberly-Clark Corporation.