Come here and enjoy the Valkyries until Ragnarök calls!
In a recent initiative called Backfiles, Publisher Emerald Insight has opened access to some of their out-of-print content from several of their academic journals. One of the sample articles that has just made it to my list of “things to read, when time allows” is the article in which Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues allegedly […]
Today, fifteen years ago, Freddy Mercury, singer and musician of Queen passed away. Before that, he was one of the first celebrities to publicly speak about their HIV infection.
[Thanks for the reminder go to the Schockwellenreiter]
Today, it’s 43 years ago that former President of the U.S. John Fitzgerald Kennedy (J.F.K.) fell victim to an assassination in Dallas, Texas. I guess there’s not much more to say about this, pretty much anyone knows at least something about him (in Germany probably everyone knows the quote “Ich bin ein Berliner”). On the […]
Today, there are actually two almost equally historical events that I want to mention. For one, today 514 years ago, Christopher Columbus reached the shore of America for the first time. This discovery clearly changed the world’s history quite dramatically.
The other event took place in 1986, when the U.S. president at the time, Ronald Reagan, […]
Today, 135 years ago, the Big Fire in Chicago was extinguished after burning the city center down for almost two days. How the inferno was started remains unclear until today. The most famous rumor is, that a cow in a barn of an irish imigrant has kicked over an oil lamp which then set the […]
Ok, again I found something worth mentioning in today’s DW Kalenderblatt. Atcually, there are three items I would consider. But since the opening of the Warshaw Ghetto in 1940 and the abatement of the uprising in that Ghetto 1944 is probably mentioned way more often than the third event and since I have actually visited […]
Today it’s 289 years that the kids in Prussia legally have to go to school (well, now most of what was Prussia then is Germany, but that’s not the point). On September 28th, 1717 the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I. issued an edict which introduced compulsary school attendance for kids in the age between 5 […]
Do you know Oban or Clarenville? These are the endpoints of the first transatlantic telephone cable which has been put into official operation today, fifty years ago. Before this cable was put into operation, transatlantic telephone calls had to be transmitted via short wave radio and this technology was subject to multiple sources of interference. […]
A neat example of interactive data visualization is the Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager. It analyzes the U.S. Social Security Administration’s data on baby names back to the 1880s. Simply begin typing a name and you can see a graph representing the popularity of matching names across the entire timeline. A nice pastime! ANd some effects […]
Besides the overthrow of the French king Louis XVI. there is another event, which has its anniversary today. The peace treaty of Basel of 1499 (more extensive article in German). This peace treaty ended the Swabian War between the Swabian League and the Old Swiss Confederacy. This marked the de facto official acceptation of the […]