Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 15 Feb 2013, 09:36
15th February 1971;
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 15 Feb 2013, 13:11
15th February 1942; the Fall of Singapore.
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 15 Feb 2013, 13:38
15th February 1898, the second class battleship USS Maine blows up in Havana harbour, Cuba, further increasing tension between the United States and Spain, resulting in a declaration of war in April.
nordmann Nobiles Barbariæ
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 15 Feb 2013, 14:30
1965 - February 15th
This:
Became this:
It was decided however to keep the Irish ballad as their anthem - "O'Canada"
Caro Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 15 Feb 2013, 19:44
Would we would do something similar to our stupid flag.
Vizzer Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 15 Feb 2013, 21:38
Isn't the All Blacks logo (white fern on a black field) already the alternative Kiwi flag by default?
Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 15 Feb 2013, 23:28
Did it? We visited the historical site where the meat was processed, but I haven't time to send a photo at the moment. (Out in twenty minutes and still have to get changed.)
The silver fern is often used unofficially and is a favourite to put on any new flag, but there is no governmental push to change. Quite controversial what it could change to - there is a Maori flag (or two or three), people still want their ties to Britain acknowledged and the silver fern is a very popular symbol. And then there's the colours. One day.
nordmann Nobiles Barbariæ
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 15 Feb 2013, 23:42
16th February 2012 - this thread was started.
Well done, NormanHurst!
Caro Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Sat 16 Feb 2013, 08:01
These are two photos from Totara Estate, set up as a historical site. One a view of the buildings, the other one of the displays, a (plastic) carcass with some sort of shearing pictures or laser prints or something at the back.
Caro Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Sun 17 Feb 2013, 03:30
February 16 1942. The Bangka Island massacre took place on the Indonesian island where 22 Australian nurses were shot when they and others took shelter from the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke. There was just one survivor Sister Vivian Bullwinkel who was shot but pretended to be dead and didn't mention her experience to authorities till after the war.
I had not heard of this before and often Australian events and personalities are unknown to NZers; I am sure this woman would be well-known to Australians. I always find stories of sole survivors moving and fascinating. (Others suvived the sinking of the ship.)
1901: Regiments of British troops march from the wharves to the Auckland Domain and after a hot dusty walk were refused a beer by the prohibitionist welcoming committee, though the officers were served champagne. I find this story a little mystifying - why were we hosting British troops? We didn't have any fighting in NZ at the time. Surely they didn't come to boost support for the SA Wars. Was there a Russian panic at the time? - we seemed to have lots of those.
Priscilla Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Wed 20 Feb 2013, 13:48
On this day in 1472, the Scots claimed back the Orkneys and Shetlands from Norway for non payment of a dowry. what was that all about? And was that when the departing lot destroyed all the trees to create a waste land from which the islands never recoverd? Or is my memory on the blink?
ferval Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Wed 20 Feb 2013, 14:18
Can't blame the Norse for destroying the trees; by the mid 3rd millennium BCE they were going down quickly to the axe and the climate getting a bit chillier and once the weather started to get even worse in the mid 2nd, that did for them pretty much completely.
Priscilla Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Wed 20 Feb 2013, 15:00
Guides on Orkneys told a tale of departing Norse burning the place = esp trees down. So that is but a tale. Of course we could tell a few about departing/absent Norweigians who are chipping a banner to denote decline...........? Whose?
ferval Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Wed 20 Feb 2013, 15:08
Is it a Nordic version of Dorian's portrait? Is His Omnipotence admired for his youthful countenance or his well maintained property?
Priscilla Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Wed 20 Feb 2013, 15:48
No one I know then.
Temperance Virgo Vestalis Maxima
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 01 Mar 2013, 19:18
March 1st, 1587.
Peter Wentworth was sent to the Tower - again. The man would just not shut up.
Wentworth was a trouble maker - a Puritan and a Parliamentarian. He several times defied Elizabeth I's right to interfere with the proceedings in Parliament. He was a sign of the "deluge" to come.
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Mon 04 Mar 2013, 09:22
4 March 1890, the Forth Rail Bridge is opened;
Priscilla Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Mon 04 Mar 2013, 10:32
I guess they went ahead with the opening even if a tad behind schedule. Oh just read the words.
nordmann Nobiles Barbariæ
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Tue 05 Mar 2013, 09:43
March 5th 1869 - Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev presents his Periodic Table of the Elements to the Russian Chemical Society. While not the first attempt at such a table (Mendeleev was unaware of similar tables recently formulated in Britain and the US) it was the most accurate for its time and could be used to successfully predict the existence of several more elements than the 56 then known about. Mendeleev was not to know either that his excellent research would be used to such devastating effect 90 years later by a certain Harvard mathematician and songwriter ...
(nor indeed did Tom Lehrer know that his ditty would later be Potterised ...)
nordmann Nobiles Barbariæ
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Tue 05 Mar 2013, 10:19
March 5th 1960 - Alberto Korda, a Cuban photographer, takes a snapshot which would later become one of the most iconic images of the late 20th century.
Here's the snap:
And the rest, as they say, is iconography ...
Meles meles Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Tue 05 Mar 2013, 10:51
Regarding both Mendeleev's and Lehrer's differing interpretations of the periodic table:
It is very apt that something as scientifically exact as the periodic table should be set to music. Mendeleev noted its repeating 8-fold octave-like structure, and this musical analogy was made even more explicit by the English chemist John Newlands who had started similar thinking in 1865. Newlands, noting that many pairs of chemically similar elements existed which differed by some multiple of eight in mass number, came up with his 'Law of Octaves' , which likened the order of elements to the octaves of the musical scale. But this explicit linking of chemistry to music was ridiculed by all his scientifically minded contemporaries.
But rather ironically, though we talk about musical octaves, eight-note musical divisions are essentially artificial constructs. The repeating ‘octave’ truly exists as successive doublings of the sound wave frequency (and is linked directly to physically halving the length of a plucked string, or blown pipe etc), but there is absolutely nothing that says that this musical interval should be divided into eight. Indeed it isn’t in a lot of asian music, and even in western music the eight part division is not of equal intervals. The intervals of the western major diatonic scale C to C, or: do, re, me fa, so, la, te, do (of Julie Andrews/von Trapp fame) are: tone, tone, semi-tone, tone, tone , tone, semi-tone, and even then the whole-tone differences are not exactly the same throughout the scale. Similarly there are 12 notes, represented by all the black and white keys, to an octave on a piano keyboard. But that is basically just the way we in western Europe decided to order our music ... on a violin string you can stick your finger wherever you like, if you'll pardon the expression! Or like Daniel Radcliffe warble slightly off key however it suits you.
Nevertheless the repeating eight-step intervals of the elements are truly observable and are essentially fixed, being based on fixed eight-fold symmetry of atomic bonding. Newlands' musical analogy was spot on scientifically but is actually weakened by the lack of any true eight-fold structure in music.
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 07 Mar 2013, 12:58
7th March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell receives US patent for the telephone;
nordmann Nobiles Barbariæ
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 07 Mar 2013, 13:19
Wot he nicked!
The race between Bell and Elisha Gray to the same patent office in Washington DC on the same day is legendary drama (but true nonetheless). Gray won the race, which meant that his patent ended up under Bell's in the in-tray, a fact which was to have a huge bearing on the conduct of the later litigation by all concerned. Much has been made since of timing, technical descriptions in each patent, and even sworn affidavits alleging bribery of officials by Bell, but what seems to have been the clincher on the day was that Bell's was filed first - a fact which does not define invention under law but which puts the onus on the loser to fund a challenge to the Patent Office's decision. Ultimately it was this that won it for Bell - he grew rapidly richer while Gray grew rapidly bankrupt.
Little known fact: Alexander Graham Bell's patent included a ringing device by which incoming calls could be alerted to the appliance's user. This was called a bell. Elisha Gray's use of a gray for the same function would have been a non-runner.
Well known fact: The above little known fact is a load of bollocks.
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 07 Mar 2013, 14:00
Here's one for Temp, 7 March 1578 the death of Margaret Douglas;
Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 08 Mar 2013, 08:52
The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
This was worked out by a part-time astrologer, alcoholic believer in demonic possession whose mother was tried for witchcraft - and published on this day, March 8th 1618.
Leading astronomers, including Galileo, simply ignored what they regarded as the unwelcome intrusion of mathematics into astronomical observations, a discipline they equated with the bogus "science" of numerology. And in this case they had a point. Our astrologer was a dab-hand at earning a few extra dollars through this particular chicanery too.
Today we realise of course that the above logic is sound. Isaac Newton employed the formulae derived from it to calculate gravitational pull, and no moonshot or interplanetary probe could have been launched without it. In fact we call it the third law of planetary motion, and often preface this name with that of its author, Johannes Kepler - bonkers, but genius.
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 08 Mar 2013, 09:19
nordmann wrote:
The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.
This was worked out by a part-time astrologer, alcoholic believer in demonic possession whose mother was tried for witchcraft - and published on this day, March 8th 1618.
And, exactly 360 years later, the first radio broadcast of;
nordmann Nobiles Barbariæ
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Mon 11 Mar 2013, 10:30
This day last year we were busy listing off a litany of disasters from ferries capsizing to the Madrid bombings (as well as some Pavarotti thrown in for good measure, as if the day wasn't disastrous enough).
However we omitted to register this little snippet from March 11th 1702 - the first regular newspaper printed in England, the Daily Courant, hit the newsstands (assuming that newsstands were also hastily invented on this day for the purpose).
ferval Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Mon 11 Mar 2013, 17:01
1952 - birth of the late and deeply lamented Douglas Adams.
Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Wed 20 Mar 2013, 09:23
20th March 1727, the death of Sir Isaac Newton;
Caro Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 21 Mar 2013, 04:17
20 March 1834: the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand was recognised. There was no official British flag for NZ before 1840 and ships were being impounded due to this lack. Before 1840, when New Zealand became part of the British Empire, ships that were built in New Zealand were not entitled to fly the British flag. One New Zealand ship called the Sir George Murray, part-owned by northern chiefs Patuone and Taonui, was impounded, with Patuone on board, for not having a flag or register. To solve this issue, the British Resident (a representative of the British government) James Busby organised a meeting with northern chiefs to select a flag for use by ships from New Zealand. On 20 March 1834 the flag, known as the flag of the United Tribes of New Zealand, was adopted by 25 northern rangatira at Waitangi. The flag and informal Māori registers were recognised by Britain. from teara.govt.nz
This flag lost out to the Tino Rangitiratanga in a competition in 2009 for a flag to represent Maori. (All this plus attachment for historical reasons to the official NZ flag means it is difficult to change our ghastly flag.)
Temperance Virgo Vestalis Maxima
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 21 Mar 2013, 08:02
21st March 1556.
Thomas Cranmer was burnt at the stake in Oxford. Cranmer was a timorous man, but he faced a terrible death bravely, famously thrusting the hand which had signed his shameful recantations into the flames for all the spectators to see, declaring, "Forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished there-for." He repeated over and over again while he could, "Unworthy right hand", "this hand hath offended", finally shouting in triumphant defiance, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit! I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God!"
It was a magnificent end, and Mary Tudor must have been kicking herself that she had turned a dithering Archbishop of Recanterbury into a great Protestant martyr.
nordmann Nobiles Barbariæ
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 21 Mar 2013, 08:05
He's thrusting the wrong hand in the pic. Ditherer indeed!
Meles meles Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 21 Mar 2013, 08:40
nordmann wrote:
He's thrusting the wrong hand in the pic. Ditherer indeed!
Was Cranmer not right-handed then? I thought eye-witnesses reported that it was his right hand that he thrust first into the flames, as depicted in that print from John Foxe's "Book of Martyrs". And as Temp says he himself apparently said: "Unworthy right hand". I've always thought it was his right hand.
Temperance Virgo Vestalis Maxima
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 21 Mar 2013, 08:57
I'm totally confused, but perhaps nordmann's looking at the wrong chap?
nordmann Nobiles Barbariæ
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 21 Mar 2013, 09:00
Maybe it was his evil twin!
Actually you're right, Temp. I didn't see him back there for all the smoke and was looking at Friar Tuck in the foreground.
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 21 Mar 2013, 09:22
21 March 1925, the State of Tennessee introduces the Butler Act, making it illegal to teach evolution in schools;
Caro Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Thu 28 Mar 2013, 21:38
28th March 1900. A hui ( large meeting) of Maori protested their exclusion from participating in the Boer War. Usually you hear of people trying to get out of fighting but in this case Maori felt excluded by laws not allowing them to have a contingent. The Premier Richard Seddon felt that as Maori under the Treaty of Waitangi were equal citizens they had the right to fight too. Others disagreed: a NZ history site says, "Seddon’s proposal and offers made by Māori leaders were declined as the British government believed that native troops should not be deployed in a ‘white man’s war’. This view was reinforced by other elements of society, with the Evening Post stating: ‘if the white races of the world are to employ yellow and black troops in their wars with one another, the end of European civilization would be within measurable distance.’"
I am a little mystified by this last bit - why would it mean the end of European civilization? Maori did join the war, using English names and joining European regiments. And they were allowed to provide nurses, and some dressed in khaki and did fund-raising.
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Fri 29 Mar 2013, 09:21
29th March 1461, the Battle of Towton;
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Mon 01 Apr 2013, 09:39
1 April 1918, the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service are combined to form the Royal Air Force;
nordmann Nobiles Barbariæ
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Mon 01 Apr 2013, 13:19
On Saturday, April 1st 1724, Dublin's citizens going about their business in the commercial heart of the capital, Capel Street, encountered the usual street flotsam of beggars, vagrants, balladeers and pamphleteers - as they had grown to expect in this, the city's primary shopping district. However one pamphlet thrust upon them this day was different from the rest. Unlike the others which exorted them to join in calumny condemning some benighted individual who had raised the author's ire, or to apportion some money in supporting a nefarious commercial venture unable to be advertised through legal means, this one made a bolder claim on their attentions indeed.
Like the rest it was anonymously written, the author introducing himself at the outset merely as a common drapier, one of many hundred such simple shopkeepers whose premises abounded in the area, describing himself as god fearing, law abiding and a humble practitioner of a humble trade. He did not even exort his reader to seek out his premises and purchase goods, nor indeed purchase anything at all. His tract, religious in tone, appealed to his audience to apply the principles of their faith to the world around them when judging the actions of their superiors, and in particular the recent introduction of new copper coins minted in England to the Irish economy.
The coins in question were those which a hardware manufacturer, William Woods, had secured the patent to produce after bribing a mistress of the king, one Ehrengard Melusine Baroness von der Schulenburg, Duchess of Kendal and Duchess of Munster, to the tune of ten thousand pounds (almost one and a half million pounds today). But this, the drapier argued, was not where the ultimate immorality of the venture lay. Woods was known for producing inferior coinage, debased pieces of metal in essence which were not accepted as currency in the rest of Britain and its dominions. By flooding the Irish economy with these coins it was tantamount to England extracting the country's gold and silver by the shipload and leaving the Irish effectively destitute in the aftermath, a process of daylight robbery which would take only a few short months to complete.
The drapier urged his fellow citizens, for the sake of justice, self-preservation and the love of a god who would condemn such wanton and unprovoked aggression, to shun their use, resist their importation and cause the king and his government in London to right their wrong.
It was strong stuff for a humble drapier to demand. Moreover it bordered on treason in its request that Ireland be allowed set up its own national bank to administer its own currency, an aspiration which had only recently been outlawed by royal decree. Agitation to such an outlawed end was legally an affront therefore to the royal person itself, and in that sense punishable by death. Those who read these seditious words on that Saturday morning were in no doubts as to the nature of what they held.
But they were in complete agreement. Within hours of the pamphlet's publication printers across the city were churning out hundreds more copies to meet the avaricious demand for its contents. Crowds gathered outside their premises to obtain copies and the castle authorities were confused as to how they should react. A half-hearted attempt at blockading one printer's premises on Usher's Quay resulted almost in a full scale riot. They wisely decided to retreat. The humble drapier had won the first battle.
But his war continued. The drapier went on to produce several more pamphlets on the same theme, each one exorting the Irish to rebel against the introduction of debased currency and each one reaching a wider audience across the country, each new reader as supportive of his claims as the denizens of Capel Street had been at the beginning. Lord Carteret and the Irish Privy Council offered a massive reward of three hundred pounds (over forty thousand pounds today) for information leading to the identification and arrest of the drapier. None was forthcoming. Printers were threatened with prosecution. Drapiers across the country were questioned and arrested. But still the pamphlets appeared, and each time to an ever increasing crescendo of approval from their audience.
In 1725, much as the castle authorities had done on that April morning when the first pamphlet had appeared, Walpole's government at last bowed to the inevitable. The patent to Woods was withdrawn.
Of course by then the authorship of the pamphlets, each one phrased as a letter either to a general readership or to important people with influence and the power to help revoke the intended debasement, had become an open secret. The dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Jonathan Swift, could retire from the drapiery trade and contemplate a job well done.
Caro Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Wed 03 Apr 2013, 08:27
The Irish of the 18th C must be a lot feistier than the NZers of the present day who would complain for a moment or two and then forget the issue. Do you think Swift's ability with words would have made a difference to how his pamphlet was received?
Onto protest of a different kind. And tending to contradict what I've just said about New Zealanders.
2nd April, 1916. Rua Kenena, Maori prophet, was arrested following a shootout in which his uncle and son were killed. Rua predicted he would never be killed and he wasn't. One other prediction in 1906, that Edward VII would come to see him and hand over the country to him, didn't come to fruition but Rua said he was really that king and was with his people. I have been reading about recently in the NZ Geographic which has devoted a long article to his tribe Tuhoe (the one where people were charged with terrorism a few years ago).
In his time an act almost passed to give Tuhoe back ownership and control of their land. It didn't eventuate then, but now Tuhoe are about to be made the guardians of their large area of the Te Urerewa National Park and will have control over it. There was a last minute hiccup when the PM objected to 'ownership' of it, but it is ownership in all but name. It is the only tribe which has this sort of control over its land area. The main negotiator said, "Ownership was his obsession, not ours, So now we don't use that word. It's not a Tuhoe concept anyway...Ownership [for Europeans] is the proof that something is yours to sell. So it is more about how to rid yourself of something, to gain material benefit from it, than to preserve and keep it...Nobody owns the land. It owns you. The water owns the water, the land owns the land." So the status of national park is disappearing and a new legal entity is being formed to be eventually in the guardianship and governors of the land.
Triceratops Censura
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Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Wed 03 Apr 2013, 09:04
3rd April 1860, the first Pony Express runs are made between Missouri and California
Subject: Re: On this day in history Round One Wed 03 Apr 2013, 09:25
The eastern terminus of the Pony Express was at St Joseph, Missouri. By coincidence, on April 3rd 1882, also in St Jo, the outlaw Jesse James was shot in the back and killed by Bob Ford;