Lithium was said to be a vital element of power systems aboard the starship USS Enterprise in early episodes of Star Trek, but it was changed to the fictional “dilithium” in later episodes, and has remained so ever since, to give the writers greater leeway in describing how it works: Lithium | Memory Alpha | Fandom
Lithium is the third lightest element, with an atomic number of three. It is in the same period as sodium (atomic number 11) which similarly reacts violently with water and is typically stored in oil.
Dmitri Mendeleev created the first periodic table of elements in 1869. The first publication of the table contained 28 elements.
The Elements is a song, written by musical humorist (and mathematician) Tom Lehrer in 1959, which he recorded and released on several albums. The song, which is set to the tune of The Major-General’s Song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, has lyrics which almost entirely consist of Lehrer naming every one of the elements which were known and named at that time – however, in order to make the meter work, he did not list them in the order in which they appear on the periodic table.
Meet the Elements is a song by They Might Be Giants from their song collection Here Comes Science. The song describes how the elements are like a box of paints that are mixed to create all the different items in the world.
The collection is a follow up to the other song collections Here Comes the ABCs and Here Comes the 123s.
In 1876, millionaire John B. Day founded a baseball club based in New York City. Known originally as the Gothams, the franchise entered the National League in 1883. Two years later, the name was changed to the New York Giants, and it remained as such until the team relocated to San Francisco after the 1957 season.
There was a minor trend of naming football teams in New York City the same as their baseball franchises. The New York Giants (NFL) are the only really successful team using that name, but there were also three New York Yankees teams (plus a New York Yanks) and two Brooklyn Dodgers.
Jerry Ross was a lyricist and composer in the 1950s. Ross and his writing partner, Richard Adler, won Tony Awards in two consecutive years (1955 and 1956), for their work on The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees.
Ross died suddenly in 1955, at the age of 29, from the lung disease bronchiectasis, just a few months after Damn Yankees had premiered on Broadway.
Hamilton (2016) holds the record as the most-nominated production in Tony Awards history, with 16. In second place are The Producers, the new Mel Brooks musical (2001), Billy Elliot, The Musical (2009), and Jagged Little Pill (2020) with 15 each. The Producers is the most-winning production, triumphing in 12 categories including Best Musical.
Actor and singer Christopher Jackson, who played George Washington in the original cast of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, came to admire the First President and has participated in several programs at Mount Vernon, Washington’s historic Virginia home.
Chuck Jackson’s hit recording of “Any Day Now” was the first high position for a young song-writer Burt Bacharach in 1962. From there, Bacharach’s career went up, but Jackson never had another hit, although he had 30 singles that charted.
1962 was the only complete calendar year of John F. Kennedy’s Presidency. The Massachusetts Democrat was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1961 and assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.
There is no contemporary evidence of the so-called « calendar riots » in Britain following the introduction of the grégorien calendar. The idea that there were riots appears to be a misunderstanding of a satirical cartoon by Hogarth, where a crumpled pamphlet entitled « Give us back our eleven days » is seen on the floor of a room.
William Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic, and editorial cartoonist. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called “modern moral subjects”, and he is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode . Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as “Hogarthian”.
Several of the scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 period drama, Barry Lyndon, were based on William Hogarth’s scabrously satirical illustrations. The movie won four Oscars at the 48th Academy Awards, including Best Original Score, Costume Design, Art Direction and Cinematography.
Stanley Kubrick also directed the 1971 dystopian film A Clockwork Orange. That movie also garnered four Academy Award nominations, but won no Oscars.
The book was written by Anthony Burgess. He was a keen language student, and the Nadsat spoken in the film and book is an odd mixture of Russian, armed forces jargon, criminal slang and Shakespearean drama.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess, received substantial criticism, and in some cases censorship, due to its explicit depictions of violence, including rape.
In the United States, the film initially received an “X” rating; Kubrick later removed 30 seconds of sexually explicit footage, which led to the film being re-rated “R.” In some countries, the film was banned for decades due to its content – it wasn’t released in Ireland until 2000, and it finally premiered in Singapore in 2011.
The Night Safari is the world’s first nocturnal zoo and is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Singapore. The concept of a nocturnal park in was first suggested in the 1980s by the former executive chairman of the Singapore Zoo, Dr Ong Swee Law. The Night Safari currently houses over 900 animals representing over 100 species, of which 41% are threatened species. The park has about 1.3 million visitors per year.
I had the privilege of visiting the Night Safari in 2002 during a vacation. It was quite memorable (try walking through a dark enclosure-the only lights are the moon and nearby buildings-filled with very large bats).
When DDT was introduced as a pesticide in 1940, it took only 30 years to kill every iconic brown pelican in Louisiana, and the bitd was declared extinct in the state. In 1970, DDT was banned, pelicans were re-introduced, ant there are now 12,000 breeding pairs of the once-endangered bird in the state.