The Laxey Wheel, also known as the Lady Isabella, is a large waterwheel built in the village of Laxey in the Isle of Man. It has a 72-foot-6-inch (22.1 m) diameter and is 6 feet (1.83 m) wide. It revolves at approximately three revolutions per minute.
The Laxey Wheel is the largest working waterwheel in the world.
Stealers Wheel was originally a Scottish folk rock/rock band formed in Paisley, Renfrewshire, in 1972 by former school friends Joe Egan and Gerry Rafferty. They were considered to be the British version of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. The band broke up in 1975.
The Paisley pattern is a term in English for a design using the boteh or buta, a droplet-shaped vegetable motif of Persian origin. Such designs became very popular in the West in the 18th and 19th centuries, following imports of post-Mughal versions of the design from India, especially in the form of Kashmir shawls, and were then imitated locally.
The name paisley derives from the Scottish town of Paisley, a centre for textiles where paisley designs were produced.
The 9th highest mountain in the world, Nanga Parbat (literally, Naked Mountain) at 8,126 metres (26,660 ft) above sea level, is in the Kashmir region, a region that spans to India, Pakistan and China.
A span is the distance measured by a human hand, from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger. In ancient times, a span was considered to be half a cubit.
Ancient Greek texts show that the span was used as a fixed measure in ancient Greece since at least the archaic period. As early as the 8th century BC the word trispithamos (Greek: τρισπίθαμος), “three spans long”, occurs in Hesiod.
American standup comedian, actor and now accused rapist Bill Cosby, in a famous routine, portrayed a skeptical Noah being commanded by God to build an ark of very precise dimensions, given in cubits. Noah says, “Riiiiiight… what’s a cubit?”
“Noah Ward” is a joke name in science fiction for voting not to award a Hugo or Nebula. It’s likely Noah will win in a few categories this year.
NOAA, pronounced “Noah,” the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, traces its roots back to 1807 when the US’s first scientific agency, the Survey of the Coast, was established by Thomas Jefferson.
Although a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the NOAA has uniformed commissioned officers entitled to the protection of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, just like personnel of the Department of Defense.
The United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (PHSCC) is the federal uniformed service of the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) and is one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The six other uniformed services are the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and as Elendil’s Heir tells us, NOAA’s Commissioned Corps.
The seven hills of Rome are the Aventine Hill, the Caelian Hill, the Capitoline Hill, the Esquiline Hill, the Palatine Hill, the Quirinal Hill and the Viminal Hill.
In the post-Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novels, Capt. Ezri Dax has risen to command of the massive new starship USS Aventine.
ST-DS9 starred the only black captain of all the Star Trek series as the show’s protagonist.
The black swan is the state emblem of Western Australia. It appears on the state flag and on the coat of arms.
The black swan theory is a metaphor introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2001 book Fooled By Randomness that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. It refers to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. The rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the September 2001 attacks are examples of black swan events.
Black Beauty is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life. The novel became an immediate best-seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but long enough to see her only novel become a success. With fifty million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time.
The story is narrated in the first person as an autobiographical memoir told by the titular horse named Black Beauty, described as being “translated from the original Equine” by Sewell.
Black Beauty was also the name of the Green Hornet’s heavily weaponized car, which on the 1960’s TV series was a customized Chrysler Imperial Crown sedan. The Black Beauty was stored underneath Brit Reid’s garage. A set of switches on a secret control panel behind a tool wall would sequentially 1) lower the lights; 2) attach clamps to the axles of Reid’s personal car; 3) rotate the floor of the garage — hiding Reid’s car and bringing up the Black Beauty; and 4) unclamp the Black Beauty’s axles. The Black Beauty would then exit the garage through a hidden rear door, and enter the street from behind a billboard advertising the fictitious product Kissin’ Candy Mints — with the slogan “How sweet they are” — that was cleverly designed to separate down the middle and rejoin.
If you mean Benjamin Sisko was the only black Starfleet captain to be the lead character of a show, true. If you mean he was the only black captain, of course, not so.
In play:
The Black Watch is a famous Scottish infantry unit formed in 1725 after a Jacobite rebellion and since 2006 a part, after consolidation and reorganization of the British Army, of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.
The most famous painting in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is Rembrandt van Rijn’s Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, better known as The Night Watch. It is known for its size and its mastery of chiaroscuro (light and shadow), giving it the perception of motion.
Captain Benjamin Sisko, formerly first officer of the USS Saratoga and later commanding officer of Starfleet’s Deep Space Nine outpost, originally hailed from New Orleans, where his father ran a Creole restaurant.
