Mevion Medical Systems’ very first S250 superconducting synchrocyclotron proton linear accelerator to treat cancer is currently undergoing clinical commissioning in St. Louis, at Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital. The President and CEO of Mevion Medical Systems is Joe Jachinowski, who was a co-founder of IMPAC Medical Systems.
Joe Hill, the union activist framed on a murder charge, was born Joe Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, and later became better known as Joseph Hillström. popular songwriter and cartoonist for the radical union. His most famous songs include “The Preacher and the Slave,” where he created the phrase “pie in the sky.”
Gustavus Adolphus led Sweden during her glory years during the Thirty Years War. However, Gustavus was also responsible for many domestic reforms which pushed Sweden from being just another Baltic state to being the most dominant power in the Baltic region. Gustavus Adolphus has been described by E N Williams as “the greatest Swedish King and one of the greatest statesman in European History”.
Sweden has the highest number of McDonald’s fast food joints per capita in Europe (although that is only about half of what the US has).
Stieg Larssen’s The Millennium series were published in Sweden as Män som hatar kvinnor, literally, Men Who Hate Women; Flickan som lekte med elden, literally, The Girl Who Played with Fire; and Luftslottet som sprängdes, literally, The Air Castle that was Blown Up.
In Sweden, all employers are required to give free massages.
The Swedish Bikini Team was a group of American female models who appeared in an advertising campaign for Old Milwaukee beer. These commercials ran for several months in 1991 in the United States, playing with American stereotypes of Scandinavian women being blonde and having big breasts. The premise of the commercials was that a group of bored or thirsty men were “saved” by the Swedish Bikini Team. Other commercials would focus on a group of men male bonding on a hunting trip and saying “Guys, it does not get any better than this”, to which a narrator would say the man was wrong and an Old Milwaukee truck would drive miles off road towards them claiming “it improved”, “…and when the Swedish Bikini Team showed up, it got somewhat better.”
The bikini has been around since antiquity, where female Roman athletes wore bikini-like garments during athletic events. The modern bikini was designed by French engineer Louis Réard who, in 1946, introduced the garment and named it after Bikini Atoll, where atomic bomb testing was being conducted.
Kure Atoll, beyond Midway in the Hawaiian islands, is the world’s northernmost atoll, at 28.5 degrees. Atolls cannot form outside warm tropical waters that support coral. Bermuda makes a claim that it the most northerly, but it is disputed whether it formed as a true atoll.
The word atoll comes from the northern Indian Ocean, from the Maldives, just southwest of India and Sri Lanka. It is a word whose meaning is an administrative subdivision. Its first usage in English was as the word atollon used by Charles Darwin in his 1625 book, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, when he defined it to be a “circular group of coral islets” and synonymous with “lagoon-island.”
The Battle of Tarawa was a battle in the Pacific Theater of World War II that was fought from November 20 to November 23, 1943. It took place at the Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands. Nearly 6,400 Japanese and Americans died in the fighting, mostly on and around the small island of Betio, in the extreme southwest of Tarawa Atoll.
The Battle of Tarawa was the first American offensive in the critical central Pacific region. It was also the first time in the war that the United States faced serious Japanese opposition to an amphibious landing.
Stephen King’s son uses “Joe Hill” as his pen name: Joe Hill (writer) - Wikipedia
In play:
Two U.S. Navy warships have been named USS Tarawa, after the famous World War II battle. The second was decommissioned in March 2009.
In January 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States.
Barack Obama worked at Baskin-Robbins as a teenager and now dislikes ice cream.
The buoyancy of an iceberg in the ocean is not a constant, because icebergs are composed of frozen fresh water, and the buoyancy at sea would depend on the salinity of the water at that particular location.
The largest Northern Hemisphere iceberg on record was encountered near Baffin Island in 1882. It was 13 kilometres long, six kilometres wide and had a freeboard (height above water) of about 20 metres. The mass of that iceberg was in excess of nine billion tonnes - enough water for everyone in the world to drink one litre a day for over four years.
Explorer William Baffin was mortally wounded on Qeshm, an island off Persia, in 1622 during a battle against Portuguese forces who occupied the fort. That was seven years after his discovery of what came to be known as Baffin Island.
Some of the most important data collected by explorer William Baffin concerned magnetic variation in the Far North. His records of compass variations are permanently important in tracing the changes in the magnetic north pole.
Baffin Bay is a marginal sea of the North Atlantic Ocean. It is connected to the Atlantic via Davis Strait and the Labrador Sea. A narrower Nares Strait connects Baffin Bay with the Arctic Ocean. The bay area was inhabited from around 500 BC by the Dorset and then Thule and Inuit people. It was reached by Europeans in 1585 and described in detail in 1616 by William Baffin. The bay is not navigable most of the year because of the ice cover and high density of floating ice and icebergs in the open areas.
Thule was a far-northern location in classical European literature and cartography. Though often considered to be an island in antiquity, modern interpretations of what was meant by Thule often identify it as Norway. Other interpretations include Orkney, Shetland, and Scandinavia. In the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Thule was often identified as Greenland or Iceland.