Lions Clubs International (LCI) is an American secular, non-political service organization founded by Melvin Jones in 1917. As of April 2015, it had over 46,000 local clubs and more than 1.4 million members in over 200 countries around the world. Local Lions Club programs include sight conservation, hearing and speech conservation, diabetes awareness, youth outreach, international relations, environmental issues, and many other programs. The LIONS acronym also stands for Liberty, Intelligence, Our Nations’ Safety.
The last territory east of the Mississippi to be granted statehood in our nation was Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin State Cow Chip Throw Festival, held in Sauk City and Prairie du Sac, is the world’s largest celebration of bovine fecal matter.
Wow – the rare three-for-one opportunity.
A fecal sac is a mucous membrane, generally white or clear with a dark end, that surrounds the feces of some species of nestling birds. It allows parent birds to more easily remove fecal material from the nest. Even brood parasites such as brown-headed cowbirds, which do not care for their own offspring, have been documented swallowing the fecal sacs of nestlings of their host species
Oscar-winner Brad Bird will be writing and directing the sequel to his 2004 Pixar superhero hit The Incredibles.
In Larry Bird’s first season in the NBA with the Boston Celtics, the 1979-80 season, the Celtics were 61-21. This was 32 more wins than the previous season, 29-53. Unfortunately, they lost in the Eastern Conference Finals in five games to Philadelphia.
Eastern Michigan University (EMU) is a comprehensive, co-educational public university located in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The university was founded in 1849 as Michigan State Normal School. The university’s site is composed of an academic and athletic campus spread across 800 acres, with over 120 buildings. EMU has a total enrollment of more than 23,000 students.
EMU: A 10 foot tall emu was spotted walking the streets of New York in 1973, it had accidently escaped from a circus that specialized in large exotic birds. When police questioned the circus owners they responded saying “George was constipated, so we thought a run around the grounds may help him feel better” Police fined the circus 25 dollars, and 5 months later a bi-law was passed stating that all emus within New York City must be on a leash.
Emus are capable of distinguishing male from female human beings, and at certain times of the year, it can be adventurous for a human of a certain gender to get too close to an emu. Emus are native to the southern hemisphere, and those in captivity north of the equator still breed in January and February, relying on their evolved body clock rather than astronomical observation…
More than two-thirds of the earth’s land mass is in the northern hemisphere, leaving less than one-third in the southern hemisphere.
In the Imperial system, the unit of mass is the slug. A slug will weigh just over 32 lb at 1g.
The Joule (“jool” or “jewel”) is the SI unit of energy, defined to be a force of one newton applied over a distance of 1 meter. The unit is named after James Prescott Joule, an English physicist who lived during the 19th century. Joule was actually first a brewer who wanted to replace his brewery’s steam engines with electric motors.
One of the key mathematical achievements of Issac Newton was the development of infinitesimal calculus. The calculus was also the center point of an intellectual battle between him and another mathematician Gottfried Leibniz over who had first developed the method.
Newton published few accounts of the calculus in 1693 and the full portion in 1704, whereas Leibniz published his complete papers in 1684. Newton and his supporters alleged that Leibniz had some access to Newton’s unpublished works during his London visit. This raised some questions on whether or not Leibniz’s full calculus account was based on Newton’s concept. Most modern historians and scientists believe that Leibniz did not plagiarize Newton’s works. - See more at: http://www.brighthub.com/science/space/articles/49929.aspx#sthash.2vJiejVY.dpuf
The philosopher Pangloss is a character in Voltaire’s novel Candide. His naively optimistic creed that "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, is supposedly Voltaire’s parody of the beliefs of Leibniz.
Queen Caroline of England, the wife of King George II, is considered by royal historians as one of the most educated women ever in the British monarchy, a true scholar and not just of the royal variety (i.e. reasonably well read) but one whose correspondences and friendships included Voltaire, Leibniz, and Sir Isaac Newton (whose brilliance she revered even though she didn’t like him). Like French queens before her she assisted her husband in choosing his mistresses and got along very well with some of them, though on her deathbed she did ask him not to remarry but to content himself with mistresses. (She did not want her children to have to endure a petty stepmother or split their inheritances with legitimate half-siblings.)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invented the Leibniz Wheel, a stepped drum that is a cylinder with a set of teeth of incremental lengths which, when coupled to a counting wheel, can be used in the calculating engine of a class of mechanical calculators. Invented by Leibniz in 1673, it was used for three centuries until the advent of the electronic calculator in the mid-1970s.
Consensus is that Newton discovered calculus about 10 years before Leibniz’s essentially independent discovery.
However, Newton’s notation is relatively cumbersome, and Leibniz’s more felicitous notation has become the universal standard.
Nitpick - Queen of Great Britain: Caroline of Ansbach - Wikipedia
In play:
Sir Isaac Newton was a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He was a devout but unorthodox Christian and, unusually for a member of the Cambridge faculty of the day, refused to take holy orders in the Church of England. This was perhaps because he privately rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.
Sir Isaac Isaccs was the third Chief Justice of Australia, and then the first native-born Australian Governor General. He was also the only one of either with redundant names.
Sarah Justice may be the only American woman to attend university on a football scholarship. Her husband, Charlie Justice, was an avidly recruited football player after World War II, and both Duke and North Carolina University wanted him. He preferred to attend the university on his GI-Bill benefit in his home state, and chose the school that would agree to give his wife the scholarship, which was North Carolina…