The word “robot” was popularized in the 1920 play “R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)” by Czech writer Karel Capek. Capek himself said that he did not coin the word, but his brother, Josef Capek, did. The word “robot” is derived from the Czech word for “worker”.
As a child, Josef Stalin was plagued with numerous health issues. He was born with two adjoined toes on his left foot, and his face was permanently scarred by smallpox at the age of 7. At age 12, he injured his left arm in an accident involving a horse-drawn carriage, rendering it shorter and stiffer than its counterpart.
Josef Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, a Georgian. The Russian-language version of his birth name is Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. He began using the alias “Stalin” in his writing somewhere around 1910-1912.
When Stalin was in his 30s, he took the name Stalin (as Chefguy says above). Stalin is Russian for “man of steel.”
In “Ironman”, Black Sabbath described their protagonist
He was turned to steel
In a great magnetic field
When he traveled time
For the future of mankind.
Earth’s magnetic field extends from the Earth’s interior out into space, where it meets the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun. Unlike a bar magnet, Earth’s magnetic field changes over time because it is generated by a geodynamo (in Earth’s case, the motion of molten iron alloys in its outer core).
The total solar eclipse of this coming August 21, 2017 will touch 14 of the lower 48 states with its path of totality. The path of total darkness will begin on the Pacific coast, end on the Atlantic coast, and touch the following states in this order: OR ID MT-(barely!) WY NE KS IA-(barely!) MO IL KY TN GA NC SC. After the partial eclipse begins on the Oregon coast, the last of the partial eclipse on US soil will end on the South Carolina coast 4 hours and 5 minutes later. But totality will sweep across CONUS much faster, again beginning in OR and ending in SC, but this time in only 1:30. That means the shadow of the total eclipse will travel at about 2,000 MPH.
This will be the first total solar eclipse on American soil since 1991, the first on the mainland since 1979, and the first to sweep the entire country since 1918 (ref: http://www.eclipse2017.org/eclipse2017_main.htm).
The total solar eclipse of July 11, 1991 (“The Big One”) was an exceptionally long total eclipse, with a duration at greatest eclipse of 6 minutes, 53 seconds. It had an eclipse magnitude of 1.0800.
I saw that eclipse from Kailua Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii. It was a cloudy day, but there was a brief break in the clouds during Totality, including Third Contact.
Karl Guthe Jansky was an American physicist and radio engineer who in August 1931 first discovered radio waves emanating from the Milky Way. He is considered one of the founding figures of radio astronomy. The Very Large Array (VLA) is a radio astronomy observatory named in Jansky’s honor and located in central New Mexico. The VLA comprises twenty-seven 25-meter radio telescopes deployed on railroad tracks in a Y-shaped array. Each arm of the Y is 13 miles long. This Karl Jansky VLA was in one of the opening scenes in the movie, Contact (1997), starring Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, and Tom Skerritt. The VLA is where Jodie Foster’s character was when she heard the sounds of first contact with alien beings.
George Karl is a former professional basketball coach and former player in the National Basketball Association (NBA). He is one of only 9 coaches in NBA history to have won 1,000 NBA games, but despite that he has never won a championship.
The National Security Agency is based at Ft. Meade, Md., named after Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac and victor of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg.
The poet Walter Savage Landor was not a fan of the Hanoverians:
King George III, bedraggled, mad and confined to his Windsor Castle bedroom, appears briefly in Susanna Clarke’s fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, about the return of magic to Regency England.
In spite of his status as a son of a Baronet, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was a political radical and anti-monarchist. In a poem he describes George III as “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king” and George’s sons as “Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow/Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring”.
In a 1975 interview, Dallas Cowboys Quarterback Roger Staubach was being compared to New York Jets Quarterback Joe Namath, in comparing their off-field activities. Staubach was married, Christian, and very devoted to his wife and family, while Namath enjoyed entertaining many various women. In this interview, conducted by former 1970 Miss Texas and 1971 Miss America Phyllis George, Staubach famously (somewhat) proclaimed, “I enjoy sex just as much as Joe Namath, only I do it with one girl.”
On December 4, 1919, The Sex Disqualification Act 1919 became law in the UK. Women had previously been given a limited right to vote by the Representation of the People Act 1918, and had been able to stand for Parliament. However, many less high-profile restrictions on women participating in civil life remained. This Act abolished most of the existing common-law restrictions on women. They were now able to serve as magistrates or jurors and enter the professions. Marriage was no longer legally available as a bar to a woman’s ability to work.
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Rosie Ruiz supposedly ran the 1980 Boston Marathon in record-breaking time but was disqualified when she was found to have jumped onto the course about a half-mile before the finish. She had qualified for the Boston race by supposedly finishing the 1979 NYC Marathon but when suspicions arose regarding Ruiz’s Boston win, a photographer came forward to report meeting Ruiz on the subway during the New York Marathon and accompanying her from the subway to the race, resulting in Ruiz’s disqualification from this event as well.
Rosie the Riveter is a cultural icon of the United States, representing the American women who worked in factories and shipyards during World War II. Images of women workers were widespread in the media as government posters, and commercial advertising was heavily used by the government to encourage women to volunteer for wartime service in factories.
American women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers during World War II, as widespread male enlistment left gaping holes in the industrial labor force. Between 1940 and 1945, the female percentage of the U.S. workforce increased from 27 percent to nearly 37 percent, and by 1945 nearly one out of every four married women worked outside the home.