Grover Cleveland, Democrat of New York, found a political ally in a young Theodore Roosevelt while Cleveland was governor and Roosevelt a reform-minded Republican in the state legislature. Roosevelt eventually followed Cleveland both as Governor of New York and as President of the United States.
Speaking about Alaska, Theodore Roosevelt said in a speech to the 57th Congress in 1902,
“No country has a more valuable possession – in mineral wealth, in fisheries, furs, forests, and also in land available for certain kinds of farming and stock growing. The forests of Alaska should be protected and as a secondary but still important matter, the game also….Laws should be enacted to protect the Alaskan salmon fisheries against the greed which would destroy them.”
At his persuasion, Congress passed a series of acts designed to regulate the harvesting of Alaskan wildlife, including the Alaska Game Act, which was strengthened by an act amending the Alaska Game Act in 1908. In 1909, President Roosevelt also first protected the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge.
Alaska has 663,000 square miles of area; were it an independent country, it would be the seventeenth largest in the world, just behind Libya and just ahead of Iran.
The Marble Arch in London’s Hyde Park is not the only one ever to exist. When Libya was a colony of Italy, Mussolini had a massive monument by that name built along the coastal highway between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. On the arch’s frontispiece was carved a Latin inscription taken from Horace’s Carmen Saeculare. It read: Alme Sol, possis nihil urbe Roma visere maius (which translates to: “Oh almighty Sun, you will never look upon a city greater than Rome”)
Gaddafi had it dynamited in 1973.
Prosper Mérimée is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet’s opera Carmen. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, and an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. From 1830 until 1860 he was the inspector of French historical monuments, and was responsible for the protection of many historic sites, including the medieval citadel of Carcassonne, and the restoration of the façade of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. The official database of French monuments, the Base Mérimée, bears his name.
The cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris (“Our Lady of Paris”) was built over a 100 year span beginning in 1160. 12 million people visit Notre-Dame yearly, which makes it the most visited monument in Paris.
The bell in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris’ south tower weighs 13 tons, and it is known as the Emmanuel Bell. In Notre Dame, Indiana, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart’s bell tower is 230 feet high, making it the tallest University chapel in America.
Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I.
The term “Exchequer” comes from the chequered cloth that the Barons of the Exchequer used to keep track of taxes paid by the sheriffs, by moving counters around the cloth - sort of a flat abacus.
A feudal baron is a vassal holding a heritable fief called a barony, comprising a specific portion of land. Following the end of European feudalism, feudal baronies have largely been superseded by baronies held as a rank of nobility, without any attachment to a fief.
In Scotland, Ireland, England, and Norway, a barony is an administrative division of a county.
In his sf novel The Collapsing Empire, John Scalzi has the ruler of a distant-future interstellar realm jokingly consider naming her top aide a baroness, the female equivalent of a baron. The aide is horrified, as her parents are republicans and she says would not be able to return home for holidays.
In the movie Interstellar (2014), the method of space travel was based on physicist Kip Thorne’s works, which were also the basis for the method of space travel in Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact”, and the resulting film adaptation, Contact (1997). Matthew McConaughey starred in both films.
Thorne laid down two guidelines to strictly follow: nothing would violate established physical laws, and that all the wild speculations would spring from science and not from the creative mind of a screenwriter. Christopher Nolan accepted these terms as long as they did not get in the way of the making of the movie. That did not prevent clashes, though; at one point Thorne spent two weeks talking Nolan out of an idea about travelling faster than light.
In the original TV series Star Trek, the transporter was the method by which the Enterprise crew members would travel to a planet’s surface and then back to the ship. The transporter certainly violated established physical laws, as it converted a person into energy (dematerialization), beamed the energy to the target, and then reconverted it back into matter (rematerialization).
According to syfy.com, Captain Kirk never uttered the line “Beam me up, Scotty”. He said “Scotty, beam us up”, and “Beam me up”, and “Beam us up, Scotty”, but never “Beam me up, Scotty.” (I’m not sure that I believe that!)
In December, 2018 a human-made object reached interstellar space for the second time in history. Voyager II exited the Heilosphere (the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun) about that time. It’s sister probe Voyager I had entered interstellar space in 2012. Amazingly, Voyager II is still in contact with NASA and sending data back about this region of space. It takes the messages about 16.5 hours at the speed of light to reach Earth.
ETA: A fictional Voyager probe played a major role in Star Trek; The Motion Picture in 1979.
The Voyager 6 probe featured in Star Trek: The Motion Picture is indeed fictional; NASA only launched two Voyager probes. The space agency lent the movie production crew a Voyager mockup for use in preparing a life-size model for one of the movie’s climactic scenes.
The 11-foot-long studio model of the USS Enterprise used in ST:TOS is on display (or would be, if not for the shutdown) at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
A scrap of fabric from the 1903 Wright Brothers Flyer which flew at Kitty Hawk is also on display at the National Air and Space Museum, in the same gallery as the aircraft itself. The scrap of fabric went to the Moon and back with the Apollo 11 crew.
While the Wright Brothers first flights were at Kill Devil’s Hill, there was no town at that location in 1903. Kill Devils Hill did not receive its municipal charter until 1953.After their initial flights, the Wrights had to hike about 4 miles to Kitty Hawk to send the telegram announcing their success.
“Kitty Hawk” was the nickname of the command module of the Apollo 14 mission. The lunar module’s nickname was “Antares.”
Antares is one of the brightest stars in the constellation Scorpio. It is actually a binary, one of which is a red giant.
Scorpio is the southernmost constellation in the Xodiac, best seen from latitudes 40 degrees North and farther south, which means it cannot be seen in its entirety in most of Canada.