| 1261/
The term 'scientist' was invented by a Victorian Vicar called
William Whewell. He was Master at Trinity College Cambridge,
and also held chairs in mineralogy and moral philosophy. He
introduced the word 'scientist' in the Quarterly Review for
March 1834. The word immediately caught on in the USA, but
took about another 60 years to gain general acceptance in
Britain. As well as the word 'scientist' he is also credited
with inventing numerous other science words such as, 'physicist',
'anode' and 'cathode'.
1262/ The ancient library
at Alexandria at the time of Alexander the Great (around 320BC)
was called 'the temple of the muses'. It contained about 400,000
books and it is from this that we get the modern word 'museum'.
1263/ The plague in Zurich
killed 3,700 of the cities 6,000 inhabitants in 1567.
1264/ The Black Death
(bubonic plague) killed one quarter of Europe's population
between 1346 and 1352, with death tolls ranging up to 70 per
cent in some cities.
1265/ The discover of
oxygen was Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) in 1774.
1266/ In 1905, over a
year after their first short flight, the Wright Brothers offered
their invention to the US War Department. They were turned
down.
1267/ The mass of the
Earth is roughly 6,700 million, million, million tons.
1268/ Copernicus' great
book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was
published in the year of his death, 1543. The book put foward
the then scandalous idea that the Sun is at the centre of
the Universe, not the Earth, and that the Earth along with
the other planets revolves around it. He is said to have been
handed a copy of his book as he lay on his death bed. In 1616
it was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by
the Catholic Church and wasn't removed until 1835.
1269/ The Index of
Forbidden Books ceased its publication in 1966 when Cardinal
Ottaviani, Head of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith, declared
that there would be no further editions of the Index. (The
last edition was in 1948.) More
1270/ The Flat Earth
Society has been around since 1547 and apparently is still
going strong. To join go here.
1271/ On a clear night
in the Northern Hemisphere the naked eye can discern some
5000 stars.
1272/ The fossil record
commences in pre-Cambrian times with organisms resembling
bacteria and blue-green algae in deposits 3 billion years
old.
1273/ The world's largest
open-pit copper mine can be found near Antofagasta in the
North of Chile.
1274/ The first newspaper
article on crack cocaine appeared in the Los Angeles Times
in November 1984.
1275/ By the mid 1990s, up to two thirds of clubbers in the
city of Amsterdam were using Ecstasy.
1276/ The Sumerians, who inhabited an area in what is now
Southern Iraq, from around 5000 to 2000 BC appear to have
been active Opium users. This is suggested by the fact that
they have an ideogram for it which has been translated as
"hul", meaning joy or rejoicing.
1277/ The total number
of human genes is estimated at 30,000 to 35,000 much lower
than previous estimates of 80,000 to 140,000 that had been
based on extrapolations from gene-rich areas as opposed to
a composite of gene-rich and gene-poor areas. This new figure
comes as a direct result of the human genome project. You
can read all about it here.
1278/ In 1969 Brent Berlin
and Paul Kay published their investigation of twenty different
languages, and how each language performed the coding of experience
into sound. They found experimentally that a basic set of
eleven colour categories were common to all the languages
studied - white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple,
pink, orange and grey. Interestingly, they also investigated
78 other languages via scientific literature, and found that
those that encoded fewer then 11 colour categories still seemed
to follow strict rules as to which categories they would encode.
So that 1/ All languages contain terms for black and white
2/ If a language contains three terms, then it contains a
term for red 3/ If a language contains three terms then it
contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both)
4/ If a language contains five terms then it contains terms
for both green and yellow 5/ If a language contains six terms,
then it contains a term for blue 6/ If a language contains
seven terms, then it contains a term for brown 7/ If a language
contains eight or more terms then it contains a term for purple,
pink, orange and grey. Paul Kays homepage can be found here
- Other information can be found here
- or here
- Plus take a colour survey here.
1279/ After the conversion
of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in AD 313, it was
made a punishable offence in the Roman Empire for a father
to kill his child in 318, and in 331 Constantine decreed that
those who raised exposed children could legally adopt them.
1280/ In the 1970s, Peter
Sturrock sent questionnaires to 2,611 members of the American
Astronomical Society. Replies were received from 79 percent
of the members (2062). Of these 62 respondents had either
personally observed a UFO or had detailed knowledge of a sighting.
Two respondents reported something like a searchlight playing
on a cloud when there were no clouds in the sky, 11 described
disklike objects, 3 objects that seemed to emit sparks, and
in 2 cases sightings were accompanied by problems with car
electrical systems.
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