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July 19

John D. Whitney (July 19, 1850 – November 27, 1917) was an American Catholic priest who was the president of Georgetown University from 1898 to 1901. Born in Massachusetts, he joined the United States Navy at the age of sixteen. He became a Jesuit in 1872 and spent the next twenty-five years studying and teaching mathematics at Jesuit institutions in Canada, England, Ireland, and the United States. He became the vice president of Spring Hill College in Alabama before becoming the president of Georgetown. He oversaw the completion of Gaston Hall, the construction of the entrances to Healy Hall, and the establishment of Georgetown University Hospital and what would become the School of Dentistry. Afterwards, Whitney became the treasurer of Boston College and then engaged in pastoral work in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Baltimore, where he became the prefect of St. Ignatius Church. (This article is part of a featured topic: Presidents of Georgetown University.)

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April 19

Apollo 8 was the second manned mission of the Apollo space program. Commander Frank Borman, Command Module Pilot James Lovell and Lunar Module Pilot William Anders became the first humans to travel beyond Earth orbit and into an orbit around the Moon. It was also the first manned launch of the Saturn V rocket. NASA prepared for the mission in only four months. The hardware involved had only been used a few times—the Saturn V had only launched twice before, and the Apollo spacecraft had only just finished its first manned mission, Apollo 7. However the success of the mission paved the way for the successful completion of John F. Kennedy's goal of landing on the Moon before the end of the decade. After launching on December 21, 1968, the crew took three days to travel to the Moon, which they orbited for twenty hours. While in lunar orbit they made a Christmas Eve television broadcast that is thought to be one of the most watched of all time. (more...)

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March 19

John Dee was a noted British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer and consultant to Elizabeth I. He also devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. Dee straddled the worlds of science and magic. One of the most learned men of his time, he was lecturing to crowded halls at the University of Paris in his early twenties. He was an ardent promoter of mathematics, a respected astronomer and a leading expert in navigation, training many of those who would conduct England's voyages of discovery. At the same time, he immersed himself deeply in Christian angel-magic and Hermetic philosophy, and devoted the last third of his life almost exclusively to these pursuits. For Dee, as for many of his contemporaries, these activities were not contradictory, but aspects of a consistent world-view. (more...)

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February 19

In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a galactic ruler who supposedly, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. These events are known as "Incident II" or "The Wall of Fire," and the traumatic memories associated with them are known as the "R6 implant." Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard detailed the story in Operating Thetan level III in 1967, famously warning that R6 was "calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it." Much controversy between the Church of Scientology and its critics has focused on Xenu. The Church avoids making mention of Xenu in public statements and has gone to considerable effort to maintain the story's confidentiality, including legal action on both copyright and trade secrecy grounds. Critics claim that revealing the story is in the public interest, given the high prices charged for OT III. The Xenu story prompted the use of the volcano as a Scientology symbol. (more...)

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January 19

Sir Bernard Williams was an English moral philosopher, noted by The Times of London as the "most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time." Williams spent over 50 years seeking answers to one question: "What does it mean to live well?" This was a question few Western analytic philosophers had explored since the Greeks, preferring instead to focus on the issue of moral obligation. For Williams, moral obligation, insofar as the phrase had any meaning, had to be compatible with the pursuit of self-interest and the good life. As Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge for over a decade, and the Provost of King's College, Cambridge for almost as long, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to return the study of moral philosophy to its foundations: to history and culture, politics and psychology and, in particular, to the Greeks. He saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed no longer to know how to communicate with one another. (more...)

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December 19

Newark is a city located in Essex County in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is an industrial city ten miles (16 km) west of New York City. Its location on the Atlantic coast, at the mouth of the Passaic River has helped make its port facility, Port Newark, the major container shipping port for New York Harbor. It is the home of Newark Liberty International Airport (formerly Newark Airport), which was the first airport to serve the New York metropolitan area. The City of Newark is presently governed under the Faulkner Act (Mayor-Council) system of municipal government. (more...)

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November 19

Sir Alfred Hitchcock was a British film director whose films are closely associated with the suspense thriller genre. Hitchcock is one of the most well-known and popular directors of all time, known as the "Master of Suspense" due to the many successful motion pictures he directed involving murderers and the innocent people caught in their paths. He directed over fifty films over the course of his career, with several of them becoming well-known box office hits that have influenced a great number of filmmakers, producers, and actors. From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host and producer of a long-running television series entitled Alfred Hitchcock Presents. While his films had made Hitchcock's name synonymous with "suspense," the series made Hitchcock a celebrity himself. His voice, image, and mannerisms became instantly recognizable, and were often the subject of parody. He directed a few episodes of the series himself, and he upset a number of movie production companies when he insisted on using his television crew to produce his motion picture Psycho. (more...)

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October 19

The top graph depicts probability densities that the "true" percentage is in a particular region; the bottom shows the margin of error

The margin of error is an expression of the extent to which a poll's reported percentages would vary if the same poll were taken multiple times. The larger the margin of error, the less confidence one has that the poll's reported percentages are close to the "true" percentages, i.e. the percentages in the whole population. The margin of error can be calculated directly from the sample size (the number of poll respondents) and may be reported at different levels of confidence – the 99 percent level is more conservative, while the 95 percent level is more common. (more...)

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September 19

Cricket is a team sport. The game, sometimes referred to as the "gentleman's game", originated in its formal form in England, and is popular mainly in the countries of the Commonwealth. In the countries of South Asia, including India and Pakistan, cricket is by far the most popular participatory and spectator sport. It is also the national sport of Australia, and it is the major summer sport in New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The rich jargon of cricket can often leave those unfamiliar with the game confused; the rules are of similar complexity to those of its cousin baseball. Cricket fosters die-hard aficionados, for whom matches provide passionate entertainment. Occasionally, rival nations have lampooned each other over cricket matches, provoking diplomatic outrage. (more...)

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September 6

The Warsaw Uprising was an armed struggle during the Second World War by the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) to liberate Warsaw from German occupation and Nazi rule. It started on August 1, 1944 as a part of a nationwide uprising, Operation Tempest. The Polish troops resisted the German-led forces until October 2. An estimated 85% of the city was destroyed during the urban guerrilla war and after the end of hostilities. The Uprising started at a crucial point in the war as the Soviet army was approaching Warsaw. Although the Soviet army was within a few hundred metres of the city from September 16 onward, the link between the uprising and the advancing army was never made. This failure and the reasons behind it have been a matter of controversy ever since. (more...)

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August 19

A fractal is a geometric object with an irregular, broken or fractured shape, generated by a repeating pattern, typically a recursive or iterative process. This gives it many interesting features, most notably self-similarity and infinite detail regardless of magnification. Classical attempts to measure the size of a fractal's perimeter, area or volume fail, due to the lack of definite limit of detail. Fractal geometry has numerous applications in science, technology and computer-generated art. (more...)

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July 19

Jim Henson was an American filmmaker and television producer, one of the most important puppeteers in modern American television history. Creator of the Muppets, and the leading force behind their long creative run, Henson brought an engaging cast of characters, innovative ideas, and a sense of timing and humor to millions of people. He is also widely acknowledged for the ongoing vision of faith, friendship, love of magic, and unconditional love which influenced nearly all of his work. (more...)

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June 19

Plato is credited with the inception of academia

Academia is a general term for the whole of higher education and research. The word comes from the Greek referring to the greater body of knowledge, its development and transmission across generations. In the 17th century, English and French religious scholars popularized the term to describe certain types of institutions of higher learning. Some sociologists have divided, but not limited, academia into four basic historical types: ancient academia, early academia, academic societies and the modern university. There are at least two models of academia: a European model developed since ancient times, as well as an American model developed by Benjamin Franklin in the mid-1700s and Thomas Jefferson in the early 1800s. (more...)

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May 19

Buckinghamshire is an administrative county in south central England. It has an area of 727 sq. mi. (1883 km²) and a population of 590,000; its county town is Aylesbury. Buckinghamshire is divided into four districts: Aylesbury Vale, Chiltern, South Bucks and Wycombe. In the local government reform of 1974, Buckinghamshire lost Slough and Eton to Berkshire; these areas have been administered under the unitary authorities of Slough and Windsor and Maidenhead since 1998. It has fertile agricultural lands, with many landed estates, especially those of the de Rothschild family in the 19th century. (more...)

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April 19

Trench warfare is a form of war in which both opposing armies have static lines of fortifications dug into the ground, facing each other. Trench warfare arose when there was a revolution in firepower without similar advances in mobility and communications. Whilst periods of trench warfare occurred during the American Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, it reached a peak of brutality and bloodshed on the Western Front in the First World War. (more...)

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March 19

AC Hutton

The Hutton Inquiry was a British judicial inquiry chaired by Lord Hutton, appointed by the British government to investigate the death of a government weapons expert, Dr. David Kelly. The inquiry opened in August 2003 and reported on January 28, 2004. (more...)

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