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Apr 27, 2017
Celebrating Freedom Day and Enoch Sontonga
https://www.google.com/logos/doodles...4448256-2x.jpg
Today South Africans celebrate Freedom Day! The first post-apartheid elections were held on this date in 1994, and each year this important event is remembered with a public holiday.
Today's Doodle also honors choirmaster, poet, and composer Enoch Sontonga, who wrote the first version of Africa’s democratic national anthem, “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” [[“God Bless Africa”), in 1897. Over the years, the song developed and gained popularity, even making it to a London recording studio in 1923. It later merged with the country’s other anthem, “Die Stem” [[“The Call of South Africa”).
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Apr 27, 2017
King's Day 2017
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King’s Day [[formerly “Queen’s Day”) is the annual Dutch national holiday in honor of King Willem-Alexander, who turns 50 today. This day is celebrated all over the Netherlands, but Amsterdam is the centerpiece of the festivities, with over 750,000 people traveling here to partake in the fun. The day starts bright and early and calls for partiers to put on their best orange outfits [[the national color) and take to the streets in the morning.
On this day, street-selling regulations are lifted, so the entire city becomes an enormous open air flea market for shopping second-hand treasures. Kids sell their toys, artists sell their handicrafts, homemakers sell delicious baked goods...and it’s all found at discounted “friends and family” style rates. This element of the cultural tradition poignantly illustrates the entrepreneurial and community-driven spirit of the country.
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Apr 28, 2017
Marie Harel’s 256th Birthday
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https://www.google.com/doodles/marie...256th-birthday [[interactive)
If not for Marie Harel, born April 28, 1761, brie might have no gooey counterpart. Harel, who’s credited with creating the first camembert in 1791, is said to have encountered a cheese whisperer at the Normandy manor where she worked as a dairymaid. According to legend, a priest [[purportedly from the region of Brie) took shelter at Beaumoncel near Vimoutiers during the French Revolution, and he shared his secret for making the now-famous soft-centered cheese. Harel added her own signature, packaging the cheese in its iconic wooden boxes.
Like brie, camembert is made from raw cow’s milk, but without cream. The cheese is yellow in color, with an earthy aroma, creamy taste, and an edible white rind. Today, only camembert made from unpasteurized milk receives the designation Camembert de Normandie. The village of Vimoutiers, home of the Camembert Museum, boasts a statue of a cow — as well as one of Harel, who made such a delicious contribution to French cheese culture.
Our Doodle celebrates Harel’s 256th birthday with a slideshow that illustrates how camembert is made, step by step. It's drawn in a charming, nostalgic style reminiscent of early 20th-century French poster artists, such as Hervé Morvan and Raymond Savignac.
Bon appetit!
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Oct 27, 2020
Dr. Stamen Grigorov’s 142nd Birthday
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Today’s Doodle celebrates the 142nd birthday of Bulgarian physician and microbiologist Dr. Stamen Grigorov, the first scientist to discover the bacterium essential to the fermentation of yogurt. Grigorov also contributed to the development of the world’s first tuberculosis vaccine.
Stamen Grigorov was born on this day in 1878 in the village of Studen Izvor, located in the Trun region of western Bulgaria. Passionate about science from a young age, he went on to earn a doctorate from the Medical University of Geneva, Switzerland. Following his wedding in 1904, Grigorov returned to the university to work as a research assistant.
As a reminder of home, Grigorov’s wife gifted him with some Bulgarian culinary staples, including yogurt. Intrigued by yogurt’s reputed health benefits, Grigorov decided to inspect it under a microscope. Following thousands of experiments, in 1905 he finally found what he was looking for: the rod-shaped microorganism that causes yogurt’s fermentation. The bacterium was later renamed Lactobacillus bulgaricus in honor of Grigorov’s home country.
Later that year, Grigorov took a position as chief physician at a local hospital in his hometown of Trun. In 1906, he released a groundbreaking paper demonstrating the first use of penicillin fungi against tuberculosis. He continued this research and worked as a doctor throughout the rest of his life, saving thousands of lives along the way.
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Jun 26, 2017
Juana Manso’s 198th Birthday
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Born on this date in 1819 in Buenos Aires, Juana Paula Manso was a feminist long before the word took on its modern-day meaning. Manso wore many hats, including journalist, novelist, translator, activist, and educator.
Raised in an era when much of society felt that a woman’s place was in the home, and a time when few but the wealthy sent their children to school, Manso defied the cultural conventions of the day. As a young woman, she set up a school in Montevideo [[Uruguay), sowing the seeds of her impactful career. Over the ensuing years she zigzagged between Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, with stints in the U.S. and Cuba.
Steadfast in her convictions, Manso wrote articles about women’s emancipation, as well as a compendium of Argentine history that was used in the country’s schools. She also wrote the historical novels La familia del Comendador and Misterios del Plata, which spoke out against slavery and racism. Manso was an early advocate of co-education and found a like-minded collaborator in fellow intellectual Domingo F. Sarmiento, who made her the head of an experimental school for boys and girls in Buenos Aires in 1858.
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Sep 15, 2012
Guatemala Independence Day 2012
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_A...7dYdOEAgF=s660
When visiting Guatemala, it can almost seem like from any point you will have the most spectacular view of one of the country's many volcanoes. This is certainly true of the old capital, Antigua, a city rich in historical architecture and the aforementioned breathtaking vistas.
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Sep 21, 2012
Edgar Valter's 84th Birthday
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Edgar Valter was an Estonian graphic artist, caricaturist, writer and illustrator of children's books, with over 250 books to his name, through 55 years of activity [[1950–2005). His most famous work is Pokuraamat [[The Poku Book).
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May 5, 2009
250th Anniversary of Kew Gardens
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/1i...YdB_7tcKw=s660
Kew Gardens or the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames in the United Kingdom.
Kew’s historic landscapes and buildings are a collection of gardens and parks and glasshouses.
Kew has the world's largest collection of plant specimens, and is one of the most important centres of research in botany.
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May 23, 2002
Dilbert Google Doodle 2002 - 4
https://www.google.com/logos/2002/dilbertiv.gif
Dilbert is an American comic strip written and illustrated by Scott Adams, first published on April 16, 1989. The strip is known for its satirical office humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office featuring engineer Dilbert as the title character.
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August 6, 2002
Andy Warhol's 74th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/F9...i1-Y9ozeB=s660
Andy Warhol was an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans [[1962) and Marilyn Diptych [[1962), the experimental films Empire [[1964) and Chelsea Girls [[1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable [[1966–67).
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November 8, 2010
Discovery of X-rays
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The discovery of x-rays is a fascinating story. It’s a moment that had a sudden and profound impact, but it took place quietly, in secret and by accident, in the laboratory of one inquisitive scientist. It’s a story about a naturally curious person who was paying attention to the right things at the right time. And like any good story about curiosity, it begins with an experiment.
On November 8, 1895, physicist Wilhelm Röntgen was testing the effects of sending electrical currents through glass vacuum-filled bulbs called cathode ray tubes. During one of his tests, Röntgen noticed that a screen on the other side of his lab began to glow whenever he sent electricity through the tube, even when the tube was fully covered with an opaque piece of cardboard.
Röntgen’s theory was that the tube was emitting an unknown kind of ray. He tried blocking the ray with different materials, but it seemed to pass through solid matter untouched. Then, by accident, he moved his hand through its path, and the shadows of his own bones were projected onto the screen.
For seven weeks, he worked in secret. He x-rayed his wife’s hand, wearing her wedding ring. When his wife saw the first-ever radiographic image, she said, “I have seen my death!”
In December of 1895, he published his findings. Röntgen gave his discovery the temporary name “X-ray,” for the mathematical term for an unknown quantity [[“x”). Within weeks, the first clinical x-rays were taking place all over the world. Röntgen never patented his discovery, believing it should be freely available. In 1901, Röntgen received the first Nobel Prize in Physics.
The x-ray gave us a new way of observing the world and ourselves. We could see right down to our bones, and even now, more than a century later, those eerie black and white images are still strange and powerful.
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January 11, 2012
Nicolas Steno's 374th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Qx...vQTJE0NKH=s660
Known as the father of stratigraphy and geology, Nicholas Steno worked to understand history by what he could find in the ground. Rather than simply write books about his findings, Steno opted to do his own hands-on research. As an innovative thinker, he disagreed with his contemporaries in thinking that shark-tooth-shaped objects found imbedded in rocks "fell from the sky." Instead, Steno argued that these formations were fossils. His dedication to analysis, critical thinking, and creative thinking make him a great subject for a Google doodle!
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July 8, 2013
Roswell's 66th Anniversary
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http://www.google.com/doodles/roswells-66th-anniversary [interactive]
The doodle marking the 66th Anniversary of the Roswell Incident tells the story of an alien, who, despite having mastered interstellar space travel, appears less than adept at making a smooth landing on Earth. The team was inspired by classic point-and-click adventure games, and wanted to invite users to help an alien repair its spacecraft by exploring a 1940's New Mexican landscape, interacting with farm animals, and solving puzzles. When designing the game, we tried to think of things from an alien's point of view... chatting with a cow or chicken would be just as novel as meeting human beings for the first time; horseshoes and sacks of feed might be considered fascinating artifacts.
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April 10, 2019
First Image of a Black Hole
https://www.google.com/logos/doodles...0528.2-2xa.gif
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole.
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May 3, 2018
Celebrating Georges Méličs
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http://www.google.com/doodles/celebr...georges-melies [animated]
Marie-Georges-Jean Méličs was a French illusionist, actor, and film director who led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méličs was well known for the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. He was also one of the first filmmakers to use storyboards.
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October 15, 2012
107th Anniversary of Little Nemo in Slumberland
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https://www.google.com/logos/2012/nemo/nemo12.html [interactive]
A true pioneer and master draftsman, Winsor McCay is an artist and visionary. As a storyteller, his imagination reaches beyond the confines of reality and even the technology of his time.
Among his most famous works is his weekly comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland." This series follows the journeys of Nemo through a fantastic dreamworld. Nightly, he finds himself thrown into a topsy turvy, overgrown, and colorful mess that often leaves him tumbling out of bed. McCay's mastery of perspective, bold use of color, and sheer creativeness yield a series that is visually stunning and immersive. Though not popular in its time, "Little Nemo in Slumberland" became celebrated in the mid 20th century. Since its "rediscovery," the comic has inspired artists, feature animated films, and operas. Original pages have also drawn attention at the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
If drawing painfully intricate comic strips every week isn't enough, McCay is also a pioneer in animation. His short film, "Gertie the Dinosaur" is regarded to have the first character designed for animation with a unique personality. His groundbreaking achievements in animation, art, and storytelling make McCay a perfect candidate for a doodle.
Paying tribute to such a creative giant and body of work, however, is intimidating for any artist. "Little Nemo in Slumberland" is an undertaking in itself, but the doodlers and I wanted to approach this doodle as McCay might have. What if McCay composed a Nemo comic for the internet? What if he had Google engineers to back his creativity? We may never know how far he would have pushed the resources and technology available today, but his work will continue to inspire generations of dreamers.
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Oct 16, 2012
Hisashige Tanaka's 213th Birthday
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Hisashige Tanaka was a great inventor, born in what is today called Fukuoka Prefecture in Japan on October 16th, 1799. Tanaka’s prolific career began in his youth, when he famously engineered a set of handmade karakuri dolls; small, mechanized figurines capable of performing simple tasks, such as shooting a bow and arrow, receiving an empty teacup and returning with a filled one, and writing calligraphy with a miniature brush and inkstone. I was immediately taken by the elegance of the karakuri, and set about developing a sketch in which the calligraphy writing doll completes the Google logo by painting an ‘o’ upon his canvas.
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Nov 1, 2012
L.S. Lowry's 125th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Re...osNce02mQ=s660
Laurence Stephen Lowry was an English artist. His drawings and paintings depict Pendlebury, Lancashire, where he lived and worked for more than 40 years, Salford and its vicinity.
Lowry is famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial districts of North West England in the mid-20th century. He developed a distinctive style of painting and is best known for his urban landscapes peopled with human figures, often referred to as "matchstick men". He painted mysterious unpopulated landscapes, brooding portraits and the unpublished "marionette" works, which were only found after his death.
His use of stylised figures, which cast no shadows, and lack of weather effects in many of his landscapes led critics to label him a naďve "Sunday painter".
Lowry holds the record for rejecting British honours [five], including a knighthood [1968].
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Nov 3, 2012
Samuil Marshak's 125th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Yp...x3O28bvVj=s660
Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak was a Russian and Soviet writer of Jewish origin, translator and poet who wrote for both children and adults. He translated the sonnets and some other of the works of William Shakespeare, English poetry [including poems for children], and poetry from other languages. Maxim Gorky proclaimed Marshak to be "the founder of Russia's [Soviet] children's literature."
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Jan 2, 2013
Barış Manço's 70th Birthday
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Mehmet Barış Manço, better known by his stage name Barış Manço, was a Turkish rock musician, singer, songwriter, composer, actor, television producer and show host.[3] Beginning his musical career while attending Galatasaray High School, he was a pioneer of rock music in Turkey and one of the founders of the Anatolian rock genre. Manço composed around 200 songs and is among the best-selling and most awarded Turkish artists to date. Many of his songs were translated into a variety of languages including English, French, Japanese, Greek, Italian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Persian, Hebrew, Urdu, Arabic, and German, among others. Through his TV program, 7'den 77'ye ["From 7 to 77"], Manço traveled the world and visited many countries on the globe. He remains one of the most popular public figures of Turkey.
Barış Manço was one of the most influential Turkish musicians. In his early career he and his bands contributed to the Turkish rock movement by combining traditional Turkish music with rock influences, which is still one of the main trends of Turkish popular music.
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Jan 17, 2013
Cecilia May Gibbs' 136th Birthday
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Cecilia May Gibbs was an Australian children's author, illustrator, and cartoonist. She is best known for her gumnut babies [also known as "bush babies" or "bush fairies"], and the book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie.Gibbs bequeathed the copyright from the designs of her bush characters and her stories to Northcott Disability Services [formerly The NSW Society for Crippled Children] and Cerebral Palsy Alliance [formerly The Spastic Centre of NSW]. The residue of her estate was left to the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund.
In 1985 a postage stamp honouring Gibbs, or her best known creations, was issued by Australia Post as part of a set of five commemorating children's books.
In 1988 a street in the Canberra suburb of Richardson was named May Gibbs Close in her honour.
On 3 December 2016, the State Library of New South Wales opened an exhibition of Gibbs’ artwork to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Gumnut Babies. In January 2018 a Sydney Ferries' Emerald-class ferry was named in honour of the author.
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Jan 21, 2013
Emma Gad's 161th Birthday
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Emma Gad , born Emma Halkier, was a Danish writer and socialite who wrote plays and books that were often satirical. Although she was a prolific writer, many of her works fell into obscurity after her death. One work that remained popular was Takt og Tone, a book of etiquette she wrote in old age.
She received a gold Medal of Merit in 1905. Today her plays are preserved in Denmark's Royal Library.
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Jan 26, 2013
Australia Day 2013
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Australia Day is the official national day of Australia. Observed annually on 26 January, it marks the 1788 landing of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove and raising of the Union Flag by Arthur Phillip following days of exploration of Port Jackson in New South Wales. In present-day Australia, celebrations aim to reflect the diverse society and landscape of the nation and are marked by community and family events, reflections on Australian history, official community awards and citizenship ceremonies welcoming new members of the Australian community.
Some Australians regard Australia Day as a symbol of the adverse impacts of British settlement on Australia's Indigenous peoples.
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Feb 3, 2013
Polde Bibič's 80th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Lp...hmRVlGJqP=s660Polde Bibič was a Slovenian stage and film actor, a writer, and an academic professor, best known for his role in the film Flowers in Autumn and his work in theater, Bibič was a recipient of several top awards in the field of arts in Slovenia.
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Feb 5, 2013
64th anniversary of Alberto Larraguibel's record setting Puissance jump
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Colonel Alberto Larraguibel Morales was a Chilean Army officer born in Angol, Chile. He remains as the record holder for highest jump, one of the longest-running unbroken sport records in history – 72 years as of 2021.
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Feb 8, 2013
Jagjit Singh's 72nd Birthday
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Jagjit Singh, born Jagmohan Singh Dhiman , popularly known as "The Ghazal King" or "King of Ghazals", was an Indian composer, singer and musician. He composed and sang in numerous languages and is credited for the revival and popularity of ghazal, an Indian classical art form, by choosing poetry that was relevant to the masses and composing them in a way that laid more emphasis on the meaning of words and melody evoked by them.
Singh is considered to be the most successful ghazal singer and composer of all time in terms of critical acclaim and commercial success. With a career spanning five decades and many albums, the range and breadth of his work has been regarded as genre-defining.
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Feb 9, 2013
Barranquilla Carnival
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Ow...nameBW2vg=s660
The Carnival of Barranquilla is one of Colombia's most important folkloric celebrations, and one of the biggest carnivals in the world. The carnival has traditions that date back to the 19th century. Four days before Holy Week, Barranquilla decks itself out to receive national and foreign tourists and joins together with the city's inhabitants to enjoy four days of intense festivities.
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Feb 14, 2013
Valentine's Day and George Ferris' 154th Birthday
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http://www.google.com/doodles/valent...154th-birthday [interactive]
Romance and amusement parks often go hand in hand. In many places a carnival, fair or circus is a popular destination for a thrilling and action-packed date. Coincidentally, George W.G. Ferris Jr., the creator of the Ferris Wheel was born on Valentine’s Day in 1859. This year seemed like a golden opportunity to combine our celebration of love with the birthday of the engineer whose mechanical invention has filled so many hearts with wonder.
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Mar 7, 2013
Volodymyr Dakhno's 81st Birthday
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Vladymyr Dakhno was a Ukrainian animator, animation film director and scriptwriter. He was a laureate of the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine , and a People's Artist of Ukraine. Dakhno was best known for the animation series Cossacks. He worked at Kievnauchfilm, which has since been renamed Ukranimafilm.
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Mar 9, 2013
Luis Barragan's 111th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/t3...1vY8CN0Rg=s660
Luis Ramiro Barragán Morfín was a Mexican architect and engineer. His work has influenced contemporary architects visually and conceptually. Barragán's buildings are frequently visited by international students and professors of architecture. He studied as an engineer in his home town, while undertaking the entirety of additional coursework to obtain the title of architect.
Barragán won the Pritzker Prize, the highest award in architecture, in 1980, and his personal home, the Luis Barragán House and Studio, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004.
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Mar 12, 2013
André Le Nôtre's 400th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/y_...qzNBiNFYL=s660
André Le Nôtre, originally rendered as André Le Nostre, was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France. He was the landscape architect who designed the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, and his work represents the height of the French formal garden style, or jardin ŕ la française
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October 18, 2012
161st Anniversary of Moby Dick's First Publishing
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/IC...sNm0Bu1jQ=s660
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a "Great American Novel" was established only in the 20th century, after the centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written". Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.
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Oct 21, 2012
Jonas Maciulis-Maironis' 150th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/I3...sBKkZ2LBc=s660
Maironis is one of the most famous Lithuanian poets and was also a Catholic priest and educator.
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Oct 22, 2012
Abu Simbel
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Qx...q2bgrzHXf=s660
Abu Simbel is a village in the Egyptian part of Nubia, about 240 km [150 mi] southwest of Aswan and near the border with Sudan. As of 2012, it has about 2600 inhabitants. It is best known as the site of the Abu Simbel temples, which were built by King Ramses II.
The name Abu Simbel is European, a cacography of the Arabic, Abu Sunbul, due in part to assimilation. Abu Sunbul is itself a derivative of the ancient place name Ipsambul. In the New Kingdom period, the region in which the temple was built may have been called Meha, but this is not certain. About 20 km southwest of Abu Simbel was the small village of Ibshek, which was somewhat north of the Second Cataract of the Nile, in present-day Sudan [Wadi Halfa Salient] flooded by Lake Nubia, near the border with Egypt.
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Nov 11, 2012
Roberto Matta's 101st Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/0x...mGlCRxNiw=s660
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren, better known as Roberto Matta, was one of Chile's best-known painters and a seminal figure in 20th century abstract expressionist and surrealist art.
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Nov 13, 2012
Anniversary of the 1st use of the Canadarm in space
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/yC...XMQ5Cm1PM=s660Canadarm or Canadarm1 [officially Shuttle Remote Manipulator System or SRMS] is a series of robotic arms that were used on the Space Shuttle orbiters to deploy, maneuver, and capture payloads. After the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, the Canadarm was always paired with the Orbiter Boom Sensor System [OBSS], which was used to inspect the exterior of the Shuttle for damage to the thermal protection system.
The Canadarm's 90th and final Shuttle mission was in July 2011 on STS-135, delivering the Raffaello MPLM to the ISS and back. It is on display with Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Discovery's Canadarm is displayed next to it in the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center. Endeavour left its OBSS at the International Space Station as part of its final mission, while its Canadarm was originally going to be displayed in the headquarters of the Canadian Space Agency [CSA].
However, Endeavour's Canadarm is now on permanent display at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa. The last of the Canadarms to fly in space, the SRMS flown aboard Atlantis on STS-135 in July 2011, was shipped to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for engineering study and possible reuse on a future mission.
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Dec 28, 2012
Leonardo Torres Quevedo's 160th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Y-...AtNZkr7pw=s660
Leonardo Torres y Quevedo was a Spanish civil engineer and mathematician of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With his Telekine, Torres-Quevedo created wireless remote-control operation principles. He was also a famous speaker of Esperanto.
Torres's experimentation in the area of cableways and cable cars began very early during his residence in the town of his birth, Molledo. There, in 1887, he constructed the first cableway to span a depression of some 40 metres. The cableway was some 200 metres across and was pulled by a pair of cows, with one log seat. This experiment was the basis for the request for his first patent, which he sought in the same year: an aerial cable car with multiple cables, with which it obtained a level of safety suitable for the transport of people, not only cargo. Later, he constructed the cableway of the Río León, of greater speed and already with a motor, but which continued to be used solely for the transport of materials, not of people.
In 1907, Torres constructed the first cableway suitable for the public transportation of people, in the mount Ulía in San Sebastián. The problem of safety was solved by means of an ingenious system of multiple support cables. The resulting design was very strong and perfectly resisted the rupture of one of the support cables. The execution of the project was the responsibility of the Society of Engineering Studies and Works of Bilbao, which successfully constructed other cableways in Chamonix, Rio de Janeiro, and elsewhere.
In 1907, Torres constructed the first cableway suitable for the public transportation of people, in the mount Ulía in San Sebastián. The problem of safety was solved by means of an ingenious system of multiple support cables. The resulting design was very strong and perfectly resisted the rupture of one of the support cables. The execution of the project was the responsibility of the Society of Engineering Studies and Works of Bilbao, which successfully constructed other cableways in Chamonix, Rio de Janeiro, and elsewhere.
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Jan 7, 2013
Nanakusa Gayu [7 Herb Porridge]
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/5Q...4l-h2Eusw=s660
The Festival of Seven Herbs or Nanakusa no sekku ; one of the Gosekku.
The seventh of the first month has been an important Japanese festival since ancient times. Jingchu Suishiji, written in the Six Dynasties China, recorded the Southern Chinese custom of eating a hot soup that contains seven vegetables to bring longevity and health and ward off evil on the 7th day of the first month of the Chinese calendar. Since there is little green at that time of the year, the young green herbs bring color to the table and eating them suits the spirit of the New Year. The custom was present in Taiwan until the mid-Qing Dynasty, and is still present in parts of rural Guangdong province.
There is considerable variation in the precise ingredients, with common local herbs often being substituted.
On the morning of January 7, or the night before, people place the nanakusa, rice scoop, and/or wooden pestle on the cutting board and, facing the good-luck direction, chant "Before the birds of the continent [China] fly to Japan, let's get nanakusa" while cutting the herbs into pieces. The chant may vary from place to place.
The seven flowers of autumn are bush clover [hagi], miscanthus [obana, Miscanthus sinensis], kudzu, large pink [nadeshiko, Dianthus superbus], yellow flowered valerian [ominaeshi, Patrinia scabiosifolia], boneset [fujibakama, Eupatorium fortunei], and Chinese bellflower [kikyō, Platycodon gradiflorus]. These seven autumn flowers provide visual enjoyment. Their simplicity was very much admired: they are small and dainty yet beautifully colored. They are named as typical autumn flowers in a verse from the Man'yōshū anthology.
Unlike their spring counterparts, there is no particular event to do anything about the seven flowers of autumn. The autumn flowers are not intended for picking or eating, but for appreciation, despite each one is believed to have medical efficacy in traditional Chinese medicine. Tanka and haiku theming hanano, meaning fields where the autumn wildflowers are in full bloom, have a centuries-old history.
CAUTION:
The Japanese parsley [Oenanthe javanica] species of the Oenanthe [water dropworts] genus is closely related to and easily confused with toxic water hemlock.
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Jan 23, 2013
Andrija Mohorovičić's 156th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Iz...liNOsS7Fg=s660Andrija Mohorovičić was a Croatian geophysicist. He is best known for the eponymous Mohorovičić discontinuity and is considered as one of the founders of modern seismology.
Crater Mohorovičić [on the Moon's far side] is named in his honour. A gymnasium in Rijeka, Croatia and a school ship in the Croatian Navy are named after him, as was [in 1996] asteroid 8422 Mohorovičić.