A Brief History On February 17, 1996, Chess champion Garry Kasparov bested the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer in an historic chess game between man and machine. The battle between organic and electronic brains went far beyond a single match, as Kasparov beat the special-built chess playing machine three games to one and two ties. Digging Deeper Not content with beating the Grand Master once, IBM reworked their computer, doubling its computing speed, and a rematch was held in 1997, this time resulting in a win for Deep Blue. An irate Kasparov demanded a rematch, but IBM had taken the computer…
Browsing: February 17
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A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on February 17th. For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On February 17, 1370, the Teutonic Knights fought a great battle against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a battle known as the Battle of Rudau. On February 17, 1600, Italian polymath and philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Papal States of Rome for the crime of heresy. On February 17, 1801, the Presidential election of the United States faced its…
A Brief History On February 17, 1600, Italian polymath and philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Papal States of Rome for the crime of heresy. Digging Deeper Bruno had the nerve to believe in the Heliocentric model of the solar system as taught by Polish astronomer Copernicus, and that the stars in the sky were really distant suns that had their own planets. Further, Bruno opined that unlike the Catholic belief, not only was our Sun not the center of the universe, the universe is infinite and therefore could have no center. As he was led…
A Brief History On February 17, 1370, the Teutonic Knights fought a great battle against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a battle known as the Battle of Rudau. This particular battle was one in the series of wars called “The Northern Crusades,” a war to impose the Christian religion on Pagan people in Northern Europe, especially in the Baltic region. The “other” Crusades, those in the Middle East as a Christian effort to take and retain control of Jerusalem and “The Holy Lands” against Islamic forces is much better known, and had been discussed on our site at length. Today…
A Brief History On February 17, 2019, we take a look back to this date in 2015, when we listed “10 of the Sexiest Songs of All Time.” Today we list another 10 of the Sexiest Songs of All Time, and as always, invite you, our valued reader, to nominate those songs you believe should be on this list. The so called “sexiness” can be sort of explicit lyrics (but not out of the range of what you might hear on the radio or in common use), the suggestiveness, use of double entendres, or the general ability of the song…
