A Brief History On October 17, 2018, an 18-year-old student went on a shooting rampage at the Kerch Polytechnic College, in Crimea, killing 20 people and himself while wounding another 67. Digging Deeper As we have previously reported, mass shootings and school shootings are not an American phenomenon. Using a pump action shotgun, the shooter fired for about 15 minutes before ending his rampage. The teen also exploded a nail bomb, although several other pipe bombs that he had placed were deactivated by the responding military. Russia had illegally occupied the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, despite condemnation from other nations.…
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A Brief History On October 16, 2010, a graduate student at Auburn University named a new species of fish Lepidocephalichthys zeppelini, because he thought a marking on the fish looked like a double necked guitar used by Led Zeppelin member Jimmy Page. Digging Deeper Obviously, it would be fun to be able to give a new species the name of your choice, and here are a few goofy sounding ones already taken: Gorilla gorilla gorilla, the Western Lowland Gorilla. If only they could all be so easy! Mini mum, Mini scule and Mini ature, three of the tiniest species of…
A Brief History On October 7, 1996, Fox News Channel debuted on cable, later to become the most watched of the cable news networks. Fox was late to the party, with CNN starting the cable news craze in 1980. MSNBC, the #2 cable news outlet, also launched in 1996, and Newsmax premiered in 2014 as a major player. Many other financial, sports and specialty news channels are also available on cable. Digging Deeper Prior to the ascendancy of cable news, network TV news was king, starting with 15 minute broadcasts and in 1963 moving to the 30 minute format. Before…
A Brief History On September 19, 1982, Professor Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University, posted on the school’s bulletin board the first documented emoticons, the simple use of a colon, a dash and either a right or left facing curved bracket, indicating a “Happy Face” or a “Sad Face.” Digging Deeper Born in Medina, Ohio back in 1948, Fahlman is now a Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon and has a long career in academia and in the private sector developing computer languages and software. His studies at MIT included Artificial Intelligence, pioneering work in the field. The idea of “emoticons”…
A Brief History On September 1, 1939, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man famous as the “father of the atomic bomb,” along with his student, Hartland Snyder, using the physics of the day, published a definitive proof of how black holes could develop. Digging Deeper The scientific paper known as the Oppenheimer–Snyder model relied on earlier work by Albert Einstein, especially vis a vis the Schwarzschild metric concerning gravitational forces involved in the collapse of stars leading to black holes. Educated at Harvard, Christ’s College and Cambridge, Oppenheimer became a professor at Berkely in 1936. His contributions to the field of…