A Brief History On August 20, 1858, naturalist Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, the change of organisms over time through mutation and natural selection, in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Digging Deeper While we generally think of Darwin as the man that came up with the idea of “evolution,” there were other scientists at the time that also came to a similar conclusion, including fellow British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose work was published at the same time and in the same publication as Darwin’s. While most serious scientists today accept Darwin’s…
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A Brief History On August 19, 1839, the government of France announced that the “Daguerreotype process,” an invention of Louis Daguerre as an early form of photography, would be available for free to the entire world. Digging Deeper The Daguerreotype style of photographic process would soon be superseded by more advanced methods that cost less and produced better photographs, such as the ambrotype, but nonetheless, the gesture of goodwill by Daguerre and his country of France was a boon to civilization, a gesture only sometimes repeated by other inventors. Another example of such inventive largesse was the work of Philo…
A Brief History On August 18, 2019, about 100 environmentally concerned citizens, including government officials and activists, held a funeral for the Okjökull glacier in Iceland. Digging Deeper The glacier, a large landbound ice formation, once covered about 6 square miles, but had completely melted away, presumably due to global climate change. Located northeast of Reykjavík, the end of the glacier often called “the Ok glacier” actually came in 2014, so the 2019 funeral was perhaps a bit late. The gone but not forgotten glacier is memorialized on a metal plaque placed in its honor that bears the inscription (in…
A Brief History Fantasy fans, here is your chance to be among the first in Cleveland, Ohio to see Three Thousand Years of Longing on Wednesday, August 24, 2022 at 7:00 PM at Cedar Lee Theatre at 2163 Lee Road in Cleveland Heights, Ohio! For your chance to get a pass, please log on to https://uareleasingscreenings.com/3000YRSHH24. Passes are first-come, first-serve. The theater is overbooked slightly to ensure a full audience. Therefore, seating is not guaranteed. So, please arrive early! Saving seats for other parties is prohibited. Digging Deeper In Three Thousand Years of Longing, Dr. Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) is…
A Brief History On August 17, 1914, the World War I Battle of Stallupönen was fought between the Imperial German army and the Imperial Russian army near Nesterov, Russia. The Germans were armed with the Mauser M98 chambered in 7.92 mm Mauser (sometimes called “8 mm Mauser”) and the Russians with the M1891 Mosin-Nagant rifle chambered in 7.62×54mmR. both rifles were 5 shot bolt action repeating rifles firing smokeless powder cartridges topped by copper jacketed pointy nosed bullets that were accurate and highly effective. Digging Deeper Bullets were originally merely lead round balls, and then were blunt tip hollow based…