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"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."
[Saul Bellow]

Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2025/09/01)

Randy Travis (born 1959) is an American country and gospel music singer and songwriter. He has recorded more than 20 studio albums and charted more than 50 singles on Billboard's Hot Country Songs charts, including 16 that reached the number-one position. Travis's commercial success began in the mid-1980s with the release of his album Storms of Life, which was certified triple-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. His major songs include "On the Other Hand", "Forever and Ever, Amen", "I Told You So", "Hard Rock Bottom of Your Heart", and "Three Wooden Crosses". Travis is noted as a key figure in the neotraditional country movement, a return to more traditional sounds within the genre following the country pop crossovers of the early 1980s. Since surviving a near-fatal stroke in 2013, which severely limited his singing and speaking ability, he has released archival recordings and made limited public appearances. (Full article...)

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September 1: Labour Day in Canada and Labor Day in the United States (2025)

Title page of the soprano part book

1610 – Claudio Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine (page pictured) was first printed in Venice, dedicated to Pope Paul V.
1804 – German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding discovered one of the largest main-belt asteroids, naming it Juno after the Roman goddess.
1902 – The first science fiction film, titled A Trip to the Moon and based on From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne, was released in France.
1937 – The first group of around 172,000 Koreans were deported by Soviet authorities from the Russian Far East to the Kazakh and Uzbek SSRs; around 10 to 25 percent died.
2000 – Speakers' Corner, a free speech area in Hong Lim Park in Singapore, was launched.

Age of Earth: ~ 4.568 billion years
World Population: 7.3 billion (July 2015)
Continents: 7 (Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia)
Mean Radius: 6371.0 km
Axial Tilt: 23,44°

Image Source: Wikipedia - License: Public Domain (thanks to NASA)

Our solar system consists of
1 star (Sun) and 8 planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune).

1 AU (astronomical unit) is roughly the distance between Earth and the Sun (about 150 million kilometres).
The space probe Voyager 1 was launched by the NASA in 1977 and is meanwhile (autumn 2015) about 133 AU away from Earth.

Image Source: Wikipedia - License: CC BY-SA 3.0