Daily Knowledge "Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable."
[Franz Kafka]
Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2018/11/19)
Article of the Day
Life's Shop Window is an American silent drama film directed by J. Gordon Edwards, released on November 19, 1914. Starring Claire Whitney and Stuart Holmes, it is a film adaptation of the 1907 novel by Annie Sophie Cory. It depicts the story of English orphan Lydia Wilton (Whitney) and her husband Bernard Chetwin (Holmes). Although Wilton's marriage is legitimate, it was conducted in secret, and she is accused of having a child out of wedlock. Forced to leave England, she reunites with her husband in Arizona. There, she meets an old acquaintance, Eustace Pelham, and considers running away with him before she sees the error of her ways and returns to her family. Life's Shop Window was the first film produced, rather than simply distributed, by William Fox's Box Office Attractions Company, the corporate predecessor to Fox Film. Reviewers' opinions of the film's quality were mixed, but it was very popular upon its initial release in New York. Like many of Fox's early works, it was likely lost in the 1937 Fox vault fire. (Full article...)
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Image of the Day
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
On this day: November 19
November 19: International Men's Day; World Toilet Day
- 1794 – The United States and Great Britain signed the Jay Treaty, the basis for ten years of peaceful trade between the two nations.
- 1863 – American Civil War: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
- 1943 – The Holocaust: Inmates at the Janowska concentration camp near what is now Lviv, Ukraine, staged a failed uprising, after which the SS liquidated the camp, resulting in at least 6,000 deaths.
- 1985 – Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan (both pictured) held the first of five summit meetings between them in Geneva.
- 2002 – The Greek oil tanker Prestige split in half off the coast of Galicia, after spilling 17.8 million US gallons (420,000 bbl) in the worst environmental disaster in Spanish and Portuguese history.
Nicolas Poussin (d. 1665) · Mikhail Kalinin (b. 1875) · James Ensor (d. 1949)
Knowledge about Earth
Facts and Figures
- 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
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
Why you should extend your general knowledge:
There are many reasons why one should or wants to extend his knowledge.
First you should consider that "general knowledge" is knowledge which a group of humans - who belong together regional, temporal or otherwise - owns. Thus, it describes a basic understanding of specific categories of knowledge.
As the English philosopher Francis Bacon said before: "Wisdom is Power" [Bacon 1597].