Daily Knowledge "Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family."
[Joseph Brodsky]
Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2026/05/11)
Article of the Day
The Japan Cup is a Group 1 horse race in Japan, held annually on the last Sunday of November at Tokyo Racecourse in Fuchū, Tokyo. It is a flat race run over a distance of 2400 metres (about 1+1⁄2 miles), with a maximum of 18 horses. First run in 1981, the Japan Cup was created by the Japan Racing Association and extends invitations to top-performing horses aged 3 and above from around the world. The race has had a total prize purse of over one billion yen since 2023, and is the middle leg of the informal "Autumn Triple Crown" along with the Tennō Shō (Autumn) and the Arima Kinen. The Japan Cup is regularly ranked highly in the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities' "Top 100 Group 1 Races of the Year" compilation due to the high quality and depth of racers, and has had winners from all over the world. Initially, the race was dominated by foreign horses, with 8 of the first 10 winners coming from abroad, however, in the last twenty years only one horse from outside Japan has won. (Full article...)
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Image of the Day
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
On this day: May 11
- 1813 – William Lawson, Gregory Blaxland and William Wentworth departed westward from Sydney on an expedition to become the first confirmed Europeans to cross the Blue Mountains.
- 1894 – In response to a 28-percent wage cut, 4,000 Pullman Palace Car Company workers went on strike in Illinois, bringing rail traffic west of Chicago to a halt.
- 1981 – Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats (performers pictured), opened at the New London Theatre.
- 2011 – An earthquake registering Mw 5.1, the worst to hit the region for more than 50 years, struck near Lorca, Spain.
- 2022 – Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot and killed while reporting on an Israel Defense Forces raid on the Jenin refugee camp.
- Chang and Eng Bunker (b. 1811)
- Ed Stelmach (b. 1951)
- Fermín López (b. 2003)
- Sue Maroroa (d. 2023)
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].