"The best revenge is massive success."
[Frank Sinatra]
Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2026/06/17)
Article of the Day
Cedric Howell (17 June 1896 – 10 December 1919) was an Australian flying ace of the First World War. He enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1916 and was posted to the 46th Battalion on the Western Front. In November 1916, he was accepted for a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps and was shipped to the United Kingdom for flight training. Graduating as a pilot, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and posted to No. 45 Squadron RFC in France during October 1917; two months later, the unit sailed to the Italian theatre. Howell spent eight months flying operations over Italy, conducting attacks against ground targets and engaging in sorties against aerial forces and he was credited with shooting down a total of nineteen aircraft. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, the Military Cross and Distinguished Flying Cross. He was posted back to the United Kingdom in July 1918. In 1919, Howell was killed while taking part in the England-to-Australia air race. (Full article...)
Current Events
BBC One-minute World News
Fast briefed every day.
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- READ: Trump indictment related to hush money payment (1970-01-01 01:00)
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Image of the Day
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
On this day: June 17
- 1579 – Explorer Francis Drake landed in a region of present-day California, naming it New Albion and claiming it for England.
- 1631 – Mumtaz Mahal (pictured), wife of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, died in childbirth; Jahan spent the next seventeen years constructing her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal.
- 1919 – Hundreds of Canadian soldiers rioted in Epsom, England, leading to the death of a British police officer.
- 1952 – Guatemalan Revolution: The Guatemalan Congress passed Decree 900, redistributing unused land greater than 224 acres (0.91 km2) in area to local peasants.
- M. C. Escher (b. 1898)
- Richard Gagnon (b. 1948)
- Amari Cooper (b. 1994)
- Mohamed Morsi (d. 2019)
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].
Daily Knowledge