Daily Knowledge

"Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success."
[C. S. Lewis]

Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2026/08/02)

Page from the Brokmerbrief written in Old Frisian

Old Frisian was a West Germanic language spoken between the late 13th century and the end of the 16th century by Frisians who comprised a loose confederacy along the North Sea coast. It served as an early regional standard language and demonstrates remarkable uniformity across time and space. The surviving corpus is almost entirely legal documents (example pictured). Old Frisian marked for four cases, three genders, and two tenses, though other grammatical functions could be achieved through periphrasis. Word order varied widely, though subject–object–verb was most common. Middle Low German began to displace Old Frisian as the language of trade during the 15th century and, by the turn of the 17th century, it had evolved into Middle Frisian, a vernacular language constrained to rural areas. It is the common ancestor of all Frisian languages except for the Insular North Frisian languages, with which they share an earlier ancestor called Pre–Old Frisian. (Full article...)

Drawing of the interior of the Tower Subway

1870 – One of the world's earliest underground tube railways opened in the Tower Subway (interior depicted), a tunnel beneath the River Thames in London.
1914 – The French army's general headquarters was activated in anticipation of war with Germany.
1932 – At the California Institute of Technology, American physicist Carl David Anderson proved the existence of antimatter with the discovery of the positron, for which he would receive the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.
1939 – Leo Szilard penned a letter, signed by Albert Einstein and addressed to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that Germany may develop atomic bombs, leading to the establishment of the Manhattan Project.
1986 – The animated film Castle in the Sky, the first from Studio Ghibli, was released.

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