Daily Knowledge "He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."
[Muhammad Ali]
Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2026/05/12)
Article of the Day
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The Golden Bough is a fantastical object in the Aeneid, an epic poem by the 1st century BCE Roman poet Virgil. The Trojan hero Aeneas is tasked to find the bough and remove it from its host tree to prove his divine favour before his journey into the Underworld. It briefly resists as he does so – the implications of which have been widely debated in scholarship. In the medieval period, commentators often interpreted the bough allegorically and as a symbol of wisdom. More recent scholars have viewed the episode as reflecting Virgil's ambivalence towards the Roman Empire, and connected it to the deaths of two of Aeneas's antagonists, Dido and Turnus. The bough has been widely referenced in art and literature. It was used by James Frazer for the title of his 1890 work on comparative religion, is recalled in Dante's Divine Comedy, and was the subject of an 1834 painting by J. M. W. Turner. It is also a recurring motif in the "Byzantium" poems of W. B. Yeats and in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. (Full article...)
Current Events
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Image of the Day
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
On this day: May 12
May 12 :
- 1510 – Zhu Zhifan, the Prince of Anhua (in modern Shaanxi, China), began an unsuccessful rebellion against the reign of the Zhengde Emperor.
- 1846 – The Donner Party, an American pioneer group which became known for resorting to cannibalism when they became trapped in the Sierra Nevada, left Independence, Missouri, for California.
- 1926 – The crew of the airship Norge (pictured), led by Roald Amundsen, became the first people to make a verified trip to the North Pole.
- 1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the first working programmable and fully automatic computer, to an audience of scientists in Berlin.
- 2015 – A train derailment killed eight people and injured more than 200 others in Philadelphia.
- Fergus of Galloway (d. 1161)
- Indra Devi (b. 1899)
- Marilyn Knowlden (b. 1926)
- Vasilije Adžić (b. 2006)
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].