Daily Knowledge

"The less you talk, the more you're listened to."
[Pauline Phillips]

Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2026/06/01)

Plan and profile of SMS Westfalen

SMS Westfalen was a Nassau-class dreadnought battleship built for the Imperial German Navy. Laid down in 1907 and launched in July 1908, she was commissioned into the High Seas Fleet in November 1909. She was equipped with a main battery of twelve 28 cm (11 in) guns in six twin turrets using an unusual hexagonal arrangement (pictured). Westfalen saw extensive service in the North Sea in the early years of World War I. In the early hours of 1 June 1916, she was heavily engaged in fighting against British light forces during the Battle of Jutland, severely damaging several British destroyers. On another fleet sortie in August 1916, she was damaged by a torpedo from a British submarine. Later in the war, Westfalen participated in sorties into the Baltic Sea against the Russian Navy, and to support the White Finns in the Finnish Civil War. She was ceded to the Allies after the war and broken up in 1924. (This article is part of a featured topic: Battleships of Germany.)

Battle of Öland

1676 – Scanian War: The Swedish warship Kronan, one of the largest ships in the world at the time, sank at the Battle of Öland (depicted) with the loss of around 800 men.
1796 – Tennessee was admitted as the 16th state of the United States.
1943 – Eight German Junkers Ju 88s shot down British Overseas Airways Corporation Flight 777 over the Bay of Biscay off the coast of Spain and France, killing actor Leslie Howard and several other notable passengers.
2001 – A Hamas-affiliated Islamist militant blew himself up outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing 21 people, most of whom were teenage girls.
2015 – The river cruise ship Dongfang zhi Xing capsized in the Yangtze, resulting in 442 deaths in China's worst peacetime maritime disaster.

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