Daily Knowledge

"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."
[Charles Baudelaire]

Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2026/03/31)

The Duke of Windsor inspecting German troops

The 1937 tour of Germany by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor was opposed by the British government, which feared that Nazi Germany would use the visit for propaganda. After Edward VIII's abdication in December 1936, his brother George VI became king. Given the title of Duke of Windsor, Edward married Wallis Simpson in June 1937. He appeared to have been sympathetic to Germany in this period and announced his intention to travel there privately to tour factories. He promised the British government that he would keep a low profile, and the tour went ahead between 12 and 23 October. The Windsors visited factories, many of which were producing materiel for the war effort, and the Duke inspected German troops (pictured). They dined with prominent Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Albert Speer, and also had tea with Adolf Hitler at his house at Berchtesgaden. (Full article...)

TAROM Flight 371

1146 – French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux preached a sermon to a crowd at a council in Vézelay, with King Louis VII in attendance, urging the necessity of a Second Crusade.
1521 – Ferdinand Magellan and members of his crew participated in the first Catholic Mass in the Philippines.
1910 – Six English towns amalgamated to form a single county borough called Stoke-on-Trent, the first union of its type.
1995 – TAROM Flight 371 (pictured) crashed near Balotești, Romania, killing all 60 people on board.
2023 – A tornado caused the collapse of a venue hosting a sold-out concert in Belvidere, Illinois, United States, resulting in one death and 48 injuries.

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