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May 1, 2021 - May 1, 2022
More important, the treaty enshrined the principle of national sovereignty that has guided foreign affairs until the present.
Treaty negotiations were actually held in two separate towns, one for Protestants and another for Catholics, because the two camps refused to meet with each other directly.
Accordingly, at the end of Voltaire’s novel, Candide has a revelation of sorts and rejects Pangloss’s teachings. He decides instead that the way to achieve fulfillment is to “cultivate one’s garden”—in other words, to engage in practical pursuits that create tangible benefit.
In the nineteenth century, the romantics claimed Mozart’s legacy as their own, making up myths about how he never got his due and starved for his music. In reality, he was recognized as a genius during his lifetime, and he was one of the highest-paid composers of the era.
When Mozart died, his widow, Constanze, married a Danish diplomat whose tombstone reads, “Here Rests Mozart’s Widow’s Second Spouse.”
🤓
In addition to major and lasting work in philosophy, theology, and mathematics, Leibniz made significant contributions to chemistry, physics, logic, medicine, botany, optics, history, linguistics, jurisprudence, philology, and diplomacy.
A polymath if ever there was one!
Although Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is widely credited with the discovery, Leibniz also developed differential calculus.
The word vaccine comes from the Latin vacca, or cow.
Both the Protestant and Catholic churches initially objected to vaccines.
The piece was solicited by a stranger dressed in gray who came to Mozart’s Vienna home in July 1791. After Mozart’s death, it was revealed that this stranger was actually an amateur musician named Count Franz von Walsegg, who wanted Mozart to write the piece so that he could put his name on it and pass it off as his own.
NOT SALIERI!
A pupil of Mozart’s named Franz Süssmayr vowed to finish the piece, and he did, based on sketches of bass lines that Mozart had laid out at the start of the final Lachrymosa section.
Marie Curie was the first woman ever to become a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris.
It is rumored that after seeing Don Giovanni, Emperor Franz Joseph told Mozart that it had “too many notes,” to which the composer replied, “Just as many as needed, Your Majesty.”
Gradually, however, works such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) cast a more critical eye on Europe’s colonial involvement.
Notable works from Africa include Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958); from Asia, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), Anita Desai’s Games at Twilight (1978), and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981); and from the Caribbean, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985).
Many experts consider driving and watching television to be states of hypnosis.
Irenaeus of Lyons is credited with insisting that the New Testament contain only four Gospels and no more. His reasoning? Four was the number of winds as well as the corners of the earth.
The Gospel according to John is the major source for suggesting that the Jews were to blame for Jesus’s death.
Paine’s writing style was uncompromising, inflammatory, and inspiring.
“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all humankind,”
John Adams, the second president of the United States, who called Paine a “mongrel between pig and puppy,” conceded that “without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.”
Great quote from John Adams!
Paine is generally credited with inventing the name United States of America for the thirteen colonies.
In 1802 Beethoven wrote a famous letter to his brother known as the “Heiligenstadt Manifesto,” named for the town where he wrote it, explaining in florid, sometimes abstruse language that he lived in a state of constant despair and that if it weren’t for his love of music and his passion for life, he would surely kill himself.
An albino sperm whale dubbed Mocha Dick was seen for decades off the Chilean coast before it was finally captured in the 1830s. Melville clearly drew from the story, but it is unclear why he altered the whale’s name.
Adult stem cells from bone marrow have been used to treat leukemia and lymphoma since the 1970s.
Legend has it that when Beethoven died, shortly after completing his ninth symphony, there was a rainstorm in Vienna. He was lying unconscious on his bed, and at the moment of a lightning strike, he suddenly sat up, shook his fist at the heavens, and fell back dead.
The Protestant Reformation was further strengthened by King Henry VIII of England’s split with the Roman Catholic Church in 1529.
Frost recognizes the human tendency to self-aggrandize, to sugarcoat the uncertainty of life, to take comfort in viewing life as a series of conscious, knowable choices between good and bad alternatives. But his ultimate point is that in reality, we have no way of knowing which path in life is best, and our decisions are just as often random, uneducated guesses.
Visible light is a small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, but it is in this range that the sun and stars emit most of their radiation. It is probably no coincidence that our eyes are like two antennae finely tuned to this range of light.
Is this actually true? Various animals are able to see light beyond the spectrum a human eye can perceive.
is used for wireless Internet networks.
Microwave technology has been used for more than a half-century already for communications, far beyond “wireless Internet communications”. In fact, that term is deceiving and WRONG - wireless Internet, such as wifi and cellular telecomms do NOT use microwave frequency signals. Only in the back haul, if (preferred and higher speed/higher capacity) wired fiber optic linkages are not available, aremicfowave towers used.
The word circadian comes from the Latin for “about one day.”
Heart attacks are most likely to occur in the morning.
Originating in New England, transcendentalism was an optimistic intellectual philosophy that emphasized individuality, self-reliance, and the pursuit of a spiritual purity that transcended the concerns of the everyday world.
Whitman’s poems gradually became more serious, reflecting his deep sadness about the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. His heartbreaking elegy to Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (written 1865–1866), ranks among his finest poems.
Jackson claimed to follow the example of Thomas Jefferson, but the stately Virginian was no fan of the violent-tempered Tennessean. “His passions are terrible,” Jefferson wrote of Jackson. “He is a dangerous man.”
This whole description is nothing but a load of tripe.
The problem of reconciling God’s perfect goodness with the evil in the world is called theodicy.
Brown’s revolt failed militarily, but politically it was successful. Terrified, many Southerners concluded that separating from the North was the only way to preserve slavery. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election with the support of Northern abolitionists, the Southern states seceded, sparking the Civil War that eventually did end slavery.
This hardly reads as a “political success”. How many died? If you’re saying he raised the issue to the level of national importance, yes. But war is virtually NEVER “political success”.
Proust conceives of time as a flowing, amorphous whole rather than an ordered, linear progression of moments.
Paganini’s most famous trick was to play so furiously that he broke three of his strings but still continued playing using only one.
Later in life, Liszt confessed his philandering sins to the pope himself, who cut the composer off halfway through his confession and said, “Enough, Liszt. Tell your sins to your piano.”
😎
“Tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks,” Lincoln reportedly quipped. “I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”
Lincoln’s assassin was John Wilkes Booth, a well-known Shakespearean actor and a distant relative of Cherie Blair, the wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair.
As a young man, Brahms played piano in Hamburg’s seaside brothels, where he developed a lifelong affection for prostitutes.
Brahms lost favor with Liszt by falling asleep at one of his concerts.
Brahms “listing” to starboard as he fell asleep while “listening” to “Lizst” is pure comedy. 😎
“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” —Critique of Practical Reason
Thus, in Kant’s words, “I had to suspend knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”
She is said to have told God that if she loves God because she fears hell, then she should burn in hell, and if she loves God because she desires to reach heaven, then she should be denied heaven. Sufis seek a pure communion with the divine.
Grant later wrote in his memoirs: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought.”
Grant was elected president of the United States in 1868, but historians judge him as one of the country’s worst presidents.
Donald J. Trump says: “Hold my beer.”
