Stonehenge,
located in South West England, is a prehistoric monument with standing
stones. It is positioned to align
perfectly with the sunrise on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year,
and on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. There are also eight lines that appear
between rectangle and triangles that align with seasonal dates. In 2018, roughly 9,500 people visited Stonehenge
on the summer solstice to see the sun above the heel stone, which is also
called friar's heel. A new book entitled
"Megalith" asserts that the ancient humans who designed the
Stonehenge followed Pythagoras' theorem.
This states that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the
other two squares on the triangle. It
was developed by ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who was born in 570
B.C. However, the Stonehenge was
assembled 2,000 years before his birth, around 2500 B.C. This theory suggests that these ancient
humans were smarter than what people gave them credit for. In order to use Pythagoras' theorem, they had
to be really skilled at geometry. The book was released June 21 2018 to coincide with
the summer solstice. "We think
these people didn't have scientific minds but first and foremost they were
astronomers and cosmologists," John Matineau, the editor of the
book, told the
Telegraph. "They were studying long and difficult to understand
cycles and they knew about these when they started planning sites like
Stonehenge." Robin Heath, a
contributor to the book, believes that there must also be a great Pythagorean
triangle somewhere else in the United
Kingdom. It is assumed that this
will link to Stonehenge. Heath also
contends that the ancient humans who built Stonehenge likely used a rope or
another object to represent a time period as it relates to the sun and the
moon. He says that this is where the
phrase "a length of time" originates from. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/230844/20180621/stonehenge-builders-used-pythagoras-theorem-2-000-years-before-he-was-born.htm
The FIFA
World Cup, often simply called the World Cup, is an
international association
football competition contested
by the senior men's national teams of the members of the Fédération
Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport's global
governing body. The championship has
been awarded every four years since the inaugural tournament
in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946 when
it was not held because of the Second World War. The current champion is Germany, which won its fourth title at the 2014 tournament in Brazil. The world's first
international football match was a challenge match played in Glasgow in
1872 between Scotland and England, which ended in a 0–0
draw. The first international
tournament, the inaugural edition of the British Home Championship, took place in
1884. As football grew in popularity in
other parts of the world at the turn of the 20th century, it was held as
a demonstration sport with no medals awarded
at the 1900 and 1904 Summer Olympics (however,
the IOC has retroactively upgraded their status to official events), and at
the 1906 Intercalated Games. After FIFA was founded
in 1904, it tried to arrange an international football tournament between
nations outside the Olympic framework in Switzerland in 1906. These were very early days for international
football, and the official history of FIFA describes the competition as having
been a failure. At the 1908 Summer Olympics in London, football
became an official competition. Planned
by The Football Association (FA), England's
football governing body, the event was for amateur players
only and was regarded suspiciously as a show rather than a competition. Great Britain (represented by the England national amateur
football team) won the gold medals. They repeated the feat at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm. With the Olympic event continuing to be
contested only between amateur teams, Sir
Thomas Lipton organised the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy tournament
in Turin in
1909. The Lipton tournament was a
championship between individual clubs (not national teams) from different nations,
each one of which represented an entire nation.
The competition is sometimes described as The First World Cup, and
featured the most prestigious professional club sides from Italy, Germany and
Switzerland, but the FA of England refused to be associated with the
competition and declined the offer to send a professional team. Lipton invited West Auckland, an amateur side from County
Durham, to represent England instead.
West Auckland won the tournament and returned in 1911 to successfully
defend their title. In 1914, FIFA agreed
to recognise the Olympic tournament as a
"world football championship for amateurs", and took responsibility
for managing the event. This paved the way for the world's first
intercontinental football competition, at the 1920 Summer Olympics,
contested by Egypt and 13 European teams, and
won by Belgium. Uruguay won the next two
Olympic football tournaments in 1924 and 1928. Those were also the first two open world
championships, as 1924 was the start of FIFA's professional era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_World_Cup
The 2018 World Cup is held in
Russia from June 14 through July 15.
FIFA Women's World Cup is an international football competition
contested by the senior women's national
teams of the members of Fédération Internationale de Football
Association (FIFA),
the sport's global governing body. The
competition has been held every four years since 1991, when the inaugural tournament, then called
the FIFA Women's World
Championship, was held in China. Under the tournament's current format, national teams
vie for 23 slots in a three-year qualification phase. (The host nation's team is automatically
entered as the 24th slot.) The
tournament proper, alternatively called the World Cup Finals, is
contested at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about one
month. The seven FIFA Women's World Cup
tournaments have been won by four different national teams. The current champion is the United States,
after winning their third title in the 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup. In 1988--58
years after the first Men's FIFA
World Cup tournament in 1930 and
approximately 17 years after the FA ban on women's football was eliminated in
1971--FIFA hosted an invitational in China as a test to see if a global women's
World Cup was feasible. Twelve national
teams took part in the competition – four from UEFA, three from AFC, two from CONCACAF and
one from CONMEBOL, CAF and OFC. The
tournament saw European champion Norway defeat Sweden 1–0 in the final to win the tournament,
while Brazil clinched third place by beating the
hosts in a penalty
shootout. The competition was deemed a
success and on 30 June FIFA approved the establishment of an official World
Cup, which was to take place in 1991 again in China.
Again, twelve teams competed, this time culminating in the United States
beating Norway in the final 2-1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA_Women%27s_World_Cup
Lyon
Sprague de Camp (1907–2000),
better known as L. Sprague de Camp, was an American writer of science
fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. In a career
spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including novels and works of
non-fiction, such as biographies of other fantasy authors. He was a major figure in science fiction in
the 1930s and 1940s. An
aeronautical engineer by profession, De Camp conducted his undergraduate
studies at the California
Institute of Technology (where his roommate was at one point
noted rocket fuel scientist John Drury Clark), and earned his Bachelor of Science degree
from Caltech in Aeronautical
Engineering 1930. He earned his Master of Science degree in Engineering from the Stevens
Institute of Technology in 1933. De Camp was also a surveyor and an expert in patents.
His first job was with the Inventors Foundation, Inc. in Hoboken, N.J.,
which was taken over by The International Correspondence Schools. De Camp transferred to the Scranton, PA division. He was Principal of the School of Inventing
and Patenting when he resigned in 1937. "Extraterrestrial,"
a coinage from "extra" + "terrestrial," meaning from beyond
earth, is attested as an adjective as early as 1868, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary. Its first use
in connection with life beyond earth was likely by H. G. Wells, in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. L. Sprague de Camp is credited with its first
usage as a noun with the meaning of "alien life" and with coining the
abbreviation "E.T." in the first part of his two-part article
"Design for Life," published in the May 1939 issue of Astounding
Science Fiction. De Camp was
best known for his light fantasy, particularly two series written in
collaboration with Pratt, the Harold Shea stories and Gavagan's Bar . De Camp also wrote historical fiction set
in the era of classical antiquity from the height of the First Persian Empire to the waning of
the Hellenistic period. Five novels published by Doubleday from
1958 to 1969 form a loosely connected series based on their common setting
and occasional cross references. They
were also linked by a common focus on the advancement of scientific knowledge,
de Camp's chosen protagonists being explorers, artisans, engineers, innovators
and practical philosophers rather than famous names from antiquity, who are
relegated to secondary roles. De Camp's
first book was Inventions
and Their Management, co-written with Alf K. Berle and published
by International
Textbook Company in 1937:
a 733-page book with three-page list of law cases cited. He enjoyed debunking doubtful history and pseudoscientific claims about the
supernatural. He conducted extensive
research for what was to be a book on magic, witchcraft and occultism, though
only the first chapter, "The Unwritten Classics" (March, 1947), was
published in the Saturday Review of Literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Sprague_de_Camp The works of L. Sprague de Camp (full of
magic, threats and nonsense) remind me of Lewis Carroll's writings.
Murray
Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956)
was an American writer
of science fiction, fantasy and history. He is best known for his works on naval history and
on the American Civil War and for fiction written with L. Sprague de Camp. Pratt
was the inventor of a set of rules for naval wargaming,
which he created before the Second
World War. This was known as
the "Fletcher
Pratt Naval War Game" and it involved dozens of tiny wooden
ships, built on a scale of one inch to 50 feet.
These were spread over the floor of Pratt's apartment and their
maneuvers were calculated via a complex mathematical formula. Noted author and artist Jack
Coggins was a frequent participant in Pratt's Navy Game, and de Camp
met him through his wargaming group.
Pratt established the literary dining club known as the Trap
Door Spiders in 1944. The name
is a reference to the exclusive habits of the trapdoor spider, which when it
enters its burrow pulls the hatch shut behind it. The club was later fictionalized as the Black
Widowers in a series of mystery stories
by Isaac Asimov. Pratt himself was fictionalized in one story,
"To the Barest", as the Widowers’ founder, Ralph Ottur. He was also a charter member of The Civil War Round Table of New York,
organized in 1951, and served as its president from 1953-1954. In 1956, after his death, the Round Table's
board of directors established the Fletcher Pratt Award in his honor, which is
presented every May to the author or editor of the best non-fiction book on the
Civil War published during the preceding calendar year. Read more and
see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher_Pratt See
also http://endlessbookshelf.net/fletcherpratt.html
Fletcher and I by L.
Sprague de Camp, first published in The Compleat Enchanter, SF Book Club, 1975 My
friend and collborator Fletcher Pratt had two careers: that of librarian and the other of
prizefighter in the fly-weight (112-pound) class. He read Norse sagas in the original, learned
Danish among other languages, and spoke French with a terrible accent. He was fluent in Portuguese. He wrote over fifty books, including science
fiction, history and biography.
Organic Red Kuri Squash: You Can Even Eat the Skin! by Louisa Shafia Being able to
eat the skin gives you cooking options.
Usually, most of us roast squash in the oven and then scoop out the
flesh. With organic squash, you can cook
it any way you would cook a potato. To prepare
the squash, simply slice it in half, scoop out the seeds, and then cut it up
into chunks. Now you’re ready to sauté,
steam, braise, roast, or boil. What I
like about red kuri is the rich, buttery flesh, and savory flavor. There are lots of ways to prepare it, but my
go-to method is to braise red kuri with salt, olive oil, and garlic. Find a basic recipe for cooking red kuri that
takes about fifteen minutes at
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1909
June 26, 2018
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