Duke The Menace

[Duke of Buckingham]

Romulus and Remus

Romulus and Remus are the twin brothers and central characters of Rome's foundation myth. Their mother is Rhea Silvia, daughter to Numitor, king of Alba Longa. Before their conception, Numitor's brother Amulius seizes power, kills Numitor's male heirs and forces Rhea Silvia to become a Vestal Virgin, sworn to chastity. Rhea Silvia conceives the twins by the god Mars, or by the demi-god Hercules; once the twins were born, Amulius has them abandoned to die in the river Tiber. They are saved by a series of miraculous interventions: the river carries them to safety, a she-wolf named Lupa finds and suckles them, and a woodpecker feeds them. A shepherd and his wife find them and foster them to manhood, as simple shepherds. The twins, still ignorant of their true origins, prove to be natural leaders. Each acquires many followers. When they discover the truth of their birth, they kill Amulius and restore Numitor to his throne. Rather than wait to inherit Alba Longa, they choose to found a new city.

Romulus wants to found the new city on the Palatine Hill; Remus prefers the Aventine Hill. They agree to determine the site through augury but when each claims the results in his own favor, they quarrel over which land is their own. Remus is then killed by Romulus by a stone. Romulus founds the new city, names it Rome, after himself, and creates its first legions and senate. The new city grows rapidly, swelled by landless refugees; as most of these are male, and unmarried, Romulus arranges the abduction of women from the neighboring Sabines. The ensuing war ends with the joining of Sabines and Romans as one Roman people. Thanks to divine favour and Romulus' inspired leadership, Rome becomes a dominant force, but Romulus himself becomes increasingly autocratic, and disappears or dies in mysterious circumstances. In later forms of the myth, he ascends to heaven, and is identified with Quirinus, the divine personification of the Roman people.

The legend as a whole encapsulates Rome's ideas of itself, its origins and moral values. For modern scholarship, it remains one of the most complex and problematic of all foundation myths, particularly in the matter and manner of Remus' death. Ancient historians had no doubt that Romulus gave his name to the city. Most modern historians believe his name a back-formation from the name Rome; the basis for Remus' name and role remain subjects of ancient and modern speculation. The myth was fully developed into something like an "official", chronological version in the Late Republican and early Imperial era; Roman historians dated the city's foundation to between 758 and 728 BC, and Plutarch reckoned the twins' birth year as c. 27/28 March 771 BC. An earlier tradition that gave Romulus a distant ancestor in the semi-divine Trojan prince Aeneas was further embellished, and Romulus was made the direct ancestor of Rome's first Imperial dynasty. Possible historical bases for the broad mythological narrative remain unclear and disputed. The image of the she-wolf suckling the divinely fathered twins became an iconic representation of the city and its founding legend, making Romulus and Remus preeminent among the feral children of ancient mythography.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Discovery of Brazil

The fleet under the command of the 32–33-year old Cabral departed from Lisbon on 9 March 1500 at noon. The previous day it had been given a public send-off which included a Mass and celebrations attended by the King, his court and a huge crowd. On the morning of 14 March the flotilla passed Gran Canaria, in the Canary Islands. It sailed onward to Cape Verde, a Portuguese colony situated on the West African coast, which was reached on 22 March. The next day, a nau commanded by Vasco de Ataíde with 150 men disappeared without a trace. The fleet crossed the Equator on 9 April, and sailed westward as far as possible from the African continent in what was known as the volta do mar (literally "turn of the sea") navigational technique. Seaweed was sighted on 21 April, which led the sailors to believe that they were nearing the coast. They were proven correct the next afternoon, Wednesday 22 April 1500, when the fleet anchored near what Cabral christened the Monte Pascoal ("Easter Mount", it being the week of Easter). The spot is on the northeast coast of present-day Brazil.

The Portuguese detected inhabitants on the shore, and all ships' captains gathered aboard Cabral's lead ship on 23 April. Cabral ordered Nicolau Coelho, a captain who had experience from Vasco da Gama's voyage to India, to go ashore and make contact. He set foot on land and exchanged gifts with the indigenous people. After Coelho returned, Cabral took the fleet north, where after traveling 65 kilometres (40 mi) along the coast, it anchored on 24 April in what the commander-in-chief named Porto Seguro (Safe Port). The place was a natural harbor, and Afonso Lopes (pilot of the lead ship) brought two natives aboard to confer with Cabral.

As in the first contact, the meeting was friendly and Cabral presented the locals with gifts. The inhabitants were stone age hunter-gatherers, to whom the Europeans assigned the generic label "Indians". The men collected food by stalking game, fishing and foraging, while the women engaged in small-scale farming. They were divided into countless rival tribes. The tribe which Cabral met was the Tupiniquim. Some of these groups were nomadic and others sedentary—having a knowledge of fire but not metalworking. A few tribes engaged in cannibalism. On 26 April, as more and more curious and friendly natives appeared, Cabral ordered his men to build an altar inland where a Christian Mass was held—the first celebrated on the soil of what would later become Brazil. He, along with the ships' crews, participated.

The following days were spent stockpiling water, food, wood and other provisions. The Portuguese also built a massive—perhaps 7 metres (23 ft) long—wooden cross. Cabral ascertained that the new land lay east of the demarcation line between Portugal and Spain that had been specified in the Treaty of Tordesillas. The territory was thus within the sphere allotted to Portugal. To solemnize Portugal's claim to the land, the wooden cross was erected and a second religious service held on 1 May. In honor of the cross, Cabral named the newly discovered land Ilha de Vera Cruz (Island of the True Cross). The next day a supply ship under the command of either Gaspar de Lemos or André Gonçalves (the sources conflict on who was sent) returned to Portugal to apprise the King of the discovery.

[Duke of Buckingham]

June 22

217 BC – Battle of Raphia: Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt defeats Antiochus III the Great of the Seleucid kingdom.
168 BC – Battle of Pydna: Romans under Lucius Aemilius Paullus defeat Macedonian King Perseus who surrenders after the battle, ending the Third Macedonian War.
1527 – Fatahillah chased away Portugal from Sunda Kelapa harbour, and peoples celebrated it as birthday of Jakarta, Indonesia.
1593 – Battle of Sisak: Allied Christian troops defeat the Turks.
1622 – Portuguese forces repel a Dutch invasion at the Battle of Macau during the Dutch–Portuguese War.
1633 – The Holy Office in Rome forces Galileo Galilei to recant his view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe in the form he presented it in, after heated controversy.
1774 – The British pass the Quebec Act, setting out rules of governance for the colony of Quebec in British North America.
1783 – A poisonous cloud caused by the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland reaches Le Havre in France.
1807 – In the Chesapeake–Leopard Affair, the British warship HMS Leopard attacks and boards the American frigate USS Chesapeake.
1813 – War of 1812: After learning of American plans for a surprise attack on Beaver Dams in Ontario, Laura Secord sets out on a 30 kilometer journey on foot to warn Lieutenant James FitzGibbon.
1825 – The British Parliament abolishes feudalism and the seigneurial system in British North America.
1839 – Cherokee leaders Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot are assassinated for signing the Treaty of New Echota, which had resulted in the Trail of Tears.
1870 – US Congress created the United States Department of Justice
1893 – The Royal Navy battleship HMS Camperdown accidentally rams the British Mediterranean Fleet flagship HMS Victoria which sinks taking 358 crew with her, including the fleet's commander, Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon.
1897 – British colonial officers Charles Walter Rand and Lt. Charles Egerton Ayerst are assassinated in Pune, Maharashtra, India by the Chapekar brothers and Mahadeo Vinayak Ranade, who are later caught and hanged.
1898 – Spanish–American War: United States Marines land in Cuba.
1906 – The flag of Sweden is adopted.
1907 – The London Underground's Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway opens.
1911 – George V and Mary of Teck are crowned King and Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1918 – The Hammond Circus Train Wreck kills 86 and injures 127 near Hammond, Indiana.
1922 – Herrin massacre: 19 strikebreakers and 2 union miners are killed in Herrin, Illinois.
1940 – France is forced to sign the Second Compiègne armistice with Germany.
1941 – Germany invades the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.
1941 – The June Uprising in Lithuania begins.
1942 – Erwin Rommel is promoted to Field Marshal after the capture of Tobruk.
1944 – Opening day of the Soviet Union's Operation Bagration against the Army Group Centre.
1944 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill.
1945 – The Battle of Okinawa comes to an end.
1954 – In Christchurch (New Zealand) Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme murder Pauline's mother because they think she is in the way of their close friendship (movie Heavenly Creatures by Peter Jackson in 1994). See Parker–Hulme murder case.
1957 – The Soviet Union launches an R-12 missile for the first time (in the Kapustin Yar).
1962 – An Air France Boeing 707 jet crashes in bad weather in Guadeloupe, West Indies, killing 113.
1969 – The Cuyahoga River catches fire, triggering a crack-down on pollution in the river.
1978 – Charon, a satellite of the dwarf planet Pluto, is discovered by American astronomer James W. Christy.
1984 – Virgin Atlantic Airways launches with its first flight from London Heathrow Airport.
1990 – Checkpoint Charlie is dismantled in Berlin.
2002 – An earthquake measuring 6.5 Mw strikes a region of northwestern Iran killing at least 261 people and injuring 1,300 others and eventually causing widespread public anger due to the slow official response.
2007 – An F5 tornado strikes Elie, Manitoba in Canada; part of the town is destroyed, but there are no fatalities or injuries.
2009 – Washington Metro train collision: Two Metro trains collide in Washington, D.C., USA, killing nine and injuring over 80.
2009 – Eastman Kodak Company announces that it will discontinue sales of the Kodachrome Color Film, concluding its 74-year run as a photography icon.
2012 – Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo is removed from office by impeachment and succeeded by Federico Franco.
2012 – A Turkish Air Force McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II fighter plane is shot down by the Syrian Armed Forces, killing both of the plane's pilots and worsening already-strained relations between Turkey and Syria.


Battle of Macau

The Battle of Macau in 1622 was a conflict of the Dutch-Portuguese War fought in the Portuguese settlement of Macau, in southeastern China. The Portuguese, outnumbered and without adequate fortification, managed to repel the Dutch in a much-celebrated victory on June 24 after a three-day battle. To date, the battle remains the only major engagement that was fought between two European powers on the Chinese mainland.

Being a great victory for the Portuguese in Macau, the battle was commemorated in a number of ways. When the English traveler Peter Mundy arrived in Macau in 1637, he described a children's dance which depicted a "battaille betweene the Portugalls and the Dutch... where the Dutch were overcome, butt withoutt any reproachfull speeche or Disgracefull action to thatt Nation." In 1871, a monument of the battle was erected in the Victory Garden. Also, after the victory, the residents of Macao began to celebrate on June 24 as the City Day to commemorate the victory. This day was a public holiday on the Macau Peninsula and was observed every year until the handover of Macau to China in 1999.


Spanish–American War

On June 20, a U.S. fleet commanded by Captain Henry Glass, consisting of the armored cruiser USS Charleston and three transports carrying troops to the Philippines, entered Guam's Apra Harbor, Captain Glass having opened sealed orders instructing him to proceed to Guam and capture it. Charleston fired a few cannon rounds at Fort Santa Cruz without receiving return fire. Two local officials, not knowing that war had been declared and believing the firing had been a salute, came out to Charleston to apologize for their inability to return the salute. Glass informed them that the U.S. and Spain were at war.

The following day, Glass sent Lt. William Braunersruehter to meet the Spanish Governor to arrange the surrender of the island and the Spanish garrison there. Some 54 Spanish infantry were captured and transported to the Philippines as prisoners of war. No U.S. forces were left on Guam, but the only U.S. citizen on the island, Frank Portusach, told Captain Glass that he would look after things until U.S. forces returned.


Second Armistice at Compiègne

The Second Armistice at Compiègne was signed at 18:50 on 22 June 1940 near Compiègne, France, between Nazi Germany and the French Third Republic. Following the decisive German victory in the Battle of France (10 May–21 June 1940), it established a German occupation zone in Northern France that encompassed all English Channel and Atlantic Ocean ports and left the remainder "free" to be governed by the French. Adolf Hitler deliberately chose Compiègne Forest as the site to sign the armistice due to its symbolic role as the site of the 1918 Armistice with Germany that signaled the end of World War I with Germany's surrender.


Charon (moon)

Charon is the largest satellite of the dwarf planet Pluto. It was discovered in 1978 at the United States Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station (NOFS). Following the 2005 discovery of two other natural satellites of Pluto (Nix and Hydra), in 2011, a fourth, S/2011 P 1, and on July 11, 2012, a fifth satellite S/2012 P 1, Charon may also be referred to as (134340) Pluto I. The New Horizons mission is scheduled to visit Charon and Pluto in July 2015.

Charon was discovered by U.S. Naval Observatory astronomer James Christy, using the 1.55-meter telescope at NOFS, and was formally announced to the world via the International Astronomical Union on July 7, 1978. On June 22, 1978, he had been examining highly magnified images of Pluto on photographic plates taken at the 61-inch Flagstaff telescope two of months prior. Christy noticed that a slight elongation appeared periodically. Later, the bulge was confirmed on plates dating back to April 29, 1965.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Your mind hears everything your body says.

Very Crazy Duke

[Duke of Buckingham]

The Invasion of Russia June 24 1812

The Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 resulted in the Anglo-Russian War (1807–12). Emperor Alexander I declared war on the United Kingdom after the British attack on Denmark in September 1807. British men-of-war supported the Swedish fleet during the Finnish War and had victories over the Russians in the Gulf of Finland in July 1808 and August 1809. However, the success of the Russian army on the land forced Sweden to sign peace treaties with Russia in 1809 and with France in 1810 and to join the Continental Blockade against Britain. But Franco-Russian relations became progressively worse after 1810, and the Russian war with the UK effectively ended. In April 1812, Britain, Russia and Sweden signed secret agreements directed against Napoleon.

In 1812, at the height of his power, Napoleon invaded Russia with a pan-European Grande Armée, consisting of 650,000 men (270,000 Frenchmen and many soldiers of allies or subject areas). He aimed to compel Emperor Alexander I to remain in the Continental System and to remove the imminent threat of a Russian invasion of Poland. The French forces crossed the Niemen River on 23 June 1812. Russia proclaimed a Patriotic War, while Napoleon proclaimed a Second Polish war. The Poles supplied almost 100,000 men for the invasion-force, but against their expectations, Napoleon avoided any concessions to Poland, having in mind further negotiations with Russia.

The Grande Armée marched through Russia, winning a number of relatively minor engagements and the major Battle of Smolensk on 16–18 August. However, in the same days, a part of the French Army led by Marshal Nicolas Oudinot was stopped in the Battle of Polotsk by the right wing of the Russian Army, under command of General Peter Wittgenstein. This prevented the French march on the Russian capital, Saint Petersburg; the fate of the invasion was to be decided in Moscow, where Napoleon himself led his forces.

Russians used scorched-earth tactics, and harried the Grande Armée with light Cossack cavalry. The Grande Armée did not adjust its operational methods in response. This refusal led to most of the losses of the main column of the Grande Armée, which in one case amounted to 95,000 men, including deserters, in a single week.

At the same time, the main Russian army retreated for almost three months. This constant retreat led to the unpopularity of Field Marshal Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly and a veteran, Prince Mikhail Kutuzov, was made the new Commander-in-Chief by Tsar Alexander I. Finally, the two armies engaged in the Battle of Borodino on 7 September, in the vicinity of Moscow. The battle was the largest and bloodiest single-day action of the Napoleonic Wars, involving more than 250,000 men and resulting in at least 70,000 casualties. The French captured the main positions on the battlefield, but failed to destroy the Russian army; logistical difficulties meant that French losses were irreplaceable, unlike Russian ones.

Napoleon entered Moscow on 14 September, after the Russian Army retreated yet again. But by then, the Russians had largely evacuated the city and even released criminals from the prisons to inconvenience the French; furthermore, the governor, Count Fyodor Rostopchin, ordered the city to be burnt. Alexander I refused to capitulate, and the peace talks, attempted by Napoleon, failed. In October, with no sign of clear victory in sight, Napoleon began the disastrous Great Retreat from Moscow.

At the Battle of Maloyaroslavets the French tried to reach Kaluga, where they could find food and forage supplies. But the replenished Russian Army blocked the road, and Napoleon was forced to retreat the same way he had come to Moscow, through the heavily ravaged areas along the Smolensk road. In the following weeks, the Grande Armée was dealt a catastrophic blow by the onset of the Russian Winter, the lack of supplies and constant guerrilla warfare by Russian peasants and irregular troops.

When the remnants of the Napoleon's army crossed the Berezina River in November, only 27,000 fit soldiers remained, with some 380,000 men dead or missing and 100,000 captured. Napoleon then left his men and returned to Paris, to prepare the defence against the advancing Russians, and the campaign effectively ended on 14 December 1812, when the last enemy troops left Russia. The Russians had lost around 210,000 men, but with their shorter supply lines, they soon replenished their armies.

[Duke of Buckingham]

They are repeating a very bad word in Portuguese and are saying a lot of stupid things and I mean a lot.

[Duke of Buckingham]

On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies

Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper" ("On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies"),[einstein 3] his third paper that year, was received on June 30 and published September 26. It reconciles Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism with the laws of mechanics by introducing major changes to mechanics close to the speed of light. This later became known as Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The paper mentions the names of only five other scientists, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Hertz, Christian Doppler, and Hendrik Lorentz. It does not have any references to any other publications. Many of the ideas had already been published by others, as detailed in history of special relativity and relativity priority dispute. However, Einstein's paper introduces a theory of time, distance, mass, and energy that was consistent with electromagnetism, but omitted the force of gravity.

At the time, it was known that Maxwell's equations, when applied to moving bodies, led to asymmetries (Moving magnet and conductor problem), and that it had not been possible to discover any motion of the Earth relative to the 'light medium'. Einstein puts forward two postulates to explain these observations. First, he applies the principle of relativity, which states that the laws of physics remain the same for any non-accelerating frame of reference (called an inertial reference frame), to the laws of electrodynamics and optics as well as mechanics. In the second postulate, Einstein proposes that the speed of light has the same value in all inertial frames of reference, independent of the state of motion of the emitting body.

Special relativity is thus consistent with the result of the Michelson–Morley experiment, which had not detected a medium of conductance (or aether) for light waves unlike other known waves that require a medium (such as water or air). Einstein may not have known about that experiment, but states,

Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the "light medium," suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest.

The speed of light is fixed, and thus not relative to the movement of the observer. This was impossible under Newtonian classical mechanics. Einstein argues,

… the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the "Principle of Relativity") to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. These two postulates suffice for the attainment of a simple and consistent theory of the electrodynamics of moving bodies based on Maxwell's theory for stationary bodies. The introduction of a "luminiferous ether" will prove to be superfluous in as much as the view here to be developed will not require an "absolutely stationary space" provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place.

The theory […] is based—like all electrodynamics—on the kinematics of the rigid body, since the assertions of any such theory have to do with the relationships between rigid bodies (systems of co-ordinates), clocks, and electromagnetic processes. Insufficient consideration of this circumstance lies at the root of the difficulties which the electrodynamics of moving bodies at present encounters.

It had previously been proposed, by George FitzGerald in 1889 and by Lorentz in 1892, independently of each other, that the Michelson-Morley result could be accounted for if moving bodies were contracted in the direction of their motion. Some of the paper's core equations, the Lorentz transforms, had been published by Joseph Larmor (1897, 1900), Hendrik Lorentz (1895, 1899, 1904) and Henri Poincaré (1905), in a development of Lorentz's 1904 paper. Einstein's presentation differed from the explanations given by FitzGerald, Larmor, and Lorentz, but was similar in many respects to the formulation by Poincaré (1905).

His explanation arises from two axioms. First, Galileo's idea that the laws of nature should be the same for all observers that move with constant speed relative to each other. Einstein writes,

The laws by which the states of physical systems undergo change are not affected, whether these changes of state be referred to the one or the other of two systems of co-ordinates in uniform translatory motion.

The second is the rule that the speed of light is the same for every observer.

Any ray of light moves in the "stationary" system of co-ordinates with the determined velocity c, whether the ray be emitted by a stationary or by a moving body.

The theory, now called the special theory of relativity, distinguishes it from his later general theory of relativity, which considers all observers to be equivalent. Special relativity gained widespread acceptance remarkably quickly, confirming Einstein's comment that it had been "ripe for discovery" in 1905. Acknowledging the role of Max Planck in the early dissemination of his ideas, Einstein wrote in 1913 "The attention that this theory so quickly received from colleagues is surely to be ascribed in large part to the resoluteness and warmth with which he [Planck] intervened for this theory". In addition, the improved mathematical formulation of the theory by Hermann Minkowski in 1907 was influential in gaining acceptance for the theory. Also, and most importantly, the theory was supported by an ever-increasing body of confirmatory experimental evidence.

[Duke of Buckingham]

Time is only another dimension that we must understand. There is a time to be active and a time to stop.

Ric