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November 12

Ferry Boat Inn, behind which Gedling Town was based

Gedling Town Football Club was a semi-professional association football club based in Stoke Bardolph in Nottinghamshire, England. Founded in 1985 as R & R Scaffolding, the works team of a construction firm from Netherfield, the club played its first four seasons in amateur football. Between 1990 and 2008, Gedling competed in three Central Midlands Football League divisions and Division One of the Northern Counties East Football League, winning three league titles in the process. Gedling then joined the Premier Division of the East Midlands Counties Football League at the tenth tier of the English football pyramid, in which the club remained until its dissolution in 2011 due to insolvency. Its home ground from the early 1990s was the Riverside Stadium behind the Ferry Boat Inn (pictured). Tournament records included reaching the third qualifying round of the FA Cup in in 2003–04 and the fourth round of the FA Vase in 2003–04, 2004–05 and 2005–06. The team were nicknamed "The Ferrymen", and their colours were primarily yellow and blue. (Full article...)

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April 12

In cryptography, a Caesar cipher is one of the simplest and most well-known classical encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions further down the alphabet. For example, with a shift of 3, A would be replaced by D, B would become E, and so on. The method is named after Julius Caesar, who used it to communicate with his generals. The encryption step performed by a Caesar cipher is often incorporated as part of more complex schemes, such as the Vigenère cipher, and still has modern application in the ROT13 system. As for all single alphabet substitution ciphers, the Caesar cipher is easily broken and in practice offers no communication security. (more...)

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March 12

Charles II was the King of England, Scotland and Ireland from 30 January 1649 until his death. Charles II's father, Charles I, had been executed in 1649 following the English Civil War; the monarchy was then abolished and replaced with a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell, who had named himself "Lord Protector". In 1660, shortly after Cromwell's death, the monarchy was restored under Charles II. Unlike his father, Charles II was skilled at managing Parliament. It was during his reign that the Whig and Tory political parties developed. He famously fathered numerous illegitimate children, of whom he acknowledged fourteen. Known as the "Merry Monarch", Charles was a patron of the arts and less restrictive than many of his predecessors. By converting to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed, Charles II became the first Roman Catholic to reign over England since Mary I's death in 1558. (more...)

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February 12

Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist who is widely regarded as the greatest scientist of the 20th century. He proposed the theory of relativity and also made major contributions to the development of quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and cosmology. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect and "for his services to Theoretical Physics." After his general theory of relativity was formulated, Einstein became world-famous, an unusual achievement for a scientist. In his later years, his fame exceeded that of any other scientist in history, and in popular culture, Einstein has become a byword for great intelligence or even genius. His is also one of the world's most recognizable faces. (more...)

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January 12

Lottie Dod was a British athlete. She is best known as a tennis player, winning the Wimbledon championships five times. She won her first victory when she was only 15 years old, remaining the youngest player ever to win the tournament for over a century until Martina Hingis won the title in 1996 being three days younger than Dod. In addition to tennis, Dod competed in many other sports. Among others, she won the British amateur golf championships, played for the British national field hockey team, and won a silver medal at the 1908 Summer Olympics in archery. The Guinness Book of Records has named her as the most versatile female athlete of all time, together with track and field athlete and fellow golf player Babe Zaharias. (more...)

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December 12

Victoria was a Queen of the United Kingdom, reigning from 20 June 1837 until her death. Her reign lasted more than sixty-three years—longer than any other British monarch. As well as being Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, she was also the first monarch to use the title Empress of India. The reign of Victoria was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. The Victorian Era was at the height of the Industrial Revolution, a period of great social, economic, and technological change in the United Kingdom. Victoria was the last monarch of the House of Hanover; her successor belonged to the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. (more...)

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November 12

Baseball is a team sport that is popular in the Americas and East Asia. In the United States, baseball has often been called the national pastime, and the total attendance for Major League games is more than that of all other American professional sports combined. In Japan, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, South Korea, and several other countries, baseball is the most popular sport by any measurement. Among American television viewers, however, it has been surpassed in popularity by American football and, in the South, car racing. Although the three most popular team sports in North America are ball games (baseball, basketball and American football), baseball's popularity was once so great that the word "ballgame" in the United States specifically refers to a game of baseball, and "ballfield" or "ballpark" to a baseball diamond. Baseball is played between two teams of nine players each on a baseball field, usually under the authority of one or more officials, called umpires. The game is played in nine innings in which each team gets one turn to and try to score runs while the other pitches and defends in the field, attempting to get three players of the batting team out. (more...)

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October 12

Political graffiti, in Vulgar Latin, found at Pompeii

"Vulgar Latin" is a blanket term covering the vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken mostly in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, starting from the second and third century AD, until its direct merging with the early Romance languages in the ninth century. This spoken Latin differed from the literary language of classical Latin in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some features of Vulgar Latin did not appear until the late Empire. Other features are likely to have been in place in spoken Latin, in at least its basilectal forms, much earlier. Our knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources. First, the comparative method can reconstruct the underlying forms from the attested Romance languages, and note where they differ from classical Latin. Second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin users were likely to commit, providing insight into how Latin speakers used their language. Finally, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in late Latin texts also shed light on the spoken language of the writer. (more...)

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September 12

Anatoly Karpov is a Russian chess grandmaster and former World Champion. He is considered one of the greatest players in chess history, especially in tournament play: he is the most successful tournament player in history, with over 140 first-places to his credit. His overall record is 1,118 wins, 287 losses, and 1,480 draws in 3,163 games, and his peak Elo rating is 2780. Karpov's "boa constrictor" playing style is solidly positional, taking no risks but reacting mercilessly to any tiny errors made by his opponents. As a result, he is often compared to his idol, the famous José Raúl Capablanca, the third World Champion. (more...)

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September 6

The Warsaw Uprising was an armed struggle during the Second World War by the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) to liberate Warsaw from German occupation and Nazi rule. It started on August 1, 1944 as a part of a nationwide uprising, Operation Tempest. The Polish troops resisted the German-led forces until October 2. An estimated 85% of the city was destroyed during the urban guerrilla war and after the end of hostilities. The Uprising started at a crucial point in the war as the Soviet army was approaching Warsaw. Although the Soviet army was within a few hundred metres of the city from September 16 onward, the link between the uprising and the advancing army was never made. This failure and the reasons behind it have been a matter of controversy ever since. (more...)

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August 12

Plate tectonics is a theory of geology developed to explain the phenomenon of continental drift. In the theory of plate tectonics the outermost part of the Earth's interior is made up of two layers, the outer lithosphere and the inner asthenosphere. Plate tectonic theory arose out of two separate geological observations: seafloor spreading and continental drift. Tectonic plates are broadly divisible into two groups: continental and oceanic plates. The distinction is based on the density of their constituent materials; oceanic plates are denser than continental plates due to their greater mafic mineral content. As a result, the oceanic plates generally lie below sea level, while the continental plates project above sea level. (more...)

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July 12

City status in the United Kingdom is granted by the British Monarch to a select group of communities. The status does not apply automatically on the basis of any particular criteria, although it was traditionally given to towns with diocesan cathedrals. Normally, city status is conferred by Royal Charters, but there are some British cities which predate the historical monarchy and have been regarded as cities since "time immemorial." There are currently sixty-six officially designated cities in the UK, of which eight have been created since 2000 in competitions to celebrate the new millennium and the Queen's Golden Jubilee. (more...)

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June 12

Abu Bakr Mohammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi was a versatile Islamic philosopher who made fundamental and lasting contributions to the fields of medicine, chemistry (alchemy) and philosophy. He is credited with, among other things, the discovery of sulfuric acid, the "work horse" of modern chemistry and chemical engineering; and also of alcohol and its use in medicine. Razi was a prolific writer, having produced 184 books and articles, in several fields of science. According to historian Ibn an-Nadim, Razi distinguished himself as the best physician of his time who had fully absorbed Greek medical learning. As a medical educator, he attracted many students of all levels. (more...)

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May 12

The Western is one of the classic American film genres. Westerns are arts works (films, books, television shows) devoted to telling romanticized tales of the American West usually involving cowboys and outlaws. The fundamental plots of Westerns are simple. Life is reduced to its elements: there are none of the complications and technology of modern life. You have the clothes on your back, your gun, and possibly a horse. The art of the Western takes these simple elements and uses them to tell simple morality stories, setting them against the spectacular scenery of the American West. (more...)

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April 12

A soap bubble is a thin film of soap water that forms a hollow spherical shape with an iridescent surface. Soap bubbles usually last for only a few moments and burst either on their own or on contact with another object. Due to their fragile nature they have also become a metaphor for something that is attractive, yet insubstantial. They are mostly used as a children's plaything, but their usage in artistic performances shows that they can be fascinating for adults too. Soap bubbles can help to solve complex mathematical problems of space, as they will always find the smallest surface area between points or edges. (more...)

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March 12

The Parthenon, the most famous surviving building of Ancient Greece and one of the most famous buildings in the world, has stood atop the Acropolis of Athens for nearly 2,500 years. It was built to give thanks to Athena, the city's protecting goddess, for the salvation of Athens and Greece in the Persian Wars. It replaced an older temple which had been destroyed by the Persians. As well as being a temple, the Parthenon was used as a treasury, and was the location of the treasury of the Delian League, which later became the Athenian Empire. (more...)

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