11th October: Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt was born on this date in 1884. Here are 10 words of wisdom from her:

1. Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
2. We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot.
3. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
4. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
5. A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.
6. You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.
7. It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
8. Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn't have the power to say yes.
9. It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.
10. Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

10 October: Ignobel Prizes

The winners of this year's Ignobel prizes are announced around about now. The Ignobel prize is a spoof on the Nobel Prizes and are awarded for scientific studies that may seem, at first glance, rather silly - but on closer reflection, make you think. As I write this I don't know this year's winners, but here are 10 of my favourites from years gone by.

1. ANATOMY: Frans de Waal (Netherlands/USA) and Jennifer Pokorny (US) for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. (2012)
2. CHEMISTRY: Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M Castano of Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico, for creating diamonds from Tequila. (2009)
3. ARCHAEOLOGY: Astolfo Gomes de Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino, for showing that armadillos can mix up the contents of an archaeological site. (2008)
4. ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches. (2006)
5. MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for Dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness. (2005)
6. ASTROPHYSICS Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that Black Holes fulfil all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. (2001)
7. COMPUTER SCIENCE Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a Cat is walking across your computer keyboard. (2000)
8. ENGINEERING: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect Whale snot, using a remote-control Helicopter. (2010)
9. BIOLOGY: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using Bacteria extracted from the faeces of giant Pandas. (2009)
10. JOINT PRIZE IN BIOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY: Marie Dacke [Sweden, Australia], Emily Baird [Sweden, Australia, Germany], Marcus Byrne [South Africa, UK], Clarke Scholtz [South Africa], and Eric J. Warrant [Sweden, Australia, Germany], for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way. (2013)

9th October: Give Peace a Chance Day

For Give Peace a Chance Day, 10 quotes about peace:

1. Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding. Albert Einstein
2. When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. Jimi Hendrix
3. A people free to choose will always choose peace. Ronald Reagan
4. Peace begins with a smile. Mother Teresa
5. Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without. Buddha
6. You cannot find peace by avoiding life. Virginia Woolf
7. It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it. Eleanor Roosevelt
8. If you want peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. Desmond Tutu
9. It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war. John F. Kennedy
10. Peace is its own reward. Mahatma Gandhi

8th October: Che Guevara

In Bolivia, Che Guevara is seen as a saint by farm workers who actually pray to him for assistance and for rain. They honour him particularly on this, the date on which he was captured in La Higuera. 10 things you might not know about Che Guevara:

1. He was half Irish. His full name at birth was actually Ernesto Guevaro Lynch. His father said of him, "in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels". During a world tour, Che stopped off in Limerick City to celebrate St Patrick's day and wrote to his father, "I am in this green Ireland of your ancestors."
2. He was a geeky kid who suffered from asthma, played chess and loved poetry. He could also recite Rudyard Kipling's "If—" from memory. Although he did like sport as well - swimming, football, golf, shooting and cycling; he was an avid rugby player and played at fly-half for Club Universitario de Buenos Aires.
3. He was a qualified doctor. He got his medical degree at the University of Buenos Aires in 1953. He had a particular interest in leprosy, and for a while, considered going to Africa to work as a doctor.
4. He not only read poetry, but wrote it as well. He once wrote a poem dedicated to an elderly washerwoman who was one of his patients. To him, she represented "the most forgotten and exploited class" and in the poem he promised to fight for a better world for all the poor and exploited.
5. The 2004 film The Motorcycle Diaries was based on Guevara's own account of a motorcycle trip he took through South America while he was a student.
6. He once took part in a fishing contest along with Fidel Castro and the writer Ernest Hemingway.
7. He became known as "Che" rather than "Ernesto" because he often used the Argentinian interjection, "Che" which is similar to the word "Eh" as used by Canadians.
8. He was allergic to Mosquito bites. When bitten, the bite would turn into a painful cyst the size of a walnut.
9. When he was Finance Minister under Fidel Castro in Cuba, he would sign bills simply, "Che" to signal how much he despised money and capitalism.
10. His executioner was an alcoholic sergeant in the Bolivian army called Mario Terán. Terán volunteered for the job because three of his friends, all called Mario, had been killed by Guevara's guerillas. When it came to pulling the trigger, though, Terán hesitated slightly, causing Guevara to utter his last words: "Shoot me, you coward! You are only going to kill a man!" After the execution a military doctor cut off Guevara's hands so that they could be sent to Buenos Aries, where the police had his fingerprints on file, for formal identification.

7th October: Neils Bohr

Neils Bohr is a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1922 for contributions to quantum mechanics. He was born 7 October 1885. 10 quotes from him:

1. Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
2. Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.
3. The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true.
4. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
5. Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
6. Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.
7. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
8. An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
9. The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.
10. A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.

6th October: Discovery of Potassium

Potassium was first discovered on this date in 1807 by Sir Humphrey Davy. 10 things you might not know about potassium:

1. It is a very light and soft metal. It is so soft that in its pure form, it can be cut with a knife. Freshly cut potassium is silvery in appearance, but it begins to tarnish toward grey immediately after being exposed to air.
2. Potassium compounds emit a lilac or violet flame when burned.
3. Potassium is the second least dense metal after lithium.
4. Potassium was the first metal to be isolated using electrolysis.
5. In its various compounds, potassium makes up about 2.6% of the weight of the Earth's crust and is the seventh most abundant element. Granite contains 5% potassium, well above the average in the Earth's crust.
6. In nature, it is only found in compounds, because it reacts violently with many other things, most notably oxygen and water. It was originally created inside type II supernovas.
7. The name potassium was derived from potash, from which the element was first isolated. It has the unlikely seeming chemical symbol K from a Neo-Latin word, Kalium, meaning alkali, which in turn came from an Arabic word meaning "plant ashes".
8. Potassium is a vital element for all living cells, including ours. It helps with nerve transmissions. Foods rich in potassium include yam, Parsley, dried Apricots, dried Milk, Chocolate, various nuts (especially Almonds and Pistachios), Potatoes, Bamboo shoots, Bananas, Avocados, soybeans, and bran, although it is also present in sufficient quantities in most fruits, vegetables, meat and fish.
9. Potassium carbonate (K2CO3 or potash) is used in the manufacture of glass, soap, colour TV tubes, fluorescent lamps, textile dyes and pigments. In 1840, Justus Liebig discovered that potassium is a necessary element for plants and that most types of soil lack potassium. His discovery caused a steep rise in demand for potassium based fertilizers.
10. The superoxide KO2 is an orange solid that acts as a portable source of Oxygen and a carbon dioxide absorber. It is widely used in respiration systems in mines, submarines and spacecraft because it takes up less volume than gaseous oxygen.

5th October: Ray Kroc's birthday

Ray Kroc was the founder of McDonald's and was born on this date in 1902. He opened his first restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955. It is now the site of a McDonald's museum. So here are 10 things you didn't know about McDonald’s.

1. The Queen owns a McDonald's restaurant as part of her property portfolio.
2. 68 million people a day eat at a McDonald's somewhere in the world. That's more than the population of the UK. Yet McDonald’s isn't the world's largest fast-food chain. Subway is.
3. McDonald's has 761,000 employees worldwide. That's more than the population of Luxembourg.
4. When McDonald’s first opened, they didn't sell Hamburgers, but Hot dogs.
5. Surveys have shown that 88% of people could identify the golden arches logo (designed by Jim Schindler in 1962) while only 54% could recognise the Christian cross.
6. Their salads are more fattening than their burgers. A McDonald’s crispy chicken and bacon salad offers 380 calories, while a hamburger is a mere 250.
7. In Japan, where 'r' is rarely pronounced, Ronald McDonald is Donald McDonald.
8. The world's largest McDonald’s is in Orlando, Florida, a multi-level McDonald’s which measures 30,000 square feet. The biggest UK McDonald’s restaurant is in the Olympic Park in London. It opened just in time for the London 2012 Games.
9. McDonald's is the world's largest distributor of toys, with one included in 20% of all sales.
10. In 2005 a man called Ronald McDonald robbed... a Wendy's.