28th March: Maxim Gorky

Today, 10 quotes by Maxim Gorky, who was born on this date in 1868.

1. Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is.
2. When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.
3. When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.
4. You can't do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.
5. Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.
6. Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man - Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?
7. In the carriages of the past you can't go anywhere.
8. Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.
9. Writers build castles in the air, the reader lives inside, and the publisher inns the rent.
10. For sadness and gladness live within us side by side, almost inseparable; the one succeeding the other with an elusive, inappreciable swiftness.

27th March: Fly a Kite Day

Today is Fly A Kite Day. So here are ten facts about kites:

1. The first kites were flown in China in the 5th-century BC. Chinese philosophers Mozi (also Mo Di) and Lu Ban (also Gongshu Ban) were said to have invented them. These first kites were made from silk with Bamboo frames.
2. Marco Polo arrived back from his travels towards the end of the 13th century with tales of kites. Actual kites were brought back to Europe by sailors from Japan and Malaysia in the 16th and 17th centuries.
3. Kites have had numerous uses throughout the centuries, including measuring distances, fishing, testing the wind, lifting men, signalling, and communication.
4. Kites fly because air flows over the surface producing low pressure above and high pressure below. This same principle, known as "lift" is the reason aeroplanes can fly. In fact, the Wright Brothers used to experiment with kites prior to building their flying machine.
5. The principle of lift applies in liquids as well as in air - so there are such things as underwater kites. They are being developed to harvest renewable power from the flow of water.
6. In 1750 Benjamin Franklin published a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning was caused by electricity by flying a kite in a storm. Although he is famous for this experiment, it's not known whether he ever actually tried it. Scientists did make use of kites in the 19th century though, for such purposes as meteorology, aeronautics, wireless communications and photography.
7. In Asian countries, kite flying is often kite fighting, where the purpose it to cut other kites down. Participants may pass their kite strings through ground glass and glue to make the strings abrasive. Kite fighting in Kabul is most famously depicted in Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner. Kite flying was one of the many recreations banned by those miserable killjoys, the Taliban.
8. In some countries, wind pipes and flutes are attached to kites so they play a tune when flown.
9. The World record for the highest kite was set on September 23, 2014. A team of four flew a 120 square feet (11 m2) kite to 16,009 feet (4,880 m) above ground level. The biggest-ever kite flown for at least 20 minutes was a kite with lifting area of 10,971 square feet (1,019 m2).
10. Weifang, Shandong, China is the kite capital of the world. The largest kite museum in the world is there. The museum has thousands of kites in a display area of 87,188 square feet (8,100 m2). Weifang also hosts an annual international kite festival on large salt flats south of the city.

26th March: Solitude Day

Solitude Day. Neo-Pagans spend all or part of the day alone, meditating in solitude to reconnect with their "inner selves. They might take a quiet walk through the woods, or along a remote river or beach and listen to Nature's music. So today, ten quotes on the subject of solitude.

1. Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. Francis Bacon
2. Solitude sometimes is best society. John Milton
3. A man can be himself only so long as he is alone, and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom, for it is only when he is alone that he is really free. Arthur Schopenhauer
4. Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone. Paul Tillich
5. There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
6. The thoughtful soul to solitude retires. Omar Khayyam
7. Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once. Robert Browning
8. When you have a lot of solitude, any living thing becomes a companion. Jose Mujica
9. Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones. Sydney Smith
10. It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it. Rainer Maria Rilke

25th March: Titan, Saturn's moon

On this date in 1655 Dutch physicist and astronomer Christiaan Huygens discovered Titan, a moon of Saturn. Here are 10 facts about Titan:

1. Huygens, inspired by Galileo's discovery of four of Jupiter's moons, started building telescopes with his brother's help, and, using one of his own Telescopes, was the first to observe a moon orbiting Saturn. He named it simply Saturni Luna (Latin for "Saturn's moon"). As more moons were discovered around Saturn, astronomers began to number them. Titan has been known as Saturn II, Saturn IV and Saturn VI, the latter being its final and official number when the number system was frozen to prevent confusion. John Herschel later suggested the names of the mythological Titans (the brothers and sisters of Cronus, the Greek Saturn) as suitable names for Saturn's largest moons.
2. It is the second-largest moon in the Solar System, after Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Titan is larger than the smallest planet, Mercury. It is 50% bigger than Earth's Moon.
3. It is the only moon to have a dense atmosphere (as far as we know, anyway). Titan's atmosphere is 98.4% nitrogen, 1.4% methane and 0.1–0.2% hydrogen.
4. It used to be thought that Titan was bigger than Ganymede because of Titan's thick, opaque atmosphere. It was only when Voyager I passed close by it in 1980 that we realised this.
5. It is also the only moon where liquid has been observed on its surface. There is only one other object in the Solar system which has liquid on its surface - planet Earth. The liquid on Titan is thought to be liquid methane, and it has weather patterns and surface features similar to those we find on earth, only caused by liquid methane, not Water.
6. The temperature on Titan is about 94 K (−179.2 °C), so it's effing cold up there. Titan only gets 1% as much sunlight as Earth does. It would be even colder if it wasn't for the methane in the atmosphere creating a greenhouse effect.
7. Titan orbits Saturn once every 15 days and 22 hours. Like our own moon, it rotates at the same rate as it orbits, which means if Saturn had inhabitants, they would always see the same side of Titan. Titan has seasons, too - long ones as its year lasts 30 Earth years.
8. In 2004, a spacecraft named Cassini–Huygens (after the discoverers of the various moons) reached the Saturn system and began mapping Titan by radar. The Cassini probe flew by Titan on October 26, 2004, and took the highest-resolution images ever of Titan's surface. On January 14, 2005 Huygens landed on Titan, making Titan the most distant body from Earth to have a space probe land on it.
9. Therefore, scientists have been able to observe, and name, some of the surface features of Titan. These include Xanadu, a large, reflective equatorial area about the size of Australia, which is filled with hills, valleys and chasms. There are also lakes of liquid methane, one of which has a feature called the “magic island,” spotted in images from the Cassini spacecraft taken in 2013 and 2014. It measures about 260 square kilometers (100 square miles) in size – roughly the size of Washington DC. What makes it fascinating is that it was not present in the images taken in 2007 or in later ones taken in 2015. This suggests that Titan’s liquid hydrocarbon seas are active. The predominant theory as to what caused the "magic island" to appear is waves moving slowly on the surface. This theory is supported by the fact that the moon’s Northern Hemisphere, where the sea is located, is entering its summer, and winds are expected to pick up at this time, causing waves.
10. Could there be life on Titan? Dr. Robert Zubrin has pointed out that Titan possesses an abundance of all the elements necessary to support life, and that it might be the most hospitable place in the Solar System for humans to colonise. There may, he says, be liquid water under the surface which could be used to make breathable air, and Nitrogen, methane and ammonia can all be used to produce fertilizer for growing food. The problems would be living in low gravity, and the extreme cold.

24th March: Joseph Priestley

This date in 1733 saw the birth of Joseph Priestley, English clergyman and scientist who discovered Oxygen, sulphur dioxide, silicon fluoride and ammonia. Here are ten facts about him you may not be aware of:

1. He never took a formal science course in his entire life. He was primarily a clergyman (classic case of nominative determinism here - a clergyman called Priestley!) with an interest in science.
2. At the age of four he could recite all 107 questions and answers of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, leading his aunt, with whom he lived, to pursue the best education for him with a view to him entering the ministry.
3. When he was about 17, he became seriously ill and thought he was going to die. The illness shook up his religious beliefs and left him with a stutter, which delayed his entry to the ministry for a while.
4. His first position as a minister was in Needham Market, Suffolk. It didn't work out well. He missed urban life and theological debate. His congregation were traditional in their beliefs and many stopped attending his church when they found out how progressive he was. He moved to Cheshire which turned out to be a much more suitable placement.
5. His interest in science was nurtured by his friendship with Benjamin Franklin (the one who flew Kites in thunderstorms). Priestley began reproducing some of Franklin's experiments which led to his discovery that graphite conducts Electricity. Priestley went on to write a book about electricity - The History of Electricity, which was well received by the scientific community.
6. When he moved to a position as a pastor in Leeds, he lived next door to a brewery and became intrigued by the gas (which he called "air") which was given off by the fermenting grain, would float to the ground and extinguish smouldering wood chips. This was carbon dioxide. He was so interested in it that he found a way to make it at home. One of the things he tried doing with it was dissolving it in Water. He found it made the water taste tangy. He'd just invented soda water. This got him elected to the French Academy of Sciences.
7. Priestley was considered for the position of astronomer on James Cook's second voyage to the South Seas, but wasn't chosen. However, he told the crew how to make soda water, which he believed might be a cure for scurvy.
8. He found a way to collect gases by floating them on Mercury and heating them. One of the gases he found in this way was oxygen, which interested him because, unlike the other gases he'd found, he could burn candles in it and Mice put in the chamber didn't die. He was also the first to observe photosynthesis in plants.
9. Priestley was also the person who first discovered that India gum could be used to rub out lead Pencil marks. He invented the eraser, or rubber.
10. Priestley persisted in some antiquated beliefs about science, however. Even though he discovered oxygen, he rejected the idea that it was oxygen that made things burn. He believed in a theory called phlogiston theory, that there was an element present in combustible materials that was released as they burned. He refused to accept the new theories scientists were coming up with, which we accept as correct today. The 19th-century French naturalist George Cuvier said of him that he was "the father of modern chemistry [who] never acknowledged his daughter". 

23rd March: Asparagus

The French Revolutionary Calendar celebrated asparagus today, so here are ten facts about asparagus you may not know:

1. The earliest depiction of asparagus was on an Egyptian frieze dating back to 3,000 BC. It’s said Queen Nefertiti proclaimed it to be the food of the Gods. By 160BC people like Cato The Elder, a Roman statesman, were writing about how to grow it. The Romans loved asparagus. Caesar Augustus would send out special “asparagus fleets” to collect the very best plants, and have his fastest runners take them to the Alps to be frozen. France’s King Louis XIV dubbed asparagus the “king of vegetables” and was first to have them cultivated in greenhouses. Nicholas Culpeper, a 17th century English botanist, herbalist, physician and astrologer wrote in The English Phystian that asparagus “stirreth up bodily lust in Man or Woman”, in other words, it's an aphrodisiac.
2. The Romans had a saying, “Velocius quam asparagi conquantur!” or “Faster than cooking asparagus,” which meant "hurry up!"
3. The word asparagus originates from the Persian word for "sprout" or "shoot". It is sometimes called "sparrow grass".
4. The country which produces the most asparagus is China, followed by Peru and Germany.
5. Asparagus contains no fat or cholesterol. It is high in asparagine (an amino acid which acts as a diuretic) and helpful for removing salts from the body which is good for people with oedema, high blood pressure, or other heart-related issues. Asparagus is one of the best vegetable sources for riboflavin (Vitamin B2) which studies have shown can help reduce the frequency of migraine headaches. It is believed that the vegetable helps certain enzymes break down alcohol so it can also be a hangover cure. The aphrodisiac label probably comes from the amount of Vitamin E in it.
6. OK, so we can't do asparagus without mentioning smelly urine. Certain compounds in asparagus are metabolised to ammonia and various sulfur-containing products, including thiols and thioesters, which give urine the characteristic smell. What you may not know is that only about 25% of people can smell this - those with a specific gene.
7. Most asparagus is Green, although there is a purple variety. White asparagus is basically green asparagus which has been deprived of sunlight. If white asparagus isn't put in a sealed box as soon as it is picked, it will turn Pink, and there is no market for pink asparagus.
8. Most of the asparagus on your plate is a male clone. This is because the female plants expend too much energy producing red berries.
9. Once planted, it takes three years for an asparagus plant to produce a harvest, but they can be harvested for around 15 years after that. The plants are fast growing, too - when it's hot, asparagus plants can grow up to 7 inches a day.
10. There is a museum dedicated to asparagus. The European Asparagus Museum (Europäisches Spargelmuseum in German), is in Schrobenhausen, Bavaria, Germany and contains everything about asparagus - its history, botany, cultivation, art and curiosities.

22 March: First metered London taxis

On this date in 1907 the first cabs with taxi meters began operating in London. Some things you may not know about London taxis.

1. While the majority of them are Black, it isn't a legal requirement. Black is popular because it makes them recognisable. They come in a variety of colours and company liveries, including "Newspaper" ones. 50 golden cabs were produced for the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002.
2. You may know that the test London taxi drivers have to pass to get their licence is called "The Knowledge". You may not know that it involves memorising 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks; that there are two levels - Green, which covers central London and Yellow, which covers smaller suburban areas; that there is an 80% failure rate; and that neurologists have found that London taxi drivers have larger hippocampuses (the part of the Brain responsible for spacial navigation) than regular people.
3. Only around 2% of London's black cab drivers are women.
4. There are approximately 21,000 black cabs in London. 200,000 cab journeys are made in the city every day, 3.2 miles in length on average; at an average speed 9mph. The average fare is £11.79. On average a cab driver will make 5226 journeys a year.
5. Oliver Cromwell set up the Fellowship of Master Hackney Carriages by Act of Parliament in 1654. Motorised taxis didn't appear until the early 20th century.
6. The vehicles used as black cabs are called TX4s. This is the iconic London black cab and they are built by The London Taxi Company. These are gradually being replaced by TX1s, introduced in 1997, a more modern vehicle which allegedly has a button the passenger can press to mute the driver if he talks too much!
7. The Governor's official car In the Falkland Islands was a London taxi between 1976 and 2010.
8. The ward “taxi” comes from taximeter, the counter used to calculate the fare. “Cab” was short for “cabriolet”, a French word for “to leap”, because that is what one did in order to get off.
9. It's da law! It is a legal requirement for a London taxi to have a turning circle of 25 feet. This is so they can negotiate the small roundabout in front of the Savoy Hotel. There are some wacky laws which may have been repealed now, but which persisted for a long time, such as, taxicabs had to be tall enough for a passenger to sit comfortably while wearing a Bowler hat, and were legally required (even when motorised) to carry a bale of hay for the Horse. Some say it is legal to urinate on a London taxi’s left rear wheel provided that the driver’s right hand is touching the cab. They support this by quoting the Town Police Clauses Act of 1847, but the Law Commission tends to disagree. Hailing a cab is fraught with legalities, too. It's technically against the law to hail one by yelling "taxi!" In reality, it's likely they simply wouldn't hear you. The correct way is to signal by holding out your arm. Finally, you could get in trouble with the law if you happen to have bubonic plague and try to hail a cab as this was illegal. The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act of 1984 still requires anyone suffering from a notifiable disease to inform the cab driver, who can then decide whether or not to take the fare. If he does, he is required to notify the authorities and disinfect the cab before taking another fare.
10. There are a handful of black cabs which would never stop for you - the ones owned by celebrities. Celebs who own black cabs for their personal use include Stephen Fry, Kate Moss, Yvette Fielding, Bez of the Happy Mondays, Noel Edmonds and Prince Philip.