7 June: Tasmania

On this date in 1825 Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) became a separate colony of Australia. Here are some facts about Tasmania.

1. Tasmania is an island (the 26th largest in the world) separated from mainland Australia by the Bass Strait. The state of Tasmania includes 334 other islands as well.
2. The first European known to have caught sight of it was Abel Janszoon Tasman, the Dutch explorer. He didn't land there, but he did give it a name - Anthoonij van Diemenslandt, after his sponsor, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. The British later shortened the name to Van Diemen’s Land, and later still, in 1856, changed the name to Tasmania.
3. The capital city is Hobart, named after Robert Hobart, the British Secretary of State for War and the Colonies at the time of its settlement in 1804. It is known for having the second lowest rainfall of all the Australian state capitals. Other cities include Launceston, Devonport, Burnie, and Ulverstone.
4. Tasmania's tallest mountain is Mount Ossa at 1,617 metres (5,305 feet). The South Esk River is the longest river in Tasmania. Other rivers have the same names as rivers in the UK - The Derwent, the Tamar and the Mersey.
5. Tasmania's official flower is The Tasmanian Blue Gum, Eucalyptus glolulus Labill In favourable situations the Tasmanian Blue Gum can grow into a tree about 200 feet tall.
6. It doesn't have an official animal but it does have an unofficial animal symbol - the Tasmanian Devil, a creature only found wild in Tasmania, which is the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. According to myth, they are man eaters, but there is no proof of this. We do know they have the strongest bite of any living mammal based on its body mass. The most famous Tasmanian Devil is the Warner Brothers Tasmanian Devil cartoon character Taz, introduced in 1954, who had his own series - Taz-Mania.
7. Another animal which used to live in Tasmania is the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger because of the stripes on its back. It wasn't a tiger. It wasn't even a cat. It looked more like a dog - but it wasn't a dog either - it was a marsupial. It was hunted to extinction in 1936, but two of them appear on the coat of arms of Tasmania.
8. Famous people from Tasmania include Errol Flynn, Elizabeth Blackburn, the first woman from Australia to win a Nobel Prize, and Mary Donaldson, now the Crown Princess Mary of Denmark.
9. Tasmania's history has its dark side. The settlers tried to forcibly remove the aboriginal population to other islands. As well as a conflict between the settlers and indigenous people known as the Black War, the settlers brought diseases with them that killed all but 300 Aborigines. Modern historians say what the early settlers did amounted to genocide and ethnic cleansing. The last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine died in 1876. Her name was Truganini.
10. In the 19th century it was Britain’s prime penal colony. About 75,000 convicts were sent there; 40% of all the convicts sent to Australia. The last penal settlement in Tasmania closed in 1877.

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June 6th: The Letter D

It's D day - with a twist. 10 things you didn't know about the fourth letter of the alphabet.

1. The letter D derives from the Semitic letter Daleth and the Greek Delta. These in turn probably derived from a hieroglyph for a fish or a door.
2. D is the 10th most frequently used letter in the English language. In Scrabble, there are two D tiles, worth two points each.
3. In the NATO phonetic alphabet, D is represented by Delta and in Morse code it's -··. In British Sign Language 'd' is indicated by holding the right hand with the index and thumb extended and slightly curved, and the tip of the thumb and finger held against the extended index of the left hand, forming the shape of an upper case letter D.
4. If you write down all the names of consecutive numbers in English (one, two, three, etc) d does not appear until you reach one hundred.
5. There isn't a chemical element with the symbol D, but it is used to represent Deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
6. There is a river in Lincoln City, Oregon, United States called the D River. This river is just 440 feet (130m) long, which was in the Guinness book of records until 1989 as the world's shortest river. It lost its title to the Roe River in Montana at this point, although the people of Lincoln City submitted new measurements to try and get the title back. Presumably the people at Guinness World Records got a bit sick of this as they removed the category for the world's shortest river in 2006. The river was so short that for a long time it didn't have a name at all and was simply called "the Outlet" until the city ran a contest to name it.
7. A D year is a non-leap year which starts on a Thursday. The most recent D year was 2015 and the next one will be 2026. A D year is notable as the one which contains the most Friday the 13ths; in February, March and November.
8. Vitamin D is a group of fat-soluble substances responsible for increasing absorption of calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphate, and zinc. There are not many foods which contain it - it's the one we make in our skin when we go out in the sun.
9. There is a film called D. It's an Indian film released in 2005, a crime drama-thriller directed by Vishram Sawant and co-written by Manish Gupta, and Ram Gopal Varma.
10. Other uses for the letter D include: the Roman numeral for 500; a below average grade in education; specifying the number of sides to Dice in role playing games; a musical note a tone above C, known as Re within the fixed-Do solfege (Do-re-me) system; a penny in pre-decimal British currency; a computer programming language by Walter Bright and D (for Degenerate), a white dwarf in stellar classification.

If you want facts about the D Day landings in WWII: D-Day

5th June: John Maynard Keynes Quotes

John Maynard Keynes, the economist, was born on this date in 1883. I've put together a few quotes from him:

1. The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
2. Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
3. The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
4. There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.
5. Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.
6. It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
7. When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?
8. If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has.
9. It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.
10. When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.

4th June: Rice

The first Sunday in June is the Day of the Rice God in Japan, a rice transplanting festival. Here are a few things you might not know about rice.

1. People have been eating rice since 5000BC - the first traces of rice cultivation dating back this far were found in China, India and Thailand.
2. There are more than 40,000 varieties of rice which grow everywhere in the world except Antarctica. In terms of the varieties we eat, they can be classified into three basic types - short grain, medium grain and long grain. Common food varieties include Thai Jasmine rice, the Italian Arborio rice used in risottos and Basmati. Basmati means ‘the queen of fragrances’ in Hindi and the word also means something in Arabic - ‘my smile’. The rice used for sweets and puddings are still more different varieties. Brown rice and White rice aren't different varieties - just the same ones that have been milled differently. White rice has been milled more and the bran and germ layers removed.
3. Rice is the second most produced crop in the world. Maize is the first, but maize is less important for human consumption. Rice is the most important crop for human food. This is reflected in the language of many of the countries where it is a dietary staple. In China, the word for rice is the same as the word for food. In Japan, the word for meal is the same as the word for cooked rice. In Thailand, people call their family to a meal by saying "eat rice."
4. Drive a Japanese car? The word Toyota translates as "Bountiful Rice Field" and Honda as "The Main Rice Field". Also in Japan, Rice grains are called ‘Little Buddhas’.
5. Of all cereal crops, rice is the most productive. One rice seed can produce up to 3,000 grains. Production is labour intensive (More than half the labour force in Thailand is involved in rice production) and requires a lot of water (5,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of rice). Rice grows best in water-logged fields. Hindus believe that Indra, the god of bad weather, first taught people how to grow rice after the god Vishnu had created it from nothing. In some parts of Asia, farmers still use buffaloes to plough the fields. The harvest takes place once a year and when all the rice has been harvested, some farmers keep their fields flooded so that migratory waterfowl can live there over the winter. China produces the most rice, and 90% of all the rice eaten in the world comes from Asia.
6. People in Asia are also the biggest consumers. People there eat on average 150 kg of rice a year while in Europe, people only eat about 5kg a year.
7. Rice contains (thiamin, niacin) Zinc and phosphorus, with brown rice being richer in it than white. Brown rice has significantly more fibre, more fat and more calories. Rice contains more protein than any other cereal, and no cholesterol. It is not only used for food - you can make booze out of it, too. Rice wine, rice beer, grappa, and sake are all made from rice.
8. In medieval China, they used to add rice to walls to add strength and stability. The walls of the city of Nanjing contained rice.
9. In India, rice is associated with prosperity and with the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi. In Japan, the sun-god Amatereshu-Omi-Kami is associated with it. In Thailand, the goddess Mae Posop, who is considered to be the ‘mother of rice’. Men are not allowed to enter the rice fields there. Rice is commonly a symbol of life and fertility as well as prosperity, which is why people throw it at weddings.
10. A Taiwanese artist has carved a portrait of the new Chinese leader Xi Jinping on a grain of rice.

3rd June: The Pyramids

On this date in 1853 Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, English Egyptologist who excavated at the pyramids and temples of Giza, was born.

What better excuse to present you with 10 facts you didn't know about the pyramids in Egypt.

When we think of "The Pyramids" the image that comes to mind is the three on the Giza plateau including the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu or the Pyramid of Cheops; the other two are called Chephren and Mycerinus. There are more than 130 pyramids in Egypt altogether though, and even more in Sudan. Mexico has some, too, but since the bloke whose birthday it is excavated Giza, the following facts relate to the Great Pyramid and its two companions.

1. The Great Pyramid was the tallest building in the world for getting on for four thousand years. It was built between 2589 BC and 2504 BC and was 146.5 meters (481 feet) tall (it's only 138.8 meters (455 feet) tall now due to erosion and earthquakes). It wasn't until 1311 that people built anything taller - which happened to be Lincoln Cathedral in England. It's now thought that the workers who built the Pyramids may not have been slaves, but highly skilled people who were being paid.
2. The Great Pyramid has four sides, right? Wrong. It actually has eight, because all four faces are slightly concave. It is very difficult to see this. You can't tell from the ground at all, it's only visible from the air, and even then only when the light conditions are absolutely right - which happens to be at dawn and sunset on the Spring and autumn equinoxes. What's more, the curvature of the concave faces of the pyramid is exactly the same as the curvature of the Earth.
3. That's not the only amazing mathematical connection between the pyramids and the properties of the planet. Here are a few more. The average land height above sea level is 5,449 inches. The exact height of the Great Pyramid is 5,449 inches. The pyramid is aligned with true north more accurately than any other structure in the world. It's slightly off, even so, but that is because the North Pole has moved slightly over the millennia. When it was built, it was exactly right. Finally the pyramid stands on Earth's geographical centre, at the intersection of the longest land parallel and the longest land meridian. There is only about a one in three billion probability that it could have been built in that exact spot by chance.
4. The Great Pyramid was built from about 2,300,000 stone blocks weighing from 2 to 30 tons each with some blocks weighing over 50 tons. That's probably about 6 million tons of stone, or enough to build the Empire State building thirty times over. The only reason it's still there and hasn't sunk into the ground is because the Giza Plateau is basically a mountain of solid granite under the ground.
5. There are a couple more reasons why this structure has survived and become the only ancient wonder of the world still standing - and also the oldest. One is that the builders used a ball and socket design in the cornerstone foundations which would help it withstand earthquakes and heat expansion. The other is the mortar used to cement the stones together. This stuff is actually stronger than the stones themselves and nobody knows where it came from or how to make it. Scientists have worked out exactly what its chemical composition is, but they have no idea how to reproduce it.
6. When they were first completed, the Great Pyramid was covered in an outer mantle of White limestone casing stones - 144,000 of them. They were polished and flat to an accuracy of a hundredth of an inch; they were 100 inches thick and each weighed about 15 tons each. This outer mantle would reflect the sun's light and would have made the structure quite dazzling. The ancient Egyptians called the Great Pyramid “Ikhet”, meaning the “Glorious Light”. The pyramid could be seen for miles - from the mountains in Israel and, some theorists believe, from the Moon. A few of the casing stones remain today near the base of the pyramid. Most were removed after an Earthquake in the 14th century and the rest were used to build mosques.
7. The temperature inside the Pyramid is a fairly constant 20 Celsius (60 F), no matter how hot it gets outside. This happens to be the average temperature on earth.
8. Inside the Great Pyramid is a a granite coffer, made out of one solid piece of granite which is much too big to fit down the passageway into the chamber it sits in. Which is probably why it's the only thing in there - the only thing plunderers couldn't carry off. It's thought the entire pyramid must have been built around it. That's not all that's remarkable about the coffer. It would have taken bronze saws 8-9 ft. long set with teeth of sapphires and tubular sapphire drills capable of a drilling force of 2 tons to make it. The other interesting thing about the interior is that there are no hieroglyphics anywhere inside. Unless you count some which were found in about 2011 in the air shafts above the King’s Chamber - which are probably fake. It's thought an Egyptologist called Colonel Howard Vyse was so desperate to become famous through making a significant discovery that he painted some symbols himself. We know the symbols can't be authentic because whoever did paint them got the symbol for the sun god Ra wrong, and no Ancient Egyptian would dare make a mistake like that.
9. In the 12th century. Al-Aziz, a Kurdish ruler and the second Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt tried to knock the Pyramids down. Thankfully he failed. It was too big a task and he gave up, but not before creating a huge vertical gash in the north face of Menkaure's Pyramid.
10. These pyramids, and all the others in Egypt, are built on the west bank of the River Nile, where the sun sets and where the realm of the dead is to be found. The god of the afterlife, Osiris, is associated with the constellation of Orion, which suggests it's no coincidence that the relative size and alignment of the three Pyramids exactly mirrors the three stars of Orison's belt and their orientation to the Milky Way mirrors the orientation of the Pyramids to the River Nile.

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2nd June: Thomas Hardy quotes

10 quotes from Thomas Hardy, born on this date in 1840.

1. It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
2. Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
3. The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
4. There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
5. Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
6. A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
7. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away.
8. Women can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.
9. I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
10. He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.

1st June: Peas

Today, the French Revolutionary Calendar, which assigned a plant, substance or tool to every day, celebrates Peas. Here are some things you may not know about this popular vegetable.

1. Peas have been around a long time. 3,000 year old peas have been found in Thailand; peas dating back to 3800BC-3600BC have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs. Archaeologists think the pea originally came from the near east in countries such as Turkey, Jordan and Syria. The Romans grew over 37 different varieties of peas.
2. They'd certainly reached the UK by the time of the Norman Conquest. The vegetable, when it first arrived in the UK, was called "pease" but evolved into "pea" so people would know whether they were talking about one pea or many.
3. The Latin name for the pea plant is pisum sativum. The UK is the largest producer of peas for freezing - 35,000 hectares of pea plants are grown in the UK in a single year, equivalent to about 70,000 football pitches. The yield is about 160,000 tonnes of frozen peas.
4. The Green peas we eat aren't actually ripe. If they were allowed to ripen, they'd be Yellow. Eating green peas became the fashion in the 17th century. The practice was described as "madness" by the French back then.
5. A pea pod is usually 5-6 inches long and an individual pea weighs between 0.1 and 0.36 grams. 100 grams of peas contains as much as Vitamin C as two large Apples (66% of the daily requirement) and more fibre than a slice of wholemeal Bread (20%). They also contain sugar, protein, Vitamins A and B6, calcium, iron and magnesium. A 100g serving contains 81 calories.
6. Clarence Birdseye made the first frozen peas in the 1920s. In 1969, the first television commercial broadcast in colour was for Birds Eye frozen peas.
7. Petits pois, despite their French name, were bred in Italy.
8. The leaves of the pea plant are a delicacy in China. And while we're on the subject of things Chinese, Janet Harris from Sussex holds a pea eating record - she ate 7175 peas in a minute using chopsticks.
9. On average, a person in Britain eats more than 9,000 peas a year.
10. Eating peas is said to relieve stomach ulcers because digesting them "uses up" stomach acids. If you boil peas up with Onions and add cinnamon, it is said to be a powerful aphrodisiac.