FYI April 07, 2020

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On This Day

1890 – Completion of the first Lake Biwa Canal.
Lake Biwa Canal (琵琶湖疏水 or 琵琶湖疎水, Biwako Sosui) is a waterway in Japan constructed during the Meiji Period to transport water, freight, and passengers from Lake Biwa to the nearby City of Kyoto. The canal supplied Japan’s first public hydroelectric power generator, which served from 1895 to provide electricity for Kyoto’s trams.[1]

In 1996 the canal was designated a Historic Site.[2] As of 2008, the waterway is not used so much to generate electricity, but rather for water supply, fire-fighting and irrigation purposes.[citation needed]

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Born On This Day

1870 – Gustav Landauer, Jewish-German theorist and activist (d. 1919)
Gustav Landauer (7 April 1870 – 2 May 1919) was one of the leading theorists on anarchism in Germany at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. He was an advocate of social anarchism and an avowed pacifist. In 1919, during the German Revolution, he was briefly Commissioner of Enlightenment and Public Instruction of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic.[1] He was killed when this Republic was overthrown.

Landauer is also known for his study of metaphysics and religion, and his translations of William Shakespeare’s works into German.

Life and career
Landauer was the second child of Jewish parents Rosa (Neuberger) and Herman Landauer.[2]

Landauer supported anarchism already in the 1890s. In those years, he was especially enthusiastic about the individualistic approach of Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche, but also “cautioned against an apotheosis of the unrestrained individual, potentially leading to the neglect of solidarity”.[3] Landauer believed that social change could not be achieved solely through control of the state or economic apparatus, but required a revolution in interpersonal relations. [4] True socialism could result only in conjunction with this spiritual work, writing “the community we long for and need, we will find only if we sever ourselves from individuated existence; thus we will at last find, in the innermost core or our hidden being, the most ancient and most universal community: the human race and the cosmos.”[5]

One of Landauer’s grandchildren, with wife and author Hedwig Lachmann, was Mike Nichols, the American television, stage and film director, writer, and producer.[6]

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FYI

https://youtu.be/ny4q2IqBLeA
 
 
 
 
NASA Commemorates 50th Anniversary of Apollo 13, ‘A Successful Failure’
 
 
 
 

By Zach Seemayer, ET: Lady Gaga Apologizes to Jimmy Fallon After Awkward ‘Tonight Show’ Interview Moment
 
 
 
 
By messynessy, 13 Things I Found on the Internet Today (Vol. CDXCVII): An online museum of plastic lost at sea; The Food Artistry of this Baker; How this Woman bought a Chateau when she was only 29 Year Old; Caravan House boat, 1954; This North Pole Radio Station is Excellent and more ->
 
 
 
 

ILSR’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative: Recently in Community Networks… Week of 4/7
 
 
 
 

Recipes

By Lisa Kaminski, Taste of Home: 40 Homemade Easter Treats Better Than What the Bunny Brings