Tag: Hi-jacked

January 21st:

SQUIRREL APPRECIATION DAY – NATIONAL HUGGING DAY – NATIONAL GRANOLA BAR DAY
How to celebrate: Give a squirrel a granola bar to hug~

https://foodimentary.com/2017/01/21/january-21st-is-national-granola-bar-day/

https://foodimentary.com/2017/01/21/january-21st-is-national-clam-chowder-day/

On this day:

1789 – The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy or the Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth, is printed in Boston.
The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature (1789) is an 18th-century American sentimental novel written in epistolary form by William Hill Brown, widely considered to be the first American novel.[1] The novel was published by Isaiah Thomas in Boston on January 21, 1789,[2] and sold at the price of nine shillings.[3] The Power of Sympathy was Brown’s first novel. The characters’ struggles illustrate the dangers of seduction and the pitfalls of giving in to one’s passions, while advocating the moral education of women and the use of rational thinking as ways to prevent the consequences of such actions.

Historical context
The novel mirrors a local New England scandal involving Brown’s neighbor Perez Morton’s seduction of Fanny Apthorp; Apthorp was Morton’s sister-in-law. Apthorp became pregnant and committed suicide, but Morton was not legally punished.[4] The scandal was widely known,[5] so most readers were able to quickly identify the “real” story behind the fiction: “in every essential, Brown’s story is an indictment of Morton and an exoneration of Fanny Apthorp”,[6] with “Martin” and “Ophelia” representing Morton and Apthorp, respectively.

A century after William Hill Brown’s death in 1793, Arthur Bayley, editor of The Bostonian, published a serial publication of The Power of Sympathy, attributing the work to Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton of Boston, a poet, the wife of Perez Morton and sister of Frances Apthorp. Through much of the 19th century, the author was believed to be female.[7]

1908 – New York City passes the Sullivan Ordinance, making it illegal for women to smoke in public, only to have the measure vetoed by the mayor.
The Sullivan Ordinance was a municipal law passed on January 21, 1908, in New York City by the board of aldermen, barring the management of a public place from allowing women to smoke within their venue.[1] The ordinance did not bar women from smoking in general nor did the ordinance bar women from smoking in public, only public places. Right after the ordinance was enacted, on January 22, Katie Mulcahey, the only person cited for breaking this ordinance, was fined $5 for smoking in public and arrested for refusing to pay the fine; however, the ordinance itself did not mention fines nor does it ban women from smoking in public. She was released the next day.[2] The mayor at the time, George Brinton McClellan, Jr., vetoed the ordinance two weeks later.[3]

Born on this day:

1804 – Eliza R. Snow, American poet and hymn-writer (d. 1887)
Eliza Roxcy Snow (January 21, 1804 – December 5, 1887) was one of the most celebrated Mormon women of the nineteenth century. A renowned poet, she chronicled history, celebrated nature and relationships, and expounded scripture and doctrine. Snow was married to Joseph Smith as a plural wife and was openly a plural wife of Brigham Young after Smith’s death. Snow was the second general president of the Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), which she reestablished in Utah Territory in 1866.[2] She was also the sister of Lorenzo Snow, the church’s fifth president.

1884 – Roger Nash Baldwin, American author and activist, co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union (d. 1981)
Roger Nash Baldwin (January 21, 1884 – August 26, 1981) was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He served as executive director of the ACLU until 1950.

Many of the ACLU’s original landmark cases took place under his direction, including the Scopes Trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, and its challenge to the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses.[1][2] Baldwin was a well-known pacifist and author.

Baldwin was a member of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), which opposed American involvement in World War I, and spent a year in jail as a conscientious objector rather than submit to the draft. After the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1917, Baldwin called for the AUAM to create a legal division to protect the rights of conscientious objectors.

On July 1, 1917, the AUAM responded by creating the Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), headed by Baldwin. The CLB separated from the AUAM on October 1, 1917, renaming itself the National Civil Liberties Bureau, with Baldwin as director. In 1920, NCLB was renamed the American Civil Liberties Union with Baldwin continuing as the ACLU’s first executive director.[3]

As director, Baldwin was integral to the shape of the association’s early character; it was under Baldwin’s leadership that the ACLU undertook some of its most famous cases, including the Scopes Trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, and its challenge to the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses. Baldwin retired from the ACLU leadership in 1950. He remained active in politics for the rest of his life; for example, he co-founded the International League for the Rights of Man, which is now known as the International League for Human Rights.

In St. Louis, Baldwin had been greatly influenced by the radical social movement of the anarchist Emma Goldman. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World.

In 1927, he had visited the Soviet Union and wrote a book, Liberty Under the Soviets. Originally, at the beginning of the ACLU, he had said, “Communism, of course, is the goal.” Later, however, as more and more information came out about Joseph Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union, Baldwin became more and more disillusioned with Soviet-style communism and called it “A NEW SLAVERY” (capitalized in the original).[4] He condemned “the inhuman communist police state tyranny.”[5]

In the 1940s, Baldwin led the campaign to purge the ACLU of Communist Party members.[5]

In 1947, General Douglas MacArthur invited him to Japan to foster the growth of civil liberties in that country. In Japan, he founded the Japan Civil Liberties Union, and the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun. In 1948, Germany and Austria invited him for similar purposes. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1951.[6]

FYI:

https://foodimentary.com/2016/01/19/january-19-is-national-popcorn-day-2/

On this day:

1915 – Georges Claude patents the neon discharge tube for use in advertising.
Inspired by Geissler tubes and by Daniel McFarlan Moore’s invention of a nitrogen-based light (the “Moore tube”), Claude developed neon tube lighting to exploit the neon that was produced as a byproduct of his air liquefaction business.[10] These were all “glow discharge” tubes that generate light when an electric current is passed through the rarefied gas within the tube. Claude’s first public demonstration of a large neon light was at the Paris Motor Show (Salon de l’Automobile et du Cycle), 3–18 December 1910.[11][12] Claude’s first patent filing for his technologies in France was on 7 March 1910.[13] Claude himself wrote in 1913 that, in addition to a source of neon gas, there were two principal inventions that made neon lighting practicable. First were his methods for purifying the neon (or other inert gases such as argon). Claude developed techniques for purifying the inert gases within a completely sealed glass tube, which distinguished neon tube lighting from the Moore tubes; the latter had a device for replenishing the nitrogen or carbon dioxide gases within the tube. The second invention was ultimately crucial for the development of the Claude lighting business; it was a design for minimizing the degradation (by “sputtering”) of the electrodes that transfer electric current from the external power supply to the glowing gases within the sign.[10]

The terms “neon light” and “neon sign” are now often applied to electrical lighting incorporating sealed glass tubes filled with argon, mercury vapor, or other gases instead of neon. In 1915 a U.S. patent was issued to Claude covering the design of the electrodes for neon lights;[14] this patent became the strongest basis for the monopoly held in the U.S. by his company, Claude Neon Lights, through the early 1930s.[15]

In 1923, Georges Claude and his French company Claude Neon, introduced neon gas signs to the United States, by selling two to a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles. Earle C. Anthony purchased the two signs reading “Packard” for $1,250 a piece. Neon lighting quickly became a popular fixture in outdoor advertising. Visible even in daylight, people would stop and stare at the first neon signs for hours, dubbed “liquid fire.”[citation needed]

1983 – The Apple Lisa, the first commercial personal computer from Apple Inc. to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, is announced.
Apple Lisa was a desktop computer developed by Apple, released on January 19, 1983. It was one of the first personal computers to offer a graphical user interface (GUI) in a machine aimed at individual business users. Development of the Lisa began in 1978,[2] and it underwent many changes during the development period before shipping at the very high price of US$9,995 with a 5 MB hard drive. The high price, relatively low performance and unreliable “Twiggy” floppy disks led to poor sales, with only 100,000 units sold.[1]

In 1982, after Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project,[3] he joined the Macintosh project, at that time developing a much more limited machine with a task-switching interface. Jobs redirected the Macintosh team to build a cheaper and better Lisa, releasing it in January 1984 and quickly outstripping Lisa sales. Newer versions of the Lisa were introduced that addressed its faults and lowered its price considerably, but it never really picked up sales compared to the much less expensive Mac. The final revision of the Lisa, the Lisa 2/10, was modified and sold as the Macintosh XL.[4]

Generally considered a failure, the Lisa nevertheless introduced a number of advanced features that would not re-appear on the Macintosh for a number of years. Among these was an operating system which featured protected memory and preemptive multitasking,[5] and a more document-oriented workflow. The hardware itself was also much more advanced with a hard drive and support for up to 2 megabytes (MB) of RAM, expansion slots and a larger higher-resolution display. The Macintosh featured a faster 68000 processor (7.89 MHz) and sound; however, the complexity of the Lisa operating system and its programs overtaxed the 5 MHz Motorola 68000 microprocessor enough that users said it felt sluggish, particularly when scrolling in documents.

1986 – The first IBM PC computer virus is released into the wild. A boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain, it was created by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter unauthorized copying of the software they had written.
A computer virus is a type of malicious software program (“malware”) that, when executed, replicates by reproducing itself (copying its own source code) or infecting other computer programs by modifying them.[1] Infecting computer programs can include as well, data files, or the “boot” sector of the hard drive. When this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be “infected” with a computer virus.[2][3][4] The term “virus” is also commonly, but erroneously, used to refer to other types of malware. “Malware” encompasses computer viruses along with many other forms of malicious software, such as computer “worms”, ransomware, trojan horses, keyloggers, rootkits, spyware, adware, malicious Browser Helper Object (BHOs) and other malicious software. The majority of active malware threats are actually trojan horse programs or computer worms rather than computer viruses. The term computer virus, coined by Fred Cohen in 1985, is a misnomer.[5] Viruses often perform some type of harmful activity on infected host computers, such as acquisition of hard disk space or central processing unit (CPU) time, accessing private information (e.g., credit card numbers), corrupting data, displaying political or humorous messages on the user’s screen, spamming their e-mail contacts, logging their keystrokes, or even rendering the computer useless. However, not all viruses carry a destructive “payload” or attempt to hide themselves—the defining characteristic of viruses is that they are self-replicating computer programs which install themselves without user consent.

Virus writers use social engineering deceptions and exploit detailed knowledge of security vulnerabilities to gain access to their hosts’ computers and computing resources. The vast majority of viruses target systems running Microsoft Windows,[6][7][8] employing a variety of mechanisms to infect new hosts,[9] and often using complex anti-detection/stealth strategies to evade antivirus software.[10][11][12][13] Motives for creating viruses can include seeking profit (e.g., with ransomware), desire to send a political message, personal amusement, to demonstrate that a vulnerability exists in software, for sabotage and denial of service, or simply because they wish to explore cybersecurity issues, artificial life and evolutionary algorithms.[14]

Computer viruses currently cause billions of dollars’ worth of economic damage each year,[15] due to causing system failure, wasting computer resources, corrupting data, increasing maintenance costs, etc. In response, free, open-source antivirus tools have been developed, and an industry of antivirus software has cropped up, selling or freely distributing virus protection to users of various operating systems.[16] As of 2005, even though no currently existing antivirus software was able to uncover all computer viruses (especially new ones), computer security researchers are actively searching for new ways to enable antivirus solutions to more effectively detect emerging viruses, before they have already become widely distributed.[17]

Born on this day:

1833 – Alfred Clebsch, German mathematician and academic (d. 1872)
Rudolf Friedrich Alfred Clebsch (19 January 1833 – 7 November 1872) was a German mathematician who made important contributions to algebraic geometry and invariant theory. He attended the University of Königsberg and was habilitated at Berlin. He subsequently taught in Berlin and Karlsruhe. His collaboration with Paul Gordan in Giessen led to the introduction of Clebsch–Gordan coefficients for spherical harmonics, which are now widely used in quantum mechanics.

Together with Carl Neumann at Göttingen, he founded the mathematical research journal Mathematische Annalen in 1868.

In 1883 Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant translated Clebsch’s work on elasticity into French and published it as Théorie de l’élasticité des Corps Solides.

1948 – Nancy Lynch, American computer scientist and academic
Nancy Ann Lynch (born January 19, 1948)[1] is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering in the EECS department and heads the Theory of Distributed Systems research group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

She is the author of numerous research articles about distributed algorithms and impossibility results, and about formal modeling and validation of distributed systems (see, e.g., input/output automaton). She is the author of the graduate textbook “Distributed Algorithms”.[2] She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and an ACM Fellow.[3]

Lynch was born in Brooklyn, and her academic training was in mathematics, at Brooklyn College and MIT, where she received her Ph.D. in 1972 under the supervision of Albert R. Meyer.[4] She served on the math and computer science faculty at several other universities, including Tufts University, the University of Southern California and Georgia Tech, prior to joining the MIT faculty in 1982. Since then, she has been working on applying mathematics to the tasks of understanding and constructing complex distributed systems.

Danese Cooper (born January 19, 1959[1]) is an American programmer,[2] computer scientist[3] and advocate of open source software.[4]
Cooper has managed teams at Symantec and Apple Inc. and for six years served as chief open source “evangelist” for Sun Microsystems before leaving to serve as senior director for open source strategies at Intel.[4][5][6] In 2009 she worked as “Open Source Diva” at REvolution Computing (now Revolution Analytics).[7] She is a board member of the Drupal Association[8] and the Open Source Hardware Association.[9] She is a board observer at Mozilla, and serves as a member of the Apache Software Foundation.[4] She was a board member at Open Source Initiative.[10] In February 2014, Cooper joined PayPal as their first Head of Open Source.[11]
Open source

Cooper’s major work within the open source area of computer software has garnered her the nickname “Open Source Diva”.[5][12] She was recruited, while at a sushi bar in Cupertino, to a position at Sun working towards opening the source code to Java. Within six months she quit frustrated by the claims of open source development with Java that Sun made, only to find that little “open sourcing” was taking place. Sun sought to keep Cooper understanding her need to further open source software and re-hired her as their corporate open source officer.[13] Her six years with Sun Microsystems is credited as the key to the company opening up its source code and lending support to Sun’s OpenOffice.org software suite, Oracle Grid Engine, among others.[6][14] In 2009 she joined REvolution Computing, a “provider of open source predictive analytics solutions”, to work on community outreach amongst developers unfamiliar with the programming language R and general open source strategies.[7] She has also made public speaking appearances discussing open sourcing, speaking at the Malaysian National Computer Confederation Open Source Compatibility Centre, OSCON, gov2.0 Expo, and the Southern California Linux Expo.[15][16][17][18] In 2005 Cooper was a contributing author to Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution.[19]
Wikimedia Foundation

In February 2010 Cooper was appointed Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, leading their technical team and developing and executing the Foundation’s technical strategy,[4][14][20] along with which she would also be working on outreach with Wikimedia volunteers to expand on development and localizing of software.[14] Cooper credits the open source community in helping her obtain the position at Wikimedia.[21] She left the organization in July 2011.[22]
daneseWorks
In June 2011, Cooper started a consultancy, daneseWorks, whose first client was the Gates Foundation’s shared learning collaborative (now called inBloom). She is currently helping[23] numenta/nupic with their open source & machine learning strategy.

FYI:

Nagi’s Steak Sandwich

Ryan F. Mandelbaum: Breathtaking New Video Footage of the Ocean’s Uncharted Depths

Casey Chan: his Never-Ending Parade of Snow Plows Is Easily the Best Way to Clear Snowy Roads

He bought a car that he doesn’t like.  Not a fan of convertibles, why buy one?
Tom McParland: My Miata Is No Longer The Answer! What Car Should I Buy?

By Kyrie O’Connor: Happy Winnie the Pooh Day! 8 things to know about the loveable bear

Christopher Robin Milne (21 August 1920 – 20 April 1996) was the son of author A. A. Milne. As a child, he was the basis of the character Christopher Robin in his father’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories and in two books of poems.

https://foodimentary.com/2017/01/18/january-18th-is-national-gourmet-coffee-day/

On this day:

1788 – The first elements of the First Fleet carrying 736 convicts from Great Britain to Australia arrive at Botany Bay.
The First Fleet is the name given to the 11 ships that left England on 13 May 1787 to found the penal colony that became the first European settlement in Australia. The Fleet consisted of two Royal Navy vessels, three store ships and six convict transports, carrying between 1,000 and 1,500 convicts, marines, seamen, civil officers and free people (accounts differ on the numbers), and a vast quantity of stores. From England, the Fleet sailed southwest to Rio de Janeiro, then east to Cape Town and via the Great Southern Ocean to Botany Bay, arriving over the period 18 to 20 January 1788, taking 250 to 252 days from departure to final arrival.

Convicts were originally transported to the Thirteen Colonies in North America, but after the American War of Independence ended in 1783, the newly formed United States refused to accept further convicts.[1] On 6 December 1785, Orders in Council were issued in London for the establishment of a penal colony in New South Wales, on land claimed for Britain by explorer James Cook in his first voyage to the Pacific in 1770.[2][3]

The First Fleet was commanded by Commodore Arthur Phillip, who was given instructions authorising him to make regulations and land grants in the colony.[4] The ships arrived at Botany Bay between 18 January and 20 January 1788:[5] HMS Supply arrived on 18 January, Alexander, Scarborough and Friendship arrived on 19 January, and the remaining ships on 20 January.[6][7]

The cost to Britain of outfitting and despatching the Fleet was £84,000[8] (about £9.6 million as of 2015).[9]

1911 – Eugene B. Ely lands on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania stationed in San Francisco Bay, the first time an aircraft landed on a ship.
Eugene Burton Ely (October 21, 1886[1] – October 19, 1911) was an aviation pioneer, credited with the first shipboard aircraft take off and landing.

In October, Ely and Curtiss met Captain Washington Chambers, USN, who had been appointed by George von Lengerke Meyer, the Secretary of the Navy, to investigate military uses for aviation within the Navy. This led to two experiments. On November 14, 1910, Ely took off in a Curtiss pusher from a temporary platform erected over the bow of the light cruiser USS Birmingham.[7][nb 1] The airplane plunged downward as soon as it cleared the 83-foot platform runway; and the aircraft wheels dipped into the water before rising.[7] Ely’s goggles were covered with spray, and the aviator promptly landed on a beach rather than circling the harbor and landing at the Norfolk Navy Yard as planned.[7] John Barry Ryan offered $500 to build the platform, and a $500 prize, for a ship to shore flight.[14]

1983 – The International Olympic Committee restores Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals to his family.
James Francis Thorpe (Sac and Fox (Sauk): Wa-Tho-Huk, translated as “Bright Path”;[2] May 22 or 28,[1] 1887 – March 28, 1953)[3] was an American athlete and Olympic gold medalist. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe became the first Native American to win a gold medal for his home country. Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, he won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, and played American football (collegiate and professional), professional baseball, and basketball. He lost his Olympic titles after it was found he had been paid for playing two seasons of semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics, thus violating the amateurism rules that were then in place. In 1983, 30 years after his death, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) restored his Olympic medals.

Controversy
In 1912, strict rules regarding amateurism were in effect for athletes participating in the Olympics. Athletes who received money prizes for competitions, were sports teachers or had competed previously against professionals were not considered amateurs and were barred from competition.

In late January 1913, the Worcester Telegram published a story announcing that Thorpe had played professional baseball, and other U.S. newspapers followed up the story.[21][28] Thorpe had indeed played professional baseball in the Eastern Carolina League for Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1909 and 1910, receiving meager pay; reportedly as little as US$2 ($51 today) per game and as much as US$35 ($900 today) per week.[29] College players, in fact, regularly spent summers playing professionally but most used aliases, unlike Thorpe.[13]

Although the public didn’t seem to care much about Thorpe’s past,[30] the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and especially its secretary James Edward Sullivan, took the case very seriously.[31] Thorpe wrote a letter to Sullivan, in which he admitted playing professional baseball:[21]

I hope I will be partly excused by the fact that I was simply an Indian schoolboy and did not know all about such things. In fact, I did not know that I was doing wrong, because I was doing what I knew several other college men had done, except that they did not use their own names …

His letter didn’t help. The AAU decided to withdraw Thorpe’s amateur status retroactively and asked the International Olympic Commission (IOC) to do the same. Later that year, the IOC unanimously decided to strip Thorpe of his Olympic titles, medals and awards and declare him a professional.

Although Thorpe had played for money, the AAU and IOC did not follow the rules for disqualification. The rulebook for the 1912 Olympics stated that protests had to be made “within” 30 days from the closing ceremonies of the games.[18] The first newspaper reports did not appear until January 1913, about six months after the Stockholm Games had concluded.[18] There is also some evidence that Thorpe’s amateur status had been questioned long before the Olympics, but the AAU had ignored the issue until being confronted with it in 1913.

The only positive element of this affair for Thorpe was that, as soon as the news was reported that he had been declared a professional, he received offers from professional sports clubs.[32]

Born on this day:

1853 – Marthinus Nikolaas Ras, South African farmer, soldier, and gun-maker (d. 1900)
Marthinus Nikolaas Ras (18 January 1853 – 21 February 1900)[1] was a South African farmer, soldier, and gun-maker who is considered the father of South African Artillery.[2]

He served in the First Boer War in the Potchefstroom commando under General Piet Cronjé. After witnessing the siege on the British fort at Potchefstroom by the Boers, he realized the need for artillery by the Boer forces to be able to successfully mount an assault the British blockhouses and forts. In the early stages of the conflict, the Boers seriously lacked cannons to enable them to assault the six British army forts in the Transvaal. In December 1880, he requested and obtained permission to return home to his farm Bokfontein, near Brits, to build a cannon for the Boer forces.[3]
Cannon building

He built two cannons (named the Ras cannons), the first being a 3 inch caliber, 4½ feet barrel cannon, named “Martienie” and the second a 2 inch caliber, 5½ barrel cannon, named “Ras”. The “Martienie” cannon was used to great effect on a British fort near Rustenburg, firing 93 shots and resulting in the subsequent surrender of the fort.[4]

On 21 February 1900 during the Second Boer War, whilst on the way back to his farm at Bokfontein, he was ambushed and killed at Kaya’s Put by an impi (African war party) of the Kgatla tribal chief Linchwe, an African tribe fighting on the side of the British.[5][6]

1877 – Sam Zemurray, Russian-American businessman, founded the Cuyamel Fruit Company (d. 1961)
Samuel Zemurray (nicknamed “Sam the Banana Man”;[1] born Schmuel Zmurri on January 18, 1877 in Kishinev, Bessarabia, Russian Empire, present-day Chişinău, Moldova; died November 30, 1961 in New Orleans, Louisiana) was an American businessman who made his fortune in the banana trade. He founded the Cuyamel Fruit Company, and later became head of the United Fruit Company, the world’s most influential fruit company at the time.[2] Both companies played highly controversial roles in the history of several Latin American countries and had a significant influence on their economic and political development.

1901 – Ivan Petrovsky, Russian mathematician and academic (d. 1973)
Ivan Georgievich Petrovsky, (Russian: Ива́н Гео́ргиевич Петро́вский) (18 January 1901 – 15 January 1973) (the family name is also transliterated as Petrovskii or Petrowsky), was a Soviet mathematician working mainly in the field of partial differential equations. He greatly contributed to the solution of Hilbert’s 19th and 16th problems, and discovered what are now called Petrovsky lacunas. He also worked on the theories of boundary value problems, probability, and on the topology of algebraic curves and surfaces.

1933 – Ray Dolby, American engineer and businessman, founded Dolby Laboratories (d. 2013)
Ray Milton Dolby, OBE (January 18, 1933 – September 12, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor of the noise reduction system known as Dolby NR. He helped develop the video tape recorder while at Ampex and was the founder of Dolby Laboratories.

In 1957, Dolby received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford.[5] He subsequently won a Marshall Scholarship for a Ph.D. (1961) in physics from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Research Fellow at Pembroke College.

After Cambridge, Dolby acted as a technical advisor to the United Nations in India, until 1965 when he returned to England, where he founded Dolby Laboratories in London with a staff of four. In that same year, 1965, he officially invented the Dolby Sound System, a form of electronic filter, although his first U.S. patent was not filed until 1969, four years later. The filter was first used by Decca Records in the UK.[6]

Dolby was a Fellow and past president of the Audio Engineering Society.
Death

Dolby died of leukemia on September 12, 2013, at his home in San Francisco at the age of 80.[7] Dolby was survived by his wife Dagmar, two sons, Tom and David, and four grandchildren.[8] Kevin Yeaman, president and chief executive of Dolby Laboratories, said “Today we lost a friend, mentor and true visionary.”[8] Neil Portnow, president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, said Dolby had “changed the way we listen to music and movies for nearly 50 years” and that Dolby’s “technologies have become an essential part of the creative process for recording artists and filmmakers, ensuring his remarkable legacy for generations to come.”[9]

In his will, Dolby bequeathed more than $52 million to Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge, the largest single donation received by the University’s current fundraising campaign.[10]

FYI:

Andrew Liszewski: Watch a Reinforced Steel Rod Break Like a Weak Little Twig

Something to remember in daily living:  “You never win the championship criticizing the other team.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X9iOsZywbU

On January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment and Volstead Act went into effect, beginning the Prohibition era in the United States. With the quality and quantity of available spirits being squeezed dry, the daring residents of Templeton, Iowa, started producing a carefully crafted bootleg rye whiskey affectionately known as The Good Stuff.

This date also happened to be the birth date of the notorious bootlegger and Chicago gangster, Al Capone.

https://foodimentary.com/2017/01/17/january-17th-is-national-hot-buttered-rum-day/

On this day:

1917 – The United States pays Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands.
The United States Virgin Islands (U.S.V.I.; also called the American Virgin Islands), officially the Virgin Islands of the United States, are a group of islands in the Caribbean that are an insular area of the United States. The islands are geographically part of the Virgin Islands archipelago and are located in the Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles.

The U.S. Virgin Islands consist of the main islands of Saint Croix, Saint John, and Saint Thomas, and many other surrounding minor islands. The total land area of the territory is 133.73 square miles (346.36 km2).[1] The territory’s capital is Charlotte Amalie on the island of Saint Thomas.

In 2010 the population was 106,405,[2] and mostly Afro-Caribbean. Tourism is the primary economic activity, although there is a significant rum manufacturing sector.[1] Farming is done on a relatively small scale on the islands of St. Croix and St. Thomas, although it has seen a slow revival in recent years.

Previously the Danish West Indies of the Kingdom of Denmark–Norway, they were sold to the United States by Denmark in the Treaty of the Danish West Indies of 1916. They are classified by the U.N. as a Non-Self-Governing Territory, and are currently an organized, unincorporated United States territory. The U.S. Virgin Islands are organized under the 1954 Revised Organic Act of the Virgin Islands and have since held five constitutional conventions. The last and only proposed Constitution, adopted by the Fifth Constitutional Convention in 2009, was rejected by the U.S. Congress in 2010, which urged the convention to reconvene to address the concerns Congress and the Obama Administration had with the proposed document. The convention reconvened in October 2012 to address these concerns, but was not able to produce a revised Constitution before its October 31 deadline.

1929 – Popeye the Sailor Man, a cartoon character created by E. C. Segar, first appears in the Thimble Theatre comic strip.
Popeye the Sailor Man is a cartoon fictional character created by Elzie Crisler Segar.[3] The character first appeared in the daily King Features comic strip, Thimble Theatre, on January 17, 1929, and Popeye became the strip’s title in later years; Popeye has also appeared in theatrical and television animated cartoons.

Segar’s Thimble Theatre strip was in its 10th year when Popeye made his debut, but the one-eyed (left) sailor quickly became the main focus of the strip, and Thimble Theatre became one of King Features’ most popular properties during the 1930s. After Segar’s death in 1938, Thimble Theatre was continued by several writers and artists, most notably Segar’s assistant Bud Sagendorf. The strip continues to appear in first-run installments in its Sunday edition, written and drawn by Hy Eisman. The daily strips are reprints of old Sagendorf stories.[citation needed]

In 1933, Max Fleischer adapted the Thimble Theatre characters into a series of Popeye the Sailor theatrical cartoon shorts for Paramount Pictures. These cartoons proved to be among the most popular of the 1930s, and Fleischer—and later Paramount’s own Famous Studios—continued production through 1957. These cartoon shorts are now owned by Turner Entertainment, a subsidiary of Time Warner, and distributed by its sister company Warner Bros. Entertainment.[citation needed]

Over the years, Popeye has also appeared in comic books, television cartoons, arcade and video games, hundreds of advertisements,[citation needed] and peripheral products (ranging from spinach to candy cigarettes), and the 1980 live-action film directed by Robert Altman, starring comedian Robin Williams as Popeye.

In 2002, TV Guide ranked Popeye #20 on its “50 Greatest Cartoon Characters of All Time” list.[4]

1961 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a televised farewell address to the nation three days before leaving office, in which he warns against the accumulation of power by the “military–industrial complex” as well as the dangers of massive spending, especially deficit spending.
As early as 1959, Eisenhower began working with his brother Milton and his speechwriters, including his chief speechwriter Malcolm Moos, to develop his final statement as he left public life. It went through at least 21 drafts.[6] The speech was “a solemn moment in a decidedly unsolemn time”, warning a nation “giddy with prosperity, infatuated with youth and glamour, and aiming increasingly for the easy life.”[3]

As we peer into society’s future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.[1]

A draft of the farewell address, showing handwritten edits.

The only general to be elected president in the 20th century, he famously warned the nation about the potentially corrupting influence of the “military-industrial complex”. This is frequently mischaracterized as a criticism of the arms industry, which it was not.[7] He in fact declared such an industry to be necessary. His concern was of its potential for corruption:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.[1]

He also expressed his concomitant concern for corruption of the scientific process as part of this centralization of funding in the Federal government:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

…

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.[1]

Born on this day:

1560 – Gaspard Bauhin, Swiss botanist, physician, and academic (d. 1624)
Jean and Gaspard were the sons of Jean Bauhin (1511–1582), a French physician who had to leave his native country on becoming a convert to Protestantism. Gaspard was born at Basel and studied medicine at Padua, Montpellier, and in Germany. Returning to Basel in 1580, he was admitted to the degree of doctor, and gave private lectures in botany and anatomy. In 1582 he was appointed to the Greek professorship in the University of Basel, and in 1588 to the chair of anatomy and botany. He was later made city physician, professor of the practice of medicine, rector of the university, and dean of his faculty.

The Pinax theatri botanici (English, Illustrated exposition of plants) is a landmark of botanical history, describing some 6,000 species and classifying them. The classification system was not particularly innovative, using traditional groups such as “trees”, “shrubs”, and “herbs”, and using other characteristics such as utilization, for instance grouping spices into the Aromata. He did correctly group grasses, legumes, and several others. His most important contribution is in the description of genera and species. He introduced many names of genera that were later adopted by Linnaeus, and remain in use. For species he carefully pruned the descriptions down to as few words as possible; in many cases a single word sufficed as description, thus giving the appearance of a two-part name. However, the single-word description was still a description intended to be diagnostic, not an arbitrarily-chosen name (in the Linnaean system, many species names honor individuals, for instance).

In addition to Pinax Theatri Botanici, Gaspard planned another work, a Theatrum Botanicum, meant to be comprised in twelve parts folio, of which he finished three; only one, however, was published (1658), long after his death. He also gave a copious catalogue of the plants growing in the environs of Basel, its flora, and edited the works of Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500–1577) with considerable additions. His principal work on anatomy was Theatrum Anatomicum infinitis locis auctum (1592).

1886 – Glenn L. Martin, American pilot and businessman, founded the Glenn L. Martin Company (d. 1955)
On May 10, 1912, Martin flew a self-built seaplane from Newport Bay, California to Avalon on Catalina Island, then back across the channel. This broke the earlier English Channel record for over-water flight. Martin’s total distance was 68 miles (109 km), with the Newport-Avalon leg taking 37 minutes.[5] He picked up a bag of mail on the island on the way, and was presented with $100 ($2300 in 2011) prize for his achievement. In 1913, Martin was not as fortunate while competing in the Great Lakes Reliability Cruise, a 900 miles (1,400 km) race of seaplanes around the Great Lakes. Martin’s pontoon hit a wave at high speed and low altitude, causing the plane to somersault, and sink to the bottom with Martin, who escaped and attempted to salvage the plane to finish the race.[6]

In 1912, Glenn L. Martin built an airplane factory in an old Methodist church in Los Angeles, California. To make money to finance this business, he began stunt-flying at fairs and local airfields. He saw an advertisement for a pilot/airplane owner to play a role in a movie. Sensing an opportunity to market his airplanes, he replied to the ad and got the part. He was to play the role of a dashing hero in the movie A Girl of Yesterday (1915) starring Mary Pickford. He soon found that it would be harder than he thought. In addition to flying Pickford around in his airplane, he had a scene where he had to kiss Frances Marion, who later became a legendary Hollywood screenwriter. Martin in describing his hesitance having to kiss Marion declared “my mother would not like it” which astounded Pickford. He worked up the courage however after persuasion by Paramount boss Adolph Zukor and completed the scene.[7][8]
Achievements
Martin held a record for longest American over-water flight, 66 miles. His company designed aircraft for the military, including bombers for both world wars. An early success came during World War I with production of the MB-1 bomber. The MB-2 and others were also successful. In 1932, Martin won the Collier Trophy for his involvement with the Martin B-10 bomber.

1922 – Betty White, American actress, game show panelist, television personality, and animal rights activist
Betty Marion White Ludden (born January 17, 1922)[2] is an American actress, animal rights activist, author, comedian, radio host, singer, and television personality. Regarded as a pioneer of television, White was one of the first women to have control both in front of and behind the camera;[3] and is recognized as the first woman to produce a sitcom,[4] which contributed to her receiving the honorary title as the Mayor of Hollywood in 1955.[5]

She is known for her Emmy Award-winning roles as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1973–77) and Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls (1985–92). The Writers Guild of America has included both sitcoms in its list of the 101 Best Written TV Series Of All Time.[6] A staple guest of many American game shows such as Password, Match Game and The $25,000 Pyramid, White has been dubbed the ‘First Lady of Game Shows’ and became the first woman to receive an Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host in 1983 for the show Just Men!.[7] From 2010 to 2015, she starred as Elka Ostrovsky in the TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland, for which she has won two consecutive Screen Actors Guild Awards and she was nominated for an Emmy Award.

In a career that has spanned more than 75 years, she has received seven Emmy awards, three American Comedy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild awards, and a Grammy.[8] She also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is a Television Hall of Fame inductee (class of 1995), and a Disney Legend (class of 2009).

In 2013, the Guinness World Records recognized White as having the longest television career for a female entertainer.[9]

On this day:

1883 – The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, establishing the United States Civil Service, is passed.
The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act (ch. 27, 22 Stat. 403) is a United States federal law, enacted in 1883, which established that positions within the federal government should be awarded on the basis of merit instead of political affiliation.[1] The act provided selection of government employees by competitive exams,[1] rather than ties to politicians or political affiliation. It also made it illegal to fire or demote government officials for political reasons and prohibited soliciting campaign donations on Federal government property.[1] To enforce the merit system and the judicial system, the law also created the United States Civil Service Commission.[1] This board would be in charge of determining the rules and regulations of the act.[2] The Act also allowed for the president, by executive order to decide which positions could be subject to the act and which would not.[2] A crucial result was the shift of the parties to reliance on funding from business,[3] since they could no longer depend on patronage hopefuls.

It was 50 years ago on Jan. 16, 1964 that Charles Dotter, the father of interventional radiology, performed the first angioplasty. Today, millions of individuals get this medical intervention annually.

Angioplasty and stenting revolutionized medicine and led the way for the more widely known applications of coronary artery angioplasty and stenting that revolutionized the practice of cardiology. Today many conditions that once required surgery can be treated nonsurgically by interventional radiologists. Through a small knick in the skin, they use tiny catheters and miniature instruments so small they can be run through a person’s network of arteries to treat at the site of illness internally, saving the patient from open invasive surgery. While no treatment is risk free, the risks of interventional procedures are far lower than the risks of open surgery, and are a major advance in medicine for patients.

Some of the more recent advances in interventional radiology include:

Nonsurgical ablation of tumors to kill cancer without harming the surrounding tissue
Embolization therapy to stop hemorrhaging or to block the blood supply to a tumor
Catheter-directed thrombolysis to clear blood clots, preventing disability from deep vein thrombosis and stroke
Carotid artery angioplasty and stenting to prevent stroke

Charles Theodore Dotter (14 June 1920 – 15 February 1985) was a pioneering US vascular radiologist who is credited with developing interventional radiology.

Dotter, together with his trainee Dr Melvin P. Judkins, described angioplasty in 1964.

Dotter invented angioplasty and the catheter-delivered stent, which were first used to treat peripheral arterial disease. On January 16, 1964, at Oregon Health and Science University Dotter percutaneously dilated a tight, localized stenosis of the superficial femoral artery (SFA) in an 82-year-old woman with painful leg ischemia and gangrene who refused leg amputation. After successful dilation of the stenosis with a guide wire and coaxial Teflon catheters, the circulation returned to her leg. The dilated artery stayed open until her death from pneumonia two and a half years later.[4] He also developed liver biopsy through the jugular vein, initially in animal models[5] and in 1973 in humans.[6]

Charles Dotter is commonly known as the “Father of Interventional Radiology.” He served as the chairman of the School of Medicine Department of Diagnostic Radiology at Oregon Health Sciences University for 33 years, from 1952 until his death in 1985. The University now boasts the Dotter Interventional Institute in his honor.

Born on this day:

1634 – Dorothe Engelbretsdatter, Norwegian author and poet (d. 1716)
In 1678 her first volume appeared, Siælens Sang-Offer published at Copenhagen. This volume of hymns and devotional pieces, very modestly brought out, had an unparalleled success. The first verses of Dorothe Engelbretsdatter are commonly believed to have been her best.[3]

The fortunate poet was invited to Denmark, and on her arrival at Copenhagen was presented at court. She was also introduced to Thomas Hansen Kingo, the father of Danish poetry. The two greeted one another with improvised couplets, which have been preserved and of which the poet’s reply is incomparably the neater.[4] King Christian V of Denmark granted her full tax freedom for life. Her Taare-Offer (1685) was dedicated to Queen Charlotte Amalia, the wife of King Christian V.[5]

In 1683, her husband died. She had nine children, but seven of them died young and her two adult sons lived far away from Bergen. She lost her house in the great fire in 1702 in which 90 percent of the city of Bergen was destroyed. Her re-placement house was not available until 1712. Her sorrow is evident in examples such as the poem Afften Psalme. She died on the 19th of February 1716. [4]

1919 – Jerome Horwitz, American chemist and academic (d. 2012)
In 1964, while conducting research for the Karmanos Institute, Horwitz synthesized a compound that was to become known as zidovudine (AZT) – an antiviral drug used to treat HIV patients; Zidovudine was initially developed as a treatment for cancer.[5] Horwitz was also first to synthesize stavudine (d4T) and zalcitabine (ddC) – two other reverse transcriptase inhibitors used in the treatment of HIV patients.[6]

Also during 1964, he published the first production and demonstration of X-gal as a chromogenic substrate.[7]

After synthesizing AZT, Horwitz went on to create many successful treatments for cancer and other diseases. At the time of his most recent findings, Horwitz was working for the Michigan Cancer Foundation with a federal grant from the National Institutes of Health; he retired in 2005.

1947 – Laura Schlessinger, American physiologist, talk show host, and author
Laura Catherine Schlessinger (born January 16, 1947) is an American talk radio host, socially conservative commentator and author.[5] Her radio program consists mainly of her responses to callers’ requests for personal advice and has occasionally featured her short monologues on social and political topics. Her website says that her show “preaches, teaches, and nags about morals, values and ethics”.[6]

Schlessinger used to combine her local radio career with a private practice as a marriage and family counselor, but after going into national syndication, she concentrated her efforts on the daily The Dr. Laura Program, and on writing self-help books. The books Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, and The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands are among her bestselling works. A short-lived television talk show hosted by Schlessinger was launched in 2000. In August 2010, she announced that she would end her syndicated radio show in December 2010.[7][8]

Her show moved to Sirius XM Radio’s Sirius XM Stars on January 3, 2011. Schlessinger announced a “multi-year” deal to be on satellite radio.[9][10]

1948 – John Carpenter, American director, producer, screenwriter, and composer
John Howard Carpenter (born January 16, 1948) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, musician, editor and composer. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres, he is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction films from the 1970s and 1980s.[1]

Most films in Carpenter’s career were initially commercial and critical failures, with the notable exceptions of Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), and Starman (1984). However, many of Carpenter’s films from the 1970s and the 1980s have come to be viewed as cult classics, and he has been acknowledged as an influential filmmaker. Cult classics that Carpenter directed include: Dark Star (1974), Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), The Thing (1982), Christine (1983), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Prince of Darkness (1987), They Live (1988) and In the Mouth of Madness (1995).

Carpenter is also notable for having composed or co-composed most of the music of his films; some of them are now considered cult as well, with the main theme of Halloween being considered a part of popular culture. He released his first studio album Lost Themes in 2015, and also won a Saturn Award for Best Music for Vampires (1998).

FYI:

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On this day:

1759 – The British Museum opens.
The British Museum is dedicated to human history, art and culture, and is located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection, numbering some 8 million works,[4] is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence[4] and originates from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present.[a]

The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. Its expansion over the following two and a half centuries was largely a result of an expanding British colonial footprint and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington in 1881. Some objects in the collection, most notably the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, are the objects of controversy and of calls for restitution to their countries of origin.

In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and as with all other national museums in the United Kingdom it charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions.[5]

1870 – A political cartoon for the first time symbolizes the Democratic Party with a donkey (“A Live Jackass Kicking a Dead Lion” by Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly).
An editorial cartoon, also known as a political cartoon, is an illustration containing a commentary that usually relates to current events or personalities. An artist who draws such images is known as an editorial cartoonist.

They typically combine artistic skill, hyperbole and satire in order to question authority and draw attention to corruption, political violence and other social ills.[1]

2001 – Wikipedia, a free wiki content encyclopedia, goes online.
Wikipedia (Listeni/ˌwɪkᵻˈpiːdiə/ or Listeni/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free online encyclopedia that aims to allow anyone to edit articles.[3] Wikipedia is the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet[4][5][6] and is ranked among the ten most popular websites.[7] Wikipedia is owned by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.[8][9][10]

Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[11] Sanger coined its name,[12][13] a portmanteau of wiki[notes 4] and encyclopedia. There was only the English language version initially, but it quickly developed similar versions in other languages, which differ in content and in editing practices. With 5,329,682 articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. Overall, Wikipedia consists of more than 40 million articles in more than 250 different languages[15] and as of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.[16]

In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia, and found that Wikipedia’s level of accuracy approached Encyclopædia Britannica’s.[17] Criticism of Wikipedia includes claims that it exhibits systemic bias, presents a mixture of “truths, half truths, and some falsehoods”,[18] and that in controversial topics, it is subject to manipulation and spin.[19]

Born on this day:

1754 – Richard Martin, Irish activist and politician, co-founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (d. 1834)
Colonel Richard Martin (15 January 1754 – 6 January 1834), was an Irish politician and campaigner against cruelty to animals. He was commonly known as “Humanity Dick”, a nickname bestowed on him by King George IV. He succeeded in getting the pioneering Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act 1822, nicknamed ‘Martin’s Act’, passed into British law.[1]

Martin is now best known for his work against animal cruelty, especially against bear baiting and dog fighting. His actions resulted eventually in Martin’s Act of 1822, entitled “Ill Treatment of Cattle Bill”. He also tried to spread his ideas in the streets of London, becoming the target of jokes and political cartoons that depicted him with ears of a donkey. He also sometimes paid fines of minor offenders.

On 16 June 1824, Martin was present when the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was founded in a London coffee shop “Old Slaughter’s”. He denied being the initiator of the society.

1929 – Martin Luther King, Jr., American minister and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1968)
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr., January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs.

King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the 1963 nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

On October 14, 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped to organize the Selma to Montgomery marches, and the following year he and SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing. In the final years of his life, King expanded his focus to include opposition towards poverty and the Vietnam War, alienating many of his liberal allies with a 1967 speech titled “Beyond Vietnam”.

In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People’s Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities.

King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971, and as a U.S. federal holiday in 1986. Hundreds of streets in the U.S. have been renamed in his honor, and a county in Washington State was also renamed for him. The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated in 2011.

FYI:

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NATIONAL HOT PASTRAMI SANDWICH DAY

On this day:

Ratification Day in the United States is the anniversary of the ratification of the Treaty of Paris on January 14, 1784 at the Maryland State House in Annapolis, Maryland by the Confederation Congress. This act officially ended the American Revolutionary War.[1]

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