February 14

Are You Sure ... (February 14)

• ... that Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe as part of the Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System, and that Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan?

• ... that engineer and inventor Charles William Oatley developed one of the first commercial scanning electron microscopes?

• ... that "Have You Never Been Holden?" is a song by Oliva Newton-John and J.D. Salinger?

Screenshot: Are You Sure (February 14, 2020)

On This Day in History and Fiction

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  1404: Polymath Leon Battista Alberti born. Alberti will epitomize the Renaissance man: humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, cryptographer.

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  1744: Mathematician John Hadley dies. Hadley laid claim to the invention of the octant, two years after Thomas Godfrey claimed the same. Hadley also developed ways to make precision aspheric and parabolic objective mirrors for reflecting telescopes.

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  1855: Texas is linked by telegraph to the rest of the United States, with the completion of a connection between New Orleans and Marshall, Texas.

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  1876: Alexander Graham Bell applies for a patent for the telephone, as does Elisha Gray.

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  1904: Engineer and inventor Charles William Oatley born. He will develop of one of the first commercial scanning electron microscopes.

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  1943: Mathematician David Hilbert dies. He discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization of geometry.

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  1950: Physicist and engineer Karl Guthe Jansky dies. Jansky discovered radio waves emanating from the Milky Way while investigating sources of static that might interfere with radio voice transmissions, and is considered one of the founding figures of radio astronomy.

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  1990: The Voyager 1 spacecraft takes the Pale Blue Dot photograph of planet Earth from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU). Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel.

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  2017: Routine annual steganographic analysis of famed illustration Alice and Niles Dancing unexpectedly reveals "at least a megabyte" of love letters between Gnomon algorithm engineers Alice Beta and Niles Cartouchian.