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Also 67 years old ⚡

Happy Birthday to Gerald Caiafa aka Jerry Only, American musician, bassist for the Misfits, Osaka Popstar, Kryst The Conqueror and Balzac, born on this day in 1959, Lodi, New Jersey

📸 Unknown

❝
One can easily split what was never united,
the song of the two of us.
❞

In the Old English original, the words for “the song of the two of us” are “uncer giedd” – meaning “our song”, but just for two people.

“The dual pronoun is used in that poem, and I think it’s quite an intimate use, because it’s all about ‘We two together against the world’,” says Birkett. “Certainly in poetry, it has that use of creating an intimate connection between two people.”

– Sophie Hardach, Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy https://archive.is/OJQxe (originally from bbc.com)

, 20 Apr 1902, Maria Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie refine radium chlorine. The discovery leads to Marie being the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.

The committee had planned to only award the Nobel to Pierre and Henri. Committee member and Swedish mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler alerted Pierre Curie to the plan. Pierre insisted Marie also receive the prize.

posed photograph of Maria Skłodowska-Curie in her lab holding a volumetric flask. She is a white woman with dark hair in a bun.
Pierre and Marie outdoors with their bicycles, during their honeymoon.

47 years ago today
Jimmy Jimmy is the third single by the Northern Irish band The Undertones, released on this day in 1979 and was also included on the band's self-titled debut album

36 years ago today
Repeater is the full-length debut studio album by the American hardcore punk band Fugazi, released on this day in 1990 on LP, and in May 1990 on CD bundled with the 3 Songs EP as Repeater + 3 Songs

While we may not normally celebrate a holiday called "National Cheese Ball Day", last weekend for a medieval and Renaissance conference on stargazing at Ohio State University, Arlecchino (and other commedia dell'arte) went to the Moon in hopes it tasted like a big round ball of cheese! Spoiler alert: it did not!

(Pardon the poor footage; we had some technical difficulties with our camera during the performance.)

I was today years old when I learned that scientists from the 17th century had their own form of "preprints" to lay claim to ideas before they got them officially published.

Galileo wrote in a letter to Kepler "Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur o.y.", in English "These are now too young to be read by me)".

*After* his work was formally published, he explained the anagram to Kepler:

"Cynthiae figuras aemulatur mater amorum" (The mother of love imitates the shape of Cynthia)

By sending the letter, Galileo could prove to Kepler and others that he had observed that Venus (mother of love) had phases like the moon (Cynthia), without giving Kepler a chance to scoop him before his own work was published.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_Venus