Fong Fei Fei

Fong Fei Fei was born as Lin Chiu-luan in 20 August 1953 and grew up in Daxi, Taoyuan County (now Daxi District, Taoyuan City), Taiwan. She had two elder brothers Lim Yu-Nung and Lim Hung-Ming. Her younger brother Kempis Lim (林鸿棠) (1957–2006) was also a singer under a stage name of Fong Fei-yang (鳳飛颺).

~wikipedia~

Happy National Day 国庆日快乐

Happy birthday from Google!

Dargon Boat Festival

Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri

Georgios Papanikolaou

Georgios Papanikolaou



Georgios Nikolaou Papanikolaou (or George Papanicolaou /ˌpæpəˈnɪkəlaʊ/; Greek: Γεώργιος Ν. Παπανικολάου [papanikoˈlau]; 13 May 1883 – 19 February 1962) was a Greek pioneer in cytopathology and early cancer detection, and inventor of the "Pap smear".

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First Image of a Black Hole

First ever black hole image released. Astronomers have taken the first ever image of a black hole, which is located in a distant galaxy. It measures 40 billion km across - three million times the size of the Earth - and has been described by scientists as "a monster".

~BBC~

Holi

Holi ( /ˈhoʊliː/; Sanskrit: होली Holī) is an ancient Hindu spring festival, originating from the Indian subcontinent. It is celebrated predominantly in Pakistan, India and Nepal, but has also spread to other areas of Asia and parts of the Western world through the diaspora from the Indian subcontinent. Holi is popularly known as the Indian "festival of spring", the "festival of colours", or the "festival of love". The festival signifies the arrival of spring, the end of winter, the blossoming of love, and for many a festive day to meet others, play and laugh, forget and forgive, and repair broken relationships. The festival also celebrates the beginning of a good spring harvest season. It lasts for a night and a day, starting on the evening of the Purnima (Full Moon day) falling in the Vikram Samvat Hindu Calendar month of Phalgun, which falls somewhere between the end of February and the middle of March in the Gregorian calendar. The first evening is known as Holika Dahan (burning of demon holika) or Chhoti Holi and the following day as Holi, Rangwali Holi, Dhuleti, Dhulandi, or Phagwah.

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World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://www.example.com/), which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible via the Internet. The resources of the WWW may be accessed by users via a software application called a web browser.

~wikipedia~

Olga Ladyzhenskaya

Olga Aleksandrovna Ladyzhenskaya (Russian: Óльга Алекса́ндровна Лады́женская, IPA: [ˈolʲɡə ɐlʲɪˈksandrəvnə ɫɐˈdɨʐɨnskəɪ̯ə] (About this soundlisten); 7 March 1922 – 12 January 2004) was a Russian mathematician. She was known for her work on partial differential equations (especially Hilbert's 19th problem) and fluid dynamics. She provided the first rigorous proofs of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations. She was a student of Ivan Petrovsky, and was awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal in 2002.

~wikipedia~

Desi Arnaz

Desi Arnaz

Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III (March 2, 1917 – December 2, 1986), better known as Desi Arnaz or Desi Arnaz, Sr., was a Cuban-born American actor, musician, and television producer. He is best remembered for his role as Ricky Ricardo on the American television series sitcom I Love Lucy. He co-starred on that show with dramatic and comedic actress Lucille Ball (1911-1989), to whom he was married at the time. He and Ball are generally credited as the inventors of the syndicated rerun, which they pioneered with the I Love Lucy series.

Arnaz and Lucille Ball co-founded and ran the television production company Desilu Productions, originally to market I Love Lucy to television networks. After I Love Lucy ended, Arnaz went on to produce several other television series, at first with Desilu Productions, and later independently; examples of which included The Ann Sothern Show and The Untouchables. He was also renowned for leading his Latin music band, the Desi Arnaz Orchestra.

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Spring Lantern Festival 元宵节

The Lantern Festival or the Spring Lantern Festival is a Chinese festival celebrated on the fifteenth day of the first month in the lunisolar Chinese calendar. Usually falling in February or early March on the Gregorian calendar, it marks the final day of the traditional Chinese New Year celebrations. As early as the Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE-CE 25), it had become a festival with great significance. During the Lantern Festival, children go out at night carrying paper lanterns and solve riddles on the lanterns (simplified Chinese: 猜灯谜; traditional Chinese: 猜燈謎; pinyin: cāidēngmí; Jyutping: caai1 dang1 mai4).

In ancient times, the lanterns were fairly simple, and only the emperor and noblemen had large ornate ones. In modern times, lanterns have been embellished with many complex designs. For example, lanterns are now often made in the shape of animals. The lanterns can symbolize the people letting go of their past selves and getting new ones, which they will let go of the next year. The lanterns are almost always red to symbolize good fortune.

The festival acts as an Uposatha day on the Chinese calendar. It should not to be confused with the Mid-Autumn Festival; which is sometimes also known as the "Lantern Festival" in locations such as Singapore and Malaysia. The Lantern Festival has also become popular in Western countries, especially in cities with a large Chinese community. In London, the Magical Lantern Festival is held annually.

~wikipedia~

Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge

Friedlieb (or Friedlob, occasionally misnamed as "Friedrich") Ferdinand Runge (born near Hamburg on 8 February 1794, died in Oranienburg on 25 March 1867) was a German analytical chemist.

Runge conducted chemical experiments from a young age, serendipitously identifying the mydriatic (pupil dilating) effects of belladonna (deadly nightshade) extract.

In 1819 he demonstrated his finding to Goethe, who encouraged him to analyse coffee. A few months later, Runge identified caffeine.

Commemorative plaque in Oranienburg. It reads: Historical site of the Oranienburg chemical product factory, whose technical director from 1832–1852 was Prof. Dr. Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, discoverer of coal tar dyes.

Runge studied chemistry in Jena and Berlin, where he obtained his doctorate. After touring Europe for three years, he taught chemistry at the university of Breslau until 1831. From then until 1852 he worked for a chemical company, but was dismissed by a resentful manager and died fifteen years later in poverty.

His chemical work included purine chemistry, the identification of caffeine, the first coal tar dye (aniline blue), coal tar products (and a large number of substances that derive from coal tar), paper chromatography, pyrrole, chinoline, phenol, thymol and atropine.

He was the first to notice in 1855 the phenomenon of "Liesegang rings". He observed them in the course of experiments on the precipitation of reagents in blotting paper.

~wikipedia~

Happy Chinese New Year

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth (/soʊˈdʒɜːrnər ˈtruːθ/; born Isabella (Belle) Baumfree; c. 1797 – November 26, 1883) was an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.    

She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 after she became convinced that God had called her to leave the city and go into the countryside "testifying the hope that was in her". Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title "Ain't I a Woman?," a variation of the original speech re-written by someone else using a stereotypical Southern dialect; whereas Sojourner Truth was from New York and grew up speaking Dutch as her first language. 

During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves.    

In 2014, Truth was included in Smithsonian magazine's list of the "100 Most Significant Americans of All Time".    

~wikipedia~

Singapore Bicentennial

Lev Davidovich Landau

Lev Davidovich Landau (22 January 1908 – 1 April 1968) was a Soviet physicist who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics.

His accomplishments include the independent co-discovery of the density matrix method in quantum mechanics (alongside John von Neumann), the quantum mechanical theory of diamagnetism, the theory of superfluidity, the theory of second-order phase transitions, the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, the theory of Fermi liquid, the explanation of Landau damping in plasma physics, the Landau pole in quantum electrodynamics, the two-component theory of neutrinos, and Landau's equations for S matrix singularities.

He received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity that accounts for the properties of liquid helium II at a temperature below 2.17 K (−270.98 °C).

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Sake Dean Mahomed

Sake Dean Mahomed was a Anglo-Indian traveller, surgeon and entrepreneur who was one of the most notable early non-European immigrants to the Western World. He introduced Indian cuisine and shampoo baths to Europe, where he offered therapeutic massage. He was also the first Indian to publish a book in English.

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Evelyn Dove

Evelyn Mary Dove (11 January 1902 – 7 March 1987) was a British singer and actress, who early in her career drew comparisons with Josephine Baker. Of West African and English parentage, Dove built a solid reputation in Britain through her work with the BBC in the 1940s, and also performed internationally, travelling to France, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Hungary, the United States, India and Spain.

~wikipedia~

Fahrelnissa Zeid

Fahrelnissa Zeid (Arabic: الأميرة فخر النساء زيد‎) Fakhr un-nisa or Fahr-El-Nissa (7 January 1901–5 September 1991) was a Turkish artist best known for her large-scale abstract paintings with kaleidoscopic patterns. Also using drawings, lithographs, and sculptures, her work blended elements of Islamic and Byzantine art with abstraction and other influences from the West. Zeid was one of the first women to go to art school in Istanbul.

She lived in different cities and became part of the avant-garde scenes in Istanbul, pre-war Berlin and post-war Paris. Her work has been exhibited at various institutions in Paris, New York, and London, including the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1954. In the 1970s, she moved to Amman, Jordan, where she initiated an art school.

In 2017, Tate Modern in London organized a major retrospective of the artist and called her "one of the greatest female artists of the 20th century." Her largest work to be sold at auction, Towards a Sky (1953), sold for just under one million pounds in 2017.

In the 1930s, she married into the Hashemite royal family of Iraq, and was the mother of Prince Ra'ad bin Zeid and the grandmother of Prince Zeid bin Ra'ad.

~wikipedia~

First day of school in Singapore