You Never Knew

a little bit of something about a lot of things.

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Robert Kennedy’s Speech for Martin Luther King

Robert Kennedy’s Speech for Martin Luther King

By adding a quote by Aeschylus it made me think about where I first heard this poet’s name and how worthy the event itself was of its own post. The speech made by Robert Kennedy on April 4th 1968 may be overshadowed by the death of Martin Luther King, which inspired it, but it still holds its own fame for its eloquence, sincerity and the positive impact it made at the time where emotions were far…

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The Story of the Talbot Brothers

John Talbot, winner of the British Expeditionary Medal during his time with the Metropolitan Police, was a Royal Navy bomb disposal diver during the Second World War. On May 21st, 1941 he was aboard the British cruiser HMS Juno when it was attacked and sunk by Italian bombers during the battle of Crete. Of 212 men, 116 lost their lives as three high explosive shells tore the vessel in two and sunk her in just under three minutes. John was one of the 96 men who survived the attack, although five of these later died of their injuries.

In the same month, his brother, Plt Off Henry Talbot [aged 24], crashed in thick fog during a routine RAF flight in Iceland. Having been injured in a previous crash, he had been placed in a Fairey Battle bomber for transport from a hospital ship back to the mainland before an expected return to Britain. Twenty-eight miles after take off the bomber crashed in the mountains of the Vaskardular Valley, killing the four airmen.

Shortly after, their mother received two telegrams on the same day, telling her that both her sons were missing and presumed dead. It was a week before she heard that John had survived the sinking of the Juno and John himself was only informed of the loss of his brother after he had been stationed in North Africa, at Tobruk. Henry Talbot, remained lost in the wild landscape for a period of 60 years until finally, in the year 2000, climbers in Iceland located the wreckage of the aircraft and reclaimed the bodies from the heart of a melting glacier. Preserved in the ice, the remains of the four servicemen were brought down from the mountain and John, now in his 70s, was able to travel to a country he had never seen, been inextricably connected to, and say goodbye to a brother he had last known as a young man during the heat of war. Their story was finally brought to rest.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1367955/A-final-farewell-59-years-after-air-crash.html

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Cardano's Game of Dice

Gerolamo Cardano [24th Sep 1501 – 21st Sep 1576] was one of numerous Renaissance polymaths of the sixteenth century who was prolific in mathematics, medicine, physics, philosophy and religion and whose works as an engineer are still relevant to this very day.  He was also an habitual gambler who used his talents to unlock some of the fundamental rules behind probability.

A central element of this was the work he did relating to the rolls of a dice.  At this time, it was believed that the chances of rolling a 9 or a 10 with two dice were the same because they could be achieved with the same number of combinations:

3 + 6 = 9

4 + 5 = 9

4 + 6 = 10

5 + 5 = 10

However, experience showed that far from occurring with the same frequency 9 was actually seen more often. Cardano explained this by digging deeper into the probabilities behind the assembled numbers and showed that the order in which the dice fell was also important in affecting the result.  The key was in the number 5.

3 + 6 = 9

6 + 3 = 9

4 + 5 = 9

5 + 4 = 9        4 combinations were still relevant to achieving this number.

4 + 6 = 10

6 + 4 = 10

5 + 5 = 10

5 + 5 = 10      only 3 combinations were now in play.

Simple thought this may seem it was not something gamblers of the sixteenth century readily understood and must have come as an epiphany to a man who solved his constant money troubles with games of chance.

Possessed with an erratic and confrontational personality Cardano’s eccentricities appear to have permeated his entire family.  His youngest son shared his father’s love of gambling and was a thief, while his eldest son was eventually executed for the poisoning of his own wife.

Not to be outdone, Cardano ended his own life with a virtuoso flourish that would be hard to believe.  Having first brought charges of heresy upon himself for having published a horoscope of Jesus Christ, the astrologer/mathematician then sought to predict his own death.  When the appointed day arrived, fit and healthy and faced with the prospect of being wrong, Gerolamo Cardano took the only decision he felt open to him…he committed suicide.

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Quote

“… there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.”

United States Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld

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Quote

“Outside, the world moves forward as a lice-smitten dog pisses against a beautiful lemon tree vibrating in the sun.”

Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man

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