Cyclopedia of Factoids - The Letter G

Gandhi, Mahatma

Many myths abound about Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand known as Mahatma "Great Souled") Gandhi (1869-1948).

He was not born to a poor Indian family. His father was dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, the capital of a small principality in Gujarat in western India under British suzerainty. He later became dewan of Rajkot.

He married at the age of 13 and was a mediocre student. In his adolescence he defied his repressive environment by petty thieving, meat eating, smoking, and professed atheism.

Until the age of 18 He spoke very little English. His main language was Gujarati.

He wanted to be a medical doctor - more precisely, a surgeon. His family forced his to study law.

His first political activity was as a member of the executive committee of the London Vegetarian Society.

He went to South Africa because he couldn't find work in India. He was a poor lawyer, in both senses of the word. He suffered from stage fright.

The "Encyclopedia Britannica" describes his first days there:

"Africa was to present to Gandhi challenges and opportunities that he could hardly have conceived. In a Durban court, he was asked by the European magistrate to take off his turban; he refused and left the courtroom.

A few days later, while traveling to Pretoria, he was unceremoniously thrown out of a first-class railway compartment and left shivering and brooding at Pietermaritzburg Station; in the further course of the journey he was beaten up by the white driver of a stagecoach because he would not travel on the footboard to make room for a European passenger; and finally he was barred from hotels reserved "for Europeans only." These humiliations were the daily lot of Indian traders and labourers in Natal who had learned to pocket them with the same resignation with which they pocketed their meagre earnings."

He was about to sail to London when he read about a bill to deprive the Indians of their right to vote. He decided to stay. It is in Johannesburg, South Africa that his first civil disobedience ("Satyagraha") campaign was staged - not in India.

Gandhi's life was at peril many times. He was almost lynched in Durban as early as January 1897. He was assassinated in 1948.

He was not a pacifist. Nor was he anti-British. When the Boer war broke out, he organized a volunteer corps of 11,000 Indians to defend the British colony of Natal.

There is much more here:

http://dmoz.org/Society/History/By_Region/Asia/South_Asia/Personalities/Gandhi,_Mohandas_Karamchand,_Mahatma/

Glass

Is glass an inorganic solid material - or a highly viscous liquid?

At room temperatures, glass is an elastic solid. The source of the confusion is its unusual atomic structure. Glass indeed starts its life as a molten liquid. But when it cools, the atoms do not form crystals. Instead, they are arranged randomly, fully reflecting their distribution in the liquid. This property of homogeneous continuity is called viscosity.

So, why do some scholars insist that glass is really a liquid?

Solid glass "remembers" its previous state as a fluid. It, therefore, acts as though it were a solution - as though various materials, such as soda, lime, and silica - were added and diluted in a solvent. As opposed to most solids, pure, non-commercial, glass has low density (i.e., large interstitial spaces between its atoms). Such "holes" are typical of liquids.

Why is glass transparent if it is, indeed, a solid?

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica (2003 edition), electrons in glass molecules are confined to specific energy levels and cannot absorb and reemit photons (i.e., light). This is why visible light travels through glass unhindered. It is not absorbed. Glass molecules are so tiny compared to ordinary lightwaves that they also do not absorb them when they traverse the glass sheet.

http://www.cmog.org/

Gorky, Maxim

Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) is widely considered a Bolshevik author, closely allied with the likes of Lenin and Stalin. But this is far from the truth.

Gorky's real name was Alexei Maximovich Peshkov. He chose the pseudonym "Gorky" - "bitter" in Russian - to describe his early experiences from the age of eight as a menial worker. In his late teens he attempted suicide. The bullet pierced his lung, rendering him susceptible to Tuberculosis for the rest of his life.

Between 1899 and 1906 Gorky lived in St. Petersburg and participated in the activities of the Social Democratic Party. When it split in 1903, he, indeed, supported the Bolsheviks financially - though he never joined them formally. He was a strong critic of Lenin. Partly to avoid his wrath, he exiled himself to Capri, Italy in 1906.

Moreover, though he upheld the Bolsheviks' anti-war stance, he opposed the 1917 October Revolution (the Bolshevik coup against the post-Tsarist Social Democratic government). So damaging was his criticism of Lenin's dictatorial ways and the illegitimacy of the Bolshevik regime that his work was censored from July 1918 onwards.

Gorky left Russia in 1921 and lived in Sorrento, Italy until 1928 when he was lured back by a lavish celebration of his 60th birthday. The year after, he relocated permanently to Russia. In 1938, certain senior Soviet figures - like Nikolai Bukharin and Genrikh Yagoda - were accused of murdering him in 1936, while under medical treatment.

http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc73.html

http://filine.centro.ru/Gorky/

Greek Philosophers

There were so many ancient Greek thinkers that virtually every bit of modern knowledge, fact, pseudo-science and counterfact are represented.

Greek mathematician Pythagoras (582-500 BC) postulated that earth is round and that, together with the other planets, it is revolving around a central fire.

Aristarchus, a Greek Astronomer (310-250 BC), was more precise. He suggested that the earth revolves around the sun. He also suggested a correct method to calculate the distance between the two.

Another Greek astronomer, Eratosthenes (276-196 BC), measured the earth's circumference accurately. He used astronomical observations to calculate the difference in latitude between the cities of Syene (now Aswân) and Alexandria, Egypt.

Democritus (460-370 BC) invented the concept of a-toms - minute, invisible, indivisible and indestructible particles, which populate an infinite empty void (kenon).

http://www.tmth.edu.gr/en/aet.html

Guillotine

The guillotine was first put to lethal use on April 25, 1792, at 3:30 PM, in Paris at the Place de Greve on the Right Bank of the Seine. It separated highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier's head from the rest of his body.

The device was perfected - though not invented- by Doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin (1738 - 1814). The 'e' at the end of the noun is a later, British, addition. Ironically, he belonged to a movement seeking to abolish capital punishment altogether.

Guillotine-like implements were used on delinquents from the nobility in Germany, Italy, Scotland and Persia long before the good doctor's era. Guillotin and German engineer and harpsichord maker, Tobias Schmidt, improved and industrialized it. It was Schmidt who transformed the blade, changing it from round to the familiar form and placing it at an oblique, 45 degree, angle. The process of severing the head - the blade falling, cutting through the tissues and severing the head - took less than half a second. More than 40,000 people were guillotined during the French Revolution and in its immediate aftermath (1789-1795).

Nor was the guillotine abandoned after the French Revolution. As late as 1870, one Leon Berger, an assistant executioner and carpenter, added a spring system, which stopped the mouton at the bottom of the groves, a lock/blocking device at the lunette and a new release mechanism for the blade.

The murderer Hamida Djandoubi was beheaded on September 10, 1977, in Marseilles, France. The guillotine was never used since.

Total weight of a Guillotine is about 580 kg
The guillotine blade with weight is over 40 kg
The heights of the guillotine posts average about 4 meters
The guillotine blade drop is about 2.3 meters
The falling blades rate of speed is about 7 meters/second
The actual beheading was completed in 2/100 of a second
The power when the guillotine blade stops at the bottom is 400 kg/square inch
http://www.napoleonguide.com/guillotine.htm

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa103197.htm

Philosophical Musings and Essays
Essays about current topics in philosophy.