Tel Asiado's Blog

Posted by Tel Asiado

October 9, 2009

The Nobel Peace Prize win of American President Barack Obama came as a stunning surprise considering his short period in office. However, it has been interpreted as his "call to action" to work towards the problems that confront the world rather than an achievement award.

Not only critics, but observers and some supporters alike, were shocked by the unexpected choice which began less than two weeks before the February 1 nomination deadline, and Obama, serving so early in his term of office has yet to yield achievements in peacemaking.

President Obama himself was surprised and humbled about his win and feels he doesn't deserve "to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by the prize." He will donate the entire prize of $1.4 million to charity, but hasn't yet decided which organizations will share it. He plans to travel to Oslo to accept the prize.

According to NBC News (Oct 9, 2009, Obama: Nobel Peace Prize a 'Call to Action'), the stunning pick from the Nobel officials "was meant to build momentum behind Obama's initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and stress diplomacy and cooperation rather than unilateralism."

Aren't awards given when someone has already accomplished something? Well, not this one.

In any case, congratulations for the Nobel Peace Prize win, U.S. President Obama.

Related Articles:

• 2009 Nobel Peace Prize - 205 Names Submitted

• Obama Third US Black Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Posted by Tel Asiado

Links to great scientists' brief biographies

The development of the physical world and our understanding of the universe has undergone enormous transformation. From whatever period in time these great scientists came from - Archimedes, Faraday, Einstein, Curie, Newton - and to our current generation of brilliant minds like Hawking, they have one thing in common: they dare to challenge accepted "truths" relentlessly. The products of science surround us all as beneficiaries from the efforts of these great scientists, who have consumed themselves with their brilliant minds and genius.

It is up to the future generation to forge new scientific advances for the benefit of life and the world we live in.

This blog provides a list of great scientists linked to their lives and significant works.

All articles are brief biographies of these great scientists. The aim is to provide basic insights into their major breakthroughs.

• Ampere André-Marie
• Archimedes
• Babbage, Charles
• Barnard, Christiaan
• Binet, Alfred
• Boyle, Robert
• Bohr, Niels
• Brahe, Tycho
• Broglie, Louis de
• Cavendish, Henry
• Copernicus, Nicolaus
• Crowfoot Hodgkin, Dorothy
• Curie, Marie
• Dalton, John
• Edison, Thomas Alva
• Einstein, Albert
• Euclid
• Faraday, Michael
• Fermi, Enrico
• Feynman, Richard
• Ford, Henry
• Gauss, Carl Friedrich
• Hawking, Stephen
• Heisenberg, Werner
• Herschel, Caroline
• Hertz, Heinrich
• Hipparchus
• Hubble, Edwin
• Hutton, James
• Huygens, Christiaan
• Kaluza, Theodor
• Kepler, Johannes
• Klein, Oscar
• Lavoisier, Antoine
• Lavoisier, Marie Anne Paulze
• Lyell, Charles
• Maxwell. James Clerk
• Mendel, Gregor
• Newton, Isaac
• Oersted, Hans Christian
• Pasteur, Louis
• Ride, Sally
• Rayleigh, John
• Rutherford, Daniel
• Rutherford, Ernest
• Scheele, Karl Wilhelm
• Sziland, Leo
• Travers, Morris
• Watson, John
• Watt, James

Related link:

• Early Women Scientists

Posted by Tel Asiado

List of links to great philosophers' brief biographies

Despite centuries of trying to unravel "what is truth?", human beings have never really fully cracked to answer what makes the world go round, or what makes us keep going.

Perhaps, it's this very reason that philosophy is alive and thinkers take great interest, as they are continuously challenged by the eternal puzzle of the 'whys' of things.

This blog provides a list of great philosophers linked to their brief biographies.

• Aristotle (pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great)
• Arnauld, Le Grand Antoine
• Austin, J.L.
• Bacon, Roger
• Benedict de Spinoza
• Bentham, Jeremy
• Berkeley, George
• Boethius
• Bonhoeffer, Dietrich
• Democritus
• Descartes, René
• Dewey, John
• Diogenes
• Epicurus
• Frege Gottlob (also mathematician & logician)
• Freud, Sigmund (and psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, psychologist)
• Hegel, G.W. Friedrich
• Husserl, Edmund
• James, William (also a psychologist)
• Jung, G. Carl (analytical psychologist)
• Kant, Immanuel
• Keynes, John Maynard
• Locke, John
• Lucius Annaeus Seneca (also a dramatist and statesman)
• Lucretius (also a Latin poet)
• Machiavelli, Niccolo
• Malebranche, Nicolas
• Marx, Karl
• Nietzsche, Friedrich
• Parmenides of Elea
• Pascal, Blaise
• Peirce, Charles Sanders
• Philo of Alexandria
• Plato
• Plotinus
• Pythagoras
• Reid, Thomas
• Russell, Bertrand
• Sartre, Jean-Paul
• Schelling, Frederick W.
• Schiller, Friedrich von
• Schlick, Moritz
• Socrates
• St. Thomas Aquinas
• Thales (also a scientist)
• Weber, Max
• Whitehead, Alfred North
• Xenophanes (also a poet and religious thinker)

All articles are brief biographies that aim to provide basic insight into the major ideas of great minds and their overall effect to humankind and the world around us.

Posted by Tel Asiado

Great Thinkers Birthday Celebrant: May 22

Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993), best-known for his bestselling book, The Power of Positive Thinking, was an American Christian Reformed pastor and writer.

He was born on May 22, 1898 in Bowersville, Ohio and educated at Ohio Wesleyan University and Boston Univerisity.

Dr. Peale was a Methodist Episcopal minister in 1922, and held three pastorates before he began his long ministry at Marble Collegiate Reformed Church in New York City, from 1932 to 1984.

He established a psychiatric clinic called the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, next door to his church. He was also a popular lecturer on public affairs.

Books by Dr. Peale:

• The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952
• The Tough-Minded Optimist, 1962
• Jesus of Nazareth, 1966
• Power of the Positive Factor

Posted by Tel Asiado

Great Thinkers Birthday Celebrants: May 22

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859), Scottish crime writer famous for his detective novels featuring character Sherlock Holmes.

Laurence Olivier, Baron (1907), English actor, director. He is best-known for outstanding theatre work and considered one of the greatest actors of the 20th century.

Richard Wagner (1813), German composer known for revolutionizing the 19th century concept of the opera.

Links to some of Wagner’s Operas:

Posted by Tel Asiado

• Bertrand (Arthur William) Russell, (1872-1970), was a British philosopher and mathematician who wrote numerous books on various topics including the theory of knowledge, mathematical logic, and social issues. His most important work was Principia mathematica in 3 volumes, written in collaboration with hs teacher, Alfred North Whitehead. Read more... Bertrand Russell Life and Philosophy
• Rudolph Carnap (1891-1970), was a German philosopher, an advocate of logical positivism. A member of the Vienna Circle and recognized as a founder of logical postivism, he came to the US from Europe in 1936. He was coeditor of the Journal of Unified Science wiht Hans Reichenbach, he wrote on the theory of probability, theory of knowledge, mathematical logic, and the philosophy of science.

Posted by Tel Asiado

Did you know that these two former American presidents follow the other one's birthday? Andrew Jackson was born on March 13 (1767) and James Madison, on March 14 (1751.)

James Madison (March 16, 1751 – June 28, 1836) was an American politician and political philosopher who became the 4^th President of the U.S. (1809-1817.) He was born in Port, Conway, Virginia. He graduated from Princeton University in 1771. He married Dolley Payne Todd in 1794.

He was one of the founding fathers of the United States and also the "Father of the Constitution" having been the principal author of the Constitution document. Madison was the first president to have served in the U.S. Congress. He drafted basic laws and was responsible for the first ten amendments to the Constitution and was regarded as the "Father of the Bill of Rights."

Madison's most distinctive belief was that there should exist checks and balances in a government to protect individual rights from the tyranny of the majority.

Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 - June 8, 1845) was the 7th president of the U.S. (1829-1837). Famous for his toughness, he was nicknamed "Old Hickory." Jackson was born in the Waxhaw settlement near the border between North and South Carolina. Known for his long miltary career, he was governor of Florida (1821), commander of the AMerican forces at the Battle of New Orleans (1815), and leading figure in the 1820s and 1830s era, shaping a modern Jacksonian democracy.

Orphaned at the age of 13, he wandered to western North Carolina, now Tennessee, and admitted to the bar in later years. In 1788 he settled in Nashville and married Rachel Donelson Robards. As his career progressed along with the development of the state of Tennessee, Jackson was the first president mainly associated with the frontier. He became a delegate to the Tennessee constitutional convention, and served as US representative and senator, and at one point, also a judge in the superior court of Tennessee.

Posted by Tel Asiado

This day, March 15, Emil von Behring (1854-1917) is born. He was a German bacteriologist and pioneer immunologist. In 1901 Behring was awarded the first Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his work on serum therapy. He is considered the founder of the science of immunology.

Emil Adolf von Behring was born in Handsorf, Prussia (Germany). He was educated at the University of Berlin and later served with the Army Medical Corps. He also became an assistant at the Robert Koch Institute of Hygiene in Berlin, where he met the Japanese bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburo. The two men collaborated and showed it was possible to provide an animal with immunity from tetanus by injecting it with animal serum of another animal already infected by the disease. This is now commonly called antitoxic immunity.

He died on March 31, 1917.

Posted by Tel Asiado

This day, March 9, is the birthday of Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), the Spanish explorer after whom the continent of America was named. His name has been Latinized as "Americus."

Vespucci was born in Florence, Italy. He was a contractor in Seville from 1495 to 1498, and provisioned one or two of the expeditions of Christopher Columbus, the navigator, explorer and colonizer from Genoa, Italy.

Vespucci was not a navigator himself but promoted an expedition to the New World commanded by Alonso de Hojeda and sailed there in his own ship, in which he explored the coast of Venezuela. He was naturalized in Spain in 1508, he was appointed pilot-major of Spain.

Christopher Columbus may have received credit for the discovery of the Americas, but it was Amerigo Vespucci who corrected Columbus's mistaken belief that his discoveries were part of Asia. It was also Vespucci who stated that the Americas were a "New World."

Trivia:

Other great thinkers born today:

• Bobby Fischer, chess grandmaster, arguably the greatest chess player.
• Yury Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, who became the first man to travel in space
• Howard Aiken, American mathematician who inventedthe forerunner of electronic digital computer, Howard Mark I.

Posted by Tel Asiado

American writers John Steinbeck and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow have the same birthday today, February 27.

John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968) was an American novelist and short-story writer famous for many novels including Of Mice and Men and his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 - March 24, 1882) was an American poet, the first American to be honoured with a bust in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. He is famous for many poems including "The Song of Hiawatha" and "Evangeline."

Related Links:

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow brief biography

John Steinbeck and His Works

Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Longfellow wrote some of the most well-known poem in American literature including "Paul Revere's Ride" from the Tales of a Wayside Inn. Steinbeck is famous for his compassionate depiction of people in the American society.

Posted by Tel Asiado

This day, February 22, George Washington (1732-1799), the first president of the United States, is born in Westmoreland County, Virginia.

It's never easy to write about someone extremely popular and whose life is very well-documented. This is written to remember a prime mover in the history of America and of the world. Washington is fondly called the "Father of His Country."

George Washington married Martha D. Custis, a widow. They had no children. Born into a wealthy family, he became a surveyor, and he charted lands in western Virginia. Upon the death of his half-brother, he inherited large estates which included Mount Vernon.

He later fought in the last French and Indian Wars, eventually achieving the rank of colonel and a military commander.

As president of the US, he chose to serve only two terms. He probably would have served as president for the rest of his life.

Related link:

Presidents of the United States

Posted by Tel Asiado

What do Boris Pasternak, Walter Brattain and Bertold Brecht have in common?

They have the same birthday - February 10.

This week is Valentine's Week, and for the lovestruck there's one love story of all time that will warm and inspire your hearts. I'm talking about Dr. Zhivago, a novel that made Boris Pasternak (1890) famous. Dr Zhivago has been made into a blockbuster film, produced by David Lean in 1965.

Check out my short piece at Inspiredpen Today dotcom - Pasternak and Dr Zhivago

Walter Brattain (1902) was an American physicist who shared a 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics for invention of transistor.

Bertold Brecht (1898) was a German playwright and also a poet, a theatrical reformer who developed drama as a social forum.

Posted by Tel Asiado

February 2 is significant to Joyce and his masterpiece Ulysses.

This day, February 2 (1882) James Joyce is born in Rathgar, just outside the city of Dublin, in Ireland. It was also on this day in 1922, forty years later, when Ulysses, his masterpiece was published.

When James Joyce was in his early 20s, he met Nora Barnacle and fell in love and they left IReland together. Then one day Joyce decided to write a novel abaout "one day" in Dublin. He chose the day that he and Nora had gone on their first date which was 16th of June, 1904. The day has been dubbed "Bloomsday" because the main character of Ulysses is Leopold Bloom.

It took him seven years to complete Ulysses which turned out to be his masterpiece. He had problems finding a publisher. Then critics thought it was too experimental, even somewhat obscene. One day, a friend who owned a bookstore in Paris decided to publish it herself.

Joyce also wrote other popular books:

• Dubliners, 1914
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916
• Finnegans Wake (1939).

Here's the brief biography of James Joyce.

Posted by Tel Asiado

This day, January 31, we remember three great celebrants, two of them, Irving Langmuir and Rudolf Mössbauer, were awarded the Nobel Prize, and Schubert is a famous composer.

Irving Langmuir (31 January 1881 – 16 August 1957) was an American chemist. He is known for his 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure." He advanced several basic fields of chamistry and physics, invented the gas-filled incandescent lamp, among others. It was his work in surface chemistry that he was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Langmuir was the first industrial chemist to become a Nobel laureate. The Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research near New Mexico and the American Chemical Society (ACS) jorunal for Surface Science, are called Langmuir, in his honor.

Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer is born on January 31, 1929, a German physicist known for his discovery of a nuclear process, the "Mössbauer Effect." He studied nuclear transitions and the gamma rays. In 1957, he discovered the famous "Mössbauer Effect" named after him, after a research that he worked on as a PhD student in Heidelberg, at the Physics Institute of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. For his work on this, he won the Nobel Pize in Physics in 1961, along with American Robert Hofstadter.

Last but not the least, I'd like to include one of the famous composers, Austrian composer, Franz Schubert, the greatest melodist of all time Here's a link to Schubert's biography.

Posted by Tel Asiado

This day, January 24 (1872), Morris W. Travers is born in Kensington London. He is the founding director of the Indian Institute of Science, an English chemist who worked with Sir William Ramsay. Together, they discovered the inert gases xenon, neon and krypton.

In search for other gases, Travers and Ramsay experimented in heating minerals and meteorites. Then in 1898, they obtained a large quantity of liquid air subjecting this to fractional distillation. So began their extensive experiment, first discovering krypton, then neon, and finally, xenon.

Travers continued work on cryogenics, and in Europe, assisted in building esperimental liquid air plants. For his brief biography, check out Morris Travers Biography.

Posted by Tel Asiado

This day, January 14 (1875), is the birthday of Albert Schweitzer, French medical missionary, theologican, physician, philosopher and musician. He was multi-awarded including the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize for medical and other works in Africa.

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was born in Kaysersberg, Alsace, but brought up in Guensbach in the Muenster Valley, where he attended the local school. He studied theology and philosophy at Strasbourg and learned the organ in Paris. In 1896 he decided to live for science and art until he was 30 years old, then he devoted his life to serving humanity.

Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of historical Jesus current at his time and the traditional Christian view, depicting a Jesus who expected the imminent end of the world. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life." He was also a lecturer in Oxford, London and Edinburgh.