Triệu Thị Trinh, better known by the honorific Bà Triệu or Lady Triệu, was a Vietnamese warrior who resisted the Eastern Wu occupation of Vietnam in the 3rd century AD. Her fight against the Chinese occupation of her country, which had been annexed by the Han dynasty in the 2nd century BC, had some success in the short term but it remained part of China for a further seven centuries.
Vietnam was under Chinese sovereignty on and off for around 1,500 years. In 1428, Lê Lợi re-established the independent nation of Vietnam under his House of Lê. He was a guerilla leader who drove out the Ming Chinese armies but subsequently proved an astute politician by his diplomatic negotiations with the Ming court, promising loyalty to China in return for political independence. This is he.
"My body is like a jackfruit swinging on a tree,
My skin is rough, my pulp is thick.
Dear prince, if you want me then pierce me upon your stick
Don't squeeze, i'll ooze and stain your hands."
("The Jackfruit")
Because I pitied, this happened,
I wonder if he knows?
Our match had not begun
When fate intervened.
The sin he will have to bear, for a hundred years -
Right now, love's burden is all mine.
("Premarital Pregnancy")
The modern history of this small. much maligned nation began with the oppression of Western Christian religious influence and resulted in French invasion and colonisation. Phan Đình Phùng was a Vietnamese revolutionary who led rebel armies against French colonial forces at the end of the 19th century and is regarded to this day as a revolutionary hero.
In World War II, Japanese invasion and a French Vichy government were overcome by the Allies but in September 1945 Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. His Viet Minh forces defeated the French in 1954. Twenty years of war followed, with first the French seeking to defend its interests and then the USA attempting to stop the spread of communism. Despite this pressure, the communists solidified control over the country and renamed Saigon, the previous South Vietnam capital, as Ho Chi Minh City.
After two thousand years of conflict, Vietnam is now a modern nation, a member of the United Nations since 1977 and currently a member of the UN Security Council. They have one of the fastest growing economies in South East Asia and a poverty rate below 6 per cent. Let's hope the next two thousand years will be peaceful and stable.
I'm not sure whether exponentialism is a word. If not, I have invented it. I'll be on to the OED in the morning. My definition is "the religion of solving jigsaw puzzles". Put simply, if I have 800 pieces of a 1,000 piece puzzle still to be placed, and I spend one hour today working on the puzzle, I might expect to correctly place say one piece, whilst when I have only 50 pieces still to be placed, I would expect to place all of them within the hour. The placing success grows at an exponential rate rather than a linear one. [Ed: You have a strange definition of "simply", Nigel]
I am a worshipper of exponentialism. It gives me hope in the dark days when pieces don't fit and I simply can't find that piece with a green stripe and a dash of yellow on the tongue. It gives me belief that I will eventually solve the puzzle. It gives me joy in the company of shared believers in the healing powers of puzzling.
Regular readers will know of my difficulties with my Starry Night puzzle. I get great succour from the experiences of a fellow disciple of exponentialism, Hugh Jackman:
Until February 2020 I played poker once a week at a local pub. They were just fun games really, highly competitive but friendly with just a £1 stake. Once a month we would play a £10 game, just to kid ourselves we were professionals. Sadly, the pandemic has meant that hasn't happened for nearly a year; squeezing ten people round a small table is not exactly conducive to keeping viruses from spreading. Indeed, we and many other live poker games throughout the UK, rather than Wuhan's bats, may have been the original superspreaders.
My topic today is: kickers. In Texas Holdem poker, a kicker is a side card which can act as a decider between two otherwise equal hands. Two aces, two tens with a six beats two aces, two tens and a five. The six is the kicker.
But enough of poker. What you really want to read about today, my friends, is......football!!! And what word could better reflect the essence of football than: Kicker.
I was intrigued to learn of a German club called Stuttgarter Kickers. They play in the Oberliga Baden-Württemberg, which is the fifth tier of the German professional football pyramid, after two successive relegations. They are currently second in the table. However, matches in this league haven't been played since October, presumably because of Covid-19. They are not due to play again until the last weekend in February; hopefully things might be a bit better by then.
So why my interest in this obscure team? Because of their name, of course. Kickers is such an obvious word for a football club. That's what footballers do, they kick. Sometimes each other but mostly the ball. A typical new football club would entitle themselves something like MyNewClub FC, where the FC stands for Football Club. It sounds so much posher than Kickers, which is the ultimate in onomatopoeia (in its original Greek meaning). Or maybe MyNewClub City or MyNewClub United or MyNewClub Albion, all of them rubbish deflections, claiming some kind of social function, from the primary purpose of the club, which is to kick balls.
I thought at first that this was an anglicized version of a different German word but no, that's their name. Even babelfish.com translates the English "kicker" into German as "kicker".
I wondered if this club is unique in its name but no, there is also the Kickers Offenbach which is absolutely not a hater of The Tales of Hoffman but a genuine football club. A few more include Richmond Kickers of Virginia, USA, playing in the United States Soccer League One, Kickers Emden in the Oberliga Lower Saxony, Femina Kickers in Worb, Switzerland, currently bottom of the Nationalliga B Women table with 0 points after 7 matches and Würzburger Kickers who are in the Bundesliga 2 in Germany. The latter copped out a bit by calling themselves themselves FC Würzburger Kickers - covering all bases and a definite nod to establishment elitism.
I just wish we had some in England. I can think of many English clubs with reputations for being bunches of cloggers - opposition first, ball second. Bolton Kickers more apt than Bolton Wanderers (what does that mean?) for instance. Kickers Wimbledon in the old days. If you've got this far in this post, you'll have your own favourites for that.
Here's to Kickers everywhere - enjoy what you do!
I've just had another birthday present. I'm like the Queen, in that I have two birthdays a year. That's the only resemblance; as far as I know, she doesn't have a blog.
I was woken up by the chiming of my doorbell at 07:10 today. I'm pretty sure none of my readers will think that 07:10 is anything other than a late start to the day but I'm used to getting out of my warm bed some time between 08:00 and 08:30. For those of you shocked by that, bear in mind I am rarely in bed before midnight. Anyway, it was a courier delivering a large parcel. I hope he's getting overtime for unsocial hours.
Even at that ungodly hour, I was too inquisitive to pass up the opportunity to see what was inside the parcel. A cornucopia of delights! First of all, though, back to my warm bed for another hour's sleep. My heating doesn't come on until 07:30, after all. But I couldn't sleep, so made a cuppa and re-examined my loot.
Best of all was a card from my grandson
The Death Star is of course a sphere. And that set me thinking about spheres. Which I know is weird but thinking outside the box is the lifeblood of bloggers.
Now balls are spheres but you'll be relieved to know that I'm not going to talk about football. No, I am into much bigger spheres than those. Last night I watched the movie First Man, about Neil Armstrong and the years leading up to the Apollo 11 mission. It's a decent enough couple of hours if you're looking for some entertainment. Some of the time it's a bit tense, as they travel through the ionosphere and the troposphere. See, spheres! Concentrate, people.
Which of those spheres surrounding the earth is nearer to us? It's the troposphere, in which we all live. Clouds, rain, snow, that sort of stuff. The lowest part is the boundary layer, the earth's surface.
Further out from the troposphere is the stratosphere. This extends outwards a further 50km from the troposphere. The ozone in this layer absorbs ultraviolet light from the sun and prevents us from getting skin cancers and the earth from getting overheated. Or at least it would do if we weren't slowly destroying it with our nasty aerosols.
Then there's the mesosphere, thermosphere and the exosphere. I feel a home schooling science lesson coming on. Taken together, these three make up the ionosphere. It contains free electrons; without them there wouldn't be any radio waves and we couldn't hear Listen With Mother. Or use GPS.
The ionosphere is also where man made satellites orbit the earth. As of 1 April 2020, there were 2,666 of them. That sounds a lot - are they all really necessary? You'd think they would crash into each other. Want to know which countries have launched satellites? I have just the thing for you:
So Nigel, once we get to the edge of the exosphere, are we nearly at the moon? As you see, the exosphere stretches to around 400km above the earth. Further out, the outer regions, up to 16,000km above the earth, make up the magnetosphere. The moon, however, is 384,400km away. So no.
Thinking about the universe is why I couldn't get back to sleep at 07:15 today. I need an afternoon nap!
By popular request, some female mathematicians, scientists and engineers.
Let's start with my favourite - Hypatia. Perhaps the first female mathematician about whom we know a great deal. She taught philosophy and astronomy at the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria at the end of the 4th century AD. agnesscott.edu tells us that "she edited the work On the Conics of Apollonius, which divided cones into different parts by a plane. This concept developed the ideas of hyperbolas, parabolas, and ellipses." I guess to us that sounds esoteric but to mathematicians it's probably fundamental.
Why is she my favourite? OK, you've guessed it - she's the earliest Great Scientist available in the popular Civilization VI computer game, and it's always a race to be the first to recruit her. I know, that's sad. And so was the end of her life - murdered by religious zealots. Maybe this quote of hers didn't endear her to them:
All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.
Moving on in time, eight centuries to be exact, we come to Hildegard of Bingen. She was a German Benedictine abbess who has claims to be a polymath, excelling as a botanist, theologian and philosopher as well as a poet and composer. Check out this utterly beautiful piece:
From the 17th century we have Martine Bertereau, who was a mining engineer and mineralogist. Mr Wiki tells us she "surveyed the sites of hundreds of potential mines in France in the service of the French King Henry IV. Her writings describe the use of divining-rods as well as much useful scientific and practical advice which she derived largely from the Roman engineer Vitruvius's book on architecture, De architectura." She and her husband Jean, also a mineralogist, suffered abuse from many who regarded their work as witchcraft and sorcery, and she eventually died in prison.
Proceeding to the early 20th century, Marie Curie has to be included, of course. She was a chemist and physicist who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. She researched radioactivity and discovered two new elements, Polonium (named after her country of birth) and Radium. She set up institutes as centres of medical research, particularly into radiography. Sadly her death was from exposure to radiation.
We need to finish up in the present day with Yi So-yeon. Born in South Korea in 1978, she gained a doctorate in biotechnology before, in 2008, becoming the first Korean to fly in space. One to watch!