21 septembre

The feud between the houses of Orléans and Burgundy split France into two parties, each of which bid for English help. The Armagnacs took their name from Count Bernard VII of Armagnac, father-in-law of the murdered duke’s son. Henry V invaded into the middle of it; it ended only when Burgundy made…

At the first great European peace congress, Philip the Good of Burgundy abandoned the English and recognised Charles VII, who apologised for the murder at Montereau. The English had walked out, and Bedford had died at Rouen a week before the treaty was sealed.

Kings are in the moral order what monsters are in the physical. — Abbé Grégoire The Convention’s first act, voted unanimously on its first full day.

Babur’s descendants ruled most of the subcontinent by 1700, an empire that by Angus Maddison’s estimate produced close to a quarter of the world’s output. After Aurangzeb it broke into successor states, but the emperor in Delhi stayed the source of legitimacy until 1857.

After a summer of runs on sterling, the Bank of England stopped selling gold. The pound fell by about a quarter against the dollar within months, and the countries that left gold soonest were the first out of the Depression.

MYCIN, built at Stanford by Edward Shortliffe, chose antibiotics for blood and meningitis infections from several hundred if-then rules. In a blind trial, experts rated its choices acceptable in 65% of cases, as good as or better than Stanford’s own specialists. It was never used on patients.

Its big dish antenna never unfolded, so everything it found came home through a small one at a trickle. It still showed that Europa probably hides a salt-water ocean, and at the end it was steered into Jupiter so it could never contaminate that ocean.

The last two big independent investment banks became bank holding companies overnight, trading lighter rules for the Fed’s protection. The Wall Street model of 1933 to 2008 was over.

The clearest view of the rings since Voyager 2 flew past in 1989, and the first in infrared, with seven of Neptune’s fourteen moons.