10 febbraio

Three trips before the winter laid about 3,000 kilograms of food and fuel at 80°, 81° and 82° south. Each depot was marked with a line of flags running east and west, so a party that missed it in fog would still cross the line.

At 2.30 in the morning the Terra Nova crept into Oamaru; Pennell and Atkinson went ashore quietly and cabled London. The deaths were in the papers the next day, eleven months after Amundsen’s success had been.

A protest at the government’s claim that Congress was to blame for the violence of 1942. He was seventy-three, and officials prepared for his funeral; he lived.

The U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers walked west across the bridge between Potsdam and West Berlin as the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel walked east. The bridge was used for two more such exchanges, in 1985 and 1986.

It confirms Tyler’s precedent, lets a president fill a vacant vice presidency with Congress’s approval, and lets a president, or the vice president and cabinet, declare the president unable to serve. That last clause, Section 4, has never been invoked.

State President P. W. Botha had offered to free him if he renounced violence. His daughter Zindzi read his answer to a rally in Soweto: “I cherish my own freedom dearly, but I care even more for your freedom.” And: “Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.”

The first time a reigning world champion lost a game to a computer at a classical time control.

A six-game match for the Association for Computing Machinery’s fiftieth anniversary. Kasparov lost the first game, then won three and drew two to take the match 4–2.

Pony Ma’s Tencent, a few months old, released a Chinese-language copy of the instant messenger ICQ. After AOL, ICQ’s owner, complained about the name, it became QQ. When it added profiles and friend pages it became, in boyd and Ellison’s words, the largest social network site in the world.