11 giugno

Suger, abbot from 1122 and adviser to two kings, rebuilt the royal abbey in two campaigns: a new west front, then a new choir. The choir went up in under four years, from 14 July 1140 to June 1144. Its ring of chapels shares one continuous band of windows, and that ring of light is where most…

King Louis VII, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and a crowd of archbishops and bishops watched as the relics of Saint Denis and his companions were carried to the new altars. Suger’s own account of the day survives, and praises the “wonderful and uninterrupted light” of the new windows.

We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element air. — Evangelista Torricelli He wrote it to a friend in Rome, describing the tube of mercury that became the barometer: the air’s weight holds the mercury up, and the space above it is empty.

Parliament banned joint-stock companies without a royal charter, largely to stop rival “bubbles” soaking up the money the South Sea Company wanted. Mackay’s famous prospectus “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is” may never have existed. The act stayed…

Joseph Paxton, the Duke of Devonshire’s gardener, drew his idea on a sheet of blotting paper during a Midland Railway board meeting. A giant greenhouse of standard iron and glass parts, it could be built in months and taken down again. The sketch is in the V&A.

After a limited vote for women with an income or property in 1907, the Storting gave the vote to every woman of 25, making Norway the first independent country in Europe with equal suffrage.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. — John F. Kennedy Speaking from the Oval Office that evening, largely unscripted at the end, he promised the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He sent it to…

The monk sat down at a busy crossroads and set himself alight in protest at the government’s treatment of Buddhists. Malcolm Browne’s photograph went round the world, and Nhu’s wife called such protests a “barbecue”.

Five months after promising “segregation forever” in his inaugural address, Governor George Wallace blocked the door of Foster Auditorium to keep Vivian Malone and James Hood from registering. Kennedy federalised the Alabama Guard, and that afternoon Wallace stepped aside.

Stevie Wonder, Dire Straits, Whitney Houston and dozens more played a tribute concert broadcast to dozens of countries. Its subject, in Pollsmoor, was not allowed to watch it.

Margaret Chan raised the alert to phase 6, the first pandemic declaration since 1968. She called the severity moderate. The scale of the response was later criticised as disproportionate.

The first World Cup in Africa, remembered for the drone of the vuvuzela. South Africa became the first hosts out in the group stage. Frank Lampard’s shot against Germany landed a metre over the line and was not given, which moved FIFA to goal-line technology.

OpenAI's 175-billion-parameter model, opened to developers through an API. Given a few examples in plain text, it could translate, answer questions or write code it had never been trained for specifically — hence the paper's title, Language Models are Few-Shot Learners.