11 maggio

Constantinople dedicatedConstantinople

Constantine refounded the Greek town of Byzantium on the Bosporus as his capital, New Rome, with a senate of its own. It stayed the capital of the eastern empire until 1453.

Constantinople dedicatedConstantinople

Constantine refounded the Greek town of Byzantium as “New Rome”, with a forum, a senate and a porphyry column carrying his statue as Apollo-Helios. The city kept 11 May as its birthday for as long as it was Roman.

A woodblock-printed scroll over five metres long, sealed in a cave library at Dunhuang and found in 1900. Its colophon says one Wang Jie had it made for free distribution on behalf of his parents. It is the oldest dated printed book known.

A woodblock-printed scroll whose colophon says Wang Jie had it made for free distribution on behalf of his parents, and dates it to the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of Xiantong: 11 May 868. It is the oldest dated printed book known. It was sealed in a cave shrine at Dunhuang and taken…

The emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Philip II of France and Richard I of England all took the cross; England and France paid for it with the “Saladin tithe”, a tenth of every layman’s income and movables.

The rebels reached Delhi and, with some reluctance on his part, made the Mughal emperor, a poet past eighty with no army, the figurehead of the rising.

The Meerut troopers reached the Red Fort in the morning and asked the 82-year-old emperor, until then a Company pensioner, to lead them. Bahadur Shah Zafar gave the rising a Mughal banner, and Delhi became its centre.

If heat is the motion of molecules, then a speck suspended in water must be jostled by them and wander a distance you can see under a microscope, growing with the square root of time. He was not even sure this was Brownian motion: what he had read about it was “so imprecise” that he could form no…

Austria’s largest bank, founded by the Rothschilds in 1855, announced it had lost most of its capital. The run that followed spread to Germany that summer and turned an American slump into a world banking crisis.

An undeclared border war on the edge of Mongolia. In August Georgy Zhukov’s tanks encircled and destroyed the Japanese force. The defeat helped turn Japan’s ambitions south, towards the colonies of Southeast Asia, and away from the Soviet Union.

Eight months of night bombing of London and of cities from Coventry to Belfast and Glasgow. London was bombed on 57 nights in a row at the start, and tens of thousands of Londoners slept in the Underground. More than 40,000 British civilians were killed.

With “Shaw ’Nuff” and “Hot House”, recorded the same day for the small Guild label, these were the first records to show bebop fully formed. The quintet was playing at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street.

Akimov, Pravik and Kibenok died at Hospital No. 6 on 11 May, Toptunov on 14 May. By the end of 1986, 28 of the 134 people diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome had died of it.

IBM's chess machine beat the world champion 3½–2½ in a six-game rematch, having lost to him the year before. It searched some 200 million positions a second. Kasparov suspected human help and asked for a rematch; IBM retired the machine instead.

IBM’s machine won the rematch 3½–2½, searching some 200 million chess positions a second. It learned nothing: its skill was brute search plus an evaluation tuned by hand with grandmasters’ help.

Playing the Caro-Kann, Kasparov allowed a well-known knight sacrifice on e6 and resigned after 19 moves. Deep Blue won 3½–2½, the first match a world champion lost to a computer. IBM declined a rematch and retired the machine.

The rematch, in a small television studio on the 35th floor of the Equitable Center. The upgraded Deep Blue searched about 200 million positions a second on 480 custom chess chips. The winner took $700,000, the loser $400,000.

Hubble’s orbit gave no refuge at the space station, so Endeavour stood on the neighbouring pad, ready to fly a rescue. Five spacewalks added a new camera and spectrograph and left Hubble working into its fourth decade.