May 28

Herodotus says Thales of Miletus foretold the year of an eclipse that turned day to night during a battle between the Lydians and the Medes, who made peace on the spot. It is usually identified as the total eclipse of 28 May 585 BCE. Thales, who held that everything is made of water, is counted as…

Herodotus says Thales of Miletus foretold the year of the eclipse that stopped a battle between the Lydians and the Medes: 28 May 585 BCE by modern reckoning. Aristotle names him the first philosopher, for holding that everything comes from water. None of his writing survives.

Qalawun’s son al-Ashraf Khalil brought a huge army and dozens of siege engines. Abu’l-Fida helped haul one, “the Victorious”. The Templars’ fortress by the sea held out ten days after the city fell.

With the king a prisoner and Paris in revolt under Étienne Marcel, peasants of the Beauvaisis rose against the nobles who had lost at Poitiers and now plundered them. They burned manors and killed families; the reprisals killed thousands after Charles of Navarre beat their army at Mello and…

A truce, not a peace, sealed with a marriage: Henry VI was to marry Charles VII’s niece Margaret of Anjou. Henry later promised in secret to hand over Maine, and did in 1448. Charles used the lull to build an army.

In April, hearing his father was ill, Wolfgang wrote that death, “the true goal of our life”, had become “this true, best friend of mankind”. He did not travel to the funeral. Father and son had not met since Leopold’s visit of 1785.

Louis Delgrès, a colonel of colour, fought the expedition sent to restore the old order in Guadeloupe. Cornered at Matouba, he and some 300 followers blew up their position rather than surrender. Slavery was restored on the island that July.

A band of Szgany camps in the courtyard, and Harker throws two letters out of his window, one to Hawkins and one in shorthand for Mina, with a gold piece to the man who picks them up. The Count burns the shorthand letter in the lamp flame, hands Hawkins’s back to be re-addressed, and locks Harker…

Raymond Lambert and Tenzing spent the night at about 8,400 metres with no sleeping bags or stove, melting snow over a candle. Next day their oxygen sets worked only at rest; they crawled up the South-East Ridge to about 8,595 metres, some 250 metres below the top, and turned back. It was the…

Lowe, Alfred Gregory and the Sherpa Ang Nyima carried loads up the ridge with Hillary and Tenzing and went down. The two pitched the highest camp yet, at about 8,500 metres, on a sloping ledge, and spent the night there.

At 4 a.m. it was very still. Hillary found his boots frozen solid and thawed them over the Primus stove while they melted snow and ate.

Apple agreed to pay $3 billion for the headphone and streaming company Dr. Dre founded with Jimmy Iovine, its largest acquisition until then. Beats Music became the core of Apple Music a year later.

OpenAI’s 175-billion-parameter model could translate, answer questions or write code from a few examples typed into its prompt, without any further training — hence the paper’s title, Language Models are Few-Shot Learners.