Saturday, June 21, 2008

Fun with History: Wikipedia Date Search

I just discovered something neat: Wikipedia date search. Type in a date, any date, and you get a list of happenings around the world. I tried 1327 and got Edward III crowned king of England and Petrarch meeting Laura, plus a list of famous births and deaths.

Type in 1453 and you learn that the Ottoman capture of Constantinople coincided with the end of the Hundred Years War and the invention of Guttenberg's printing press. All in one year.

Being the narcissist I am, of course I typed in the year of my birth. And learned that the first commercial Concorde took off into the air around the time the UN vetoed a resolution to create an independent Palestinian State. Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth II sent the first royal e-mail and the DC Metro opened. In music, the first Eurovision song-contest coincided with the Ramones releasing their first album, U2 getting together for the first time, and the Eagles releasing "Hotel California." Along with the first known outbreak of the Ebola virus and the death of Mao Zedong.

(Supposedly
. It is Wikipedia, after all)

So- how old am I? (More importantly, what search term did you enter to find out? Ramones, Mao, or Eurovision?)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

A year older than me!

(I searched on 'Hotel California' but that gave the wrong answer, or at least an ambiguous one).

Bardiac said...

Erm, shouldn't Liz II have sent the first royal email? I think Liz I probably managed some fine regular royal mail, though :)

And just so you know, I feel OLD knowing when you were born!

Pamphilia said...

Obvy a Freudian Typo!

Anonymous said...

Some of us here at Pamphyllia Central think you might have been born in America's bicentenial year, which was unusually warm in America's perpetually foreign heartland.

Now that you own Greek, Latin and Hebre, will you buy some Ottoman? Not at the furniture store.

Pasha

Pamphilia said...

I wish I could pick up some Ottoman at the furniture store. Right now the plan is to get my colleague to translate and reward him with a big citation and a nice bottle of wine.

Oh, and no fair- anyone directly involved with my being born doesn't get to guess.