Thought

Sir Francis Bacon

Croesus said to Cambyses; That peace was better than war; because in peace the sons did bury their fathers, but in wars the fathers did bury their sons.
Francis Bacon, Apophthegms, New and Old (published 1625).

1 reply on “Sir Francis Bacon”

Bacon was drawing upon Herodotus for this quotation.

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On this day in 1833, Denison Olmsted was alerted by his neighbors to something truly amazing, a night sky filled with shooting stars.

Not just a one or two or a dozen or a hundred: 72,000 or more per hour. Though recognizing where among the constellations meteors came from was ancient knowledge, it had not been recorded by modern-era scientists, at least in this case. What Olmsted noticed was that the meteors were coming from one point in the sky, the constellation Leo. This regular meteor event is now called the Leonid meteor stream.

In the morning, Olmsted wrote a brief report on the meteor storm for the New Haven Daily Herald newspaper, which elicited correspondence from around the country, thus beginning a social storm, in a sense: crowd-sourced science.