THE SUMARIAN CIVILIZATION……which emerged around 4100 BCE in southern Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), is widely regarded as one of the world’s first urban cultures, pioneering advancements in agriculture, trade, and governance…..known for their city-states such as Ur, Uruk, and Eridu, the Sumerians developed cuneiform, the earliest known system of writing, to record administrative activities, literature, and laws…..they excelled in engineering, creating irrigation systems, ziggurats (stepped temples), and one of the first known legal codes, influencing neighboring civilizations for centuries….the Sumerians were polytheistic, and their religious practices revolved around the worship of gods like Enki, Inanna, and Anu, whose myths deeply shaped Mesopotamian culture and later societies…..by around 2000 BCE, Sumer declined due to invasions by the Amorites and later the Akkadians, but their cultural and technological innovations formed the foundation of subsequent Mesopotamian empires.
IN 1880….British land agent Charles Boycott….attempted to evict tenants who were protesting high rents……local workers refused to harvest crops….business stopped trading with him….and even the postman wouldn’t deliver his mail….leading to the coining of the term “Boycott.”
MARCH 20, 1957 – Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee is a Black American film director, producer, writer, and actor was born in Atlanta, GA, on this date in 1957….his production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, has produced over 35 films since 1983…..Lee’s movies have examined race relations, colorism in the black community…..the role of media in contemporary life, urban crime and poverty, and other political issues…..Lee has won numerous awards, including an Emmy Award…..he has also received two Academy Award nominations…..Lee enrolled in Morehouse College, a historically black college…..where he made his first student film, Last Hustle in Brooklyn…..he took film courses at Clark Atlanta University and graduated with a B.A. in Mass Communication from Morehouse…..he did graduate work at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts……where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Film & Television. In 1985……Lee began working on his first feature film, She’s Gotta Have It….with a budget of $175,000…..he shot the film in two weeks…..when the film was released in 1986, it grossed over $7,000,000 at the U.S. box office…..after the success of films such as Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X…..Lee expanded the 40 Acres brand by opening small clothing stores with merchandise that bore the 40 Acres emblem…..Lee has also done several collaborations with clothing companies such as Nike, Eckō and Brooklyn Denim…..40 Acres & a Mule also has an advertising division with DDb called Spike DDB located in New York…..they have done several famous Super Bowl, Nike and Lay’s potato chip commercial spots…..they have produced hundreds of commercials and music videos in addition to Lee’s famous films…..in 2004, 40 Acres moved all of its operations to New York City with headquarters in Spike Lee’s native borough of Brooklyn……40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks headquarters is located on South Elliott Place in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn.
AN AUSTRALIAN……mathematician cracked the code of a famous 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet……revealing that they were doing more accurate trigonometry nearly 1,500 years before the Greeks…….Dr. Daniel Mansfield from the University of New South Wales decoded a 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet known as Plimpton 322…..the tablet, which was originally discovered in the early 20th century in southern Iraq…….contains a series of numbers arranged in four columns and 15 rows……Dr. Mansfield and his team discovered that Plimpton 322 is a trigonometric table…..unlike Greek trigonometry…..which is based on angles and circles…… Babylonian trigonometry used ratios of sides of right-angled triangles…….and a base 60 (sexagesimal) number system…..this system, the researchers found……enabled the Babylonians to create a trigonometric table that is more accurate than the Greek method….as it avoids irrational numbers and provides exact ratios.
Key points about this discovery include:
1. Plimpton 322 predates Greek mathematicians such as Hipparchus, who is often credited with founding trigonometry, by more than a millennium.
2. The Babylonians’ use of a base 60 number system allowed them to make complex calculations with great precision. Their method is particularly advantageous for some practical applications, such as surveying and architecture.
3. The tablet shows that the Babylonians had a sophisticated understanding of right-angled triangles and could solve problems related to their sides with exceptional accuracy.
4. This finding suggests that the history of mathematics is richer and more complex than previously thought, with advanced mathematical practices emerging in different cultures independently.
The discovery of the true purpose of Plimpton 322 has reshaped our understanding of ancient mathematical knowledge…….and highlights the advanced capabilities of Babylonian scholars long before similar concepts were documented in Greek mathematics.
IN 1582….Pope Gregory XIII changed the new year date…..from April 1st to January 1st……some people ignored the change….and kept celebrating on April 1st…..they were called “fools”…..and this led to the tradition of….April Fool’s Day
IN 1831…..the Choctaw became the first Native American nation…..forcibly removed from their lands…..journeying to Indian territory on foot….with scarce food or supplies…..thousands died on this “Trail of tears and death”…..and the removals continued with the Creek in 1836….who lost 3,500 of it’s 15,000 tribal members along the way.
IN 1914….a French PM’s wife shot a newspaper editor….to stop him from revealing their affair…..while both were still married…..she was acquitted due to….. “Uncontrollable female emotions.”