Disney Educational - Bill Nye The Science Guy: Time
Can Bill Nye explain Einstein's theory of relativity to ten and 11-year-olds in less than 30 minutes? Tune in to this episode of his series, Bill Nye the Science Guy: Time, to find out, and to see how he manages to fit in two special guests, Ian Ziering of Beverly Hills 90210 and Ellen Cleghorne, comedian. Nye tells his audience how humans first began keeping track of time, what this timekeeping was based on, and why it was necessary.
The origin of Rome is marked by the legend of the bickering brothers Romulus and Remus. The city was named for the prevailing brother, Romulus, and it flourished to become the origin of a powerful empire. Citizens of Rome became rich traders and landowners thanks to an organized agricultural system and prosperous trade, and mass migration from other nations began.
The period embraced in this set is "one of the most dramatic and fruitful of results in European Annals - remarkable for work and endeavor, especially in the Slav world," the author writes. Among Western Slavs, the great events were the Hussite Wars and the union of Lithuania and Poland. The Hussite Wars were caused by ideas of race and religion (born in Bohemia.) The period of Bohemian activity began in 1403 and ended in 1434, with the battle of Lipan. Known for their great narrative power and contain vivid characterizations, Sienkiewicz' work includes the great trilogy of historical novels began to appear in 1883. It is composed of With Fire and Sword (1884), The Deluge (1886), and Pan Michael (1887-88). Set in the later 17th century, the trilogy describes Poland's struggles against Cossacks, Tatars, Swedes, and Turks, stressing Polish heroism in a vivid style of epic clarity and simplicity. Henryk (Adam Alexander Pius) Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) was a novelist, born in Wola Okrzejska, Poland. He studied at Warsaw, traveled in the USA, and in the 1870s began to write articles, short stories, and novels. His major work was a war trilogy about 17th-c Poland, beginning with Ogniem i mieczem (1884, With Fire and Sword), but his most widely known book is the story of Rome under Nero, Quo Vadis? (1896), several times filmed, notably in 1951 by Mervyn Le Roy (1900-87). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905.
In the second part of the twentieth century there began to be a marked increase in the number of reference books available in bookshops. No longer was the reference library of the average fairly educated household restricted to one dictionary, probably dog-eared and several decades old, one out-dated copy of Roget's Thesaurus, either much-thumbed or pristine, according to the needs of the household, and possibly an old copy of Fowler's English Usage. This increased interest in reference publishing started with dictionaries and a great variety of these, in various shapes and sizes, began to be made available to the public. This sparked off an interest in other kinds of reference books. Existing ones began to be regularly updated and a whole deluge of new ones appeared. These included thesauruses, guides to good usage, guides to good grammar, guides to correct spelling, hints on how to improve your writing, books of idioms and so on.
The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd and edited in London. Continuous publication began under founder James Wilson in September 1843.
