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THE BEADY EYE ASK’S; WHAT WERE THE MOST SIGNIFICANT EVENTS IN HISTORY THAT HAVE HAD THE GREATEST IMPACT ON THE WORLD.

06 Monday Jan 2020

Posted by in History.

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(Twenty-minute read)

Before we get started let’s try and explain the dating system of History.

Why?

Because people of different cultures and belief systems should be able to access and discuss history without having to date it according to the Christian belief in Jesus as the son of God and the messiah.

In order to date, a present event from a past event one must know when that past event occurred.

We have BCE/CE rather than BC/AD – Before Christ/Anno Dominior – Year of Our Lord.

 BCE/CE makes no sense because it refers to exactly the same event as BC/AD.

BC/AD also has no year zero but does not need one because it is not claiming to date history from a specific event.

After the time of Christ” or “in the common era” which eventually came to be written simply as “common era” and then CE which gave rise to BCE in defining events prior to the common era.

BCE/CE continues to be used because it is more accurate than BC/AD so forgive me for using both.

  1. First humans communicated only through speaking and picture drawings.
  2. 3000 B.C., the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (what is today southern Iraq) devised cuniform (shapes)
  3. Around 2000 B.C., Phoenicians created symbols ancient Egyptian writing is known as hieroglyphics
  4. The Greeks later adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels.
  5. The Romans gave the letters Latin names to create the alphabet we use today.
  6. Around 875 A.D., the concept of zero was developed.

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Your birth as there would be no history for you if not born.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus 484 BC – ca.425 BC has generally been acclaimed as the “father of history”.

Or was it the birth of Temujin c.1162 who DNA is in 16 million men alive today.

Sitting Bull, Lakota Tatanka Iyotake, born c. 1831.

It is said that the events in history alter the lives of mankind, and human civilization never remains the same after that. The history of the world is the memory of the past.

So was it, Plato born in 428/427 BCE, or Socrates who sought the impartial arbitration of a “thinking machine.” AI, credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy in c. 470 – 399 BC (which is probably only an inference from…Plato or  Aristotle born in 384 BC.)

In July 356 BC. Alexander the Great was born a military genius he was educated by the philosopher Aristotle.

Or was it Confucius born in 551 BCE considered as one of the most important and influential individuals in shaping human history.

Whoever it was the understanding of the linkages between past and present is absolutely basic for a good understanding of the condition of being human.

It is not just ‘useful’, it is essential. All people and peoples are living histories.

It is also essential for ‘rooting’ people in time. And why should that matter?

The answer is that people who feel themselves to be rootless live rootless lives, often causing a lot of damage to themselves and others in the process.

It took a long unfolding history to get everything to NOW.

Was it 11,000 years ago, with the invention of porridge or to put it differently, the first of at least five separate moments when farming was discovered, that is the planting and selection of cereal planting and selection of cereals, alongside the tethering of some animals. It meant that people stopped being nomadic hunters, and human populations grew, trapping farmers with more mouths to feed.

It also meant tooth decay, bad backs and a lot of very boring work. But without it, there would have been no villages, towns – no empires, no cars, no moon landing, no history, really, at all. And, of course, with GM foods and fish farms, it’s an ancient story that hasn’t stopped. In his book Sapiens: ( A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari states that we were all conned by a plant called Wheat.)

Anyway!

3500 AD the wheel was invented.

Prophet Muhammad Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim, born after his father’s death in Mecca, Arabia, around c. 570  giving birth to Islam as a religion.

Jesus was born in 3 or 2 B.C.

Julius Caesar was born in Rome on 12 or 13 July 100 BC.

With the final fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD came the dark ages which led to a complete deterioration of the Roman culture. The progressed and developed culture (law, architecture, literature, government, etc.) of the Roman Empire was lost forever.

850AD Gunpower was invented.

The Earth grew colder, and the world is plunged into a cold, pitch-black, chaotic hell with the Black Plague just suddenly appeared in Europe in the 1300s.PHOTO: telegraph

The Song dynasty in China that began in 960c lasted until 1279.

What happened? Where did all of the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans go? Why did people forget how to read and write and sculpt and build?

There was no one factor that we can pin as the cause of the Dark Ages a period from about the 6th to the 10th century CE. Now referred to as the Middle Ages it is a time of superstition, a stagnant decadent ghettoed holocaust for anyone who is not a noble or a priest, ridden with illiteracy, disease, war, and poverty, into the minds of the masses.

1066. William the Conqueror a normans from France invade England.

Around 1552 Walter Raleigh was born he has been credited with bringing potatoes and tobacco back to Britain, although both of these were already known via the Spanish. In 1616, he went off to search for El Dorado, never found it and got executed on 29 October 1618.

Out of this came Colonialism, Imperialism and Slavery, Capitalism with the Industrial Revolution.

There is no doubt that colonialism had a major effect on the entire world followed by the Reformation. It triggered off the American Revolutionary War. Great Britain lost one of its most important colony, and all the participating nations suffered economic losses with the American Revolution influence the French Revolution to a great extent.

1642 Isaac Newton born.

Napoleon Bonaparte born on August 15, 1769, uprooted the old concepts of aristocracy and hierarchy. (Pasteur As ) Germ Theory of Disease.

Samuel Morse born April 27, 1791, invented the telegraph system.

Newton’s theory of gravity in 1798  took place 111 years after the publication of Newton’s Principia and approximately 71 years after his death before we all came down to the ground.

1884 the machine gun.

On 19 March 1813, David Livingstone was born. In October 1871 found Stanley in Africa with the famous phrase: ‘Dr Livingstone I presume?’

Alexander Graham Bell was born on 3 March 1847 credited with inventing the telephone.

On July 1, 1858, Charles Darwin put forth the theory of Natural Selection.

Henry Ford, born July 30, 1863  “You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.”

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov was born near St Petersburg on 18 May 1868.

On 6 June 1868, Robert Falcon Scott was born. Beaten to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen.

Guglielmo Marconi

Ernest Henry Shackleton was born on 15 February 1874 died of a heart attack off South Georgia.

Pasteur’s a Microbiologist 1877 to 1887 presents the germ theory revolutionized biology and medicine.

1879 Albert Einstein born.

Adolf Hitler is Born at 6:30 p.m. on the evening of April 20, 1889. He rose to power as the chancellor of Germany in 1933, and as Führer in 1934.

World War I lasted from 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918 it killed 16 million people—soldiers and civilians alike giving rise to the Russian Revolution and the Second World War. It helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.

World War II September 1st, 1939 was the deadliest war in human history, with over 75 million deaths all over the world. Two Atom bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki contributed to ending of the war on May 7, 1945, after which the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or the Soviet Union) was formed, emerged as a superpower.

Germany was occupied by the Allies and the Soviet army.

However, the failing relations of the Soviet Union with the other Allies ultimately resulted in the division of Germany, and building of the Berlin Wall (also a symbol of the ‘Iron Curtain’)

The Cold War and the arms race was the indirect effects of the war, that were to define world politics for many years to come.

Titanic sinks. At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912.

In 1925 the first Television.

Donald Trump is born on June 14, 1946.

1947 the Kalashnikova.

In 1953 the structure of DNA was a discovery with the field of artificial intelligence research founded as an academic discipline in 1956.

1954, Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute.

ON 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union inaugurates the “Space Age” with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite and the start of the internet. Almost one-third of the world’s 6.8 billion people use the internet regularly today.

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became both the first person in the world to enter space and the first person to orbit the Earth.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

Viking 1 was launched on August 20, 1975, and the second craft, Viking 2, was launched on September 9, 1975.

On September 5, 1977, Voyager I was launched and Voyager 11 on August 20, 1977. 

On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Apollo 11 Lunar Module (LM) pilot Buzz Aldrin became the first people to land on the Moon. Man on MoonBill Gates and Microsoft got their start in 1975.

MS Windows debuts in 1983.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification of Germany on November 9, 1989. marked the end of the Cold War, and the ultimate fall of the Soviet Union.

Hubble’s launch and deployment in April 1990 marked the most significant advance in astronomy since Galileo’s telescope 400 years ago.

On 20 November 1998 International Space Station starts to get built.

The European Union (EU) was created by the Maastricht Treaty on November 1st 1993.

September 11, 2001, two planes were flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York triggering off the Global War on Terrorism.

In 2015 the Fourth Industrial Revolution starts. It is the fourth major industrial era since the initial Industrial Revolution of the 18th century.

2019. First picture of a Blackhole  55 million light year from the Earth.

It is revolutionizing the present scenario in the world, The main innovations should develop in the fields of nanotechnologies, alternative fuel and energy systems, biotechnologies, genetic engineering, new materials technologies and so on.

It started with Automata, the predecessors of today’s robots, date back to ancient Egyptian figurines.

It is now transforming the world in exceptional ways.

With AI becoming increasingly ingrained into our lives, it offers a lot of promise, but can also be a double-edged sword.

It is offering a plethora of opportunities yet to be ushered in.  AI can now handle complex tasks including Object detection, Speech and Face recognition, etc. However, today it has broad intellectual challenges of its own. It is not limited to specific applications or certain biological structures. It requires combined basic research in cognition, statistics, algorithms, linguistics, neurosciences and much more.

It controls how we communicate and connect, search, buy and sell.

What is called Social media is now dividing and manipulating us, catapulting us towards an Algorithm society that is tearing the connective tissue of our civilisation.

No current program based on mathematics or frame systems has common sense.

Given that all people are living histories, how can we all best learn about the long-unfolding human story in which all participate?’

My answer is: Think again about why and who we elect as leaders and how and where we use neuro-symbolic AI.

So I repeat,  History is not just ‘useful’, it is essential.

All people and peoples are living histories.

We will need to rediscover what it means to be human.

If we are not careful history will repeat itself.

It is obvious that the reason why history repeats itself is that, people do not learn from mistakes. Its lessons must remain indelible on our minds, be it AI, time, money or even a life.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.

THE BEADY EYE LOOKS AT THE FORTHCOMING IRISH CELEBRATION OF THE 1916 EASTER RISING.

02 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in History., Unanswered Questions.

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( A two-minute Historical Read.)

This could be a tricky post in so far that there is no intention or wish on my part to offend any reader.

I must declare my self as a nationalist married to the most exquisite English Lady.

I also wish to state that I do not and never will condone violence as a means to an end.

Indeed those that planted explosive devices and walked away not knowing who was going to die were and are more repugnant than the Jihadis who at least blow themselves up.
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It seems appropriate because this will be the last post for a month or so that I return to my roots and aspiration to see my country united.

There is no need here to lament the long and painful history of Ireland.

As a myth, the Easter Rising no longer exerts power over the collective Irish psyche in the way it once did.

Now, as the Troubles are fading into history, the tumultuous events of Easter 1916 are about to be remembered.

The ashes of the past will certainly be raked over again this Easter in Ireland and, no doubt, greeted with bemused indifference in the UK, where there seems to be little public interest in Britain’s long and often brutal role in shaping its neighbour’s contested history and divided culture.

For me it is not whether or not Ireland will be united, only a case of when.

We have waited about 8 centuries so another few generations is a dawdle.

As a military adventure the Rising was, of course, a dismal failure but it was the first major armed uprising against the British empire in the 20th century.

It was and is being marked 100 years later in Ireland as the turning point for Irish freedom from London rule.Afficher l'image d'origine

It may well take another centenary to come and go before the turbulent spirit of the “unquiet founders” is stilled by history and for their heirs to accept that, as Yeats put it, it is “enough to know they dreamed and are dead”.

So why is this relatively minor disturbance so potent?

Precisely because it is so hard to say what it means.

It is one of those events that has a protean quality – it continually changes its shape.

The most famous lines about the Rising are WB Yeats’s from Easter 1916: All changed, changed utterly / A Terrible beauty is born.

But in fact the terrible beauty was not just born: it remains alive. And, like any living thing, it alters over time.

Among the things that change utterly and constantly is the meaning of the Rising itself.

It was a little sideshow to the cataclysmic main event: the first world war.

Even in Irish terms, it was, objectively, quite marginal.

As a historical fact, the Rising seems quite small and self-contained.

About 1,600 men and women took some part in the rebellion during Easter week of 1916. By contrast, about a quarter of a million Irishmen fought in the Great War.

The 1916 rebellion, was organised by a band of poets, Irish language enthusiasts, former British soldiers and a revolutionary Marxist, capturing international headlines when it took place while Britain’s armed forces, including tens of thousands of Irishmen, were still mired in the first world war.

During the Rising 485 men, women and children (mostly civilians) died in Dublin.

In the same week 570 Irish soldiers were killed in a single horrific German gas attack at Hulluch on the western front – an event that is scarcely remembered.

1916 was not just about the Easter Rising, but also landmarks such as the Battle of the Somme in July – an event sacred to unionists, given the large number of casualties suffered by the 36th Ulster Division.

The Rising is just a drop in an ocean of blood.

Drop or not it can be seen as a foundational event for three political entities:

The Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and (though this is conveniently ignored) the current United Kingdom, which changed radically when most of Ireland won its independence.

Yet the struggle has always been to decide whether it is history or current affairs, something that has happened or a harbinger of something yet to happen, done and dusted or unfinished business.

Most unionists look back at the Easter Rising as a stab in the back, given that Britain was embroiled in the first world war and the rebels were backed by the Germans.

It has often been said that every Englishman should know about Irish history and every Irishman should ignore it.

I don’t know about the latter, but I certainly agree with the former.

The Brits made the mistake of murdering the leaders in 1916 and thus provoked the Irish people to join the republican cause.

The executions of the rebel leaders, the imposition of conscription and British military actions – including the deployment of the semi-irregular Black and Tans – pushed the majority of the population in the 26 counties of what is now the Irish Republic into the arms of the IRA and Sinn Féin.

When the British authorities executed 15 rebel leaders during May 1916 (a 16th, Sir Roger Casement, was hanged in London in August) the public mood began to change.

The rebels, instead of being dangerous lunatics, became martyrs.

England  tried a similar tactic of repression in 1971 by imprisoning people without trial and then murdering 13 people in Derry.

Again, what this did was swell the ranks of the nascent IRA.

On Easter Sunday 1966 Paisley organised a counter-demonstration against the 50th anniversary of the Rising and this time 5,000 people turned up.

It was Paisley’s first major protest and from then on he built his power base.

Without the jingoism of Easter 1966, Paisley might have been relegated to the sidelines and, as I have always argued, without the rise of Paisley and his opposition to reforms inside Northern Ireland there would have been no Troubles.

The 50th anniversary provided a major step up for Paisley and Paisleyism.

The events of 1968 and all that flowed from them are a reminder of how potent that moment was and how quickly its cause can be reinvigorated.

August 1969 was the most sustained period of political violence in Ireland since the 1920s, and it changed everything, not least because it left many fearful Northern Irish Catholics asking a question that reverberated back though Irish history: who will protect us if the state will not?

When the war of independence ended, Ireland was partitioned, the province of Northern Ireland established and an even more bloody civil war was fought between the majority of those who backed that Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the diehards who opposed it.

The sacrifice of Easter, 1916, which WB Yeats called “a terrible beauty”, again became the defining symbol for a new generation of young people prepared to die – and kill – in pursuit of a united Ireland. Their deaths, in turn, inspired other young volunteers throughout the 30 years of violence that followed

”Ireland did not achieve its independence in 1916.”

To day Northern Ireland is officially British, instinctively Irish.

There is another potential twist in the long grass and that is if England votes to leave the EU and Scotland then ask for a second independence referendum. NI will then be in a quandary of allegiance and identity it has not had to make for a long time

Enda Kenny, the current taoiseach, will take the salute as thousands of troops file past the GPO. His party Fine Gael is directly descended from Michael Collins and his faction of the IRA, which accepted the 1921 treaty and which, ironically, for decades since, has been accused by generations of republicans of betraying the legacy of 1916.Afficher l'image d'origine

I am sure that the Nation will like it did when England played on the Green in Croke Park show the World that there is dignity in a Deeply rooted History.