Today is May 17 2014

National Cherry Cobbler Day : More

• Pack Rat Day: More
  So, on the way home from work, remember to stop by your Dollar Store or such, and get a bunch of inexpensive things that you don't need and will never use. I bet there is still room in the kitchen collect-all drawer and certainly the garage can hold much more if you are willing to craw over the seat and exit by the rear door. As for behind the couch and the hall closet, well the opportunities are endless. For you Old Time radio fans, Fibber McGee and Molly had the classic storage area. Just remember, if you bought it, you probably will need it some day and if it is broke, it can be fixed, even if you need to wait several years for technology to catch up for said repair.
• World Telecommunications Day: More
• World Information Society Day: More
• Armed Forces Day in United States: More
• National Learn To Swim Day: More

• In 1792, The New York Stock Exchange is formed under the Buttonwood Agreement.
  From Wikipedia: 'The earliest recorded organization of securities trading in New York among brokers directly dealing with each other can be traced to the Buttonwood Agreement. Previously securities exchange had been intermediated by the auctioneers who also conducted more mundane auctions of commodities such as wheat and tobacco. On May 17, 1792 twenty four brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement which set a floor commission rate charged to clients and bound the signers to give preference to the other signers in securities sales. The earliest securities traded were mostly governmental securities such as War Bonds from the Revolutionary War and First Bank of the United States stock, although Bank of New York stock was a non-governmental security traded in the early days.
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• In 1902, Greek archaeologist Valerios Stais discovers the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient 'mechanical analog computer'.
  From Wikipedia: 'The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analog computer designed to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendrical and astrological purposes, as well as the Olympiads, the cycles of the ancient Olympic Games.
  
  Found housed in a 340 mm × 180 mm × 90 mm wooden box, the device is a complex clockwork mechanism composed of at least 30 meshing bronze gears. Its remains were found as one lump, later separated in three main fragments, which are now divided into 82 separate fragments after conservation works. Four of these fragments contain gears, while inscriptions are found on many others. The largest gear is approximately 140 mm in diameter and originally had 223 teeth.
  
  The artifact was recovered probably in July 1901 from the Antikythera shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera. Believed to have been designed and constructed by Greek scientists, the instrument has been dated either between 150 and 100 BC, or, according to a more recent view, at 205 BC.
  
  After the knowledge of this technology was lost at some point in Antiquity, technological artifacts approaching its complexity and workmanship did not appear again until the development of mechanical astronomical clocks in Europe in the fourteenth century.
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• In 1938, Radio quiz show 'Information Please!' debuts on NBC Blue Network.
  From Wikipedia: 'Information Please was an American radio quiz show, created by Dan Golenpaul, which aired on NBC from May 17, 1938 to April 22, 1951. The title was the contemporary phrase used to request from telephone operators what was then called "information" but is now called "directory assistance".
  
  The series was moderated by Clifton Fadiman. A panel of experts would attempt to answer questions submitted by listeners. For the first few shows, a listener was paid two dollars for a question that was used, and five dollars more if the experts could not answer it correctly. When the show got its first sponsor (Canada Dry), the total amounts were increased to five and ten dollars respectively. A complete Encyclopædia Britannica was later added to the prize for questions that stumped the panel. The amounts went up to ten and twenty-five dollars when Lucky Strike took over sponsorship of the program'.
  
  Information Please went to television from June 29 to September 21, 1952 on CBS Television on Sundays at 9:30 PM as a summer replacement for The Fred Waring Show, a musical variety series. Adams and Kieran returned to the show, with Fadiman again as host and two guest celebrities. On August 17, Fadiman was replaced by John McCaffery for the rest of the show's run.
  - At Wikipedia: More
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• In 1943, The U.S. army partners with the University of Pennsylvania's Moor School to create ENIAC, the world's first computer.
  From Wikipedia: 'ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was the first electronic general-purpose computer. It was Turing-complete, digital, and could solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.
  
  Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, its first programs included a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.
  
  When ENIAC was announced in 1946, it was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press. It had a speed on the order of one thousand (103) times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines; this computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists alike.
  
  ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army, Ordnance Corps, Research and Development Command, led by Major General Gladeon M. Barnes. The construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943; work on the computer began in secret at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering the following month, under the code name "Project PX", with John Grist Brainerd as principal investigator.
  
  By the end of its operation in 1955, ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 2.4m × 0.9m × 30m (8 × 3 × 100 feet) in size, occupied 167m2 (1800 ft2) and consumed 150 kW of electricity. This power requirement led to the rumor that whenever the computer was switched on, lights in Philadelphia dimmed. Input was possible from an IBM card reader; an IBM card punch was used for output. These cards could be used to produce printed output offline using an IBM accounting machine, such as the IBM 405.
  
  Several tubes burned out almost every day, leaving it nonfunctional about half the time. Special high-reliability tubes were not available until 1948. Most of these failures, however, occurred during the warm-up and cool-down periods, when the tube heaters and cathodes were under the most thermal stress. Engineers reduced ENIAC's tube failures to the more acceptable rate of one tube every two days. According to a 1989 interview with Eckert, "We had a tube fail about every two days and we could locate the problem within 15 minutes." In 1954, the longest continuous period of operation without a failure was 116 hours—close to five days.
  
  ENIAC could be programmed to perform complex sequences of operations, including loops, branches, and subroutines. However, instead of the stored program computers that exist today, ENIAC was just a large collection of arithmetic machines, which had programs hard coded into the machines with function tables that each contained 1200 ten way switches. The task of taking a problem and mapping it it onto the machine was complex, and usually took weeks. Due to the complexity of mapping programs onto the machine, programs were only changed after huge numbers of tests of the current program. After the program was figured out on paper, the process of getting the program into ENIAC by manipulating its switches and cables could take days. This was followed by a period of verification and debugging, aided by the ability to execute the program step by step.
  
  The completed machine was announced to the public the evening of February 14, 1946 and formally dedicated the next day at the University of Pennsylvania. The original contract amount was $61,700; the final cost was almost $500,000 (approximately $6,100,000 today). It was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. ENIAC was shut down on November 9, 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. There, on July 29, 1947, it was turned on and was in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.
  - At FamousDaily: More
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• In 1954, The United States Supreme Court hands down a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
  From Wikipedia: 'Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional'.
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• In 1973, The Watergate hearings begin in the United States Senate and are televised.
  From Wikipedia: 'The Senate Watergate Committee was a special committee convened by the United States Senate to investigate the Watergate scandal after it was learned that in 1972, the Watergate burglars had been directed to break into and wiretap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign fund raising organization. The formal, official name of the committee was the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities.
  
  The Committee played a pivotal role in gathering evidence that would lead to the indictment of forty administration officials and the conviction of several of Nixon's aides for obstruction of justice and other crimes. Its revelations prompted the introduction of articles of impeachment against the President in the House of Representatives, which led to Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974.
  
  'Hearings opened on May 17, 1973, and the Committee issued its seven-volume, 1,250-page report on June 27, 1974, entitled Report on Presidential Campaign Activities. The first weeks of the committee's hearings were a national politico-cultural event. They were broadcast live during the day on commercial television; at the start, CBS, NBC, and ABC covered them simultaneously, and then later on a rotation basis, while PBS replayed the hearings at night. Some 319 hours were broadcast overall, and 85% of U.S. households watched some portion of them. The audio feed also was broadcast gavel-to-gavel on scores of National Public Radio stations, making the hearings available to people in their cars and workplaces, and giving a major boost to the fledgling broadcast organization'.
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Nothing. Looks like I was lazy on this day.

No. 1 song

• Hello, Dolly! - Louis Armstrong': More
  'Can't Buy Me Love' has been displaced by 'Hello, Dolly!', which will hold the no. 1 spot until May 23th, when 'Love Me Do', takes over.

Top movie

• Crack in the World More
  Having displaced 'The Carpetbaggers', it will be there until the weekend box office of May 24, 1964 when, 'Viva Las Vegas', takes over.
  Crack in the World: on Wiki.com: More

• FamousBirthdays.com: May 17 Birthdays More
• FamousDaily.com: May 17 History More
• History.com: Historical Events on 17th May More
• HistoryOrb.com: Famous Deaths on 17th May More
• On-This-day.com history 17th May More
• On-This-day.com music history 17th May More
• Wikipedia.com: History May 17 More

National Asparagus Month National Barbeque Month National Chocolate Custard Month National Egg Month National Gazpacho Aficionado Month National Hamburger Month National Salad Month National Strawberry Month

May is:

May origin (from Wikipedia):
The month May was named for the Greek goddess Maia, who was identified with the Roman era goddess of fertility, Bona Dea, whose festival was held in May. Conversely, the Roman poet Ovid provides a second etymology, in which he says that the month of May is named for the maiores, Latin for 'elders,' and that the following month (June) is named for the iuniores, or 'young people'

May ' is the fifth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian Calendars and one of seven months with the length of 31 days.
May is a month of Autumn in the Southern Hemisphere and spring in the Northern Hemisphere (Summer in Europe). Therefore May in the Southern Hemisphere is the seasonal equivalent of November in the Northern Hemisphere and vice versa. '

May at Wikipedia: More

If you couldn't afford 90 cents for a movie ticket, 50 years ago, or your 45 RPM record player was broke, you might watch one of these shows on TV.
From this Wikipedia article: More

Best selling books of 1964 More

• Astronomy Picture of the Day: More
• NOAA: - National Hurricane Center - Atlantic Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook: More
• Listen to Old Radio Shows: (streaming mp3 with schedule) More
• NASA TV: (video feed) More
  NASA TV schedule: More
• Public Domain eBook Links

  Sites for downloading or reading free Public Domain eBooks. Available in various formats. More

• Podcast: A Moment of Science. Approximately 1 minute general science facts.
  Home page: More
  RSS: More
• Podcast: The Naked Scientists. Current science, medicine, space and other science
  Home page: More
  RSS: More
• Podcast: Quirks & Quarks. Current science news.
  Home page: More
  RSS: More
• Articles and videos: Universe Today. Current space and astronomy news.
  Home page: More
  RSS: More
• Old Picture of the Day - "Each day we bring you one stunning little glimpse of history in the form of a historical photograph."
  Home page: More
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Below, are listed several holiday sites that I reference in addition to other holiday researches.

US Government Holidays

• 2014 Postal Holidays More
• 2014 Official Federal Holidays More

Holidays Worldwide

• List of holidays by country More
• Holidays and Observances around the World More