Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

March 15, 1906: Charles Rolls and Frederick Royce founded Rolls-Royce Limited, the British car and aero-engine manufacturing company. The company charter contained a forward-looking statement that the company should produce engines for use “on land or water or in the air”.

Rolls was the first Briton to be killed in an aeronautical accident with a powered aircraft, when the tail of his Wright Flyer broke off during a flying display in Bournemouth. He was 32.

Claude Johnson, then sales manager and managing director of Rolls-Royce, proved his good sense for luxury and elegance when he ordered this 40/50 hp as a factory demonstration car. Due to the silver color scheme in combination with the almost silent engine running Rolls-Royce gave this 40/50 hp the nickname “Silver Ghost”. This name was engraved on a metal plaque which was mounted below the windscreen. This special vehicle first attracted attention at the Olympia Motor Show in London in November 1906.

A year later, it competed in a reliability contest in Scotland. This was immediately followed by an endurance test covering 15,000 miles, which included completing the route from London to Glasgow 27 times. Why this effort? The brands C.S. Rolls & Co. and Royce Ltd. had only formed a joint automobile company since March 15, 1906. Accordingly, positive publicity was important, which at that time was achieved primarily through extreme reliability of the vehicles.

Rolls-Royce 40/50 hp Silver Ghost

Accordingly, some 50 of the early motor cars were given suitably imposing names, either by Johnson or by their proud owners. In an inspired moment, Johnson dubbed the twelfth chassis, number 60551, the ‘Silver Ghost’, in homage to its almost supernatural quietness and smooth ride. Painted silver and adorned with silver-plated fittings, it was widely exhibited by Rolls-Royce at motor shows, and Silver Ghost would go on to become the name by which the 40/50 H.P. was generally known, as it is today.

But chassis 60551 was more than just a showpiece. Out on the road, it dominated the gruelling, high-profile reliability trials that represented the pinnacle of motoring endeavour at that time and were thus central to Johnson’s relentless promotional activities. In the process, it perhaps did more than any other early Rolls-Royce model to establish the marque’s international reputation for performance and engineering excellence.

Its extraordinary run of success began with the 1907 Scottish Reliability Trial, in which it covered some 2,000 miles without a single breakdown, the only delay being for a minute to re-open a closed fuel tap. Immediately afterwards, it covered 15,000 miles non-stop, driving day and night except for Sundays, setting a new world record for continuous travel.

THE 1910s: THE ROLLS-ROYCE 40/50 H.P. ‘SILVER GHOST’

The big fat ugly bomber that refuses to die in the American weapons arsenal gets Rolls-Royce New Engine for B-52J


https://x.com/RollsRoyceNA/status/1867630415671894250



March 15, 1918: The Standard Time Act is passed by Congress, creating Daylight Saving Time in the United States.

March 19, 1918: The Standard Time Act is signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson.

March 31, 1918: Daylight Saving Time goes into effect in the U.S. for the first time.



"The story you are about to see is true", "Just the facts, ma'am", "We were working the day watch."

"The flood of Dragnet fan mail suggests that the U.S. completely forgets that it is a nation of incipient cop haters when its eyes are glued on Webb's show." TIME magazine, March 15, 1954.




Vic Schoen And His Orchestra – A Swinger's Holiday (1958)

A note on the back cover of this 1958 LP reads "Our thanks to the officers and men of the Strategic Air Command, March Air Force Base, Riverside, California, for their help and cooperation in the production of this cover."




March 15, 1985: the very first .COM domain, http://symbolics.com, was registered. Symbolics was a spinoff from the MIT AI Lab, one of two companies to be founded by AI Lab staffers and associated hackers for the purpose of manufacturing Lisp machines. Early origins of AI funded in part by DARPA. It marked the beginning of the commercial internet as we know it.

The Symbolics 3640 Lisp Machine is a fascinating piece of computing history, a high-end workstation from the mid-1980s designed specifically to run Lisp, a programming language favored for artificial intelligence  development known as "expert systems". Introduced in 1984 as part of Symbolics' 3600 family, the 3640 was a compact, high-performance evolution of earlier models, built to handle the demands of symbolic processing and AI research. Symbolics, a company spun off from MIT’s AI Lab, aimed to create machines that excelled at running Lisp natively, and the 3640 embodied that vision.

The 3640 ran Symbolics’ Genera operating system, written entirely in Lisp (initially ZetaLisp, later evolving with Common Lisp). Genera was a standout: fully object-oriented, with a presentation-based window system called Dynamic Windows. This wasn’t just a command-line box—it offered a rich, interactive development environment that was years ahead of its peers. Imagine a workstation where everything, from the OS to the apps, was built to feel seamless for Lisp developers, complete with high-resolution bitmapped graphics and networking via protocols like Chaosnet.


The Symbolics 3640 was a niche marvel—overbuilt for Lisp, a pioneer in workstation design, and a relic of an era when AI dreams drove hardware innovation.

Symbolics.com Museum  |  Symbolics keyboards & other images.


March 15, 1990: The Congress of People’s Deputies elected Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev as the new president of the Soviet Union. The public at large had elected the Congress by secret ballot for the first time.


March 15, 1991: The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany came into effect, granting full sovereignty to the united Federal Republic of Germany. Often referred to as the "Two Plus Four Agreement", it was unanimously agreed and signed by West Germany and East Germany and the key Allied powers (UK, France, USSR and USA). Drafted: 13 February 1990; Signed: 12 September 1990; Effective: 15 March 1991

In later years the interpretation of a comment allegedly made by US Secretary of State, James Baker, to the effect that NATO would expand "not one inch eastward" in a unified Germany, as applying instead to Eastern Europe, however neither has such a provision been included in the treaty, nor any of the parties has proposed or demanded its inclusion, and neither a recording nor written minutes of Baker's comment exist.

In 2014, Gorbachev said that the assurance only pertained to East Germany, and that the resulting agreement was upheld by NATO. His main aide in these negotiations, Eduard Shevardnadze, likewise agreed that NATO never made any such commitment regarding other countries in Eastern Europe, and that "the question never came up" in the talks on German reunification. That is presumably because all of the countries in question were still in the Warsaw Pact at the time and hosted large Soviet garrisons. Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, felt that NATO's later acceptance of countries like Poland violated the spirit of the earlier agreements. And here we find ourselves back in another war, this time a hot proxy war with Russia, now about to engulf Europe.


Do you believe in UFOs? It's Not Unusual.

USA #1 on this day in 1999: Cher - Believe



UK #1 on this day in 1965: Tom Jones- It's Not Unusual




President Jimmy Carter's White House Diary book published in 2010 promised access to his "entire diary" in the "near future."

Well, it's been 15 years, Jimmy is dead and the US National Archives archivist at the Carter Library as of last month said it still isn't available for researchers.

Vice President Mondale was going to The Greenbrier or some other "safe place" in the event of an imminent nuclear attack.




Robbie and Deckard...




HDR view of the lunar eclipse. 300GB image shows the lunar surface in extreme detail. Mega 4K size