featured Wiki of the Day Abulsme Productions

Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.

The featured article for Tuesday, 16 April 2024 is William T. Stearn.

William Thomas Stearn (; 16 April 1911 – 9 May 2001) was a British botanist. Born in Cambridge in 1911, he was largely self-educated and developed an early interest in books and natural history. His initial work experience was at a Cambridge bookshop, but he also had a position as an assistant in the university botany department. At the age of 29 he married Eldwyth Ruth Alford, who later became his collaborator, and he died in London in 2001.

While at the bookshop, he was offered a position as a librarian at the Royal Horticultural Society in London (1933–1952). From there he moved to the Natural History Museum as a scientific officer in the botany department (1952–1976). After his retirement, he continued working there, writing, and serving on a number of professional bodies related to his work, including the Linnean Society, of which he became president. He also taught botany at Cambridge University as a visiting professor (1977–1983).

Stearn is known for his work in botanical taxonomy and botanical history, particularly classical botanical literature, botanical illustration and for his studies of the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. His best known books are his Dictionary of Plant Names for Gardeners, a popular guide to the scientific names of plants, and his Botanical Latin for scientists.

Stearn received many honours for his work, at home and abroad, and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1997. Considered one of the most eminent British botanists of his time, he is remembered by an essay prize in his name from the Society for the History of Natural History, and a named cultivar of Epimedium, one of many genera he produced monographs on. He is the botanical authority for over 400 plants that he named and described.

This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:33 UTC on Tuesday, 16 April 2024.

For the full current version of the article, see William T. Stearn on Wikipedia.

This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.

Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.

Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.

Until next time, I'm Kimberly Neural.

Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.

The featured article for Monday, 15 April 2024 is One of the Boys (1989 TV series).

One of the Boys is an American sitcom created by Blake Hunter and Martin Cohan that aired six episodes on NBC from April 15 to May 20, 1989. It was one of the only American primetime programs to star a Latin American woman—María Conchita Alonso—that decade. She features as Maria Conchita Navarro, a Venezuelan immigrant to the United States who begins working in the office of a small construction company and marries its widowed owner, Mike Lukowski (Robert Clohessy). Five production companies oversaw filming at Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, where delays prevented critics from watching a preview in advance of the premiere. Reviews referred to the concept, script, and Alonso's acting. The mid-season replacement received inconsistent Nielsen ratings and was not renewed for a second season by NBC.

This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:30 UTC on Monday, 15 April 2024.

For the full current version of the article, see One of the Boys (1989 TV series) on Wikipedia.

This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.

Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.

Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.

Until next time, I'm Gregory Neural.

Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.

The featured article for Sunday, 14 April 2024 is Walt Whitman's lectures on Abraham Lincoln.

The American poet Walt Whitman gave a lecture on Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, several times between 1879 and 1890. The lecture centered on the assassination of Lincoln, but also covered years leading up to and during the American Civil War and often included readings of poems such as "O Captain! My Captain!". The deliveries were generally well received, and cemented Whitman's public image as an authority on Lincoln.

Whitman greatly admired Lincoln and was moved by his assassination in 1865 to write several poems in the President's memory. The idea of a lecture on the topic was first proposed by his friend John Burroughs in an 1878 letter. Whitman, who had long aspired to be a lecturer, first spoke on the death of Lincoln in New York City's Steck Hall on April 14 the following year. Over the next eleven years, he delivered the lecture at least ten, and possibly as many as twenty, more times.

Many deliveries of the lecture were part of a broader speaker series or fundraising events. A delivery of the lecture in 1887 at Madison Square Theatre is considered the most successful lecture. Whitman's biographer Justin Kaplan writes that this delivery and the reception that followed was the closest Whitman came to "social eminence on a large scale", as it was attended by many prominent members of American society. Whitman later described that lecture and reception as "the culminating hour" of his life, but at another time criticized it as "too much the New York Jamboree". He gave the lecture for the last time in Philadelphia in 1890, two years before his death.

This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:30 UTC on Sunday, 14 April 2024.

For the full current version of the article, see Walt Whitman's lectures on Abraham Lincoln on Wikipedia.

This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.

Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.

Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.

Until next time, I'm Justin Neural.

Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.

The featured article for Saturday, 13 April 2024 is 1999 Sydney hailstorm.

The 1999 Sydney hailstorm was the costliest natural disaster in Australian insurance history, causing extensive damage along the east coast of New South Wales. The storm developed south of Sydney on the afternoon of Wednesday, 14 April 1999, and struck the city's eastern suburbs, including the central business district, later that evening. The storm dropped an estimated 500,000 tonnes of hailstones in its path. The insured damage bill caused by the storm was over A$1.7 billion (equivalent to $3.8 billion in 2022), with the total bill (including uninsured damage) estimated to be around $2.3 billion. It was the costliest single natural disaster in Australian history in insured damage, surpassing the $1.1 billion in insured damage caused by the 1989 Newcastle earthquake. Lightning also claimed one life during the storm, and the event caused approximately 50 injuries. The storm was classified as a supercell following further analysis of its erratic nature and extreme attributes. During the event, the Bureau of Meteorology was constantly surprised by the frequent changes in direction, as well as the severity of the hail and the duration of the storm. The event was also surprising as neither the time of year, time of day, nor the general meteorological conditions in the region were seen as conducive for extreme storm cell formation.

This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:15 UTC on Saturday, 13 April 2024.

For the full current version of the article, see 1999 Sydney hailstorm on Wikipedia.

This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.

Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.

Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.

Until next time, I'm Kimberly Neural.

Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.

The featured article for Friday, 12 April 2024 is Fallout (video game).

Fallout: A Post Nuclear Role Playing Game is a 1997 role-playing video game developed and published by Interplay Productions. In a mid-22nd century post-apocalyptic and retro-futuristic world, decades after a global nuclear war between the United States and China, Fallout's protagonist, the Vault Dweller, inhabits the underground nuclear shelter Vault 13. After customizing their character, the player must scour the surrounding wasteland for a computer chip that can fix the Vault's failed water supply system. They interact with other survivors, some of whom give them missions, and engage in turn-based combat where they battle until their action points are depleted.

Tim Cain began working on Fallout in 1994. It began as a game engine based on Steve Jackson Games's tabletop role-playing game GURPS. Interplay dropped the license after Steve Jackson Games objected to Fallout's violence, and Cain and designer Christopher Taylor created a new character customization scheme, SPECIAL. Although Interplay initially gave the game little attention, the development ultimately cost $3 million and employed up to thirty people. Interplay considered Fallout the spiritual successor to its 1988 role-playing game Wasteland and drew artistic inspiration from 1950s literature and media emblematic of the Atomic Age as well as the films Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog. The quests were intentionally made morally ambiguous. After three and a half years of development, Fallout was released in North America in October 1997.

Fallout received acclaim for its open-ended gameplay, character system, plot, and perceived original setting. It won "Role-Playing Game of the Year" from GameSpot and Computer Games Magazine, was nominated by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences at the Spotlight Awards, and is often listed among the greatest video games of all time. Fallout has been credited for renewing consumer interest in the role-playing video genre due to its setting, open-ended plot, and gameplay. Fallout was a commercial success, selling 600,000 copies worldwide. It spawned the Fallout series, the rights to which were purchased in 2007 by Bethesda Softworks.

This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:31 UTC on Friday, 12 April 2024.

For the full current version of the article, see Fallout (video game) on Wikipedia.

This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.

Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.

Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.

Until next time, I'm Olivia Neural.

Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.

The featured article for Thursday, 11 April 2024 is Kurt Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut ( VON-ə-gət; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer and humorist known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published 14 novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death.

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University, but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the U. S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox. He and his wife both attended the University of Chicago while he worked as a night reporter for the City News Bureau.

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. It received positive reviews but was not commercially successful at the time. In the nearly 20 years that followed, he published several novels that were well regarded, including two—The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1963)—that were nominated for the Hugo Award for best science fiction or fantasy novel of the year. He published a short-story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House, in 1968.

Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Its anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War, and its reviews were generally positive. It rose to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and made Vonnegut famous. Later in his career, Vonnegut published autobiographical essays and short-story collections such as Fates Worse Than Death (1991) and A Man Without a Country (2005). Since his death, he has been hailed for his dark humor commentary on American society. His son Mark published a compilation of his unpublished works, Armageddon in Retrospect, in 2008. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction.

This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 02:55 UTC on Thursday, 11 April 2024.

For the full current version of the article, see Kurt Vonnegut on Wikipedia.

This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.

Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.

Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.

Until next time, I'm Stephen Neural.