Battle cry

A battle cry is a yell or chant taken up in battle, usually by members of the same combatant group. Battle cries are not necessarily articulate, although they often aim to invoke patriotic or religious sentiment. Their purpose is a combination of arousing aggression and esprit de corps on one's own side and causing intimidation on the hostile side. Battle cries are a universal form of display behaviour (i.e., threat display) aiming at competitive advantage, ideally by overstating one's own aggressive potential to a point where the enemy prefers to avoid confrontation altogether and opts to flee. In order to overstate one's potential for aggression, battle cries need to be as loud as possible, and have historically often been amplified by acoustic devices such as horns, drums, conches, carnyxes, bagpipes, bugles, etc. (see also martial music).

Battle cries are closely related to other behavioral patterns of human aggression, such as war dances and taunting, performed during the "warming up" phase preceding the escalation of physical violence. From the Middle Ages, many cries appeared on standards and were adopted as mottoes, an example being the motto "Dieu et mon droit" ("God and my right") of the English kings. It is said that this was Edward III's rallying cry during the Battle of Crécy. The word "slogan" originally derives from sluagh-gairm or sluagh-ghairm (sluagh = "people", "army", and gairm = "call", "proclamation"), the Scottish Gaelic word for "gathering-cry" and in times of war for "battle-cry". The Gaelic word was borrowed into English as slughorn, sluggorne, "slogum", and slogan.

2430 A.D.

2430 A.D. is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the October 1970 issue of Think, the IBM house magazine, and was reprinted in Asimov's 1975 collection Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.

Early in 1970 the author was commissioned by Think to write a story based on a quotation by writer and social commentator J. B. Priestley:

Asimov, assuming that Think wanted a story that illustrated Priestley's quotation, crafted 2430 A.D. He selected the date because he calculated that at the then-current rate of human population growth, doubling every thirty-five years, that would be the year when the world's animal biomass would consist entirely of human beings. Asimov wrote the story on April 26, 1970 but it was rejected as Think had actually wanted a story that refuted the quotation. ("Well, they never said so," Asimov remarked later.) After Asimov wrote a second story that did refute the quotation, Think took the first story after all and published it in their October 1970 issue. The second story was later published in Analog magazine as The Greatest Asset. Both stories inspired by the Priestley quote were included in the 1975 collection Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.

1500

Year 1500 (MD) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar.

The year was seen as being especially important by many Christians in Europe, who thought it would bring the beginning of the end of the world. Their belief was based on the phrase "half-time after the time", when the apocalypse was due to occur, which appears in the Book of Revelation and was seen as referring to 1500.

Events

January–June

July–December

0 (year)

Year zero does not exist in the Anno Domini (or Common Era) system usually used to number years in the Gregorian calendar and in its predecessor, the Julian calendar. In this system, the year 1 BC is followed by AD 1. However, there is a year zero in astronomical year numbering (where it coincides with the Julian year 1 BC) and in ISO 8601:2004 (where it coincides with the Gregorian year 1 BC) as well as in all Buddhist and Hindu calendars.

Historical, astronomical and ISO year numbering systems

Historians

The Anno Domini era was introduced in 525 by Scythian monk Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470–c. 544), who used it to identify the years on his Easter table. He introduced the new era to avoid using the Diocletian era, based on the accession of Roman Emperor Diocletian, as he did not wish to continue the memory of a persecutor of Christians. In the preface to his Easter table, Dionysius stated that the "present year" was "the consulship of Probus Junior [Flavius Anicius Probus Iunior]" which was also 525 years "since the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ". How he arrived at that number is unknown.