Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 November 1

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From today's featured article

Super Mario Galaxy is a platform video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Wii console, first released on 1 November 2007. In this third 3D-graphics game in the Super Mario series, Mario is on a quest to rescue Princess Peach while saving the universe from Bowser. A central element of gameplay is the way gravitational forces change as Mario navigates galaxies filled with minor planets and worlds. The spherical platforms used in the game first appeared in Super Mario 128, a technology demonstration shown at Nintendo Space World in 2000. Development of Super Mario Galaxy began after the release of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat in late 2004, when Shigeru Miyamoto suggested that Nintendo should commission a large-scale Mario game. The game was a critical and commercial success, hailed as one of the greatest video games of all time. It won multiple Game of the Year titles, and became the first Nintendo title to win a British Academy Games Award for Best Game. It is the second-highest-rated game of all time on review aggregator GameRankings. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Receiving (left) and casting (right) a secret ballot, Roman Republic, 113–112 BC

... that the ballot laws introduced the secret ballot (voting pictured) to all popular assemblies in the Roman Republic?
... that Kia Steave-Dickerson, the design artist for four films by M. Night Shyamalan, originally considered a career in dry cleaning?
... that Baloke, a small village in Punjab, is the birthplace of Satnam Singh Bhamara, the first Indian to be drafted into the National Basketball Association?
... that the fungus Arthrobotrys dactyloides can trap a nematode with a ring of hypha before feeding on it?
... that rally driver Louise Cook sold her trophies on eBay to help her continue competing in the 2012 World Rally Championship after her funding dried up?
... that the Rush song "Freewill" was the last studio recording to use the "shrieking high range" of Geddy Lee's vocals?
... that American paleontologist Walter W. Granger used the Fayoum Light Railway for transporting the fossils he had found in Egypt?
... that it is better for one's self-concept to be a big fish in a little pond than in a big pond?

In the news

Nursultan Nazarbayev

In the United States, a vehicle-ramming attack in New York City kills eight people and injures at least eleven others.
Catalonia issues a unilateral declaration of independence from Spain, whose government imposes direct rule under Article 155 of its constitution.
President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev (pictured) announces that the Kazakh language will begin using a Latin script, rather than the current Cyrillic script.
The High Court of Australia finds that five parliamentarians are ineligible to serve.
Venezuela's democratic opposition win the Sakharov Prize.

On this day...

November 1: Rajyotsava (Formation Day) in Karnataka, India (1956)

Goaltender mask worn by Jacques Plante

1214 – Byzantine–Seljuq wars: Seljuq Turks captured the important port city of Sinope.
1914 – World War I: The first contingent of the First Australian Imperial Force departed Albany.
1941 – American photographer Ansel Adams shot Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, one of his most famous photographs.
1959 – After being struck in the face with a hockey puck, Jacques Plante played the rest of the game wearing a face mask (pictured), now mandatory equipment for goaltenders in ice hockey.
1998 – The European Court of Human Rights was instituted as a permanent court with full-time judges to monitor compliance by the signatory parties of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Matthew Hale (b. 1609) · Emma Albani (b. 1847) · Walter Payton (d. 1999)

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Today's featured picture

The Agfa Optima 1a is a camera produced by the German manufacturer Agfa beginning in 1962. One of the first fully automatic 35mm film cameras, it took power required to read the light level for the automatic calculation of aperture and shutter speed from a selenium cell.

Photograph: Uwe Aranas

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