In the United States Senate Democratic primary election in Pennsylvania on May 18, 2010, Congressman Joe Sestak (pictured) defeated incumbent Arlen Specter, who had been in the Senate for five terms as a Republican. Just before the primary campaign, Specter switched to the Democratic Party in anticipation of a difficult primary challenge by Pat Toomey. Sestak was ultimately defeated by Toomey in the general election. Political observers and journalists described the race between Specter and Sestak as one of the bitterest and most watched of all the 2010 primary elections. Specter led Sestak by more than 20 percentage points for most of the race, but this lead narrowed in the final month of the campaign, when Sestak concentrated his funds and efforts on television commercials questioning Specter's Democratic credentials. Political observers said that Sestak's commercials and a national swing in momentum against incumbents harmed Specter's chances. (Full article...) . Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_Senate_Democratic_primary_election_in_Pennsylvania> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 1655: Anglo-Spanish War: England invaded Spanish Jamaica, capturing it a week later. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_Jamaica> 1743: French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin published the design of a mercury thermometer with the centigrade scale, with 0 representing the freezing point of water and 100 its boiling point. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius> 1911: Parks Canada, the world's first national park service, was established as the Dominion Parks Branch under the Department of the Interior. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks_Canada> 1991: With the local Serb population boycotting the polls, voters in Croatia passed a referendum supporting independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Croatian_independence_referendum> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: gnomon: 1. An object such as a pillar or a rod that is used to tell time by the shadow it casts when the sun shines on it, especially the pointer on a sundial. 2. An object such as a pillar used by an observer to calculate the meridian altitude of the sun (that is, the altitude of the sun when it reaches the observer's meridian), for the purpose of determining the observer's latitude. 3. The index of the hour circle of a globe. 4. (geometry) A plane figure formed by removing a parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram. 5. (mathematics, by extension) A number representing the increment between two figurate numbers (“numbers equal to the numbers of dots in geometric figures formed of dots”). <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gnomon> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:   For me the important distinction is between a stylistic approach to the design; and an analytical approach giving the process of due consideration to time, place, and purpose ... My analytical approach requires a full understanding of the three essential elements ... to arrive at an ideal balance among them.   --I. M. Pei <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/I._M._Pei>