November 16

Tiberius, Rome's second emperor, was born; before his accession he spent years on Rhodes immersed in rhetoric, astronomy, and Greek philosophy.

Akbar Allahabadi, an Urdu poet celebrated for gently satirising the meeting of tradition and modern life, was born near Allahabad in 1846.

Alan Watts, the British-American writer whose books and talks introduced Western audiences to Zen and Asian philosophy, died on this day in 1973.

The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico beamed a single coded message toward a distant star cluster, humanity's first deliberate interstellar radio transmission.