Here’s a fact for the day: February 4th 1600, two of our era’s most influential men met for the very first time, at Benatek Castle near Prague. Tycho de Brahe, a Danish grand seigneur whose greatest discovery was that astronomy needed precise and continuous observational data and who had accordingly assembled the world’s most impressive collection of instruments for planetary observation, and Johannes Kepler, a myopic, somewhat hypochondriac German peasant, genius and stargaz