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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 Linux

The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.

X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting with a mouse and keyboard. X does not mandate the user interface – this is handled by individual programs. As such, the visual styling of X-based environments varies greatly; different programs may present radically different interfaces.

X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at version 11 (hence "X11") since September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.Org Server, available as free and open-source software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 China 🔗 Plants 🔗 Pharmacology 🔗 Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs

For over two millennia, texts in Chinese herbology and traditional Chinese medicine have recorded medicinal plants that are also hallucinogens and psychedelics. Some are familiar psychoactive plants in Western herbal medicine (e.g., Chinese: 莨菪; pinyin: làngdàng, i.e. Hyoscyamus niger), but several Chinese plants have not been noted as hallucinogens in modern works (e.g.,Chinese: 雲實; pinyin: yúnshí; lit. 'cloud seed', i.e. Caesalpinia decapetala). Chinese herbals are an important resource for the history of botany, for instance, Zhang Hua's c. 290 Bowuzhi is the earliest record of the psilocybin mushroom xiàojùn 笑菌 (lit. "laughing mushroom", i.e. Gymnopilus junonius).

🔗 Sanitation

A bidet shower—also known as a handheld bidet, commode shower, toilet shower, health faucet, bum shower, shatafa (from the Arabic: شَطَّافَة [ʃɑtˤˈtˤɑːfɑ], "rinser") or bum gun—is a hand-held triggered nozzle that is placed near the toilet and delivers a spray of water used for anal cleansing and cleaning of the genitals after using the toilet for defecation and urination, popularised by Arab nations where the bidet shower is a common bathroom accessory. The device is similar to that of a kitchen sink sprayer.

In predominantly Catholic countries, the Muslim world, in the Eastern Orthodox and Hindu cultures, and in some Protestant countries such as Finland, water is usually used for anal cleansing, using a jet (bidet shower, bidet) or vessel, and a person's hand (in some places only the left hand is used).

🔗 Birds

Crop milk is a secretion from the lining of the crop of parent birds in some species that is regurgitated to young birds. It is found among all pigeons and doves where it is also referred to as pigeon milk. Crop milk is also secreted from the crop of flamingos and the male emperor penguin, suggesting independent evolution of this trait. Unlike in mammals where only females produce milk, crop milk is produced by both males and females in pigeons and flamingos; and in penguins, only by the male. Lactation in birds is controlled by prolactin, which is the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals. Crop milk is a holocrine secretion, unlike in mammals where milk is an exocrine secretion. Crop milk contains both fat and protein, as with mammalian milk, but unlike mammalian milk, it contains no carbohydrates.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Trains 🔗 Finland 🔗 Trains/Streetcars 🔗 Food and drink/Pubs

SpåraKoff is a HM V type tram converted into a mobile bar in Helsinki, Finland. Known as the pub tram, the vehicle does circular tours of downtown Helsinki picking up passengers for a fee during summer months. It is operated jointly by Sinebrychoff, HOK-Elanto (part of the S Group), and Helsinki City Transport.

The pub tram is immediately distinguishable in the Helsinki traffic by its vivid red colour (as opposed to the normal colours, green and cream, used on the Helsinki tram network of the Helsinki City Transport), and by the destination board that reads "PUB".

It is one of the four HM V trams that remain operational in Helsinki. Two of them are museum trams, and one is used as a non-passenger carrying advertisement tram.

...film at 11.

It's often said that Wikipedia is dying. This is the latest in a long line of technological deaths. Earlier, the WikiWikiWeb died. Before that, Usenet died.

Reasons why Wikipedia is dying include and may not be limited to:

• most of the major editors are leaving
• most edits are now made by robots
• article syntax is too complicated for readers and new editors
• pop culture articles are longer than science or history articles
• power-hungry administrators are warring against content creators so they can delete everything and rule a perfect, empty wiki [Is this right? -- Ed.]
• the people with the most time to edit are also those with the most time and inclination to argue in perpetuity
• the Great Space Wombat said it is dying
• bias is going to destroy the entire neutral point of view we uphold so much
• vandalism. No elaboration required.
• the WMF is more corrupt than governments
• discussion here is more toxic than on Twitter
• nobody is donating (why else do they keep asking for money?)
• people will stop visiting the main site and just get blurbs from search engines or chatbots instead
• insert additional reasons here

Wikipedia has been dying since at least 100 years ago.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Aesthetics 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture

In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete". It is a concept derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印, sanbōin), specifically impermanence (無常, mujō), suffering (苦, ku) and emptiness or absence of self-nature (空, kū).

Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy, and appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Sociology

An edgelord is someone on the Internet who tries to impress or shock by posting edgy opinions such as nihilism or extremist views.

The term is a portmanteau derived from "edgy" and "shitlord" – a person who "basks in the bitterness and misery of others".

Merriam-Webster gave the following example:

We decided to watch It's A Wonderful Life and my dad said, “Every year I wait for Jimmy Stewart to jump off that bridge but he never does it” - merry Xmas from the original edgelord.

Edgelords were characterised by author Rachel Monroe in her account of criminal behaviour, Savage Appetites:

...internet cynics lumped the online Nazis together with the serial killer fetishists and the dumbest goths and dismissed them all as edgelords: kids who tried to be scary online. I thought of most of these edgelords as basement-dwellers, pale faces lit by the glow of their computer screen, puffing themselves up with nihilism. An edgelord was a scrawny guy with a LARP-y vibe, possibly wearing a cloak, dreaming of omnipotence. Or a girl with excessive eyeliner and lots of Tumblr posts about self-harm. The disturbing content posted by edgelords was undermined by its predictability...

It is frequently associated with the forum site 4chan.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Greece 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e).

In the allegory "The Cave", Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, and deductive logic; and the theory of forms.

Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not the direct source of the images seen. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.

Socrates remarks that this allegory can be paired with previous writings, namely the analogy of the sun and the analogy of the divided line.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Books

Proofs from THE BOOK is a book of mathematical proofs by Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler. The book is dedicated to the mathematician Paul Erdős, who often referred to "The Book" in which God keeps the most elegant proof of each mathematical theorem. During a lecture in 1985, Erdős said, "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book."