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๐ Islands in lakes on islands in lakes on islands
A recursive island or lake is an island or lake that is itself within an island or lake.
๐ Casu Martzu
Casu martzu (Sardinian pronunciation:ย [หkazu หmaษพtsu]; literally 'rotten/putrid cheese'), sometimes spelled casu marzu, and also called casu modde, casu cundรญdu and casu frร zigu in Sardinian language, is a traditional Sardinian sheep milk cheese that contains live insect larvae (maggots). A variation of the cheese, casgiu merzu, is also produced in some Southern Corsican villages like Sartene.
Derived from pecorino, casu martzu goes beyond typical fermentation to a stage of decomposition, brought about by the digestive action of the larvae of the cheese fly of the Piophilidae family. These larvae are deliberately introduced to the cheese, promoting an advanced level of fermentation and breaking down of the cheese's fats. The texture of the cheese becomes very soft, with some liquid (called lร grima, Sardinian for "teardrop") seeping out. The larvae themselves appear as translucent white worms, roughly 8ย mm (0.3ย in) long.
Discussed on
- "Casu Martzu" | 2021-06-19 | 209 Upvotes 175 Comments
๐ Alcohol Powder
Alcohol powder or powdered alcohol or dry alcohol is a product generally made using micro-encapsulation. When reconstituted with water, alcohol (specifically ethanol) in powder form becomes an alcoholic drink. In March 2015 four product labels for specific powdered alcohol products were approved by the United States Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) which opened the doors for legal product sales. However, as of 4 January 2016, the product is not yet available for sale and legalization remains controversial due to public-health and other concerns. Researchers have expressed concern that, should the product go into production, increases in alcohol misuse, abuse, and associated physical harm to its consumers could occur above what has been historically associated with liquid alcohol alone.
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- "Alcohol Powder" | 2021-06-18 | 21 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ United States involvement in regime change
United States involvement in regime change describes United States government participation or interference, both overt and covert, in the replacement of foreign governments. In the latter half of the 19th century, the U.S. government initiated actions for regime change mainly in Latin America and the southwest Pacific, including the SpanishโAmerican and PhilippineโAmerican wars. At the onset of the 20th century, the United States shaped or installed governments in many countries around the world, including neighbors Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
During World War II, the United States helped overthrow many Nazi Germany or imperial Japanese puppet regimes. Examples include regimes in the Philippines, Korea, the Eastern portion of China, and much of Europe. United States forces were also instrumental in ending the rule of Adolf Hitler over Germany and of Benito Mussolini over Italy. After World War II, the United States in 1945 ratified the UN Charter, the preeminent international law document, which legally bound the U.S. government to the Charter's provisions, including Article 2(4), which prohibits the threat or use of force in international relations, except in very limited circumstances. Therefore, any legal claim advanced to justify regime change by a foreign power carries a particularly heavy burden.
In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. government struggled with the Soviet Union for global leadership, influence and security within the context of the Cold War. Under the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. government feared that national security would be compromised by governments propped by the Soviet Union's own involvement in regime change and promoted the domino theory, with later presidents following Eisenhower's precedent. Subsequently, the United States expanded the geographic scope of its actions beyond traditional area of operations, Central America and the Caribbean. Significant operations included the United States and United Kingdom-orchestrated 1953 Iranian coup d'รฉtat, the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion targeting Cuba, and support for the overthrow of Sukarno by General Suharto in Indonesia. In addition, the U.S. has interfered in the national elections of countries, including the Philippines in 1953, and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s as well as Lebanon in 1957. According to one study, the U.S. performed at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections during the period 1946โ2000. Another study found that the U.S. engaged in 64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change during the Cold War.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States has led or supported wars to determine the governance of a number of countries. Stated U.S. aims in these conflicts have included fighting the War on Terror, as in the ongoing Afghan war, or removing dictatorial and hostile regimes, as in the Iraq War.
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- "United States involvement in regime change" | 2021-06-17 | 35 Upvotes 15 Comments
๐ Ohio Nuclear Bribery Scandal
The Ohio nuclear bribery scandal is a 2020 political scandal in Ohio involving allegations that FirstEnergy paid roughly $60 million to Generation Now, a 501(c)(4) organization purportedly controlled by Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Larry Householder, in exchange for passing a $1.3 billion bailout for the struggling nuclear power operator. It was described as "likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio" by U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers, who charged Householder and four others with racketeering on July 21. According to prosecutors, FirstEnergy poured millions into the campaigns of 21 candidates during the 2018 Ohio House of Representatives election, which ultimately helped Householder replace Ryan Smith as Republican House speaker.
According to DeVillers in late July 2020, the investigation is far from over. "There are a lot of federal agents knocking on a lot of doors."
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- "Ohio Nuclear Bribery Scandal" | 2021-06-16 | 27 Upvotes 7 Comments
๐ Uyghur Genocide
The Uyghur genocide is the ongoing series of human rights abuses perpetrated by the government of China against the Uyghur people and other ethnic and religious minorities in and around the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of the People's Republic of China. Since 2014, the Chinese government, under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the administration of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, has pursued policies leading to more than one million Muslims (the majority of them Uyghurs) being held in secretive internment camps without any legal process in what has become the largest-scale and most systematic detention of ethnic and religious minorities since the Holocaust and World War II. Thousands of mosques have been destroyed or damaged, and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.
These policies have been described by critics as the forced assimilation of Xinjiang, as well as an ethnocide or cultural genocide. Some governments, activists, independent NGOs, human rights experts, academics, government officials, and the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile have called it a genocide.
In particular, critics have highlighted the concentration of Uyghurs in state-sponsored internment camps, suppression of Uyghur religious practices, political indoctrination, severe ill-treatment, as well as extensive evidence and other testimonials detailing human rights abuses including forced sterilization, contraception, abortion, and infanticides. Chinese government statistics show that from 2015 to 2018, birth rates in the mostly Uyghur regions of Hotan and Kashgar fell by more than 60%. In the same period, the birth rate of the whole country decreased by 9.69%, from 12.07 to 10.9 per 1,000 people. Chinese authorities acknowledged that birth rates dropped by almost a third in 2018 in Xinjiang, but denied reports of forced sterilization and genocide. Birth rates fell nearly 24% in 2019 (compared to a nationwide decrease of just 4.2%).
International reactions have been sharply divided, with dozens of United Nations (UN) member states issuing opposing letters to the United Nations Human Rights Council in support and condemnation of China's policies in Xinjiang in 2020. In December 2020, the International Criminal Court declined to take investigative action against China on the basis of not having jurisdiction over China for most of the alleged crimes. The United States was the first country to declare the human rights abuses a genocide, announcing its determination on January 19, 2021, although the US State Department's Office of the Legal Adviser concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide. This was followed by Canada's House of Commons and the Dutch parliament each passing a non-binding motion in February 2021 to recognize China's actions as genocide. Later, in April 2021, the United Kingdom's House of Commons unanimously passed a non-binding motion to recognize the actions as genocide. In May 2021 the New Zealand parliament unanimously declared that "severe human rights abuses" were occurring against the Uyghur people in China and the Seimas of Lithuania passed a resolution that recognized the Chinese government's abuse of the Uyghurs as a genocide.
๐ Holden's Lightning Flight
On 22 July 1966 Walter "Taffy" Holden, an engineer in command of No. 33 Maintenance Unit RAF with limited experience flying small single-engine trainer aircraft, inadvertently engaged the afterburner of a Mach 2.0-capable English Electric Lightning during ground testing. Unable to disengage the afterburner, Holden ran down the runway, narrowly missing a crossing fuel bowser and a de Havilland Comet taking off, before taking off himself. Flying without a helmet or canopy, the ejection seat disabled, and the landing gear locked down, Holden aborted his first two landing attempts. He landed on his third approach, striking the runway with the aircraft's tail as he adopted in his flare the attitude of a taildragger aircraft. The aircraft returned to service, and was subsequently acquired by the Imperial War Museum Duxford.
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- "Holden's Lightning Flight" | 2021-06-14 | 144 Upvotes 27 Comments
๐ Mary Mallon
Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 โ November 11, 1938), also known as Typhoid Mary, was an Irish-born cook believed to have infected 53 people with typhoid fever, three of whom died, and the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the disease, Salmonella typhi. Because she persisted in working as a cook, by which she exposed others to the disease, she was twice forcibly quarantined by authorities, eventually for the final two decades of her life. Mallon died after a total of nearly 30 years in isolation.
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- "Mary Mallon" | 2021-06-14 | 48 Upvotes 21 Comments
๐ BBS Door
A door in a bulletin board system (BBS) is an interface between the BBS software and an external application. The term is also used to refer to the external application, a computer program that runs outside of the main bulletin board program. Sometimes called external programs, doors are the most common way to add games, utilities, and other extensions to BBSes. Because BBSes typically depended on the telephone system, BBSes and door programs tended to be local in nature, unlike modern Internet games and applications.
From the 1990s on, most BBS software had the capability to "drop to" doors. Several standards were developed for passing connection and user information to doors; this was usually done with "dropfiles", small binary or text files dropped into known locations in the BBS's file system. Most doors were responsible for operating the serial port or other communications device directly until returning control to the BBS. Later development of FOSSIL drivers have allowed both BBSes and their doors to communicate without being responsible for direct operation of the communications hardware.
๐ List of commercial video games with available source code
This is a list of commercial video games with available source code. The source code of these commercially developed and distributed video games is available to the public or the games' communities.
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- "List of commercial video games with available source code" | 2021-06-13 | 61 Upvotes 15 Comments