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🔗 Biography 🔗 Africa 🔗 BBC 🔗 Africa/Republic of the Congo

Guy Goma (born 1969) is a Congolese-French business studies graduate from Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo who was accidentally interviewed live on BBC News 24, a UK television news station, on Monday 8 May 2006. Goma was mistaken for technology expert Guy Kewney when he attended the BBC for a job interview and was brought onto a BBC special regarding the case Apple Corps v Apple Computer to provide insight on a subject he knew little about.

Goma became well known for the incident, which is noted as a memorable TV moment.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

C-- (pronounced C minus minus) is a C-like programming language. Its creators, functional programming researchers Simon Peyton Jones and Norman Ramsey, designed it to be generated mainly by compilers for very high-level languages rather than written by human programmers. Unlike many other intermediate languages, its representation is plain ASCII text, not bytecode or another binary format.

There are two main branches:

• C--, the original branch, with the final version 2.0 released in May 2005
• Cmm, the fork actively used as the intermediate representation (IR) in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC)

🔗 Italy 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Athletics 🔗 Highways 🔗 Road transport 🔗 Highways/European Highways

The Appian Way (Latin and Italian: Via Appia) is one of the earliest and strategically most important Roman roads of the ancient republic. It connected Rome to Brindisi, in southeast Italy. Its importance is indicated by its common name, recorded by Statius, of Appia longarum... regina viarum ("the Appian Way, the queen of the long roads").

The road is named after Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor who began and completed the first section as a military road to the south in 312 BC during the Samnite Wars.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Visual arts

A camera lucida is an optical device used as a drawing aid by artists.

The camera lucida performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing. The artist sees both scene and drawing surface simultaneously, as in a photographic double exposure. This allows the artist to duplicate key points of the scene on the drawing surface, thus aiding in the accurate rendering of perspective.

🔗 Greece 🔗 Politics 🔗 Elections and Referendums

In governance, sortition (also known as selection by lot, allotment, demarchy, or Stochocracy) is the selection of political officials as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates. Filling individual posts or, more usually in its modern applications, to fill collegiate chambers. The system intends to ensure that all competent and interested parties have an equal chance of holding public office. It also minimizes factionalism, since there would be no point making promises to win over key constituencies if one was to be chosen by lot, while elections, by contrast, foster it. In ancient Athenian democracy, sortition was the traditional and primary method for appointing political officials, and its use was regarded as a principal characteristic of democracy.

Today, sortition is commonly used to select prospective jurors in common law-based legal systems and is sometimes used in forming citizen groups with political advisory power (citizens' juries or citizens' assemblies).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Operations research

Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues. A queueing model is constructed so that queue lengths and waiting time can be predicted. Queueing theory is generally considered a branch of operations research because the results are often used when making business decisions about the resources needed to provide a service.

Queueing theory has its origins in research by Agner Krarup Erlang when he created models to describe the system of Copenhagen Telephone Exchange company, a Danish company. The ideas have since seen applications including telecommunication, traffic engineering, computing and, particularly in industrial engineering, in the design of factories, shops, offices and hospitals, as well as in project management.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Discrimination 🔗 Gender Studies 🔗 Men's Issues

The women-are-wonderful effect is the phenomenon found in psychological and sociological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with women compared to men. This bias reflects an emotional bias toward women as a general case. The phrase was coined by Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic in 1994 after finding that both male and female participants tend to assign positive traits to women, with female participants showing a far more pronounced bias. Positive traits were assigned to men by participants of both genders, but to a far lesser degree.

The authors supposed that the positive general evaluation of women might derive from the association between women and nurturing characteristics. This bias is suggested as a form of misandry/'benevolent misogyny', the latter being a concept within the theoretical framework of ambivalent sexism.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Germany/Hamburg 🔗 Germany/German transportation

Old Elbe Tunnel or St. Pauli Elbe Tunnel (German: Alter Elbtunnel colloquially or St. Pauli Elbtunnel officially) which opened in 1911, is a pedestrian and vehicle tunnel in Hamburg. The 426 m (1,398 ft) long tunnel was a technical sensation; 24 m (80 ft) beneath the surface, two 6 m (20 ft) diameter tubes connect central Hamburg with the docks and shipyards on the south side of the river Elbe. This was a big improvement for tens of thousands of workers in one of the busiest harbors in the world.

Six large lifts on either side of the tunnel carry pedestrians and vehicles to the bottom. The two tunnels are both still in operation, though due to their limited capacity by today's standards, other bridges and tunnels have been built and taken over most of the traffic.

In 2008 approximately 300,000 cars, 63,000 bicycles, and 700,000 pedestrians used the tunnel. The tunnel is opened 24 hours for pedestrians and bicycles. For motorized vehicles, opening times are currently Monday to Friday from 5:20 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and on Saturdays from 5:20 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Japan

Toilet meal (Japanese: 便所飯, benjo-meshi) is a Japanese slang term and social phenomenon referring to the act of an individual eating a meal in a toilet room. In modern Japan, some people eat alone in a bathroom for various reasons; the most common reason is that they do not wish to be seen eating alone. Other reasons include saving money from eating out, to hide from co-workers in a busy workplace, or simply because they find it more comfortable.

Since toilet meals are often solitary and clandestine, others are unlikely to be aware of its occurrence. For this reason, "toilet meals" were initially regarded as an urban legend, but subsequent investigations have confirmed the phenomenon as relatively widespread. The term "toilet meal" has even been referenced in various popular media, most notably in various Japanese television shows.

🔗 Spaceflight

Project Starlight is a research project of the University of California, Santa Barbara to develop a fleet of laser beam-propelled interstellar probes and sending them to a star neighboring the Solar System, potentially Alpha Centauri. The project aims to send organisms on board the probe.