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🔗 Folklore 🔗 Saudi Arabia

Abu Fanous (Arabic: أبو فانوس) is a mysterious light phenomenon observed by travellers in the Arabian desert, mainly the Eastern Province, Riyadh, Najd, Rub' al-Khali and the Gulf. It appears at dawn or during the night as an orb or headlight that moves unpredictably and lures people into the desert, then vanishes without a trace.

🔗 Sports

Naismith's rule helps with the planning of a walking or hiking expedition by calculating how long it will take to travel the intended route, including any extra time taken when walking uphill. This rule of thumb was devised by William W. Naismith, a Scottish mountaineer, in 1892. A modern version can be formulated as follows:

Allow one hour for every 3 miles (5 km) forward, plus an additional hour for every 2,000 feet (600 m) of ascent.

🔗 United States 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Law 🔗 History of Science 🔗 United States/Indiana

The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, rather than to establish a certain value for the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by the crank Edward J. Goodwin, does imply various incorrect values of π, such as 3.2. The bill never became law, due to the intervention of Professor C. A. Waldo of Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.

The impossibility of squaring the circle using only compass and straightedge constructions, suspected since ancient times, was rigorously proven in 1882 by Ferdinand von Lindemann. Better approximations of π than those implied by the bill have been known since ancient times.

🔗 United States 🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Novels/Short story

"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is a post-apocalyptic science fiction short story by American writer Harlan Ellison. It was first published in the March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction.

It won a Hugo Award in 1968. The name was also used for a short story collection of Ellison's work, featuring this story. It was reprinted by the Library of America, collected in volume two (Terror and the Uncanny, from the 1940s to Now) of American Fantastic Tales.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Canada 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Law Enforcement 🔗 Discrimination 🔗 LGBTQ+ studies

"Fruit machine" is a term for a device developed in Canada by Frank Robert Wake that was supposed to be able to identify gay men (derogatorily referred to as "fruits"). The subjects were made to view pornography; the device then measured the diameter of the pupils of the eyes (pupillary response test), perspiration, and pulse for a supposed erotic response.

The "fruit machine" was employed in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s during a campaign to eliminate all gay men from the civil service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and the military. A substantial number of workers did lose their jobs. Although funding for the "fruit machine" project was cut off in the late 1960s, the investigations continued, and the RCMP collected files on over 9,000 "suspected" gay people.

The chair employed resembled that used by dentists. It had a pulley with a camera going towards the pupils, with a black box located in front of it that displayed pictures. The pictures ranged from the mundane to sexually explicit photos of men and women. It had previously been determined that the pupils would dilate in relation to the amount of interest in the picture per the technique termed 'the pupillary response test'.

People were first led to believe that the machine's purpose was to rate stress. After knowledge of its real purpose became widespread, few people volunteered for it.

🔗 Writing systems

This is a list of rare glyph variants of the Cyrillic letter O. They were proposed for inclusion into Unicode in 2007 and incorporated as in Unicode 5.1.

🔗 United States 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model is a working hydraulic scale model of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta System. While the Bay Model is still operational, it is no longer used for scientific research but is instead open to the public alongside educational exhibits about Bay hydrology. The model is located in the Bay Model Visitor Center at 2100 Bridgeway Blvd. in Sausalito, California.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Cardiology 🔗 Wales

The Caerphilly Heart Disease Study, also known as the Caerphilly Prospective Study (CaPS), is an epidemiological prospective cohort, set up in 1979 in a representative population sample drawn from Caerphilly, a typical small town in South Wales, UK.

The initial aim was to examine relationships between a wide range of social, lifestyle, dietary and other factors with incident vascular disease. Opportunity was also taken, in collaboration with a range of clinical and laboratory colleagues, to collect data on a wide range of factors with possible relevance to diseases other than vascular, and at the same time to collect clinical information on incident disease events. The study was initiated by Professor Peter Elwood, Director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit for South Wales. The work has so far led to over 400 publications in the medical press.

🔗 Electronic music 🔗 Albums

Inferno is the fifth studio album by Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada, released on 29 May 2026 by Warp. It marks the duo's first studio album in thirteen years, following Tomorrow's Harvest (2013). An ambient and electronic album described as hauntology and IDM, the album was noted as the duo's response to a darker zeitgeist. Its instrumentation contains guitars, live drums, and synths, adopting a live sound. Recorded at Hexagon Sun studio in Pentland Hills, Scotland, both members are credited on the album as instrumentalists and sound designers; writing and production is credited solely to Mike Sandison.

The promotional campaign began in April 2026, with VHS tapes being mailed out to fans, and the track "Tape 05" being shared online later that month before the album was properly announced. The single "Introit / Prophecy at 1420 MHz" was released in early May, accompanied by a music video directed by Robert Beatty. Listening sessions occurred in various places across the world later that month. A day prior to release, use of the album's music and aesthetic was co-opted by the White House, which was received negatively by the public and denounced by Warp. Anticipated widely for release, Inferno received praise as a relevant return for Boards of Canada, and for its subject matter, musicality, and thematic content.