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🔗 Computing 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Artificial Intelligence

TESCREAL is a neologism proposed by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres. An acronym, it stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, (modern) Cosmism, Rationalists (the internet community, not to be confused with other uses of the term), Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an "interconnected and overlapping" group with shared origins. They claim these constitute a movement that allows its proponents to use the threat of human extinction to justify expensive or detrimental projects and consider it pervasive in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered on artificial intelligence. As such, the acronym is sometimes used to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech.

🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 Video games 🔗 Women 🔗 Biography/sports and games 🔗 California/Southern California 🔗 California/Los Angeles area 🔗 LGBTQ+ studies 🔗 Video games/esports 🔗 LGBTQ+ studies/LGBTQ+ Person

Rebecca Ann Heineman (October 30, 1963 – November 17, 2025) was an American video game designer and programmer. Heineman was a founder or co-founder of video game companies Interplay Productions, Logicware, Contraband Entertainment, and Olde Sküül. She was the chief executive officer of Olde Sküül from 2013 until her death in 2025.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Australia/Melbourne 🔗 Australia/Australian crime 🔗 Visual arts

The theft of The Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria took place on 2 August 1986 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The stolen work was one of a series of paintings by Pablo Picasso all known as The Weeping Woman and had been purchased by the gallery for A$1.6 million in 1985—at the time the highest price paid by an Australian art gallery for an artwork. A group calling itself "Australian Cultural Terrorists" claimed responsibility, making a number of demands (and insults) in letters to the then-Victorian Minister for the Arts, Race Mathews. The demands included increases to funding for the arts; threats were made that the painting would be destroyed. After an anonymous tip-off to police, the painting was found undamaged in a locker at Spencer Street railway station on 19 August 1986. The theft still remains unsolved.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Video games

A multi-user dungeon (MUD, ), also known as a multi-user dimension or multi-user domain, is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based or storyboarded. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. Players can read or view descriptions of rooms, objects, other players, and non-player characters, and perform actions in the virtual world that are typically also described. Players typically interact with each other and the world by typing commands that resemble a natural language, as well as using a character typically called an avatar.

Traditional MUDs implement a role-playing video game set in a fantasy world populated by fictional races and monsters, with players choosing classes in order to gain specific skills or powers. The objective of this sort of game is to slay monsters, explore a fantasy world, complete quests, go on adventures, create a story by roleplaying, and advance the created character. Many MUDs were fashioned around the dice-rolling rules of the Dungeons & Dragons series of games.

Such fantasy settings for MUDs are common, while many others have science fiction settings or are based on popular books, movies, animations, periods of history, worlds populated by anthropomorphic animals, and so on. Not all MUDs are games; some are designed for educational purposes, while others are purely chat environments, and the flexible nature of many MUD servers leads to their occasional use in areas ranging from computer science research to geoinformatics to medical informatics to analytical chemistry. MUDs have attracted the interest of academic scholars from many fields, including communications, sociology, law, and economics. At one time, there was interest from the United States military in using them for teleconferencing.

Most MUDs are run as hobbies and are free to play; some may accept donations or allow players to purchase virtual items, while others charge a monthly subscription fee. MUDs can be accessed via standard telnet clients, or specialized MUD clients, which are designed to improve the user experience. Numerous games are listed at various web portals, such as The Mud Connector.

The history of modern massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like EverQuest and Ultima Online, and related virtual world genres such as the social virtual worlds exemplified by Second Life, can be traced directly back to the MUD genre. Indeed, before the invention of the term MMORPG, games of this style were simply called graphical MUDs. A number of influential MMORPG designers began as MUD developers and/or players (such as Raph Koster, Brad McQuaid, Matt Firor, and Brian Green) or were involved with early MUDs (like Mark Jacobs and J. Todd Coleman).

🔗 Microbiology 🔗 Marine life 🔗 Tree of Life

Parakaryon myojinensis, also known as the Myojin parakaryote, is a highly unusual species of single-celled organism known only from a single specimen, described in 2012. It has features of both prokaryotes and eukaryotes but is apparently distinct from either group, making it unique among organisms discovered thus far. It is the sole species in the genus Parakaryon. It is part of the domain Parakarya.

🔗 Apple Inc.

iPod Socks are a set of multi-colored cotton knit socks introduced by Apple Inc. in November 2004 for protection of iPods from damage during travel.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Lego 🔗 Cornwall

A maritime incident occurred on 13 February 1997 when a rogue wave struck the German-registered container ship Tokio Express off the coast of Land's End, Cornwall, United Kingdom, causing 62 containers to fall overboard. One container held approximately 4.8 million Lego pieces, primarily from sea-themed sets such as Lego Aquazone and Lego Pirates. The spilled pieces have washed ashore on coastlines across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, and as far as Australia, becoming a cultural phenomenon and an unintentional case study in ocean currents and marine plastic pollution.

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics/American politics

The Howard Dean scream incident, commonly known as the Dean scream speech, was an energetic scream by Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, on January 19, 2004, during a speech he gave at the Val-Air Ballroom in West Des Moines, Iowa. That night, the presidential candidate had just lost the Iowa caucus to John Kerry and wanted to reassure his supporters. He listed states he would win to a raucous audience before screaming "BYAH!" Within four days, it was broadcast 633 times on national news networks and cable channels.

Following the scream, Dean lost more primaries and suspended his campaign following his third-place result in Wisconsin. Some commentators have described the speech as a political gaffe that destroyed Dean's campaign; however, Dean and his campaign staff have claimed that he would have lost anyway, due to poor campaign organization. Additionally, Christine Pelosi, Pacific Standard, and historian Robert Thompson have all claimed that Dean's probability of being nominated was already low due to a lack of party insider support, the Iowa loss, and the media's previous painting of Dean as too hot-tempered for the presidency.

🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Sociology

In Marxist theory, the Lumpenproletariat (German: [ˈlʊmpn̩pʁoletaʁi̯ˌaːt] ; ) is the underclass devoid of class consciousness. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels coined the word in the 1840s and used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848. They dismissed the revolutionary potential of the Lumpenproletariat and contrasted it with the proletariat. Among other groups, criminals, vagabonds, and prostitutes are usually included in this category.

The Social Democratic Party of Germany made wide use of the term by the turn of the 20th century. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky followed Marx's arguments and dismissed the group's revolutionary potential, while Mao Zedong argued that proper leadership could harness it. The word Lumpenproletariat, popularized in the West by Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth in the 1960s, has been adopted as a sociological term. However, what some consider to be its vagueness and its history as a term of abuse has led to some criticism. Some revolutionary groups, most notably the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, have sought to mobilize the Lumpenproletariat.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Kent 🔗 Architecture/Historic houses 🔗 Historic sites

The Shell Grotto, sometimes called the Shell Temple, is an ornate underground shell grotto in the seaside town of Margate, Kent, England. The grotto, which has a passageway and main room, was dug out from chalk, a soft limestone common in the region. Almost all the surface area of the walls and roof is covered in mosaics created entirely of seashells, totalling about 2,000 square feet (190 m²) of mosaic, with approximately 4.6 million shells. Its age, creators, and purpose are unknown, which has inspired a wide range of speculation, although several other shell grottos in England were made in the 18th century. This grotto was rediscovered in about 1835 and first opened to the public as a privately-owned tourist attraction in 1837. The grotto is a Grade I-listed building and remains open to the public. Attached to the grotto is a modern museum room, cafe, and gift shop.