To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/French military history 🔗 Military history/Napoleonic era 🔗 Military history/European military history

Tarrare (c. 1772 – 1798), sometimes spelled Tarare, was a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual eating habits. Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry; his parents could not provide for him, and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He travelled France in the company of a band of thieves and prostitutes, before becoming the warm-up act to a travelling charlatan; he would swallow corks, stones, live animals and a whole basketful of apples. He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer.

At the start of the War of the First Coalition, Tarrare joined the French Revolutionary Army. With military rations, though quadrupled, unable to satisfy his large appetite, he would eat any available food from gutters and refuse heaps but his condition still deteriorated through hunger. He was hospitalised due to exhaustion and became the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his eating capacity, in which, among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing. Despite his unusual diet, he was of normal size and appearance, and showed no signs of mental illness other than what was described as an apathetic temperament.

General Alexandre de Beauharnais decided to put Tarrare's abilities to military use, and he was employed as a courier by the French army, with the intention that he would swallow documents, pass through enemy lines, and recover them from his stool once safely at his destination. Tarrare could not speak German, and on his first mission was captured by Prussian forces, severely beaten and underwent a mock execution before being returned to French lines.

Chastened by this experience, he agreed to submit to any procedure that would cure his appetite, and was treated with laudanum, tobacco pills, wine vinegar and soft-boiled eggs. The procedures failed, and doctors could not keep him on a controlled diet; he would sneak out of the hospital to scavenge for offal in gutters, rubbish heaps and outside butchers' shops, and attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital and to eat the corpses in the hospital morgue. After being suspected of eating a toddler he was ejected from the hospital. He reappeared four years later in Versailles with a case of severe tuberculosis, and died shortly afterwards, following a lengthy bout of exudative diarrhoea.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Fortifications 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history 🔗 Sussex

The Trundle is an Iron Age hillfort on St Roche's Hill about 4 miles (6 km) north of Chichester, Sussex, England, built on the site of a causewayed enclosure, a form of early Neolithic earthwork found in northwestern Europe. Causewayed enclosures were built in England from shortly before 3700 BC until about 3300 BC; they are characterized by the full or partial enclosure of an area with ditches that are interrupted by gaps, or causeways. Their purpose is not known; they may have been settlements, meeting places, or ritual sites. Hillforts were built as early as 1000 BC, in the Late Bronze Age, and continued to be built through the Iron Age until shortly before the Roman occupation. A chapel dedicated to St Roche was built on the hill around the end of the 14th century; it was in ruins by 1570. A windmill and a beacon were subsequently built on the hill. The site was occasionally used as a meeting place in the post-medieval period.

The hillfort is still a substantial earthwork, but the Neolithic site was unknown until 1925 when archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford obtained an aerial photograph of the Trundle, clearly showing additional structures inside the ramparts of the hillfort. Causewayed enclosures were new to archaeology at the time, with only five known by 1930, and the photograph persuaded archaeologist E. Cecil Curwen to excavate the site in 1928 and 1930. These early digs established a construction date of about 500 BC to 100 BC for the hillfort and proved the existence of the Neolithic site. In 2011, the Gathering Time project published an analysis of radiocarbon dates from almost forty British causewayed enclosures, including some from the Trundle. The conclusion was that the Neolithic part of the site was probably constructed no earlier than the mid-fourth millennium BC. A review of the site in 1995 by Alastair Oswald noted the presence of fifteen possible Iron Age house platforms within the hillfort's ramparts.

🔗 Japan 🔗 Paranormal 🔗 Baseball 🔗 Japan/Japanese baseball 🔗 Japan/Mythology

The Curse of the Colonel (Japanese: カーネルサンダースの呪い, romanisation: Kāneru Sandāsu no Noroi) refers to a 1985 Japanese urban legend regarding a reputed curse placed on the Japanese Kansai-based Hanshin Tigers baseball team by the ghost of deceased KFC founder and mascot Colonel Sanders.

The curse was said to be placed on the team because of the Colonel's anger over treatment of one of his store-front statues, which was thrown into the Dōtonbori River by celebrating Hanshin fans before their team's victory in the 1985 Japan Championship Series. As is common with sports-related curses, the Curse of the Colonel was used to explain the team's subsequent 18-year losing streak. Some fans believed the team would never win another Japan Series until the statue had been recovered. They have appeared in the Japan Series three times since then, losing in 2003, 2005 and 2014.

Comparisons are often made between the Hanshin Tigers and the Boston Red Sox, who were said to be under the Curse of the Bambino until they won the World Series in 2004. The "Curse of the Colonel" has also been used as a bogeyman threat to those who would divulge the secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices that result in the unique taste of his chicken.

🔗 Internet 🔗 China

50 Cent Party, 50 Cent Army and wumao ( WOO-mow) are terms for Internet commentators who are hired by the authorities of the People's Republic of China to manipulate public opinion and disseminate disinformation to the benefit of the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It was created during the early phases of the Internet's rollout to the wider public in China.

The name is derived from the allegation that such commentators are paid RMB¥0.50 for every post. These commentators create comments or articles on popular Chinese social media networks that are intended to derail discussions which are critical of the CCP, promoting narratives that serve the government's interests and insulting or spreading misinformation about political opponents of the Chinese government, both domestic and abroad. Some of these commentators have labeled themselves ziganwu (Chinese: 自干五, short for 自带干粮的五毛, lit. 'wumao who bring their own dry rations'), claiming they are not paid by authorities and express their support for the Chinese government out of their own volition.

Authors of a paper published in 2017 in the American Political Science Review estimate that the Chinese government fabricates 488 million social media posts per year. In contrast to common assumptions, the 50 Cent Party consists mostly of paid bureaucrats who respond to government directives and rarely defend their government from criticism or engage in direct arguments because "... the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject." Around 80% of the analysed posts involve pro-China cheerleading with inspirational slogans, and 13% involve general praise and suggestions on governmental policies. Despite the common allegation of the commentators getting paid for their posts, the paper suggested there was "no evidence" that they are paid anything for their posts, instead being required to do so as a part of their official party duties.

Research by professors at Harvard, Stanford, and UC San Diego indicated a "massive secretive operation" to fill China's Internet with propaganda, and has resulted in some 488 million posts written by fake social media accounts, representing about 0.6% of the 80 billion posts generated on Chinese social media. To maximize their influence, such pro-government comments are made largely during times of intense online debate, and when online protests have a possibility of transforming into real life actions. The colloquial term wumao has also been used by some English speakers outside of China as an insult against people with perceived pro-CCP bias.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Systems 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Systems/Systems engineering

Conway's law is an adage stating that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. It is named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967. His original wording was:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

The law is based on the reasoning that in order for a software module to function, multiple authors must communicate frequently with each other. Therefore, the software interface structure of a system will reflect the social boundaries of the organization(s) that produced it, across which communication is more difficult. Conway's law was intended as a valid sociological observation, although sometimes it's used in a humorous context. It was dubbed Conway's law by participants at the 1968 National Symposium on Modular Programming.

In colloquial terms, it means software or automated systems end up "shaped like" the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for. Some interpretations of the law say this organizational pattern mirroring is a helpful feature of such systems, while other interpretations say it's merely a result of human nature or organizational bias.

🔗 China 🔗 Economics

Tang ping (Chinese: 躺平; pinyin: tǎng píng; lit. 'lying flat') is a lifestyle choice and social protest movement in China by some young people who reject societal pressures on hard work or even overwork (such as the 996 working hour system, which is generally regarded as a rat race with ever diminishing returns), and instead choose to "lie down flat and get over the beatings" via a low-desire, more indifferent attitude towards life. Novelist Liao Zenghu described "lying flat" as a resistance movement, and The New York Times called it part of a nascent Chinese counterculture. It has also been compared to the Great Resignation that began in America (and the western world) around the same time.

Unlike the hikikomori in Japan (who are socially withdrawn), these young Chinese people who subscribe to "lying flat" are not socially isolated, but merely choose to lower their professional and economic ambitions and simplify their goals, still being fiscally productive for their own essential needs, and prioritize psychological health over economic materialism.

🔗 Telecommunications

The Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (B.A.T.M.A.N.) is a routing protocol for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks which is under development by the German "Freifunk" community and intended to replace the Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR).

B.A.T.M.A.N.'s crucial point is the decentralization of knowledge about the best route through the network — no single node has all the data. This technique eliminates the need to spread information about network changes to every node in the network. The individual node only saves information about the "direction" it received data from and sends its data accordingly. The data gets passed from node to node, and packets get individual, dynamically created routes. A network of collective intelligence is created.

In early 2007, the B.A.T.M.A.N. developers started experimenting with the idea of routing on layer 2 (Ethernet layer) instead of layer 3. To differentiate from the layer 3 routing daemon, the suffix "adv" (for: advanced) was chosen. Instead of manipulating routing tables based on information exchanged via UDP/IP, it provides a virtual network interface and transparently transports Ethernet packets on its own. The batman-adv kernel module has been part of the official Linux kernel since 2.6.38.

🔗 Agriculture 🔗 England 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Measurement

Yan Tan Tethera or yan-tan-tethera is a sheep-counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Northern England and some other parts of Britain. The words are numbers taken from Brythonic Celtic languages such as Cumbric which had died out in most of Northern England by the sixth century, but they were commonly used for sheep counting and counting stitches in knitting until the Industrial Revolution, especially in the fells of the Lake District. Though most of these number systems fell out of use by the turn of the twentieth century, some are still in use.

🔗 Norway

Uniquely, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, located in the High Arctic, is an entirely visa-free zone. However, travelers who have a visa requirement to enter mainland Norway/the Schengen area must have a Schengen visa if they travel via mainland Norway/the Schengen area. This must be a double-entry visa so they can return to mainland Norway/the Schengen area.

Those traveling to and from Svalbard must bring passports or national identity cards, as all are subject to identity check. Passports or national identity cards satisfy the Schengen regulatory requirements for identity verification. Due to a transitional arrangement, Norwegian citizens could also prove their identity with a document issued in Norway which included at least name, photo and date of birth, such as a Norwegian driving licence issued after 1998; the transitional period ended on 31 December 2021.

Everybody may live and work in Svalbard indefinitely regardless of country of citizenship. The Svalbard Treaty grants treaty nationals equal right of abode as Norwegian nationals. Non-treaty nationals may live and work indefinitely visa-free as well. Per Sefland, then Governor of Svalbard, said "It has been a chosen policy so far that we haven't made any difference between the treaty citizens and those from outside the treaty". "Regulations concerning rejection and expulsion from Svalbard" are enforced on a non-discriminatory basis. Grounds for exclusion include lack of means of support, and violation of laws or regulations.

Hans-Henrik Hartmann, then head of the legal unit at the Norwegian government's immigration department, said, "If an asylum seeker is refused residence in Norway he can settle in Svalbard so long as he can get there and is able to pay for himself." Svalbard has a high cost of living, but only a limited welfare system. Welfare and health care is available only for Norwegians and for workers employed by a Norwegian company.

The Norwegian Nationality Act applies to Svalbard, cf. Section 1. However, the Act does not provide any special rules for foreign nationals residing on Svalbard. Foreigners living on Svalbard must meet the conditions of the law to obtain Norwegian citizenship. In order to acquire Norwegian citizenship upon application, there is, according to the main rule, a requirement to fulfill the conditions for a permanent residence permit, and consequently a requirement for residence on the Norwegian mainland with a residence permit. Such permits are granted in accordance with the Norwegian Immigration Act. Because the Norwegian Immigration Act does not apply to Svalbard, cf. Section 6, residence on Svalbard does not qualify foreign nationals for residence permits on the Norwegian mainland.

🔗 Chemicals

Fluoroantimonic acid is a mixture of hydrogen fluoride and antimony pentafluoride, containing various cations and anions (the simplest being H
₂F⁺
and SbF⁻
₆). This substance is a superacid that can be excess of a quadrillion times stronger than 100% pure sulfuric acid, depending on proportion of its ingredients. It has been shown to protonate even hydrocarbons to afford pentacoordinate carbocations (carbonium ions). Extreme caution needs to be in place when handling fluoroantimonic acid. It is exceptionally corrosive, but can be stored in containers lined with PTFE (Teflon).