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🔗 Role-playing games

Tunnels & Trolls (abbreviated T&T) is a fantasy role-playing game designed by Ken St. Andre and first published in 1975 by Flying Buffalo. The second modern role-playing game published, it was written by Ken St. Andre to be a more accessible alternative to Dungeons & Dragons and is suitable for solitaire, group, and play-by-mail gameplay.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Law 🔗 Tennessee

The Battle of Athens (sometimes called the McMinn County War) was a rebellion led by citizens in Athens and Etowah, Tennessee, United States, against the local government in August 1946. The citizens, including some World War II veterans, accused the local officials of predatory policing, police brutality, political corruption, and voter intimidation.

🔗 Physics

The Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem states that when statistical mechanics and classical mechanics are applied consistently, the thermal average of the magnetization is always zero. This makes magnetism in solids solely a quantum mechanical effect and means that classical physics cannot account for diamagnetism.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Law

The Brussels effect is the process of unilateral regulatory globalisation caused by the European Union de facto (but not necessarily de jure) externalising its laws outside its borders through market mechanisms.

🔗 Computing

Excess-3, 3-excess or 10-excess-3 binary code (often abbreviated as XS-3, 3XS or X3), shifted binary or Stibitz code (after George Stibitz, who built a relay-based adding machine in 1937) is a self-complementary binary-coded decimal (BCD) code and numeral system. It is a biased representation. Excess-3 code was used on some older computers as well as in cash registers and hand-held portable electronic calculators of the 1970s, among other uses.

🔗 Literature

"Belling the Cat" is a fable also known under the titles "The Bell and the Cat" and "The Mice in Council". Although often attributed to Aesop, it was not recorded before the Middle Ages and has been confused with the quite different fable of Classical origin titled The Cat and the Mice. In the classificatory system established for the fables by B. E. Perry, it is numbered 613, which is reserved for Mediaeval attributions outside the Aesopic canon.

🔗 Education 🔗 Homeschooling 🔗 Alternative education

Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschooling students learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, conventional grading methods, and other features of traditional schooling in the education of each unique child.

The term "unschooling" was coined in the 1970s and used by educator John Holt, widely regarded as the father of unschooling. While unschooling is often considered a subset of homeschooling and homeschooling has been subject to widespread public debate, little media attention has been given to unschooling in particular.

Critics of unschooling see it as an extreme educational philosophy, with concerns that unschooled children will lack the social skills, structure, and motivation of their schooled peers, while proponents of unschooling say exactly the opposite is true: that self-directed education in a natural environment better equips a child to handle the "real world."

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history

Zamburak (Persian: زمبورک‎), literally meaning wasp, was a specialized form of self-propelled artillery from the early modern period, featuring small cannons fired from swivel-mounts on camels. The operator of a zamburak is known as a zamburakchi. The weapon was used by the gunpowder empires, especially the Iranian empires of the Safavid dynasty, Timurid Empire and Afsharid dynasty, due to the ruggedness of the Iranian Plateau, which made typical transportation of heavy cannons problematic.

The zamburak became a deadly weapon in the 18th century. The Pashtuns used it to deadly effect in the Battle of Gulnabad, routing a numerically superior imperial Safavid army. The zamburak was also used successfully in Nader's Campaigns, when the shah and military genius Nader Shah utilized a zamburak corps in conjunction with a regular artillery corps of conventional cannon to devastating effect in numerous battles such as at the Battle of Damghan (1729), the Battle of Yeghevārd, and the Battle of Karnal.

🔗 Marine life 🔗 Animals

The Venus' flower basket (Euplectella aspergillum) is a glass sponge in the phylum Porifera. It is a marine sponge found in the deep waters of the Pacific ocean. As other glass sponges, they build their skeletons out of silica, which is of great interest in materials science as they do not require heat to form their glass latices, which in some ways makes their properties superior to manufactured fiber optics. As other sponges, they feed by filtering sea water to capture plankton.

The sponges are often found to house glass sponge shrimp, usually a breeding pair, whom are typically unable to exit the sponge's lattice due to their size. Consequently, they live in and around these sponges, where the shrimp perform a mutuallistic relationship with the sponge until they die. This may have influenced the adoption of the sponge as a symbol of undying love in Japan, where the skeletons of these sponges are presented as nuptial gifts.

🔗 United States 🔗 Television 🔗 Law 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Animation 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 South Park 🔗 United States/American television 🔗 United States/Colorado 🔗 Star Wars 🔗 United States/Animation - American animation

In a jury trial, a Chewbacca defense is a legal strategy in which a criminal defense lawyer tries to confuse the jury rather than refute the case of the prosecutor. It is an intentional distraction or obfuscation.

As a Chewbacca defense distracts and misleads, it is an example of a red herring. It is also an example of an irrelevant conclusion, a type of informal fallacy in which one making an argument fails to address the issue in question. Often an opposing counsel can legally object to such arguments by declaring them irrelevant, character evidence, or argumentative.

The name Chewbacca defense comes from "Chef Aid", an episode of the American animated series South Park. The episode, which premiered on October 7, 1998, satirizes the O. J. Simpson murder trial—particularly attorney Johnnie Cochran's closing argument for the defense. In the episode, Cochran (voiced by Trey Parker) bases his argument on a false premise about the 1983 film Return of the Jedi. He asks the jury why a Wookiee like Chewbacca would want to live on Endor with the much smaller Ewoks when "it does not make sense". He argues that if Chewbacca living on Endor does not make sense—and if even mentioning Chewbacca in the case does not make sense—then the jury must acquit.

In the Simpson murder trial, the real Johnnie Cochran tried to convince jurors that a glove found at the crime scene, alleged to have been left by the killer, could not be Simpson's because it did not fit Simpson's hand. Because the prosecution relied on the glove as evidence of Simpson's presence at the scene, Cochran argued that the lack of fit proved Simpson's innocence: "It makes no sense; it doesn't fit; if it doesn't fit, you must acquit." "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit" was a refrain that Cochran also used in response to other points of the case.