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🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Aviation/aerospace biography 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Aviation/Soviet aviation

Mikhail Petrovich Devyatayev (Russian: Михаил Петрович Девятаев; Moksha/Erzya: Михаил Петрович Девятаев; 8 July 1917 – 24 November 2002) was a Soviet fighter pilot known for his incredible escape from a Nazi concentration camp on the island of Usedom, in the Baltic Sea.

🔗 United States 🔗 Canada 🔗 Micronations 🔗 Canada/Geography of Canada 🔗 United States/New Hampshire

The Republic of Indian Stream or Indian Stream Republic was an unrecognized constitutional republic in North America, along the section of the border that divides the current Canadian province of Quebec from the U.S. state of New Hampshire. It existed from July 9, 1832, to August 5, 1835. Described as "Indian Stream Territory, so-called" by the United States census-taker in 1830, the area was named for Indian Stream, a small watercourse. It had an organized elected government and constitution and served about three hundred citizens.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Solar System 🔗 Solar System/Moon

The Artemis program is a U.S. government-funded international human spaceflight program that has the goal of landing "the first woman and the next man" on the Moon, specifically at the lunar south pole region, by 2024. The program is carried out predominantly by NASA, U.S. commercial spaceflight companies contracted by NASA, and international partners including the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the Italian Space Agency (ASI) the Australian Space Agency (ASA), the UK Space Agency (UKSA), the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA) the State Space Agency of Ukraine, and the Brazilian Space Agency (AEB). NASA is leading the program, but expects international partnerships to play a key role in advancing Artemis as the next step towards the long-term goal of establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon, laying the foundation for private companies to build a lunar economy, and eventually sending humans to Mars.

In December 2017, President Donald Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, authorizing the lunar campaign. Artemis draws upon ongoing spacecraft programs including Orion, the Gateway, and Commercial Lunar Payload Services, and adds an undeveloped crewed lander. The Space Launch System will serve as the primary launch vehicle for Orion, while commercial launch vehicles are planned for use to launch various other elements of the campaign. NASA requested US$1.6 billion in additional funding for Artemis for fiscal year 2020, while the Senate Appropriations Committee requested from NASA a five-year budget profile which is needed for evaluation and approval by Congress.

🔗 London 🔗 British Museum 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Glass

The Lycurgus Cup is a 4th-century Roman glass cage cup made of a dichroic glass, which shows a different colour depending on whether or not light is passing through it: red when lit from behind and green when lit from in front. It is the only complete Roman glass object made from this type of glass, and the one exhibiting the most impressive change in colour; it has been described as "the most spectacular glass of the period, fittingly decorated, which we know to have existed".

The cup is also a very rare example of a complete Roman cage-cup, or diatretum, where the glass has been painstakingly cut and ground back to leave only a decorative "cage" at the original surface-level. Many parts of the cage have been completely undercut. Most cage-cups have a cage with a geometric abstract design, but here there is a composition with figures, showing the mythical King Lycurgus, who (depending on the version) tried to kill Ambrosia, a follower of the god Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans). She was transformed into a vine that twined around the enraged king and restrained him, eventually killing him. Dionysus and two followers are shown taunting the king. The cup is the "only well-preserved figural example" of a cage cup.

The dichroic effect is achieved by making the glass with tiny proportions of nanoparticles of gold and silver dispersed in colloidal form throughout the glass material. The process used remains unclear, and it is likely that it was not well understood or controlled by the makers, and was probably discovered by accidental "contamination" with minutely ground gold and silver dust. The glass-makers may not even have known that gold was involved, as the quantities involved are so tiny; they may have come from a small proportion of gold in any silver added (most Roman silver contains small proportions of gold), or from traces of gold or gold leaf left by accident in the workshop, as residue on tools, or from other work. The very few other surviving fragments of Roman dichroic glass vary considerably in their two colours.

🔗 Computing

In computer storage, Bélády's anomaly is the phenomenon in which increasing the number of page frames results in an increase in the number of page faults for certain memory access patterns. This phenomenon is commonly experienced when using the first-in first-out (FIFO) page replacement algorithm. In FIFO, the page fault may or may not increase as the page frames increase, but in Optimal and stack-based algorithms like LRU, as the page frames increase the page fault decreases. László Bélády demonstrated this in 1969.

In common computer memory management, information is loaded in specific-sized chunks. Each chunk is referred to as a page. Main memory can hold only a limited number of pages at a time. It requires a frame for each page it can load. A page fault occurs when a page is not found, and might need to be loaded from disk into memory.

When a page fault occurs and all frames are in use, one must be cleared to make room for the new page. A simple algorithm is FIFO: whichever page has been in the frames the longest is the one that is cleared. Until Bélády's anomaly was demonstrated, it was believed that an increase in the number of page frames would always result in the same number of or fewer page faults.

🔗 Death 🔗 Korea 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Korea/Korean popular culture working group

Fan death is a widely held belief in Korean culture, where it is thought that running an electric fan in a closed room with unopened or no windows will prove fatal. Despite no concrete evidence to support the concept, belief in fan death persists to this day in Korea, and also to a lesser extent in Japan and Russia.

🔗 Computing 🔗 BBC 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Retailing

"Computer says no" is a catchphrase first used in the British sketch comedy television programme Little Britain in 2004. In British culture, the phrase is used to criticise public-facing organisations and customer service staff who rely on information stored on or generated by a computer to make decisions and respond to customers' requests, often in a manner which goes against common sense. It may also refer to a deliberately unhelpful attitude towards customers and service-users commonly experienced within British society, whereby more could be done to reach a mutually satisfactory outcome, but is not.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Terrorism

The 1983 U.S. Senate bombing was a bomb explosion at the United States Senate on November 7, 1983, motivated by United States military involvement in Lebanon and Grenada. The attack led to heightened security in the DC metropolitan area, and the inaccessibility of certain parts of the Senate Building. Six members of the radical left-wing Resistance Conspiracy were arrested in May 1988 and charged with the bombing, as well as related bombings of Fort McNair and the Washington Navy Yard which occurred April 25, 1983, and April 20, 1984, respectively.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Poetry

"First they came ..." is the poetic form of a post-war confessional prose by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It is about the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy—including, by his own admission, Niemöller himself—following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group. Many variations and adaptations in the spirit of the original have been published in the English language. It deals with themes of persecution, guilt, repentance, and personal responsibility.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Science

Xenobots, named after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), are synthetic organisms that are automatically designed by computers to perform some desired function and built by combining together different biological tissues.

Xenobots are less than a 1 millimeter (0.039 inches) wide and composed of just two things: skin cells and heart muscle cells, both of which are derived from stem cells harvested from early (blastula stage) frog embryos. The skin cells provide rigid support and the heart cells act as small motors, contracting and expanding in volume to propel the xenobot forward. The shape of a xenobot's body, and its distribution of skin and heart cells, are automatically designed in simulation to perform a specific task, using a process of trial and error (an evolutionary algorithm). Xenobots have been designed to walk, swim, push pellets, carry payloads, and work together in a swarm to aggregate debris scattered along the surface of their dish into neat piles. They can survive for weeks without food and heal themselves after lacerations.