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🔗 Law 🔗 England

In criminal law, Blackstone's ratio (also known as the Blackstone ratio or Blackstone's formulation) is the idea that:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

As expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s.

The idea subsequently became a staple of legal thinking in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions and continues to be a topic of debate. There is also a long pre-history of similar sentiments going back centuries in a variety of legal traditions. The message that government and the courts must err on the side of innocence has remained constant.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Cold War

Blue Peacock, renamed from Blue Bunny and originally Brown Bunny, was a British tactical nuclear weapon project in the 1950s.

The project's goal was to store a number of ten-kiloton nuclear mines in Germany, to be placed on the North German Plain and, in the event of Soviet invasion from the east, detonated by wire or an eight-day timer to:

... not only destroy facilities and installations over a large area, but ... deny occupation of the area to an enemy for an appreciable time due to contamination ...

🔗 Biography 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Systems/Visualization

Clifford Alan Pickover (born August 15, 1957) is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, science fiction, innovation, and creativity. For many years, he was employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York where he was Editor-in-Chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He has been granted more than 500 U.S. patents, is an elected Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and is author of more than 50 books, translated into more than a dozen languages.

🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Home Living 🔗 United States/Nebraska - Omaha

Nebraska Furniture Mart is the largest home furnishing store in North America selling furniture, flooring, appliances and electronics. NFM was founded in 1937 by Belarus-born Rose Blumkin, universally known as Mrs. B., in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. Under the motto "sell cheap and tell the truth," she worked in the business until age 103. In 1983, Mrs. B. sold a majority interest to Berkshire Hathaway in a handshake deal with Warren Buffett.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Television 🔗 Television/Broadcast engineering and technology

An Eidophor was a television projector used to create theater-sized images from an analog video signal. The name Eidophor is derived from the Greek word-roots eido and phor meaning 'image' and 'bearer' (carrier). Its basic technology was the use of electrostatic charges to deform an oil surface.

🔗 Law 🔗 England 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History

The Charter of the Forest of 1217 (Latin: Carta Foresta) is a charter that re-established for free men rights of access to the royal forest that had been eroded by William the Conqueror and his heirs. Many of its provisions were in force for centuries afterwards. It was originally sealed in England by the young King Henry III, acting under the regency of William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke. It was in many ways a companion document to Magna Carta, and redressed some applications of the Anglo-Norman Forest Law that had been extended and abused by William Rufus.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Video games/Nintendo

Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and Zelda's Adventure are action-adventure games produced by Philips for their CD-i format as part of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda video game series. Not designed for Nintendo platforms, the games owe their existence to negotiations related to Nintendo's decision not to have Philips create a CD add-on to the Super NES. During these negotiations, Philips secured the rights to use Nintendo characters in CD-i third-party developer games. The Faces of Evil and The Wand of Gamelon were developed by Animation Magic and were both released in North America on October 10, 1993, and Zelda's Adventure was developed by Viridis and was released in North America on June 5, 1994. The games were given little funding or development time, and Nintendo provided only cursory input. None of the games are canonical to the Zelda franchise.

CD-i players did not sell well and the games saw relatively small sales figures. Though the games initially received largely positive reviews, they have been universally criticized since the mid-2000s. This is attributed to the reaction of many gamers to the obscure games' full motion video cutscenes when they first became widely available through video-sharing websites such as YouTube. The cutscenes are perceived to be of poor quality. Because the aging early 1990s visual effects of the titles failed to live up to the graphic effects of the 2000s, and because for many fans this was their first experience of the games, the CD-i Zelda titles have developed a critical reputation as particularly poor based largely on animation quality and to an extent awkward controls. In the eyes of "devout" hardcore gamers, according to Edge, the games are now considered "tantamount to blasphemy".

Faces of Evil and Wand of Gamelon are played using the side-scrolling view introduced in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, while Zelda's Adventure has a top-down view reminiscent of the original The Legend of Zelda. All the CD-i Zelda games begin with animated FMVs to illustrate the capabilities of the CD-ROM format, save Zelda's Adventure, which begins with a live-action video.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Computing 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia

.su was assigned as the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Soviet Union (USSR) on 19 September 1990. Even though the Soviet Union itself was dissolved a mere 15 months later, the .su top-level domain remains in use today. It is administered by the Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN, or RosNIIROS in Russian transcription).

🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Athletics 🔗 Running 🔗 Evolutionary biology

The endurance running hypothesis is the hypothesis that the evolution of certain human characteristics can be explained as adaptations to long-distance running. The hypothesis suggests that endurance running played an important role for early hominins in obtaining food. Researchers have proposed that endurance running began as an adaptation for scavenging and later for persistence hunting.

🔗 United States 🔗 Books

Anti-intellectualism in American Life is a book by Richard Hofstadter published in 1963 that won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. In this book, Hofstadter set out to trace the social movements that altered the role of intellect in American society. In so doing, he explored questions regarding the purpose of education and whether the democratization of education altered that purpose and reshaped its form. In considering the historic tension between access to education and excellence in education, Hofstadter argued that both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were consequences, in part, of the democratization of knowledge. Moreover, he saw these themes as historically embedded in America's national fabric, an outcome of its colonial European and evangelical Protestant heritage. He contended that American Protestantism's anti-intellectual tradition valued the spirit over intellectual rigour. He also noted that Catholicism could have been expected to add a distinctive leaven to the intellectual dialogue, but American Catholicism lacked intellectual culture, due to its failure to develop an intellectual tradition or produce its own strong class of intellectuals.