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🔗 Germany 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Germany/GDR

The East German coffee crisis refers to shortages of coffee in the late 1970s in East Germany caused by a poor harvest and unstable commodity prices, severely limiting the government's ability to buy coffee on the world markets. As a consequence, the East German government increased its engagement in Africa and Asia, exporting weapons and equipment to coffee-producing nations.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Comics 🔗 Comics/Superman

Superman: The New Superman Adventures, commonly referred to as Superman 64, is an action-adventure game developed and published by Titus Interactive for the Nintendo 64 and based on the television series Superman: The Animated Series. Released in North America on May 31, 1999, and in Europe on July 23, 1999, it is the first 3D Superman game.

In the game, Lex Luthor has trapped Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, and Professor Hamilton in a virtual reality version of Metropolis that he created with the help of Brainiac, leaving it up to Superman to save them and break apart the virtual world. The game shifts between outdoor levels where the player flies through rings while saving civilians, and indoor levels where the player looks for access cards, activates computers, and fights villains such as Brainiac, Mala, Metallo, Darkseid, and Parasite.

The development of Superman began in 1997 and was largely hampered by constraints between Titus and the game's licensors, Warner Bros. and DC Comics, leaving little room for polishing the gameplay. BlueSky Software attempted to redo the game for the PlayStation, but this version was ultimately canceled, as Titus's license with Warner Bros. had expired by the time it was completed. With three E3 presentations and positive press coverage before its release, Superman 64 was released to strong sales and positive consumer reception; however, critical reviews were extremely negative, claiming it to be one of the worst video games ever made and panning its unresponsive controls, technical flaws, repetitive gameplay, overuse of distance fog, and poor graphics.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/Cold War

Toss bombing (sometimes known as loft bombing, and by the U.S. Air Force as the Low Altitude Bombing System, LABS) is a method of bombing where the attacking aircraft pulls upward when releasing its bomb load, giving the bomb additional time of flight by starting its ballistic path with an upward vector.

The purpose of toss bombing is to compensate for the gravity drop of the bomb in flight, and allow an aircraft to bomb a target without flying directly over it. This is in order to avoid overflying a heavily defended target, or in order to distance the attacking aircraft from the blast effects of a nuclear (or conventional) bomb.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/language and literature of Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Georgia (country)

Before he became a Bolshevik revolutionary and the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin was a promising poet.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Michael J. (Mike) Karels (August 2, 1956 – June 2, 2024) was an American software engineer and one of the key figures in history of BSD UNIX.

In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) to the Computer Systems Research Group at University of California, Berkeley, honoring 180 individuals, including Karels, who contributed to the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release.

In February 1992 Karels moved to BSDi (Berkeley Software Design) and designed BSD/OS, which, for years, was the only commercially available BSD style Unix on Intel platform. BSDi's software assets were bought by Wind River in April 2001, and Karels joined Wind River as the Principal Technologist for the BSD/OS platform.

Following his time at Wind River, Karels joined Secure Computing Corporation in 2003 as a Sr. Principal Engineer. Secure Computing used BSD/OS as the basis for SecureOS, the operating system of its Sidewinder firewall, later known as McAfee Firewall Enterprise. However, BSD/OS development had ceased, so Karels was involved in transitioning SecureOS to use FreeBSD as its base, and porting its unique features over to the new kernel. Secure Computing and the Sidewinder firewall team went through a series of acquisitions and spinoffs, including McAfee, Intel, and Forcepoint, so while Karels appeared to have several different jobs from that point onward, he had remained in roughly the same role from 2003 until his retirement in 2021.

The Sidewinder product was eventually discontinued, though Karels fed some SecureOS changes back into the main FreeBSD codebase. Karels officially became a FreeBSD committer in 2017. He continued working on FreeBSD in his spare time following retirement.

Contrafreeloading is an observed behavior in which an organism, when offered a choice between provided food or food that requires effort to obtain, prefers the food that requires effort.

The term was coined in 1963 by animal psychologist Glen Jensen. In his original study, around 200 rats were given a choice between food in a bowl and a food dispenser which required that the rat step on the pedal a set number of times. In this experiment, Jensen found that the rats chose the foot pedal option as a function of the number of foot presses required to receive the food reward. Similar studies by Jensen and other researchers have since replicated his findings with gerbils and other animals including canines, mice, rats, birds, fish, monkeys and chimpanzees. The only animal that did not display similar behavior was the domesticated cat, which preferred to be served.

Bohm Dialogue (also known as Bohmian Dialogue or "Dialogue in the Spirit of David Bohm") is a freely flowing group conversation in which participants attempt to reach a common understanding, experiencing everyone's point of view fully, equally and nonjudgementally. This can lead to new and deeper understanding. The purpose is to solve the communication crises that face society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness. It utilizes a theoretical understanding of the way thoughts relate to universal reality. It is named after physicist David Bohm who originally proposed this form of dialogue.

🔗 Video games

Doom, a first-person shooter game by id Software, was released in December 1993 and is considered one of the most significant and influential titles in video game history. Development began in November 1992, with programmers John Carmack and John Romero, artists Adrian Carmack and Kevin Cloud, and designer Tom Hall. Late in development, Hall was replaced by Sandy Petersen and programmer Dave Taylor joined. The music and sound effects were created by Bobby Prince.

The Doom concept was proposed in late 1992, after the release of Wolfenstein 3D and its sequel Spear of Destiny. John Carmack was working on an improved 3D game engine from those games, and the team wanted to have their next game take advantage of his designs. Several ideas were proposed, including a new game in their Commander Keen series, but John proposed a game about using technology to fight demons inspired by the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns the team played. The initial months of development were spent building prototypes, while Hall created the Doom Bible, a design document for his vision of the game and its story; after id released a grandiose press release touting features that the team had not yet begun working on, the Doom Bible was rejected in favor of a plotless game with no design document at all.

Over the next six months, Hall designed levels based on real military bases, Romero built features, and artists Adrian and Cloud created textures and demons based on clay models they built. Hall's level designs, however, were deemed uninteresting and Romero began designing his own levels; Hall, increasingly frustrated with his limited influence, was fired in July. He was replaced by Petersen in September, and the team worked increasingly long hours until the game was completed in December 1993. Doom was self-published by id on December 10, 1993, and immediately downloaded by thousands of players.

🔗 Animal anatomy 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Anatomy 🔗 Anatomy/Neuroanatomy

The enteric nervous system (ENS) or intrinsic nervous system is one of the main divisions of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and consists of a mesh-like system of neurons that governs the function of the gastrointestinal tract. It is capable of acting independently of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, although it may be influenced by them. The ENS is also called the second brain.It is derived from neural crest cells.

The enteric nervous system is capable of operating independently of the brain and spinal cord, but does rely on innervation from the autonomic nervous system via the vagus nerve and prevertebral ganglia in healthy subjects. However, studies have shown that the system is operable with a severed vagus nerve. The neurons of the enteric nervous system control the motor functions of the system, in addition to the secretion of gastrointestinal enzymes. These neurons communicate through many neurotransmitters similar to the CNS, including acetylcholine, dopamine, and serotonin. The large presence of serotonin and dopamine in the gut are key areas of research for neurogastroenterologists.

🔗 Astronomy

The Great Debate, also called the Shapley–Curtis Debate, was held on 26 April 1920 at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis. It concerned the nature of so-called spiral nebulae and the size of the universe; Shapley believed that distant nebulae were relatively small and lay within the outskirts of Earth's home galaxy, while Curtis held that they were in fact independent galaxies, implying that they were exceedingly large and distant.

The two scientists first presented independent technical papers about "The Scale of the Universe" during the day and then took part in a joint discussion that evening. Much of the lore of the Great Debate grew out of two papers published by Shapley and by Curtis in the May 1921 issue of the Bulletin of the National Research Council. The published papers each included counter arguments to the position advocated by the other scientist at the 1920 meeting.

In the aftermath of the public debate, scientists have been able to verify individual pieces of evidence from both astronomers, but on the main point of the existence of other galaxies, Curtis has been proven correct.