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🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Geology 🔗 Mining 🔗 Lakes

Lake Peigneur (locally pronounced [pæ̃j̃æ̹ɾ]) is a brackish lake in the U.S. state of Louisiana, 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) north of Delcambre and 9.1 mi (14.6 km) west of New Iberia, near the northernmost tip of Vermilion Bay. With a maximum depth of 200 feet (60 meters), it is the deepest lake in Louisiana.

It was a 10-foot-deep (3 m) freshwater body, popular with sportsmen, until an unusual man-made disaster on November 20, 1980 changed its structure and the surrounding land.

🔗 Electronic music 🔗 R&B and Soul Music

Woo! Yeah! is a drum break that includes James Brown's ("Woo!") and Bobby Byrd's ("Yeah!") voices which has been widely sampled in popular music, often in the form of a loop. The drum break was performed by John "Jabo" Starks. It originates from the 1972 Lyn Collins recording "Think (About It)", a song written and produced by Brown, and is just one of a few other frequently used breaks contained in the recording, often collectively known as the Think Break.

🔗 Biology

The thermal grill illusion is a sensory illusion originally demonstrated in 1896 by the Swedish physician Torsten Thunberg. The illusion is created by an interlaced grill of warm (e.g., 40°C/104°F) and cool (20°C/68°F) bars. When someone presses a hand against the grill, they experience the illusion of burning heat. But if the person presses against only a cool bar, only coolness is experienced; if the person presses against only a warm bar, only warmth is experienced.

Researchers have used the illusion to demonstrate that burning pain sensation is in fact a mixture of both cold and heat pain and that it is only the inhibition of the cold pain "channel" that reveals the heat component.

The illusion is demonstrated by positioning the middle finger in cold water and the ring and index fingers in warm water. Due to shortcomings in the body map - multisensory representation of the body - and this particular sensory input configuration, the brain is tricked into thinking the middle finger is in the warm water and the index and ring fingers in cold water.

In an fMRI experiment of the illusion, researchers recently observed an activation of the thalamus not seen for control stimuli. Also, activity in a portion of the right mid/anterior insula correlated with the perceived unpleasantness of the illusion.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Dreadnought hoax was a practical joke pulled by Horace de Vere Cole in 1910. Cole tricked the Royal Navy into showing their flagship, the battleship HMS Dreadnought, to a fake delegation of Abyssinian royals. The hoax drew attention in Britain to the emergence of the Bloomsbury Group, among whom some of Cole's collaborators numbered. The hoax was a repeat of a similar impersonation which Cole and Adrian Stephen had organised while they were students at Cambridge in 1905.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Mexico

The cocoliztli epidemic or the great pestilence is a term given to millions of deaths in the territory of New Spain in present-day Mexico in the 16th century attributed to one or more illnesses collectively called cocoliztli, a mysterious illness characterized by high fevers and bleeding. It ravaged the Mexican highlands in epidemic proportions. The disease became known as Cocoliztli by the native Aztecs, and had devastating effects on the area’s demography, particularly for the indigenous people. Based on the death toll, this outbreak is often referred to as the worst disease epidemic in the history of Mexico. Subsequent outbreaks continued to baffle both Spanish and native doctors, with little consensus among modern researchers on the pathogenesis. However, recent bacterial genomic studies have suggested that Salmonella, specifically a serotype of Salmonella enterica known as Paratyphi C, was at least partially responsible for this initial outbreak. It might have also been an indigenous viral hemorrhagic fever, perhaps exacerbated by the worst droughts to affect that region in 500 years, as well as living conditions for indigenous peoples of Mexico in the wake of the Spanish conquest (c. 1519).

A crinkle crankle wall, also known as a crinkum crankum, serpentine, ribbon or wavy wall, is an unusual type of garden wall built in a serpentine pattern with alternating curves.

The crinkle crankle wall economizes on bricks, despite its sinuous configuration, because it can be made just one brick thin. If a wall this thin were to be made in a straight line, without buttresses, it would easily topple over. The alternate convex and concave curves in the wall provide stability and help it to resist lateral forces.

"Crinkle crankle" is an ablaut reduplication, defined as something with bends and turns, first attested in 1598 (though "crinkle" and "crankle" have somewhat longer histories). However, it was not until the 18th century that the term began to be applied to wavy walls. At that time these garden walls were usually aligned east-west, so that one side faced south to catch the warming sun and were historically used for growing fruit.

Many crinkle crankle walls are found in the East Anglia region of England where the marshes of The Fens were drained by Dutch engineers starting in the mid-1600s. The walls' construction is attributed to these engineers who called them slangenmuur, meaning snake wall.  The county of Suffolk claims at least 50 examples, twice as many as in the whole of the rest of the country, and where crinkle crankle is said to derive from a local dialect. In the estate village of Easton the noted crinkle crankle wall running from the former manor house to All Saints' Church is supposed to be the longest existing example. In Lymington, Hampshire, there are at least two examples of crinkle crankle walls. The oldest is thought to have been constructed at the time of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) by exiled Hanoverian soldiers living in the adjacent house.

As a minor part of a larger system of fortification, such a wall may have been used to force oncoming troops to break ranks from closed to open ranks, and further expose them to defensive assault.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) incorporated so-called serpentine walls into the architecture of the University of Virginia, which he founded. Flanking both sides of its landmark rotunda and extending down the length of the lawn are ten pavilions, each with its own walled garden separated by crinkle crankle walls. Although some authorities claim Jefferson invented this design, he was merely adapting a well-established English style of construction. A university document in his own hand shows how he calculated the savings and combined aesthetics with utility.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Geology 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Africa/Mauritania

The Richat Structure, also called Guelb er Richât (Arabic: قلب الريشات, romanized: Qalb ar-Rīšāt), is a prominent circular geological feature in the Sahara's Adrar Plateau, near Ouadane, west–central Mauritania, Northwest Africa. In the local dialect, Richat means feather and it also is known locally in Arabic as tagense. Tagense refers to the circular opening of the leather pouch used to draw water from local wells.

It is an eroded geological dome, 40 kilometres (25 mi) in diameter, exposing sedimentary rock in layers which appear as concentric rings. Igneous rock is exposed inside and there are spectacular rhyolites and gabbros which have undergone hydrothermal alteration, and a central megabreccia. The structure is also the location of exceptional accumulations of Acheulean archaeological artifacts.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Telecommunications

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), also known as the "Digital Telephony Act," is a United States wiretapping law passed in 1994, during the presidency of Bill Clinton (Pub. L. No. 103-414, 108 Stat. 4279, codified at 47 USC 1001-1010).

CALEA's purpose is to enhance the ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct lawful interception of communication by requiring that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have built-in capabilities for targeted surveillance, allowing federal agencies to selectively wiretap any telephone traffic; it has since been extended to cover broadband Internet and VoIP traffic. Some government agencies argue that it covers mass surveillance of communications rather than just tapping specific lines and that not all CALEA-based access requires a warrant.

The original reason for adopting CALEA was the Federal Bureau of Investigation's worry that increasing use of digital telephone exchange switches would make tapping phones at the phone company's central office harder and slower to execute, or in some cases impossible. Since the original requirement to add CALEA-compliant interfaces required phone companies to modify or replace hardware and software in their systems, U.S. Congress included funding for a limited time period to cover such network upgrades. CALEA was passed into law on October 25, 1994 and came into force on January 1, 1995.

In the years since CALEA was passed it has been greatly expanded to include all VoIP and broadband Internet traffic. From 2004 to 2007 there was a 62 percent growth in the number of wiretaps performed under CALEA – and more than 3,000 percent growth in interception of Internet data such as email.

By 2007, the FBI had spent $39 million on its Digital Collection System Network (DCSNet) system, which collects, stores, indexes, and analyzes communications data.

🔗 Visual arts

A pointing machine is a measuring tool used by stone sculptors and woodcarvers to accurately copy plaster, clay or wax sculpture models into wood or stone. In essence the device is a pointing needle that can be set to any position and then fixed. It further consists of brass or stainless steel rods and joints which can be placed into any position and then tightened. It is not actually a machine; its name is derived from the Italian macchinetta di punta. The invention of the tool has been ascribed to both the French sculptor and medallist Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux (1751–1832) and to the British sculptor John Bacon (1740–1799). It was later perfected by Canova. However, similar devices were used in ancient times, when the copying of Greek sculptures for the Roman market was a large industry.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Yabasic (Yet Another BASIC) is a free, open-source BASIC interpreter for Microsoft Windows and Unix platforms. Yabasic was originally developed by Marc-Oliver Ihm. From version 2.77.1, the project adopted the MIT License and the source code was moved to GitHub to encourage others to participate in its development.