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🔗 Death 🔗 Cetaceans 🔗 Mammals 🔗 Oceans

A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft), in the bathyal or abyssal zones. On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades. This is unlike in shallower waters, where a whale carcass will be consumed by scavengers over a relatively short period of time. Whale falls were first observed in the late 1970s with the development of deep-sea robotic exploration. Since then, several natural and experimental whale falls have been monitored through the use of observations from submersibles and remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) in order to understand patterns of ecological succession on the deep seafloor.

Deep sea whale falls are thought to be hotspots of adaptive radiation for specialized fauna. Organisms that have been observed at deep-sea whale fall sites include giant isopods, squat lobsters, bristleworms, prawns, shrimp, lobsters, hagfish, Osedax, crabs, sea cucumbers, and sleeper sharks. In the past three years whale fall sites have come under scrutiny, and new species have been discovered, including potential whale fall specialists. It has been postulated that whale falls generate biodiversity by providing evolutionary stepping stones for multiple lineages to move and adapt to new environmentally-challenging habitats. Researchers estimate that 690,000 carcasses/skeletons of the nine largest whale species are in one of the four stages of succession at any one time. This estimate implies an average spacing of 12 km (7.5 mi) and as little as 5 km (3.1 mi) along migration routes. They hypothesize that this distance is short enough to allow larvae to disperse/migrate from one to another.

Whale falls are able to occur in the deep open ocean due to cold temperatures and high hydrostatic pressures. In the coastal ocean, a higher incidence of predators as well as warmer waters hasten the decomposition of whale carcasses. Carcasses may also float due to decompositional gases, keeping the carcass at the surface. The bodies of most great whales (baleen and sperm whales) are slightly denser than the surrounding seawater, and only become positively buoyant when the lungs are filled with air. When the lungs deflate, the whale carcasses can reach the seafloor quickly and relatively intact due to a lack of significant whale fall scavengers in the water column. Once in the deep-sea, cold temperatures slow decomposition rates, and high hydrostatic pressures increase gas solubility, allowing whale falls to remain intact and sink to even greater depths.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Cold War

Operation Ivy Bells was a joint United States Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Sociology

The Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time.

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

Improvised firearms (sometimes called zip guns or pipe guns) are firearms manufactured other than by a firearms manufacturer or a gunsmith, and are typically constructed by adapting existing materials to the purpose. They range in quality from crude weapons that are as much a danger to the user as the target to high-quality arms produced by cottage industries using salvaged and repurposed materials.

Improvised firearms are commonly used as tools by criminals and insurgents and are often associated with such groups; other uses include self-defense in lawless areas and hunting game in poor rural areas.

🔗 Books 🔗 Writing systems

Codex Seraphinianus, originally published in 1981, is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, created by Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini between 1976 to 1978. It is approximately 360 pages (depending on edition) and written in an imaginary language.

Originally published in Italy, it has been released in several countries.

🔗 United States 🔗 Books 🔗 Science Fiction

The Astronautilia (Czech: Hvězdoplavba; full title in Greek: Ποιητοῦ ἀδήλου ΑΣΤΡΟΝΑΥΤΙΛΙΑ ἢ ἡ Μικροοδύσσεια ἡ κοσμική; i.e. "An unknown poet's Starvoyage, or the Cosmic Micro-Odyssey") is the magnum opus, written in 1994 under the hellenised pseudonym Ἰωάννης Πυρεῖα, of Czech poet and writer Jan Křesadlo, one of the most unusual works of twentieth-century Czech literature. It was published shortly after his death, as a commemorative first edition.

While no full English translation exists as yet, there is a sample chapter translation online, and a German translation of the fully transcribed and annotated Greek text is in preparation.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

The Airbus Beluga XL (Airbus A330-743L) is a large transport aircraft based on the Airbus A330 airliner. The aircraft entered service with Airbus Transport on 9 January 2020 to replace the Airbus Beluga in the movement of oversized aircraft components, for example wings. The Beluga XL made its first flight on 19 July 2018, and received its type certification on 13 November 2019.

It made its first operational flight on January 9, 2020, and by January 20, had entered full-time service.

🔗 United States 🔗 Women's History 🔗 United States/Louisiana 🔗 United States/Franco-Americans

Correction girls was a term describing women who were forcibly shipped from France to its colonies in America as brides for its colonists during the early 18th century.

🔗 Computing

FILE_ID.DIZ is a plain text file containing a brief content description of the archive in which it is included. It was originally used in archives distributed through bulletin board systems (BBS), and still in the warez scene.

Bulletin boards commonly accept uploaded files from their users. The BBS software would prompt the user to supply a description for the uploaded file, but these descriptions were often less than useful. BBS system operators spent many hours going over the upload descriptions correcting and editing the descriptions. The FILE_ID.DIZ inclusion in archives was designed to address this problem.

FILE_ID stands for "file identification". DIZ stands for Description In Zipfile.

Clark Development and the Association of Shareware Professionals supported the idea of this becoming a standard for file descriptions. Clark rewrote the PCBDescribe program and included it with their PCBoard BBS software. The ASP urged their members to use this description file format in their distributions. Michael Leavitt, an employee of Clark Development, released the file specification and his PCBDescribe program source code to the public domain and urged other BBS software companies to support the DIZ file.

SysOps could add a common third-party script written in PPL, called "DIZ/2-PCB" that would process, rewrite, verify, and format DIZ files from archives as they were uploaded to a BBS. The software would extract the archive, examine the contents, compile a report, import the DIZ description file and then format it according to your liking. During this time, it was usual practice to add additional lines to the description, such as ads exclaiming the source of the uploaded BBS.

Traditionally, a FILE_ID.DIZ should be "up to 10 lines of text, each line being no more than 45 characters long." according to the specification v1.9.

The concept of DIZ files was to allow a concise description of uploaded files to be automatically applied. Advertisements and "high ASCII" artwork were specifically prohibited.

Even since the decline of the dial-up bulletin board system, FILE_ID.DIZ files are still utilized by the warez scene in their releases of unlicensed software. They are commonly bundled as part of the complete packaging by self-described pirate groups, and indicate the number of disks, and other basic information. Along with the NFO file, it is essential to the release. Especially in terms of unlicensed software ("warez"), it was common for each file in a sequential compressed archive (an archive intentionally split into multiple parts at creation so the parts can then be individually downloaded by slower connections like dial-up. Example: .rar, .r00, .r01, .r02, etc.), to contain this file. This probably contributed to its extended popularity after the decline of the bulletin board system in the late 1990s and early 2000s until now, since even casual consumers of unlicensed software would have stumbled upon it due to its abundance.

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