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🔗 Religion 🔗 England 🔗 Holidays 🔗 Religion/Interfaith

Guy Fawkes Night, also known as Guy Fawkes Day, Bonfire Night (predominantly Newfoundland) and Firework Night, is an annual commemoration observed on 5 November, primarily in the United Kingdom. Its history begins with the events of 5 November 1605 O.S., when Guy Fawkes, a member of the Gunpowder Plot, was arrested while guarding explosives the plotters had placed beneath the House of Lords. Celebrating the fact that King James I had survived the attempt on his life, people lit bonfires around London; and months later, the introduction of the Observance of 5th November Act enforced an annual public day of thanksgiving for the plot's failure.

Within a few decades Gunpowder Treason Day, as it was known, became the predominant English state commemoration, but as it carried strong Protestant religious overtones it also became a focus for anti-Catholic sentiment. Puritans delivered sermons regarding the perceived dangers of popery, while during increasingly raucous celebrations common folk burnt effigies of popular hate-figures, such as the pope. Towards the end of the 18th century reports appear of children begging for money with effigies of Guy Fawkes and 5 November gradually became known as Guy Fawkes Day. Towns such as Lewes and Guildford were in the 19th century scenes of increasingly violent class-based confrontations, fostering traditions those towns celebrate still, albeit peaceably. In the 1850s changing attitudes resulted in the toning down of much of the day's anti-Catholic rhetoric, and the Observance of 5th November Act was repealed in 1859. Eventually the violence was dealt with, and by the 20th century Guy Fawkes Day had become an enjoyable social commemoration, although lacking much of its original focus. The present-day Guy Fawkes Night is usually celebrated at large organised events, centred on a bonfire and extravagant firework displays.

Settlers exported Guy Fawkes Night to overseas colonies, including some in North America, where it was known as Pope Day. Those festivities died out with the onset of the American Revolution. Claims that Guy Fawkes Night was a Protestant replacement for older customs like Samhain are disputed, although another old celebration, Halloween, has lately increased in popularity in England, and according to some writers, may threaten the continued observance of 5 November.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Moon 🔗 Rocketry 🔗 Solar System/Mars 🔗 Solar System

The SpaceX Starship is a fully-reusable launch vehicle and spacecraft that is being privately developed by SpaceX. It is designed to be a long-duration cargo and passenger-carrying spacecraft. The development of the Starship began in 2014.

🔗 Biography 🔗 China 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Yuan Longping (Chinese: 袁隆平; September 7, 1930 – May 22, 2021) was a Chinese agronomist, member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, known for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s.

Hybrid rice has since been grown in dozens of countries in Africa, America, and Asia—providing a robust food source in areas with a high risk of famine. For his contributions, Yuan is always called the "Father of Hybrid Rice" by the Chinese media. On May 22, 2021, Yuan Longping died of multiple organ failure at the age of 90.

🔗 Statistics

In probability theory, although simple examples illustrate that linear uncorrelatedness of two random variables does not in general imply their independence, it is sometimes mistakenly thought that it does imply that when the two random variables are normally distributed. This article demonstrates that assumption of normal distributions does not have that consequence, although the multivariate normal distribution, including the bivariate normal distribution, does.

To say that the pair ${\displaystyle (X,Y)}$ of random variables has a bivariate normal distribution means that every linear combination ${\displaystyle aX+bY}$ of ${\displaystyle X}$ and ${\displaystyle Y}$ for constant (i.e. not random) coefficients ${\displaystyle a}$ and ${\displaystyle b}$ has a univariate normal distribution. In that case, if ${\displaystyle X}$ and ${\displaystyle Y}$ are uncorrelated then they are independent. However, it is possible for two random variables ${\displaystyle X}$ and ${\displaystyle Y}$ to be so distributed jointly that each one alone is marginally normally distributed, and they are uncorrelated, but they are not independent; examples are given below.

🔗 Television

The "rural purge" of American television networks (in particular CBS) was a series of cancellations in the early 1970s of still-popular rural-themed shows with demographically skewed audiences, the majority of which occurred at the end of the 1970–71 television season. In addition to rural-themed shows such as Mayberry R.F.D., The Beverly Hillbillies, and Green Acres, the cancellations ended several highly rated variety shows that had been on CBS since the beginning of television broadcasting. CBS saw a dramatic change in direction with the shift, moving away from shows with rural themes and toward more appeal to urban and suburban audiences.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Intelligence

The analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH) is a methodology for evaluating multiple competing hypotheses for observed data. It was developed by Richards (Dick) J. Heuer, Jr., a 45-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, in the 1970s for use by the Agency. ACH is used by analysts in various fields who make judgments that entail a high risk of error in reasoning. ACH aims to help an analyst overcome, or at least minimize, some of the cognitive limitations that make prescient intelligence analysis so difficult to achieve.

ACH was a step forward in intelligence analysis methodology, but it was first described in relatively informal terms. Producing the best available information from uncertain data remains the goal of researchers, tool-builders, and analysts in industry, academia and government. Their domains include data mining, cognitive psychology and visualization, probability and statistics, etc. Abductive reasoning is an earlier concept with similarities to ACH.

🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Molecular Biology/Genetics

In molecular biology, Human Accelerated Region 1 (Highly Accelerated Region 1, HAR1) is a segment of the human genome found on the long arm of chromosome 20. It is a human accelerated region. It is located within a pair of overlapping long non-coding RNA genes, HAR1A (HAR1F) and HAR1B (HAR1R).

🔗 Biology 🔗 Molecular and Cell Biology 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Genetics

Mirror life (also called mirror-image life, chiral life, or enantiomeric life) is a hypothetical form of life with mirror-reflected molecular building blocks. The possibility of mirror life was first discussed by Louis Pasteur. Although this alternative life form has not been discovered in nature, efforts to build a mirror-image version of biology's molecular machinery are already underway.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Crime 🔗 Politics 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Politics/Fascism 🔗 Military history/European military history

From 1933 to the end of the Second World War, high-ranking officers of the Armed Forces of Nazi Germany accepted vast bribes in the form of cash, estates, and tax exemptions in exchange for their loyalty to Nazism. Unlike bribery at lower ranks in the Wehrmacht, which was also widespread, these payments were regularized, technically legal and made with the full knowledge and consent of the leading Nazi figures.

🔗 Computing

Unlambda is a minimal, "nearly pure" functional programming language invented by David Madore. It is based on combinatory logic, an expression system without the lambda operator or free variables. It relies mainly on two built-in functions (s and k) and an apply operator (written `, the backquote character). These alone make it Turing-complete, but there are also some input/output (I/O) functions to enable interacting with the user, some shortcut functions, and a lazy evaluation function. Variables are unsupported.

Unlambda is free and open-source software distributed under a GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0 or later.