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🔗 Psychology

A granfalloon, in the fictional religion of Bokononism (created by Kurt Vonnegut in his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle), is defined as a "false karass". That is, it is a group of people who affect a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is meaningless.

As quoted in And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (2011) by Charles J. Shields, Vonnegut writes in his introduction to Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974) that a "granfalloon is a proud and meaningless collection of human beings"; Shields also comments that in the same book, Vonnegut later cites the demonym of 'Hoosiers' as "one of [Vonnegut's] favorite examples" of what the term embodies.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema

The Black Maria ( mə-RY-ə) was Thomas Edison's film production studio in West Orange, New Jersey. It was the world's first film studio.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Anime and manga

The Tamagotchi Connection, known as Tamagotchi Plus in Japan and Tamagotchi Connexion in the UK, is a virtual pet in the Tamagotchi line of digital toys from Bandai. The Tamagotchi Connection is unique from prior models in that it uses infrared technology to connect and interact with other devices and was first released in 2004, 8 years after the first Tamagotchi toy. Using the device's infrared port, the virtual pet (referred to as a Tamagotchi) can make friends with other Tamagotchis, in addition to playing games, giving and receiving presents and having a baby.

Versions 1 to 4 of Tamagotchi Connection have 6 levels of friendship that can be viewed in the Friends List:

• Acquaintance (one smiley-face)
• Buddy (two smiley-faces)
• Friend (three smiley-faces)
• Good friend (four smiley-faces)
• Best friend (two love-hearts, two smiley-faces, during connection they may kiss)
• Partner (four love-hearts, during connection they will kiss and may have babies)

Versions 5 and 6 have different levels.

If the Tamagotchi cannot find a partner from another device to have babies with, a matchmaker will come, allowing the Tamagotchi to have a baby with a computer-controlled Tamagotchi character. This applies to versions 1 to 4 and 6 only. Version 5 introduces a Dating Show game in which the user must play to gain a CPU partner.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Disability 🔗 South Africa 🔗 Primates

Jack (died 1890) was a chacma baboon, who attained some fame for acting as an assistant to a disabled railway signalman in South Africa.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Linux

The magic SysRq key is a key combination understood by the Linux kernel, which allows the user to perform various low-level commands regardless of the system's state. It is often used to recover from freezes, or to reboot a computer without corrupting the filesystem. Its effect is similar to the computer's hardware reset button (or power switch) but with many more options and much more control.

This key combination provides access to powerful features for software development and disaster recovery. In this sense, it can be considered a form of escape sequence. Principal among the offered commands are means to forcibly unmount file systems, kill processes, recover keyboard state, and write unwritten data to disk. With respect to these tasks, this feature serves as a tool of last resort.

The magic SysRq key cannot work under certain conditions, such as a kernel panic or a hardware failure preventing the kernel from running properly.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Lists 🔗 Business 🔗 Business/Accounting

This page lists the largest annual and quarterly earnings and losses in corporate history. In general terms the oil and gas industry is the one generating both largest annual and quarterly earnings. In contrast, both the annual and quarterly losses are more distributed across industries.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 France 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Évariste Galois (; French: [evaʁist ɡalwa]; 25 October 1811 – 31 May 1832) was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra.

Galois was a staunch republican and was heavily involved in the political turmoil that surrounded the French Revolution of 1830. As a result of his political activism, he was arrested repeatedly, serving one jail sentence of several months. For reasons that remain obscure, shortly after his release from prison, Galois fought in a duel and died of the wounds he suffered.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Plants

Pepper X is a cultivar of Capsicum chili pepper bred by Ed Currie, creator of the Carolina Reaper. As of 2023, it is the world's hottest pepper.

🔗 Video games

Tibia is a 1997 massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed and published by CipSoft. It is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs, with a popularity that peaked in 2007. It is a free game to download and play, though players may pay to upgrade to a premium account, granting substantial in-game benefits. Tibia is a two-dimensional tile-based game set in a fantasy world with pixel art graphics and a top-down perspective.