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🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Iceland

Although Iceland is reliant upon fishing, tourism and aluminium production as the mainstays of its economy, the production of vegetables and fruit in greenhouses is a growing sector. Until the 1960s this included commercial production of bananas.

In 1941, the first bananas in Iceland were produced. They have been produced since that time, about 100 clusters a year each about 5–20 kg (11–44 lb), but are not currently sold. In the wake of World War II, the combination of inexpensive geothermal power (which had recently become available) and high prices for imported fruit led to the construction of a number of greenhouses where bananas were produced commercially from 1945 to as late as 1958 or 1959. In 1960, the government removed import duties on fruit. Domestically grown bananas were no longer able to compete with imported ones and soon disappeared from the market. Icelandic banana production was much slower due to low levels of sunlight; Icelandic bananas took two years to mature, while it only takes a few months near the equator.

The urban myth that Iceland is Europe’s largest producer or exporter of bananas has been propagated in various books and other media. It was mentioned, in an episode of the BBC quiz programme QI, and on a forum connected with the show. According to FAO statistics, the largest European producer of bananas is France (in Martinique and Guadeloupe), followed by Spain (primarily in the Canary Islands). Other banana-producing countries in Europe include Portugal (on Madeira), Greece, and Italy.

Although a small number of banana plants still exist in greenhouses and produce fruit every year, Iceland imports nearly all of the bananas consumed in the country, with imports now amounting to over 18 kg (40 lb) per capita per annum. The Agricultural University of Iceland maintains the last such farm with 600-700 banana plants in its tropical greenhouse, which were received as donations from producers when they shut down (then the Horticultural College). Bananas grown there are consumed by the students and staff and are not sold.

🔗 Computing

The Owner-Free File System (OFF System, or OFF for short) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system in which all shared files are represented by randomized multi-used data blocks. Instead of anonymizing the network, the data blocks are anonymized and therefore, only data garbage is ever exchanged and stored and no forwarding via intermediate nodes is required. OFF claims to have been created with the expressed intention "to cut off some gangrene-infested bits of the copyright industry."

🔗 Economics 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Sociology

Wage slavery is a term describing a situation in which a person's livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate. It has been used to criticise exploitation of labour and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labour and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops) and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy. The criticism of social stratification covers a wider range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of their "species character" not only under threat of starvation or poverty, but also of social stigma and status diminution. Historically, some socialist organisations and activists have espoused workers' self-management or worker cooperatives as possible alternatives to wage labour.

Similarities between wage labour and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in Ancient Rome, such as in De Officiis. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labour and slavery, while Luddites emphasised the dehumanisation brought about by machines. The introduction of wage labour in 18th-century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism. Before the American Civil War, Southern defenders of African American slavery invoked the concept of wage slavery to favourably compare the condition of their slaves to workers in the North. The United States abolished slavery after the Civil War, but labour union activists found the metaphor useful – according to historian Lawrence Glickman, in the Gilded Age "[r]eferences abounded in the labour press, and it is hard to find a speech by a labour leader without the phrase".

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Books 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Poland 🔗 Food and drink/Foodservice 🔗 Ukraine

The Scottish Café (Polish: Kawiarnia Szkocka) was a café in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) where, in the 1930s and 1940s, mathematicians from the Lwów School of Mathematics collaboratively discussed research problems, particularly in functional analysis and topology.

Stanislaw Ulam recounts that the tables of the café had marble tops, so they could write in pencil, directly on the table, during their discussions. To keep the results from being lost, and after becoming annoyed with their writing directly on the table tops, Stefan Banach's wife provided the mathematicians with a large notebook, which was used for writing the problems and answers and eventually became known as the Scottish Book. The book—a collection of solved, unsolved, and even probably unsolvable problems—could be borrowed by any of the guests of the café. Solving any of the problems was rewarded with prizes, with the most difficult and challenging problems having expensive prizes (during the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II), such as a bottle of fine brandy.

For problem 153, which was later recognized as being closely related to Stefan Banach's "basis problem", Stanisław Mazur offered the prize of a live goose. This problem was solved only in 1972 by Per Enflo, who was presented with the live goose in a ceremony that was broadcast throughout Poland.

The café building now houses the Szkocka Restaurant & Bar (named for the original Scottish Café) and the Atlas Deluxe hotel at the street address of 27 Taras Shevchenko Prospekt.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Mathematics

A* (pronounced "A-star") is a graph traversal and path search algorithm, which is often used in computer science due to its completeness, optimality, and optimal efficiency. One major practical drawback is its ${\displaystyle O(b^{d})}$ space complexity, as it stores all generated nodes in memory. Thus, in practical travel-routing systems, it is generally outperformed by algorithms which can pre-process the graph to attain better performance, as well as memory-bounded approaches; however, A* is still the best solution in many cases.

Peter Hart, Nils Nilsson and Bertram Raphael of Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) first published the algorithm in 1968. It can be seen as an extension of Edsger Dijkstra's 1959 algorithm. A* achieves better performance by using heuristics to guide its search.

🔗 Animation 🔗 Disney 🔗 Project-independent assessment

Disney's twelve basic principles of animation were introduced by the Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation.^[a] The principles are based on the work of Disney animators from the 1930s onwards, in their quest to produce more realistic animation. The main purpose of these principles was to produce an illusion that cartoon characters adhered to the basic laws of physics, but they also dealt with more abstract issues, such as emotional timing and character appeal.

The book has been referred to by some as the "Bible of animation", and some of its principles have been adopted by traditional studios. In 1999, The Illusion of Life was voted the "best animation book[...] of all time" in an online poll done by Animation World Network. While originally intended to apply to traditional, hand-drawn animation, the principles still have great relevance for today's more prevalent computer animation.

🔗 United States 🔗 Nevada 🔗 Micronations

The Republic of Molossia, also known as Molossia, is a micronation claiming sovereignty over 1.28 acres of land near Dayton, Nevada. The micronation has not received recognition from any of the member states of the United Nations. It was founded by Kevin Baugh. On April 16, 2016, Baugh hosted a tour of Molossia, sponsored by the website Atlas Obscura. He continues to pay property taxes on the land to Storey County (the recognized local government), although he calls it "foreign aid". He has stated "We all want to think we have our own country, but you know the U.S. is a lot bigger".

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Brands 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages

OK Soda was a soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1993 that courted the American Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including neo-noir design, chain letters and deliberately negative publicity. After the soda did not sell well in select test markets, it was officially declared out of production in 1995 before reaching nationwide distribution. The drink's slogan was "Things are going to be OK."

🔗 Dentistry

Palmer notation (sometimes called the "Military System" and named for 19th-century American dentist Dr. Corydon Palmer from Warren, Ohio) is a dental notation (tooth numbering system). Despite the adoption of the FDI World Dental Federation notation (ISO 3950) in most of the world and by the World Health Organization, the Palmer notation continued to be the overwhelmingly preferred method used by orthodontists, dental students and practitioners in the United Kingdom as of 1998.

The notation was originally termed the Zsigmondy system after Hungarian dentist Adolf Zsigmondy, who developed the idea in 1861 using a Zsigmondy cross to record quadrants of tooth positions. Adult teeth were numbered 1 to 8, and the child primary dentition (also called deciduous, milk or baby teeth) were depicted with a quadrant grid using Roman numerals I, II, III, IV, V to number the teeth from the midline. Palmer changed this to A, B, C, D, E, which made it less confusing and less prone to errors in interpretation.

The Palmer notation consists of a symbol (⏌⎿ ⏋⎾) designating in which quadrant the tooth is found and a number indicating the position from the midline. Adult teeth are numbered 1 to 8, with deciduous (baby) teeth indicated by a letter A to E. Hence the left and right maxillary central incisor would have the same number, "1", but the right one would have the symbol "⏌" underneath it, while the left one would have "⎿".

🔗 Volcanoes 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Geology 🔗 Indonesia

The Toba supereruption was a supervolcanic eruption that occurred about 75,000 years ago at the site of present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It is one of the Earth's largest known eruptions. The Toba catastrophe theory holds that this event caused a global volcanic winter of six to ten years and possibly a 1,000-year-long cooling episode.

In 1993, science journalist Ann Gibbons posited that a population bottleneck occurred in human evolution about 70,000 years ago, and she suggested that this was caused by the eruption. Geologist Michael R. Rampino of New York University and volcanologist Stephen Self of the University of Hawaii at Manoa support her suggestion. In 1998, the bottleneck theory was further developed by anthropologist Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Both the link and global winter theories are controversial. The Toba event is the most closely studied supereruption.