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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 C/C++ 🔗 C/C++/C

The GLib Object System, or GObject, is a free software library providing a portable object system and transparent cross-language interoperability. GObject is designed for use both directly in C programs to provide object-oriented C-based APIs and through bindings to other languages to provide transparent cross-language interoperability, e.g. PyGObject.

Reasons for my No consensus closure of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dwm (2nd nomination)

If you want to make any comments or ask questions about this closure, please use User talk:Flyguy649/Dwm rather than my talk page. I hope the community can live with my decision; if not, there is deletion review.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Plants 🔗 Alternative medicine 🔗 Women's Health

Silphium (also known as silphion, laserwort, or laser) was a plant that was used in classical antiquity as a seasoning, perfume, as an aphrodisiac, or as a medicine. It also was used as a contraceptive by ancient Greeks and Romans. It was the essential item of trade from the ancient North African city of Cyrene, and was so critical to the Cyrenian economy that most of their coins bore a picture of the plant. The valuable product was the plant's resin (laser, laserpicium, or lasarpicium).

Silphium was an important species in prehistory, as evidenced by the Egyptians and Knossos Minoans developing a specific glyph to represent the silphium plant. It was used widely by most ancient Mediterranean cultures; the Romans who mentioned the plant in poems or songs, considered it "worth its weight in denarii" (silver coins), or even gold. Legend said that it was a gift from the god Apollo.

The exact identity of silphium is unclear. It is commonly believed to be a now-extinct plant of the genus Ferula, perhaps a variety of "giant fennel". The still-extant plants Margotia gummifera and Ferula tingitana have been suggested as other possibilities. Another plant, asafoetida, was used as a cheaper substitute for silphium, and had similar enough qualities that Romans, including the geographer Strabo, used the same word to describe both.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Paranormal

Jimmy Carter, United States president from 1977 until 1981, reported seeing an unidentified flying object while at Leary, Georgia, in 1969. While serving as governor of Georgia, Carter was asked (on September 14, 1973) by the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City to file a report of the sighting, and he filed a statement on September 18, mailed September 20. Since its writing, the report has been discussed several times by both ufologists and by members of the mainstream media.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Firearms

A synchronization gear, or a gun synchronizer, sometimes rather less accurately called an interrupter, is attached to the armament of a single-engine tractor-configuration aircraft so it can fire through the arc of its spinning propeller without bullets striking the blades. The idea presupposes a fixed armament directed by aiming the aircraft in which it is fitted at the target, rather than aiming the gun independently.

There are many practical problems, mostly arising from the inherently imprecise nature of an automatic gun's firing, the great (and varying) velocity of the blades of a spinning propeller, and the very high speed at which any gear synchronizing the two has to operate.

Design and experimentation with gun synchronization had been underway in France and Germany in 1913–1914, following the ideas of August Euler, who seems to have been the first to suggest mounting a fixed armament firing in the direction of flight (in 1910). However, the first practical—if far from reliable—gear to enter operational service was that fitted to the Eindecker monoplane fighters, which entered squadron service with the German Air Service in mid-1915. The success of the Eindecker led to numerous gun synchronization devices, culminating in the reasonably reliable hydraulic British Constantinesco gear of 1917. By the end of the war German engineers were well on the way to perfecting a gear using an electrical rather than a mechanical or hydraulic link between the engine and the gun, with the gun being triggered by a solenoid rather than by a mechanical "trigger motor".

From 1918 to the mid-1930s the standard armament for a fighter aircraft remained two synchronized rifle-calibre machine guns, firing forward through the arc of the propeller. During the late 1930s, however, the main role of the fighter was increasingly seen as the destruction of large, all-metal bombers, for which the "traditional" light armament was inadequate.

Since it was impractical to try to fit more than one or two extra guns in the limited space available in the front of a single-engine aircraft's fuselage, this led to an increasing proportion of the armament being mounted in the wings, firing outside the arc of the propeller. There were in fact some advantages in dispensing with centrally mounted guns altogether. Nevertheless, the conclusive redundancy of synchronization gears did not finally come until the introduction of jet propulsion and the absence of a propeller for guns to be synchronized with.

🔗 England 🔗 Food and drink

English coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries were public social places where men would meet for conversation and commerce. For the price of a penny, customers purchased a cup of coffee and admission. Travellers introduced coffee as a beverage to England during the mid-17th century; previously it had been consumed mainly for its supposed medicinal properties. Coffeehouses also served tea and hot chocolate as well as a light meal.

The historian Brian Cowan describes English coffeehouses as "places where people gathered to drink coffee, learn the news of the day, and perhaps to meet with other local residents and discuss matters of mutual concern." Topics like the Yellow Fever would also be discussed. The absence of alcohol created an atmosphere in which it was possible to engage in more serious conversation than in an alehouse. Coffeehouses also played an important role in the development of financial markets and newspapers.

Topics discussed included politics and political scandals, daily gossip, fashion, current events, and debates surrounding philosophy and the natural sciences. Historians often associate English coffeehouses, during the 17th and 18th centuries, with the intellectual and cultural history of the Age of Enlightenment: they were an alternate sphere, supplementary to the university. Political groups frequently used coffeehouses as meeting places.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Olympics 🔗 United States/FBI 🔗 Georgia (U.S. state)

Richard Allensworth Jewell (born Richard White; December 17, 1962 – August 29, 2007) was an American security guard and law enforcement officer who alerted police during the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. For months afterwards he was suspected of planting the bomb, leading to adverse publicity that "came to symbolize the excesses of law enforcement and the news media."

While working as a security guard at the Olympic Park, Jewell discovered a backpack containing three pipe bombs on the park grounds. He alerted law enforcement and helped evacuate the area before the bomb exploded, probably saving many people from injury or death.

Initially hailed by the media as a hero, Jewell was soon considered a suspect by the FBI and local law enforcement based on scientific profiling. Though never charged, he underwent a "trial by media", which took a toll on his personal and professional life. Jewell was cleared as a suspect after 88 days of public scrutiny. Eric Rudolph eventually confessed and pleaded guilty to that bombing and other attacks. The media circus surrounding the investigation, which was leaked to the press, has been widely cited as an example of law enforcement and media excesses.

In recent years, Jewell's heroic legacy has been the subject of popular culture, including the 2019 film Richard Jewell, and the drama anthology series Manhunt.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia

David J. DeWitt is a computer scientist specializing in database management system research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to moving to MIT, DeWitt was the John P. Morgridge Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was also a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, leading the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab at Madison, Wisconsin. Professor DeWitt received a B.A. degree from Colgate University in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1976. He then joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison and started the Wisconsin Database Group, which he led for more than 30 years.

Professor DeWitt is known for his research in the areas of parallel databases, benchmarking, object-oriented databases, and XML databases. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (1998), and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

He received the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award (now renamed SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award) in 1995 for his contributions to the database systems field. In 2009, ACM recognized the seminal contributions of his Gamma parallel database system project with the ACM Software System Award. Also in 2009, he received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award for his contributions to the database systems field.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Firearms 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Welrod is a British bolt-action, magazine-fed pistol with an integrated silencer which was devised for covert operations during the Second World War by Major Hugh Reeves at the Inter-Services Research Bureau (later Station IX).

Station IX, being based in Welwyn, gave the Welrod its unusual name, being derived from "Wel" from "Welwyn" (a prefix used by covert equipment designed by Station IX) and "rod", gangland slang for gun, as a way to obscure its purpose.

Designed for use by irregular forces and resistance groups, the Welrod is an extremely quiet gun thanks to its integrated silencer. Approximately 2,800 were made in wartime and perhaps 14,000 in total when post-war examples are included.

🔗 Catholicism 🔗 Gambling 🔗 European Microstates 🔗 European Microstates/Vatican City

Gambling on papal elections has at least a 500-year history. Betting on 16th-century papal conclaves are among the first documented examples of gambling on election outcomes. During the same period, gambling was also common on the outcomes of secular Italian elections, such as that of the Doge of Venice. Leighton Vaughan Williams and David Paton employ a unique dataset to investigate betting on the 2013 papal election, set within the context of the history of betting on papal conclaves.