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🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Venix is a discontinued version of the Unix operating system for low-end computers, developed by VenturCom, a "company that specialises in the skinniest implementations of Unix".

🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Military history/Early Modern warfare 🔗 Military history/American Revolutionary War 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/Intelligence

Agent 355 (died after 1780) was the code name of a female spy during the American Revolution, part of the Culper Ring. Agent 355 was one of the first spies for the United States, but her real identity is unknown. The number, 355, could be de-crypted from the system the Culper Ring used to mean "lady."

🔗 United States 🔗 Germany 🔗 Canada 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Canada/Ontario 🔗 Hawaii

Hawaiian pizza is a pizza topped with tomato sauce, cheese, pineapple, and ham.

🔗 Agriculture 🔗 England 🔗 Folklore

Telling the bees is a traditional custom of many European countries in which bees would be told of important events in their keeper's lives, such as births, marriages, or departures and returns in the household. If the custom was omitted or forgotten and the bees were not "put into mourning" then it was believed a penalty would be paid, such as the bees leaving their hive, stopping the production of honey, or dying. The custom is best known in England, but has also been recorded in Ireland, Wales, Germany, Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Bohemia, and the United States.

🔗 Electronics 🔗 Electrical engineering

A thyratron is a type of gas-filled tube used as a high-power electrical switch and controlled rectifier. Thyratrons can handle much greater currents than similar hard-vacuum tubes. Electron multiplication occurs when the gas becomes ionized, producing a phenomenon known as a Townsend discharge. Gases used include mercury vapor, xenon, neon, and (in special high-voltage applications or applications requiring very short switching times) hydrogen. Unlike a vacuum tube (valve), a thyratron cannot be used to amplify signals linearly.

In the 1920s, thyratrons were derived from early vacuum tubes such as the UV-200, which contained a small amount of argon gas to increase its sensitivity as a radio signal detector, and the German LRS relay tube, which also contained argon gas. Gas rectifiers, which predated vacuum tubes, such as the argon-filled General Electric "Tungar bulb" and the Cooper-Hewitt mercury-pool rectifier, also provided an influence. Irving Langmuir and G. S. Meikle of GE are usually cited as the first investigators to study controlled rectification in gas tubes, about 1914. The first commercial thyratrons appeared circa 1928.

The term "thyratron" is derived from Ancient Greek "θύρα" ("thyra"), meaning "door" or "valve". The term "thyristor" was further derived from a combination of "thyratron" and "transistor". Since the 1960s thyristors have replaced thyratrons in most low- and medium-power applications.

🔗 Fashion

Trousers or pants (American English) are an item of clothing that might have originated in Central Asia, worn from the waist to the ankles, covering both legs separately (rather than with cloth extending across both legs as in robes, skirts, and dresses).

Outside North America, the word pants generally means underwear and not trousers. Shorts are similar to trousers, but with legs that come down only to around the area of the knee, higher or lower depending on the style of the garment. To distinguish them from shorts, trousers may be called "long trousers" in certain contexts such as school uniform, where tailored shorts may be called "short trousers", especially in the UK.

The oldest known trousers were found at the Yanghai cemetery in Turpan, Xinjiang, western China and dated to the period between the 10th and the 13th centuries BC. Made of wool, the trousers had straight legs and wide crotches and were likely made for horseback riding.

In most of Europe, trousers have been worn since ancient times and throughout the Medieval period, becoming the most common form of lower-body clothing for adult males in the modern world. Breeches were worn instead of trousers in early modern Europe by some men in higher classes of society. Distinctive formal trousers are traditionally worn with formal and semi-formal day attire. Since the mid-20th century, trousers have increasingly been worn by women as well.

Jeans, made of denim, are a form of trousers for casual wear widely worn all over the world by both sexes. Shorts are often preferred in hot weather or for some sports and also often by children and adolescents. Trousers are worn on the hips or waist and are often held up by buttons, elastic, a belt or suspenders (braces).

🔗 Toys

A toy balloon or party balloon, is a small balloon mostly used for decoration, advertising and children's toys. Toy balloons are usually made of rubber or aluminized plastic, and inflated with air or helium. They come in a great variety of sizes and shapes, but are most commonly 10 to 30 centimetres in diameter. Toy balloons are not considered to include "sky lanterns" (hot-air paper balloons), although these too are or were used as child toys in some parts of the world.

According to The Journal of the American Medical Association, out of 373 children who died in the US between 1972 and 1992 after choking on children's products, nearly a third choked on latex balloons. The Consumer Products Safety Commission found that children had inhaled latex balloons whole (often while trying to inflate them) or choked on fragments of broken balloons. Parents, a monthly magazine about raising children, advised parents to buy Mylar balloons instead of latex balloons.

🔗 United States 🔗 Netherlands

The American Service-Members' Protection Act (ASPA, Title 2 of Pub.L. 107–206 (text) (pdf), H.R. 4775, 116 Stat. 820, enacted August 2, 2002) is a United States federal law that aims "to protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not party." Introduced by U.S. Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) and U.S. Representative Tom DeLay (R-TX) it was an amendment to the 2002 Supplemental Appropriations Act for Further Recovery From and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the United States (H.R. 4775). The amendment passed 75-19 (S.Amdt 3597.) The bill was signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush on August 2, 2002.

🔗 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.

🔗 Microbiology

Archaeal Richmond Mine acidophilic nanoorganisms (ARMAN) were first discovered in an extremely acidic mine located in northern California (Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain) by Brett Baker in Jill Banfield's laboratory at the University of California Berkeley. These novel groups of archaea named ARMAN-1, ARMAN-2 (Candidatus Micrarchaeum acidiphilum ARMAN-2 ), and ARMAN-3 were missed by previous PCR-based surveys of the mine community because the ARMANs have several mismatches with commonly used PCR primers for 16S rRNA genes. Baker et al. detected them in a later study using shotgun sequencing of the community. The three groups were originally thought to represent three unique lineages deeply branched within the Euryarchaeota, a subgroup of the Archaea. However, this has been revised, based on more complete archaeal genomic tree, that they belong to a super phylum named DPANN. The ARMAN groups now comprise deeply divergent phyla named Micrarchaeota and Parvarchaeota. Their 16S rRNA genes differ by as much as 17% between the three groups. Prior to their discovery all of the Archaea shown to be associated with Iron Mountain belonged to the order Thermoplasmatales (e.g., Ferroplasma acidarmanus).