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🔗 Biography 🔗 Death 🔗 Skepticism

Gloria Ramirez (January 11, 1963 – February 19, 1994) was a woman from Riverside, California who was dubbed "the Toxic Lady" or "the Toxic Woman" by the media when several hospital workers became ill after exposure to her body and blood. She had been admitted to the emergency department while suffering from late-stage cervical cancer. While treating Ramirez, several hospital workers fainted and others experienced symptoms such as shortness of breath and muscle spasms. Five workers required hospitalization, one of whom remained in an intensive care unit for two weeks.

Shortly after arriving at the hospital, Ramirez died from complications related to cancer. The incident was initially considered to be a case of mass hysteria. An investigation by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proposed that Ramirez had been self-administering dimethyl sulfoxide as a treatment for pain, which converted into dimethyl sulfate, an extremely poisonous and highly carcinogenic alkylating agent, via a series of chemical reactions in the emergency department. Although this theory has been endorsed by the Riverside Coroner's Office and published in the journal Forensic Science International, it is still a matter of debate in the scientific community.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Basic Income 🔗 Taxation 🔗 Libertarianism

Georgism, also called geoism and single tax (archaic), is an economic ideology holding that while people should own the value they produce themselves, economic value derived from land (often including natural resources and natural opportunities) should belong equally to all members of society. Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.

Georgism is concerned with the distribution of economic rent caused by natural monopolies, pollution and the control of commons, including title of ownership for natural resources and other contrived privileges (e.g. intellectual property). Any natural resource which is inherently limited in supply can generate economic rent, but the classical and most significant example of land monopoly involves the extraction of common ground rent from valuable urban locations. Georgists argue that taxing economic rent is efficient, fair and equitable. The main Georgist policy recommendation is a tax assessed on land value. Georgists argue that revenues from a land value tax (LVT) can be used to reduce or eliminate existing taxes (for example, on income, trade, or purchases) that are unfair and inefficient. Some Georgists also advocate for the return of surplus public revenue to the people by means of a basic income or citizen's dividend.

Economists since Adam Smith and David Ricardo have observed that a public levy on land value does not cause economic inefficiency, unlike other taxes. A land value tax also has progressive tax effects. Advocates of land value taxes argue that they would reduce economic inequality, increase economic efficiency, remove incentives to underutilize urban land and reduce property speculation. The philosophical basis of Georgism dates back to several early thinkers such as John Locke, Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Paine, but the concept of gaining public revenues mainly from land and natural resource privileges was widely popularized by Henry George and his first book Progress and Poverty (1879).

Georgist ideas were popular and influential during the late 19th and early 20th century. Political parties, institutions and communities were founded based on Georgist principles during that time. Early devotees of Henry George's economic philosophy were often termed Single Taxers for their political goal of raising public revenue mainly from a land value tax, although Georgists endorsed multiple forms of rent capture (e.g. seigniorage) as legitimate. The term Georgism was invented later and some prefer the term geoism to distinguish their beliefs from those of Henry George.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Computing 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Brands 🔗 Microsoft

Kin was a short-lived mobile phone line from Microsoft designed for users of social networking. The phones, aimed at people between ages 15 and 30, were manufactured by Sharp Corporation and sold through Verizon Wireless.

Microsoft invested two years and about US$1 billion developing the Kin platform, beginning with its acquisition of Danger Incorporated. The Kin was based on Windows CE.

The Kin ONE and TWO went on the market on May 14, 2010. Within two months, Verizon stopped selling the phones because of poor sales. Microsoft scrapped its planned European release, stopped promoting the devices, ceased production, and reassigned the Kin development team to other projects.

Microsoft updated its unsold Kin inventory with firmware that removed social and web-based features, and in December 2010 offered these re-purposed units through Verizon stores as limited feature phones, the Kin ONEm and the TWOm. In January 2011, Microsoft shut down the kin.com website, which controlled most of the earlier phones' features.

The Kin TWOm was discontinued in August 2011; unsold inventory could still be found for sale on deals sites as late as June 2013.

🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 England 🔗 Graffiti

Who put Bella down the Wych Elm? is graffiti that appeared in 1944 following the 1943 discovery by four children of the skeletonised remains of a woman inside a wych elm in Hagley Wood, Hagley (located in the estate of Hagley Hall), in Worcestershire, England. The victim—whose murder is approximated to have occurred in 1941—remains unidentified, and the current location of her skeleton and autopsy report is unknown.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Israel

The revival of the Hebrew language took place in Europe and Palestine toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, through which the language's usage changed from the sacred language of Judaism to a spoken and written language used for daily life in Israel. The process began as a diversity of Jews started arriving and establishing themselves alongside the pre-existing Jewish community in the region of Palestine in the first half of the nineteenth century, when veteran Jews in Palestine (largely Arabic-speaking by that time) and the linguistically diverse newly arrived Jews all switched to use Hebrew as a lingua franca, the historical linguistic common denominator of all the Jewish groups. At the same time, a parallel development in Europe changed Hebrew from primarily a sacred liturgical language into a literary language which played a key role in the development of nationalist educational programs. Modern Hebrew was one of three official languages of Mandatory Palestine, and after the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, one of two official languages of Israel, along with Modern Arabic. In July 2018, a new law made Hebrew the sole official language of the state of Israel, with Arabic having "special status". More than purely a linguistic process, the revival of Hebrew was utilized by Jewish modernization and political movements, and became a tenet of the ideology associated with settlement of the land, Zionism and Israeli policy.

The process of Hebrew's return to regular usage is unique; there are no other examples of a natural language without any native speakers subsequently acquiring several million native speakers, and no other examples of a sacred language becoming a national language with millions of "first language" speakers.

The language's revival eventually brought linguistic additions with it. While the initial leaders of the process insisted they were only continuing "from the place where Hebrew's vitality was ended", what was created represented a broader basis of language acceptance; it includes characteristics derived from all periods of Hebrew language, as well as from the non-Hebrew languages used by the long-established European, North African, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities, with Yiddish (the European variant) being predominant.

🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, (43 Stat. 253, enacted June 2, 1924) was an Act of the United States Congress that granted US citizenship to the indigenous peoples of the United States. While the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution defines a citizen as any persons born in the United States and subject to its laws and jurisdiction, the amendment had previously been interpreted by the courts not to apply to Native peoples.

The act was proposed by Representative Homer P. Snyder (R-NY), and signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on June 2, 1924. It was enacted partially in recognition of the thousands of Native Americans who served in the armed forces during the First World War.

🔗 Aviation

A cyclorotor, cycloidal rotor, cycloidal propeller or cyclogiro, is a fluid propulsion device that converts shaft power into the acceleration of a fluid using a rotating axis perpendicular to the direction of fluid motion. It uses several blades with a spanwise axis parallel to the axis of rotation and perpendicular to the direction of fluid motion. These blades are cyclically pitched twice per revolution to produce force (thrust or lift) in any direction normal to the axis of rotation. Cyclorotors are used for propulsion, lift, and control on air and water vehicles. An aircraft using cyclorotors as the primary source of lift, propulsion, and control is known as a cyclogyro or cyclocopter. A unique aspect is that it can change the magnitude and direction of thrust without the need of tilting any aircraft structures. The patented application, used on ships with particular actuation mechanisms both mechanical or hydraulic, is named after German company Voith Turbo.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Birds

A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for as long as 30 minutes. Other methods of inducing this state are also known. Ethologists refer to this state as 'tonic immobility' i.e. a natural state of semi-paralysis that some animals enter when presented with a threat, which is probably a defensive mechanism intended to feign death, albeit rather poorly.

The first known written reference for this method came in 1646, in Mirabele Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by Athanasius Kircher in Rome.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom

Hostile architecture is an intentional design strategy that uses elements of the built environment to guide or restrict behaviour in urban space as a form of crime prevention or order maintenance. It often targets people who use or rely on public space more than others, like people who are homeless and youth, by restricting the behaviours they engage in. Also known as defensive architecture, hostile design, unpleasant design, exclusionary design, or defensive urban design, hostile architecture is most typically associated with "anti-homeless spikes" – studs embedded in flat surfaces to make sleeping rough, uncomfortable, and impractical. Other measures include sloped window sills to stop people sitting, benches with armrests positioned to stop people lying on them, and water sprinklers that "intermittently come on but aren't really watering anything." Hostile architecture also seeks to deter skateboarding, littering, loitering, and public urination. Critics argue that such measures reinforce social divisions and create problems for all members of the public, especially seniors, people with disabilities, and children.

🔗 Occupational Safety and Health

A criticality accident occurred on December 30, 1958, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the United States. It is one of 60 known criticality events that have occurred outside the controlled conditions of a nuclear reactor or test, though it was the third such event that took place in 1958 after events on June 16 at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and on October 15 at the Vinča Nuclear Institute in Vinča, Yugoslavia. The accident involved plutonium compounds dissolved in liquid chemical reagents; within 35 hours, it killed chemical operator Cecil Kelley by severe radiation poisoning.