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🔗 Economics

The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory first popularised by English fantasy writer Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, reasons that poverty causes greater expenses to the poor than to those who are richer. Since its publication, the theory has received wider attention, especially in regard to the effect of increasing prices of daily necessities.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Palaeontology 🔗 Archaeology

The Schöningen spears are a set of eight wooden throwing spears from the Palaeolithic Age that were excavated between 1994 and 1998 in the open-cast lignite mine in Schöningen, Helmstedt district, Germany, together with an associated cache of approximately 16,000 animal bones. The excavations took place under the management of Hartmut Thieme of the Lower Saxony State Service for Cultural Heritage (NLD).

Originally assessed as being between 380,000 and 400,000 years old, they represent the oldest completely preserved hunting weapons of prehistoric Europe so far discovered. As such they predate the age of Neanderthal Man (by convention taken to have emerged 300,000 years ago), and are associated with Homo heidelbergensis. The spears support the practice of hunting by archaic humans in Europe in the late Lower Paleolithic.

The age of the spears was estimated from their stratigraphic position, "sandwiched between deposits of the Elsterian and Saalian glaciations, and situated within a well-studied sedimentary sequence." More recently, thermoluminescence dating of heated flints in a deposit beneath that which contained the spears suggested that the spears were between 337,000 and 300,000 years old.

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Catholicism 🔗 Middle Ages/Crusades 🔗 Military history/Crusades 🔗 Belgium 🔗 Christianity/Christianity in China

William of Rubruck (Dutch: Willem van Rubroeck, Latin: Gulielmus de Rubruquis; fl. 1248–1255) was a Flemish Franciscan missionary and explorer.

He is best known for his travels to various parts of the Middle East and Central Asia in the 13th century, including the Mongol Empire. His account of his travels is one of the masterpieces of medieval travel literature, comparable to those of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Politics

The alt-right pipeline (also called the alt-right rabbit hole) is a conceptual model regarding internet radicalization toward the alt-right movement. It describes a phenomenon in which consuming provocative right-wing political content, such as antifeminist or anti-SJW ideas, gradually increases exposure to the alt-right or similar far-right politics. It posits that this interaction takes place due to the interconnected nature of political commentators and online communities, allowing members of one audience or community to discover more extreme groups. This process is most commonly associated with and has been documented on the video platform YouTube, is also largely faceted by the method in which algorithms on various social media platforms function through the process recommending content that is similar to what users engage with, but can quickly lead users down rabbit-holes.

Many political movements have been associated with the pipeline concept. The intellectual dark web, libertarianism, the men's rights movement, and the alt-lite movement have all been identified as possibly introducing audiences to alt-right ideas. BreadTube has similarly been identified as introducing audiences to far-left politics, though it has been less effective. Audiences that seek out and are willing to accept extreme content in this fashion typically consist of young men, commonly those that experience significant loneliness and seek belonging or meaning. In an attempt to find community and belonging, message boards that are often proliferated with hard right social commentary, such as 4chan and 8chan, have been well documented in their importance in the radicalization process.

The alt-right pipeline may be a contributing factor to domestic terrorism. Many social media platforms have acknowledged this path of radicalization and have taken measures to prevent it, including the removal of extremist figures and rules against hate speech and misinformation.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Finland

Finnair Flight 915 (AY915) was a scheduled flight by Finnair from Tokyo, Japan, over the North Pole to Helsinki, Finland, on 23 December 1987. In 2014, Finnish media reported a claim by two of the flight’s pilots that the Soviet Union had fired a missile at the aircraft, which exploded less than 30 seconds before impact. The allegations came out only in September 2014, when Helsingin Sanomat, the leading Finnish daily newspaper, published an extensive article on the matter. The Finnish Broadcasting Corporation YLE reported on the article on the internet the same day.

When the matter came out, it caused outrage in Finland among those politicians and civil servants, to whom it should have been reported at the time, and it was widely publicised and commented upon in the Finnish media, amidst allegations of Finlandization.

The alleged incident has been compared to other similar incidents involving the Soviet Union, such as the Aero Kaleva in 1940, Aeroflot Flight 902 in 1962, Korean Air Lines Flight 902 in 1978, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. Co-captain Kaukiainen said that the Finnair pilots decided to speak out on the matter after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 had been shot down in Ukraine on 17 July 2014.

🔗 United States 🔗 Freedom of speech

Free speech zones (also known as First Amendment zones, free speech cages, and protest zones) are areas set aside in public places for the purpose of political protesting. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The existence of free speech zones is based on U.S. court decisions stipulating that the government may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner – but not content – of expression.

The Supreme Court has developed a four-part analysis to evaluate the constitutionality of time, place and manner (TPM) restrictions. To pass muster under the First Amendment, TPM restrictions must be neutral with respect to content, be narrowly drawn, serve a significant government interest, and leave open alternative channels of communication. Application of this four-part analysis varies with the circumstances of each case, and typically requires lower standards for the restriction of obscenity and fighting words.

Free speech zones have been used at a variety of political gatherings. The stated purpose of free speech zones is to protect the safety of those attending the political gathering, or for the safety of the protesters themselves. Critics, however, suggest that such zones are "Orwellian", and that authorities use them in a heavy-handed manner to censor protesters by putting them literally out of sight of the mass media, hence the public, as well as visiting dignitaries. Though authorities generally deny specifically targeting protesters, on a number of occasions, these denials have been contradicted by subsequent court testimony. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed, with various degrees of success and failure, a number of lawsuits on the issue.

Though free speech zones existed prior to the Presidency of George W. Bush, it was during Bush's presidency that their scope was greatly expanded. These zones continued through the presidency of Barack Obama; he signed a bill in 2012 that expanded the power of the Secret Service to restrict speech and make arrests.

Many colleges and universities earlier instituted free speech zone rules during the Vietnam-era protests of the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, a number of them have revised or removed these restrictions following student protests and lawsuits.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Japan

Toilet meal (Japanese: 便所飯, benjo-meshi) is a Japanese slang term and social phenomenon referring to the act of an individual eating a meal in a toilet room. In modern Japan, some people eat alone in a bathroom for various reasons; the most common reason is that they do not wish to be seen eating alone. Other reasons include saving money from eating out, to hide from co-workers in a busy workplace, or simply because they find it more comfortable.

Since toilet meals are often solitary and clandestine, others are unlikely to be aware of its occurrence. For this reason, "toilet meals" were initially regarded as an urban legend, but subsequent investigations have confirmed the phenomenon as relatively widespread. The term "toilet meal" has even been referenced in various popular media, most notably in various Japanese television shows.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Volcanoes 🔗 Geology 🔗 Weather 🔗 Weather/Non-tropical storms

A volcanic winter is a reduction in global temperatures caused by volcanic ash and droplets of sulfuric acid and water obscuring the Sun and raising Earth's albedo (increasing the reflection of solar radiation) after a large, particularly explosive volcanic eruption. Long-term cooling effects are primarily dependent upon injection of sulfur gases into the stratosphere where they undergo a series of reactions to create sulfuric acid which can nucleate and form aerosols. Volcanic stratospheric aerosols cool the surface by reflecting solar radiation and warm the stratosphere by absorbing terrestrial radiation. The variations in atmospheric warming and cooling result in changes in tropospheric and stratospheric circulation.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

CMS Pipelines implements the pipeline concept under the VM/CMS operating system. The programs in a pipeline operate on a sequential stream of records. A program writes records that are read by the next program in the pipeline. Any program can be combined with any other because reading and writing is done through a device independent interface.

🔗 Environment