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🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Video games 🔗 United States/Washington - Seattle 🔗 United States/Washington

Valve Corporation, also known as Valve Software, is an American video game developer, publisher, and digital distribution company headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. It is the developer of the software distribution platform Steam and the Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, and Dota series.

Valve was founded in 1996 by former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. Their debut product, the PC first-person shooter Half-Life, was released in 1998 to critical acclaim and commercial success, after which Harrington left the company. In 2003, Valve launched Steam, which accounted for around half of digital PC game sales by 2011. By 2012, Valve employed around 250 people and was reportedly worth over US$3 billion, making it the most profitable company per employee in the United States. In the 2010s, Valve began developing hardware, such as the Steam Machine, a brand of gaming PCs, as well as the HTC Vive and Valve Index virtual reality headsets.

🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Assyria 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Phoenicia

The Amarna letters (; sometimes referred to as the Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets, and cited with the abbreviation EA, for "El Amarna") are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru, or neighboring kingdom leaders, during the New Kingdom, spanning a period of no more than thirty years between c. 1360–1332 BC (see here for dates). The letters were found in Upper Egypt at el-Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten, founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350s–1330s BC) during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are written not in the language of ancient Egypt, but in cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia. Most are in a variety of Akkadian sometimes characterised as a mixed language, Canaanite-Akkadian; one especially long letter—abbreviated EA 24—was written in a late dialect of Hurrian, and is the longest contiguous text known to survive in that language.

The known tablets total 382, of which 358 have been published by the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon in his work, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, which came out in two volumes (1907 and 1915) and remains the standard edition to this day. The texts of the remaining 24 complete or fragmentary tablets excavated since Knudtzon have also been made available.

The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics because they shed light on the culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in this time period. Though most are written in Akkadian, the Akkadian of the letters is heavily colored by the mother tongue of their writers, who probably spoke an early form of Proto-Canaanite, the language(s) which would later evolve into the daughter languages of Hebrew and Phoenician. These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation.

🔗 Agriculture 🔗 England 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Measurement

Yan Tan Tethera or yan-tan-tethera is a sheep-counting system traditionally used by shepherds in Northern England and some other parts of Britain. The words are numbers taken from Brythonic Celtic languages such as Cumbric which had died out in most of Northern England by the sixth century, but they were commonly used for sheep counting and counting stitches in knitting until the Industrial Revolution, especially in the fells of the Lake District. Though most of these number systems fell out of use by the turn of the twentieth century, some are still in use.

🔗 Physics

In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, the Brownian ratchet or Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet is an apparent perpetual motion machine of the second kind, first analysed in 1912 as a thought experiment by Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski. It was popularised by American Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman in a physics lecture at the California Institute of Technology on May 11, 1962, during his Messenger Lectures series The Character of Physical Law in Cornell University in 1964 and in his text The Feynman Lectures on Physics as an illustration of the laws of thermodynamics. The simple machine, consisting of a tiny paddle wheel and a ratchet, appears to be an example of a Maxwell's demon, able to extract mechanical work from random fluctuations (heat) in a system at thermal equilibrium, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Detailed analysis by Feynman and others showed why it cannot actually do this.

🔗 Biography 🔗 France

Pierre Picaud (French: [piko]) was a 19th-century shoemaker in Nîmes, France who may have been the basis for the character of Edmond Dantès in Alexandre Dumas, père's 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo.

In 1807, Picaud was engaged to marry a rich woman, but three jealous friends — Loupian, Solari, and Chaubart — falsely accused him of being a spy for England (a fourth friend, Allut, knew of their conspiracy, but did not report it). He was imprisoned in the Fenestrelle fortress for seven years, not even learning why until his second year there. During his imprisonment he ground a small passageway into a neighboring cell and befriended a wealthy Italian priest named Father Torri who was also held in the fortress. A year later, a dying Torri bequeathed to Picaud a treasure he had hidden in Milan. When Picaud was released after the fall of the French Imperial government in 1814, he took possession of the treasure, returned under another name to Paris and spent 10 years plotting revenge against his former friends.

Picaud first murdered Chaubart or had him murdered. Picaud's former fiancée had, two years after his disappearance, married his former friend Loupian, who became the subject of his most brutal revenge. Picaud tricked Loupian's daughter into marrying a criminal, whom he then had arrested. Loupian's daughter promptly died of shock. Picaud then burned down Loupian's restaurant, or arranged to have it burned down, leaving Loupian impoverished. Next, he fatally poisoned Solari and either manipulated Loupian's son into stealing some gold jewelry or framed him for committing the crime. The boy was sent to jail, and Picaud stabbed Loupian to death. He was himself then abducted by a vengeful Allut, who seriously injured Picaud while holding him captive. Picaud was eventually found by the French police, who recorded his confession before dying of his injuries. . Allut's deathbed confession forms the bulk of the French police records of the case. The detailed description of Picaud's experiences in prison, which could not have been known to Allut, were supposedly dictated to him by the ghost of Father Torri.

🔗 Espionage 🔗 Radio Stations

The Lincolnshire Poacher was a British powerful shortwave numbers station that transmitted from Cyprus from the mid-1970s to June 2008. The station gained its commonly known name as it uses bars from the English folk song "The Lincolnshire Poacher" as an interval signal. The radio station was believed to be operated by the British Secret Intelligence Service and emanated from the island of Cyprus. Amateur direction finding linked it with the Royal Air Force base at Akrotiri, Cyprus, where several curtain antennas had been identified as being its transmitter. It consisted of an electronically synthesised English-accented female voice reading groups of five numbers: e.g. '0-2-5-8-8'. The final number in each group was spoken at a higher pitch. It is likely that the station was used to communicate to undercover agents operating in other countries, to be decoded using a one-time pad.

An Asian numbers station of identical format is believed to have been broadcast from Australia, and nicknamed "Cherry Ripe". It uses several bars from the English folk song of the same name as its interval signal. Cherry Ripe continued to be on-air until December 2009.

🔗 United States 🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and June 30, 1945, as part of the Allied Alsos Mission, mainly as part of its Operation Big sweep through southwestern Germany.

They were interned at Farm Hall, a bugged house in Godmanchester, near Cambridge, England, from July 3, 1945, to January 3, 1946. The primary goal of the program was to determine how close Nazi Germany had been to constructing an atomic bomb by listening to their conversations.

A proxy firm (also a proxy advisor, proxy adviser, proxy voting agency, vote service provider or shareholder voting research provider) provides services to shareholders (in most cases an institutional investor of some type) to vote their shares at shareholder meetings of, usually, quoted companies.

The typical services provided include agenda translation, provision of vote management software, voting policy development, company research, and vote administration including vote execution. According to their websites, not all firms provide voting recommendations and those that do may simply execute client voting instructions.

The votes executed are called "Proxy Votes" because the shareholder usually does not attend the meeting and instead sends instructions - a proxy appointment - for a third party, usually the chairman of the meeting to vote shares in accordance with the instructions given on the voting card.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Physics 🔗 Health and fitness

Banana equivalent dose (BED) is an informal measurement of ionizing radiation exposure, intended as a general educational example to compare a dose of radioactivity to the dose one is exposed to by eating one average-sized banana. Bananas contain naturally occurring radioactive isotopes, particularly potassium-40 (⁴⁰K), one of several naturally-occurring isotopes of potassium. One BED is often correlated to 10⁻⁷ sievert (0.1 μSv); however, in practice, this dose is not cumulative, as the principal radioactive component is excreted to maintain metabolic equilibrium. The BED is only meant to inform the public about the existence of very low levels of natural radioactivity within a natural food and is not a formally adopted dose measurement.

🔗 Psychology

Reactance is an unpleasant motivational arousal (reaction) to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs when a person feels that someone or something is taking away their choices or limiting the range of alternatives.

Reactance can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended, and also increases resistance to persuasion. People using reverse psychology are playing on reactance, attempting to influence someone to choose the opposite of what they request.

Some individuals are naturally high in reactance, a personality characteristic called trait reactance.