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🔗 Color

Cosmic latte is the average color of the universe, found by a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the average color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper in which they reported that their survey of the light from over 200,000 galaxies averaged to a slightly beigeish white. The hex triplet value for cosmic latte is #FFF8E7.

🔗 Animal anatomy 🔗 Comics 🔗 Comics/Comic strips 🔗 Dinosaurs

A thagomizer () is the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurine dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.

The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name; cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name "thagomizer" in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip The Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term used within scientific circles, research, and education.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. It was perhaps the best known system language until C debuted a few years later. Since then, C became popular and common, and BLISS faded into obscurity.

BLISS is a typeless block-structured programming language based on expressions rather than statements, and includes constructs for exception handling, coroutines, and macros. It does not include a goto statement.

The name is variously said to be short for Basic Language for Implementation of System Software or System Software Implementation Language, Backwards. However, in his 2015 oral history for the Babbage Institute's Computer Security History Project, Wulf claimed that the acronym was originally based on the name "Bill's Language for Implementing System Software."

The original Carnegie Mellon compiler was notable for its extensive use of optimizations, and formed the basis of the classic book The Design of an Optimizing Compiler.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) developed and maintained BLISS compilers for the PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX, DEC PRISM, MIPS, DEC Alpha, and Intel IA-32, The language did not become popular among customers and few had the compiler, but DEC used it heavily in-house into the 1980s; most of the utility programs for the OpenVMS operating system were written in BLISS-32. The DEC BLISS compiler has been ported to the IA-64 and x86-64 architectures as part of the ports of OpenVMS to these platforms. The x86-64 BLISS compiler uses LLVM as its backend code generator, replacing the proprietary GEM backend used for Alpha and IA-64.

🔗 Economics 🔗 London 🔗 Energy

The oil futures drunk-trading incident was an incident in which Stephen Perkins, an employee of London-based PVM Oil Futures, traded 7 million barrels (1.1 million cubic metres) of oil, worth approximately US$520 million (£340 million) in a two-and-half-hour period in the early morning of 30 June 2009 while drunk. These unauthorised trades caused the price of Brent Crude oil to rise by over $1.50 a barrel (equivalent to $1.79 in 2019) within a short period of time, a trend generally associated with major geopolitical events, before dropping rapidly. As a result of the trading, PVM Oil Futures suffered losses of almost $10 million and Perkins was dismissed, later being banned from trading by the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Egypt

Taqi al-Din Muhammad ibn Ma'ruf ash-Shami al-Asadi (Arabic: تقي الدين محمد بن معروف الشامي‎, Ottoman Turkish: تقي الدين محمد بن معروف الشامي السعدي‎, Turkish: Takiyüddin) (1526-1585) was an Ottoman polymath active in Cairo and Istanbul. He was the author of more than ninety books on a wide variety of subjects, including astronomy, clocks, engineering, mathematics, mechanics, optics and natural philosophy.

In 1574 the Ottoman Sultan Murad III invited Taqī ad-Dīn to build the Constantinople observatory. Using his exceptional knowledge in the mechanical arts, Taqī ad-Dīn constructed instruments like huge armillary and mechanical clocks that he used in his observations of the Great Comet of 1577. He also used European celestial and terrestrial globes that were delivered to Istanbul in gift-exchange.

The major work that resulted from his work in the observatory is titled "The tree of ultimate knowledge [in the end of time or the world] in the Kingdom of the Revolving Spheres: The astronomical tables of the King of Kings [Murād III]" (Sidrat al-muntah al-afkar fi malkūt al-falak al-dawār– al-zij al-Shāhinshāhi). The work was prepared according to the results of the observations carried out in Egypt and Istanbul in order to correct and complete Ulugh Beg's Zij as-Sultani. The first 40 pages of the work deal with calculations, followed by discussions of astronomical clocks, heavenly circles, and information about three eclipses which he observed at Cairo and Istanbul. For corroborating data of other observations of eclipses in other locales like Daud ar-Riyyadi (David the Mathematician), David Ben-Shushan of Salonika.

As a polymath, Taqī al-Dīn wrote numerous books on astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, and theology. His method of finding coordinates of stars were reportedly so precise that he got better measurements than his contemporaries, Tycho Brahe and Nicolas Copernicus. Brahe is also thought to have been aware of al-Dīn's work.

Taqī Ad-Dīn also described a steam turbine with the practical application of rotating a spit in 1551. He worked on and created astronomical clocks for his observatory. Taqī Ad-Dīn also wrote a book on optics, in which he determined the light emitted from objects, proved the Law of Reflection observationally, and worked on refraction.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Religion 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Military history/Military culture, traditions, and heraldry

The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, people under arms" or "detachment, war party") refers to the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for a number of years before their full integration to the host society, in the context of a rite of passage into manhood.

Subsequent Indo-European traditions and myths feature parallel linkages between property-less adolescent males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated into the community of the married men; their service in a "police-army" sent away for a part of the year in the wild (where they hunted animals and raided foreign communities) and defending the host society during the remaining part of the year; their mystical self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, promiscuity, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between invulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.

🔗 Austria 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Vienna 🔗 Micronations

Kugelmugel, officially the Republic of Kugelmugel (German: Republik Kugelmugel), is a spherical art object located in Vienna, Austria.

It came about as the result of the artist Edwin Lipburger constructing the 8 meter diameter spherical object without permissions from the authorities in Austria. After the dispute between the artist and authorities, the artist declared it a micronation, and it was eventually granted asylum by the then-mayor Helmut Zilk in Vienna where it is housed in the Prater park.

The 'Republic' is currently administered by Linda Treiber as president.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Computing 🔗 Stanford University/SRI International 🔗 Stanford University

"The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, which was presented by Douglas Engelbart on December 9, 1968.

The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s.

🔗 Sociology

Xennials or xennials (also known as the Oregon Trail Generation and Generation Catalano) are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts. Researchers and popular media use birth years from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

In 2020, xennial was included in the Oxford Dictionary of English.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia 🔗 Geology 🔗 Russia/physical geography of Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Paranormal

The Tunguska event was a massive ~12 megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, on the morning of June 30, 1908. The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km² (830 sq mi) of forest, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the event. The explosion is generally attributed to the air burst of a stony meteoroid about 50–60 metres (160–200 feet) in size.^{: p. 178} The meteoroid approached from the east-southeast, and likely with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s. It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than to have hit the surface of the Earth.

The Tunguska event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, though much larger impacts have occurred in prehistoric times. An explosion of this magnitude would be capable of destroying a large metropolitan area. It has been mentioned numerous times in popular culture, and has also inspired real-world discussion of asteroid impact avoidance.