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🔗 Visual arts

Mail art (also known as postal art and correspondence art) is a populist artistic movement centered on sending small scale works through the postal service. It initially developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School in the 1950s and the Fluxus movement in the 1960s, though it has since developed into a global movement that continues to the present.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Television 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Lenin was a mushroom (Russian: Ленин — гриб) was a highly influential televised hoax by Soviet musician Sergey Kuryokhin and reporter Sergey Sholokhov. It was first broadcast on 17 May 1991 on Leningrad Television.

The hoax took the form of an interview on the television program Pyatoe Koleso (The Fifth Wheel). In the interview, Kuryokhin, impersonating a historian, narrated his findings that Vladimir Lenin consumed large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms and eventually became a mushroom himself. Kuryokhin arrived at his conclusion through a long series of logical fallacies and appeals to the authority of various "sources" (such as Carlos Castaneda, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky), creating the illusion of a reasoned and plausible logical chain.

The timing of the hoax played a large role in its success, coming as it did during the Glasnost period when the ebbing of censorship in the Soviet Union led to many revelations about the country's history, often presented in sensational form. Furthermore, Soviet television had, up to that point, been regarded by its audience as conservative in style and content. As a result, a large number of Soviet citizens (one estimate puts the number at 11,250,000 audience members) took the deadpan "interview" at face value, in spite of the absurd claims presented.

Sholokhov has said that perhaps the most notable result of the show was an appeal by a group of party members to the Leningrad Regional Committee of the CPSU to clarify the veracity of Kuryokhin's claim. According to Sholokhov, in response to the request one of the top regional functionaries stated that "Lenin could not have been a mushroom" because "a mammal cannot be a plant." Modern taxonomy classifies mushrooms as fungi, a separate kingdom from plants.

The incident has served as a watershed moment in Soviet (and Russian) culture and has often been used as proof of the gullibility of the masses.

🔗 New Zealand 🔗 Maps

New Zealand has often been omitted from maps of the world, which has caught the attention of New Zealanders. It is considered that this is because of the widespread use of the Mercator projection, a map projection putting Europe in the center which leaves New Zealand in the bottom right-hand corner of maps, sometimes making it go overlooked by mapmakers, easily removed by an accidental crop, or simply not added for convenience, ignorance or laziness.

New Zealand has been excluded from maps at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. in the United States, in IKEA stores, on the map of the board games Pandemic and Risk, on the map of the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit in which Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key participated, at a world map seal at the United Nations Office at Geneva in Switzerland, on the newspaper Daily Mail, on Government Executive's newsletter Defense One, on the magazine Forbes, on the digital media platform Mashable, on the Pyongyang International Airport in North Korea and on the logo of the Flat Earth Society. It was also excluded from maps promoting the 2015 Rugby World Cup even though New Zealand was the then world champion.

This recurrent occurrence has become a meme for New Zealanders. There is a community on Tumblr titled World Maps Without New Zealand and a Reddit community known as r/MapsWithoutNZ both focused on this issue with 10,000 and 30,000 members respectively as of 2017. In 2019, a user in r/MapsWithoutNZ noticed that a map, "BJÖRKSTA world map", on sale for 30 dollars at an IKEA store on Washington, D.C., did not portray New Zealand. Subsequently, IKEA apologized and removed the product from its stores. On Reddit, there also are communities about the omission of Flevoland in the Netherlands, Hawaii in the United States and Tasmania in Australia from world maps.

The New Zealand Government has acknowledged this phenomenon, and it features a map of the world in which the country is deliberately not included on the 404 error page of its official website; the page states that "something's missing". Furthermore, in 2018, a tourism campaign video was published in which the Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the New Zealander actor and comedian Rhys Darby discussed why New Zealand was being left off world maps. On the video, Darby jokingly said that it was the result of a conspiracy against New Zealand. The video promoted the hashtag #getnzonthemap.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Meteorology 🔗 Meteorology/weather data, products and instrumentation

GOES-3, known as GOES-C before becoming operational, is an American geostationary weather and communications satellite. It was originally built for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as part of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite system, and was launched in June 1978. It is positioned in geostationary orbit, from where it was initially used for weather forecasting in the United States. Since ceasing to function as a weather satellite in 1989, it has been used as a communications satellite, and has spent over thirty-eight years in operation. GOES-3 was decommissioned 29 June 2016 at the CSTARS facility in Miami, Florida.

GOES-3 was built by Ford Aerospace, and is based on the satellite bus developed for the SMS programme. At launch it had a mass of 627 kilograms (1,382 lb).

🔗 Biology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Economics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Systems 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. For example, smooth forward motion emerges when a bicycle and its rider interoperate, but neither part can produce the behavior on their own.

Emergence plays a central role in theories of integrative levels and of complex systems. For instance, the phenomenon of life as studied in biology is an emergent property of chemistry, and psychological phenomena emerge from the neurobiological phenomena of living things.

In philosophy, theories that emphasize emergent properties have been called emergentism. Almost all accounts of emergentism include a form of epistemic or ontological irreducibility to the lower levels.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Indonesia 🔗 Japan 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Japanese military history

Japanese invasion money, officially known as Southern Development Bank Notes (Japanese: 大東亜戦争軍票 Dai Tō-A Sensō gunpyō, "Greater East Asia War military scrip"), was currency issued by the Japanese Military Authority, as a replacement for local currency after the conquest of colonies and other states in World War II. In February 1942 in Japan, laws were passed establishing the Wartime Finance Bank and the Southern Development Bank. Both institutions issued bonds to raise funds. The former loaned money primarily to military industries, but also to a wide range of other ventures, including hydroelectric generators, electric power companies, shipbuilding and petroleum. The latter provided financial services in areas occupied by the Japanese military, and Southern Development Bank notes were in fact used as de facto military scrip. In December 1942, the outstanding balance of Southern Development Bank notes stood at more than 470 million; in March 1945, more than 13 billion.

Already engaged in war with China, in 1940 the Japanese expanded the scope of their military operations in Asia and finally entered the Second World War in late 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan invaded various Asian countries, occupying vast territories and setting up military administrations.

Beginning with the capture of the Philippines, the Japanese military confiscated all hard currency, both on a federal and individual level, replacing it with locally printed notes bearing a proclamation of military issue. All notes bore the name of the Imperial Japanese government, and some notes proclaimed the "promises to pay the bearer on demand". Called “Mickey Mouse Money" by local Filipinos, it was valueless after the overthrow of the Japanese, and tons of it were burned. Japanese troops were ordered to destroy bank records and any remaining currency prior to capitulation.

With the end of World War II, the currency circulated bearing the Japanese name immediately lost any value it once possessed and was discarded en masse. Money that was issued included the Philippines, Burma (now Myanmar), Malaya, North Borneo and Sarawak (now Malaysia), Singapore, Brunei, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and some areas of Oceania (New Guinea and the Solomon and Gilbert islands). Large amounts of the currency were obtained by Allied forces and civilians at the end of the war; many were kept as wartime souvenirs, and are now in both private and museum collections.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

Alexey Yakovlevich Chervonenkis (Russian: Алексей Яковлевич Червоненкис; 7 September 1938 – 22 September 2014) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, and, with Vladimir Vapnik, was one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory, also known as the "fundamental theory of learning" an important part of computational learning theory. Chervonenkis held joint appointments with the Russian Academy of Sciences and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Alexey Chervonenkis got lost in Losiny Ostrov National Park on 22 September 2014, and later during a search operation was found dead near Mytishchi, a suburb of Moscow. He had died of hypothermia.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The RTX2010 manufactured by Intersil is a radiation hardened stack machine microprocessor which has been used in numerous spacecraft.

🔗 Video games

Tibia is a 1997 massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed and published by CipSoft. It is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs, with a popularity that peaked in 2007. It is a free game to download and play, though players may pay to upgrade to a premium account, granting substantial in-game benefits. Tibia is a two-dimensional tile-based game set in a fantasy world with pixel art graphics and a top-down perspective.

🔗 Palaeontology 🔗 Geology 🔗 Extinction

The Permian–Triassic extinction event, also known as the P–Tr extinction, the P–T extinction, the End-Permian Extinction, and colloquially as the Great Dying, formed the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, approximately 252 million years ago. It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct. It was the largest known mass extinction of insects. Some 57% of all biological families and 83% of all genera became extinct.

There is evidence for one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction. Potential causes for those pulses include one or more large meteor impact events, massive volcanic eruptions (such as the Siberian Traps), and climate change brought on by large releases of underwater methane or methane-producing microbes.

The speed of the recovery from the extinction is disputed. Some scientists estimate that it took 10 million years (until the Middle Triassic), due both to the severity of the extinction and because grim conditions returned periodically for another 5 million years. However, studies in Bear Lake County, near Paris, Idaho, showed a relatively quick rebound in a localized Early Triassic marine ecosystem, taking around 2 million years to recover, suggesting that the impact of the extinction may have been felt less severely in some areas than others.