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🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Trade 🔗 Soviet Union/economy of Russia

The great grain robbery was the July 1972 purchase of 10 million tons of grain (mainly wheat and corn) from the United States by the Soviet Union at subsidized prices, which caused global grain prices to soar. Crop shortfalls in 1971 and 1972 forced the Soviet Union to look abroad for grain, hoping to prevent famine or crisis. Soviet negotiators worked out a deal to buy grain on credit, but quickly exceeded their credit limit. The American negotiators did not realize that both the Soviets and the world grain market had suffered shortfalls, and thus chose to subsidize the purchase. The strategy backfired and intensified the crisis with global food prices rose at least 30%, and grain stockpiles were decimated.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Firearms 🔗 Metalworking

A shot tower is a tower designed for the production of small diameter shot balls by freefall of molten lead, which is then caught in a water basin. The shot is primarily used for projectiles in shotguns, and also for ballast, radiation shielding and other applications where small lead balls are useful.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 New York City 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Pritzker Military Library

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (née Murray December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.

Prior to joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. Hopper attempted to enlist in the Navy during World War II but was rejected because she was 34 years old. She instead joined the Navy Reserves. Hopper began her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark I team led by Howard H. Aiken. In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I computer. At Eckert–Mauchly she began developing the compiler. She believed that a programming language based on English was possible. Her compiler converted English terms into machine code understood by computers. By 1952, Hopper had finished her program linker (originally called a compiler), which was written for the A-0 System. During her wartime service, she co-authored three papers based on her work on the Harvard Mark 1.

In 1954, Eckert–Mauchly chose Hopper to lead their department for automatic programming, and she led the release of some of the first compiled languages like FLOW-MATIC. In 1959, she participated in the CODASYL consortium, which consulted Hopper to guide them in creating a machine-independent programming language. This led to the COBOL language, which was inspired by her idea of a language being based on English words. In 1966, she retired from the Naval Reserve, but in 1967 the Navy recalled her to active duty. She retired from the Navy in 1986 and found work as a consultant for the Digital Equipment Corporation, sharing her computing experiences.

The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC. During her lifetime, Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world. A college at Yale University was renamed in her honor. In 1991, she received the National Medal of Technology. On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Numismatics/Cryptocurrency 🔗 Cryptocurrency

Base58 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes used to represent large integers as alphanumeric text, introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto for use with Bitcoin. It has since been applied to other cryptocurrencies and applications. It is similar to Base64 but has been modified to avoid both non-alphanumeric characters and letters which might look ambiguous when printed. It is therefore designed for human users who manually enter the data, copying from some visual source, but also allows easy copy and paste because a double-click will usually select the whole string.

Compared with Base64, the following similar-looking letters are omitted: 0 (zero), O (capital o), I (capital i) and l (lower case L) as well as the non-alphanumeric characters + (plus) and / (slash). In contrast with Base64, the digits of the encoding do not line up well with byte boundaries of the original data. For this reason, the method is well-suited to encode large integers, but not designed to encode longer portions of binary data. The actual order of letters in the alphabet depends on the application, which is the reason why the term “Base58” alone is not enough to fully describe the format. A variant, Base56, excludes 1 (one) and o (lowercase o) compared with Base 58.

Base58Check is a Base58 encoding format that unambiguously encodes the type of data in the first few characters and includes an error detection code in the last few characters.

🔗 Iceland 🔗 Lighthouses

Þrídrangaviti Lighthouse (transliterated as Thridrangaviti) is an active lighthouse 7.2 kilometres (4.5 miles) off the southwest coast of Iceland, in the archipelago of Vestmannaeyjar. It is often described as one of the most isolated lighthouses in the world. Þrídrangar means "three rock pillars", referring to the three named sea stacks at that location: Stóridrangur (on which the lighthouse stands), Þúfudrangur, and Klofadrangur. The lighthouse was commissioned on 5 July 1942.

🔗 Books

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't is a book by Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton. He initially wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review, published in the breakthrough ideas for 2004. Following the essay, he received more than one thousand emails and testimonies. Among other reasons disclosed in another article published at the Harvard Business Review, these letters led him to write the book, sell more than 115,000 copies, and win the Quill Award for best business book in 2007.

The theme of this book is that workplace bullying worsens morale and productivity. To screen out the toxic staff, it suggests the "no asshole rule". The author insists upon use of the word asshole since other words such as bully or jerk "do not convey the same degree of awfulness". In terms of using the word in the book's title, he said "There's an emotional reaction to a dirty title. You have a choice between being offensive and being ignored."

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

A bouncing bomb is a bomb designed to bounce to a target across water in a calculated manner to avoid obstacles such as torpedo nets, and to allow both the bomb's speed on arrival at the target and the timing of its detonation to be pre-determined, in a similar fashion to a regular naval depth charge. The inventor of the first such bomb was the British engineer Barnes Wallis, whose "Upkeep" bouncing bomb was used in the RAF's Operation Chastise of May 1943 to bounce into German dams and explode underwater, with effect similar to the underground detonation of the Grand Slam and Tallboy earthquake bombs, both of which he also invented.

🔗 British Museum 🔗 Radio 🔗 BBC 🔗 Radio/UK Radio

A History of the World in 100 Objects was a joint project of BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum, comprising a 100-part radio series written and presented by British Museum director Neil MacGregor. In 15-minute presentations broadcast on weekdays on Radio 4, MacGregor used objects of ancient art, industry, technology and arms, all of which are in the British Museum's collections, as an introduction to parts of human history. The series, four years in planning, began on 18 January 2010 and was broadcast over 20 weeks. A book to accompany the series, A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor, was published by Allen Lane on 28 October 2010. The entire series is also available for download along with an audio version of the book for purchase. The British Museum won the 2011 Art Fund Prize for its role in hosting the project.

In 2016, a touring exhibition of several items depicted on the radio program, also titled A History of the World in 100 Objects, travelled to various destinations, including Abu Dhabi (Manarat Al Saadiyat), Taiwan (National Palace Museum in Taipei), Japan (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Tokyo, Kyushu National Museum in Daizafu, and Kobe City Museum in Kobe), Australia (Western Australian Museum in Perth and National Museum of Australia in Canberra), and China (National Museum of China in Beijing and Shanghai Museum in Shanghai).

🔗 Military history 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Syria 🔗 Israel 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Explosives 🔗 Military history/Post-Cold War 🔗 Lebanon

On 17 September 2024, communication pagers simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and Syria in an apparent coordinated attack. Many of the pagers were owned by members of the Hezbollah militant group. Eighteen people were confirmed killed: eleven in Lebanon (including a child and at least two Hezbollah members) and seven in Syria. Around 4,000 people were reportedly injured, including Hezbollah members and civilians.

The blasts affected several Hezbollah strongholds, including Beirut's Dahieh suburb, southern Lebanon, and in the Beqaa Valley. Over 500 of the group's militants lost their eyesight. They called the incident the organization's "biggest security breach yet" and accused Israel of responsibility.

A day after Hamas launched its October 7 attacks on Israel in 2023, the Iranian-backed organization Hezbollah joined the conflict in support of Hamas by firing on Israel. This led to a series of cross-border military exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel. In February 2024, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, told the group's members to use pagers instead of cell phones, claiming that Israel had infiltrated their cell phone network. Hezbollah then bought a new brand of pagers that were recently imported to Lebanon.

Earlier on the day of the explosion, Israel's domestic security agency, the Shin Bet, announced it had thwarted a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former senior defense official using an explosive device.

Around 150 hospitals across Lebanon received victims of the attack, which saw chaotic scenes.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Physics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Physics/Biographies

Sir James Dewar (20 September 1842 – 27 March 1923) was a Scottish chemist and physicist. He is best known for his invention of the vacuum flask, which he used in conjunction with research into the liquefaction of gases. He also studied atomic and molecular spectroscopy, working in these fields for more than 25 years.