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🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Food and drink

Caffè Mediterraneum, often referred to as Caffè Med or simply the Med, was a café located on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California, US, near the University of California, Berkeley. The Med was a landmark of Telegraph Avenue history, "listed for years in European guidebooks as 'the gathering place for 1960s radicals who created People's Park'" and as of 2009 described in Fodor's guidebook as "a relic of 1960s-era café culture". It was located at 2475 Telegraph Avenue, between Dwight Way and Haste Street.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Geology

The Eltanin impact is thought to be an asteroid impact in the eastern part of the South Pacific Ocean during the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary around 2.51 ± 0.07  million years ago. The location was at the edge of the Bellingshausen Sea 1,500 km (950 mi) southwest of Chile. The asteroid was estimated to be about one to four km (0.6 to 2.5 mi) in diameter and the impact would have left a crater approximately 35 km (22 mi) across.

🔗 Telecommunications

The Squarial (a portmanteau of the words square and aerial) was a satellite antenna used for reception of the now defunct British Satellite Broadcasting television service (BSB). The Squarial was a flat plate satellite antenna, built to be unobtrusive and unique. BSB were counting on the form factor of the antenna to clearly differentiate themselves from their competitors at the time. At the time of development, satellite installations usually required a 90 cm dish in order to receive a clear signal from the transmitting satellite. The smaller antenna was BSB's unique selling point and was heavily advertised in order to attract customers to their service.

🔗 Europe 🔗 Musical Instruments 🔗 Percussion

A pyrophone, also known as a "fire/explosion organ" or "fire/explosion calliope" is a musical instrument in which notes are sounded by explosions, or similar forms of rapid combustion, rapid heating, or the like, such as burners in cylindrical glass tubes, creating light and sound. It was invented by physicist and musician Georges Frédéric Eugène Kastner (born 1852 in Strasbourg, France – died 1882 in Bonn, Germany), son of composer Jean-Georges Kastner, around 1870.

🔗 Judaism

Tza'ar ba'alei chayim (Hebrew: צער בעלי חיים‎), literally "suffering of living creatures", is a Jewish commandment which bans causing animals unnecessary suffering. This concept is not clearly enunciated in the written Torah, but was accepted by the Talmud as being a biblical mandate. It is linked in the Talmud from the biblical law requiring people to assist in unloading burdens from animals (Exodus 23:5).

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/relativity

The ladder paradox (or barn-pole paradox) is a thought experiment in special relativity. It involves a ladder, parallel to the ground, travelling horizontally at relativistic speed (near the speed of light) and therefore undergoing a Lorentz length contraction. The ladder is imagined passing through the open front and rear doors of a garage or barn which is shorter than its rest length, so if the ladder was not moving it would not be able to fit inside. To a stationary observer, due to the contraction, the moving ladder is able to fit entirely inside the building as it passes through. On the other hand, from the point of view of an observer moving with the ladder, the ladder will not be contracted, and it is the building which will be Lorentz contracted to an even smaller length. Therefore, the ladder will not be able to fit inside the building as it passes through. This poses an apparent discrepancy between the realities of both observers.

This apparent paradox results from the mistaken assumption of absolute simultaneity. The ladder is said to fit into the garage if both of its ends can be made to be simultaneously inside the garage. The paradox is resolved when it is considered that in relativity, simultaneity is relative to each observer, making the answer to whether the ladder fits inside the garage also relative to each of them.

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Sexology and sexuality 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Donald Trump 🔗 Conservatism 🔗 Pornography

Project 2025 is a plan to reshape the executive branch of the U.S. federal government in the event of a Republican victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Established in 2022, the project seeks to recruit tens of thousands of conservatives to Washington, D.C., to replace existing federal civil service workers it characterizes as the "deep state", to further the objectives of the next Republican president. Although participants in the project cannot promote a specific presidential candidate, many have close ties to Donald Trump and the Trump 2024 presidential campaign. The plan would perform a swift takeover of the entire executive branch under a maximalist version of the unitary executive theory — a theory proposing the president of the United States has absolute power over the executive branch — upon inauguration.

The development of the plan is led by the The Heritage Foundation, an American conservative think tank, in collaboration with over 100 partners including Turning Point USA led by Charlie Kirk; the Conservative Partnership Institute including former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as senior partner; the Center for Renewing America led by former Trump-appointee Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought; and America First Legal led by former Trump Senior Advisor Stephen Miller.

Project 2025 envisions widespread changes across the entire government, particularly with regard to economic and social policy and the role of the federal government and federal agencies. The plan proposes slashing U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) funding, dismantling the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, gutting environmental and climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production, and eliminating the cabinet Departments of Education and Commerce. Citing an anonymous source, The Washington Post reported Project 2025 includes immediately invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement and directing the DOJ to pursue Trump adversaries. Project Director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, said in September 2023 that Project 2025 is "systematically preparing to march into office and bring a new army, aligned, trained, and essentially weaponized conservatives ready to do battle against the deep state."

Project 2025 consists largely of a book of policy recommendations titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise and an accompanying personnel database open for submissions. There is also an online course called the Presidential Administration Academy, and a guide to developing transition plans. Reactions to the plan included variously describing it as authoritarian, an attempt by Trump to become a dictator, and a path leading the United States towards autocracy, with several experts in law criticizing it for violating current constitutional laws that would undermine the rule of law and the separation of powers. Additionally, some conservatives and Republicans also criticized the plan, for example in relation to climate change. The Mandate states that "freedom is defined by God, not man."

Mental poker is the common name for a set of cryptographic problems that concerns playing a fair game over distance without the need for a trusted third party. The term is also applied to the theories surrounding these problems and their possible solutions. The name comes from the card game poker which is one of the games to which this kind of problem applies. Similar problems described as two party games are Blum's flipping a coin over a distance, Yao's Millionaires' Problem, and Rabin's oblivious transfer.

The problem can be described thus: "How can one allow only authorized actors to have access to certain information while not using a trusted arbiter?" (Eliminating the trusted third-party avoids the problem of trying to determine whether the third party can be trusted or not, and may also reduce the resources required.)

In poker, this could translate to: "How can we make sure no player is stacking the deck or peeking at other players' cards when we are shuffling the deck ourselves?". In a physical card game, this would be relatively simple if the players were sitting face to face and observing each other, at least if the possibility of conventional cheating can be ruled out. However, if the players are not sitting at the same location but instead are at widely separate locations and pass the entire deck between them (using the postal mail, for instance), this suddenly becomes very difficult. And for electronic card games, such as online poker, where the mechanics of the game are hidden from the user, this is impossible unless the method used is such that it cannot allow any party to cheat by manipulating or inappropriately observing the electronic "deck".

Several protocols for doing this have been suggested, the first by Adi Shamir, Ron Rivest and Len Adleman (the creators of the RSA-encryption protocol). This protocol was the first example of two parties conducting secure computation rather than secure message transmission, employing cryptography; later on due to leaking partial information in the original protocol, this led to the definition of semantic security by Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali. The concept of multi-player mental poker was introduced in Moti Yung's 1984 book Cryptoprotocols. The area has later evolved into what is known as secure multi-party computation protocols (for two parties, and multi parties as well).

🔗 Buddhism 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture 🔗 Japan/Religion

Hitsuzendō (筆禅道, "way of Zen through brush") is believed by Zen Buddhists to be a method of achieving samādhi (Japanese: 三昧 sanmai), which is a unification with the highest reality. Hitsuzendo refers specifically to a school of Japanese Zen calligraphy to which the rating system of modern calligraphy (well-proportioned and pleasing to the eye) is foreign. Instead, the calligraphy of Hitsuzendo must breathe with the vitality of eternal experience.

🔗 California 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Trains 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Trains/Rapid transit 🔗 Buses 🔗 Trains/Streetcars

The notion of a General Motors streetcar conspiracy emerged after General Motors (GM) and other companies were convicted of monopolizing the sale of buses and supplies to National City Lines (NCL) and its subsidiaries. In the same case, the defendants were accused of conspiring to own or control transit systems, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust act. The suit created lingering suspicions that the defendants had in fact plotted to dismantle streetcar systems in many cities in the United States as an attempt to monopolize surface transportation.

Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities. Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland. NCL often converted streetcars to bus operations in that period, although electric traction was preserved or expanded in some locations. Other systems, such as San Diego's, were converted by outgrowths of the City Lines. Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry.

The story as an urban legend has been written about by Martha Bianco, Scott Bottles, Sy Adler, Jonathan Richmond, and Robert Post. It has been explored several times in print, film, and other media, notably in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Taken for a Ride, Internal Combustion, and The End of Suburbia.

Only a handful of U.S. cities, including San Francisco, New Orleans, Newark, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Boston, have surviving legacy rail urban transport systems based on streetcars, although their systems are significantly smaller than they once were. Other cities are re-introducing streetcars. In some cases, the streetcars do not actually ride on the street. Boston had all of its downtown lines elevated or buried by the mid-1920s, and most of the surviving lines at grade operate on their own right of way. However, San Francisco's and Philadelphia's lines do have large portions of the route that ride on the street as well as using tunnels.