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🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Energy

TV pickup is a phenomenon that occurs in the United Kingdom involving sudden surges in demand on the national electrical grid, occurring when a large number of people simultaneously watch the same television programme. TV pickup occurs when viewers take advantage of commercial breaks in programming to operate electrical appliances at the same time, causing large synchronised surges in national electricity consumption. Such sudden huge surges in demand tied to the TV schedule are unique to the United Kingdom.

Electricity networks devote considerable resources to predicting and providing supply for these events, which typically impose an extra demand of around 200–400 megawatts (MW) on the British National Grid. Short-term supply is often obtained from pumped storage reservoirs, which can be quickly brought online, and are backed up by the slower fossil fuel and nuclear power stations. The largest ever pickup occurred on 4 July 1990, when a 2800 megawatt demand was imposed by the ending of the penalty shootout in the England v West Germany FIFA World Cup semi-final. In addition to pickups, the Grid also prepares for synchronised switch-offs during remembrance and energy-awareness events.

🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Ohio

The Ohio nuclear bribery scandal is a 2020 political scandal in Ohio involving allegations that FirstEnergy paid roughly $60 million to Generation Now, a 501(c)(4) organization purportedly controlled by Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Larry Householder, in exchange for passing a $1.3 billion bailout for the struggling nuclear power operator. It was described as "likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio" by U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers, who charged Householder and four others with racketeering on July 21. According to prosecutors, FirstEnergy poured millions into the campaigns of 21 candidates during the 2018 Ohio House of Representatives election, which ultimately helped Householder replace Ryan Smith as Republican House speaker.

According to DeVillers in late July 2020, the investigation is far from over. "There are a lot of federal agents knocking on a lot of doors."

🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Color 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Visual arts

Mummy brown, also known as Egyptian brown or Caput Mortuum,^: 254 is a rich brown bituminous pigment with good transparency, sitting between burnt umber and raw umber in tint. The pigment was made from the flesh of mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh. Mummy brown was extremely popular from the mid-eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. However, fresh supplies of mummies diminished, and artists were less satisfied with the pigment's permanency and finish. By 1915, demand had significantly declined. Suppliers ceased to offer it by the middle of the twentieth century.^: 82

Mummy brown was one of the favourite colours of the Pre-Raphaelites. It was used by many artists, including Eugene Delacroix, William Beechey, Edward Burne-Jones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Martin Drolling.

🔗 Politics

Liquid democracy is a form of delegative democracy whereby an electorate has the option of vesting voting power in delegates as well as voting directly themselves. Liquid democracy is a broad category of either already-existing or proposed popular-control apparatuses. Voters can either vote directly or delegate their vote to other participants; voters may also select different delegates for different issues. In other words, individual A of a society can delegate their power to another individual B – and withdraw such power again at any time.

Liquid democracy lies between direct and representative democracy. In direct democracy, participants must vote personally on all issues, while in representative democracy participants vote for representatives once in certain election cycles. Meanwhile, liquid democracy does not depend on representatives but rather on a weighted and transitory delegation of votes. Liquid democracy through elections can empower individuals to become sole interpreters of the interests of the nation. It allows for citizens to vote directly on policy issues, delegate their votes on one or multiple policy areas to delegates of their choosing, delegate votes to one or more people, delegated to them as a weighted voter, or get rid of their votes' delegations whenever they please.

Most of the available academic literature on liquid democracy is based on empirical research rather than on specific conceptualization or theories. Experiments have mostly been conducted on a local-level or exclusively through online platforms, however polity examples are listed below.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Military history 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history 🔗 Commonwealth

Operation Legacy was a British Colonial Office (later Foreign Office) programme to destroy or hide files, to prevent them being inherited by its ex-colonies. It ran from the 1950s until the 1970s, when the decolonisation of the British Empire was at its height.

MI5 or Special Branch agents vetted all secret documents in the colonial administrations to find those that those that could embarrass the British government—for instance by showing racial or religious bias. They identified 8,800 files to conceal from at least 23 countries and territories in the 1950s and 1960s, and destroyed them or sent them to the United Kingdom. Precise instructions were given for methods to be used for destruction, including burning and dumping at sea. Some of the files detailed torture methods used against opponents of the colonial administrations, such as during the Mau Mau Uprising.

As decolonisation progressed, British officials were keen to avoid a repeat of the embarrassment that had been caused by the overt burning of documents that took place in New Delhi in 1947, which had been covered by Indian news sources. On 3 May 1961, Iain Macleod, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote a telegram to all British embassies to advise them on the best way to retrieve and dispose of sensitive documents. To prevent post-colonial governments from ever learning about Operation Legacy, officials were required to dispatch "destruction certificates" to London. In some cases, as the handover date approached, the immolation task proved so huge that colonial administrators warned the Foreign Office that there was a danger of "celebrating Independence Day with smoke."

Academic study of the end of the British Empire has been assisted in recent years by the declassification of the migrated archives in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 141 series. After the UK government admitted in 2011 that it had secret documents related to the Mau Mau Uprising, it began to declassify documents and by November 2013 some 20,000 files had been declassified. These documents can now be accessed at the National Archives in Kew, London.

🔗 Physiology 🔗 Evolutionary biology

In evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, the Trivers–Willard hypothesis, formally proposed by Robert Trivers and Dan Willard in 1973, suggests that female mammals are able to adjust offspring sex ratio in response to their maternal condition. For example, it may predict greater parental investment in males by parents in "good conditions" and greater investment in females by parents in "poor conditions" (relative to parents in good condition). The reasoning for this prediction is as follows: Assume that parents have information on the sex of their offspring and can influence their survival differentially. While pressures exist to maintain sex ratios at 50%, evolution will favor local deviations from this if one sex has a likely greater reproductive payoff than is usual.

Trivers and Willard also identified a circumstance in which reproducing individuals might experience deviations from expected offspring reproductive value—namely, varying maternal condition. In polygynous species males may mate with multiple females and low-condition males will achieve fewer or no matings. Parents in relatively good condition would then be under selection for mutations causing production and investment in sons (rather than daughters), because of the increased chance of mating experienced by these good-condition sons. Mating with multiple females conveys a large reproductive benefit, whereas daughters could translate their condition into only smaller benefits. An opposite prediction holds for poor-condition parents—selection will favor production and investment in daughters, so long as daughters are likely to be mated, while sons in poor condition are likely to be out-competed by other males and end up with zero mates (i.e., those sons will be a reproductive dead end).

The hypothesis was used to explain why, for example, Red Deer mothers would produce more sons when they are in good condition, and more daughters when in poor condition. In polyandrous species where some females mate with multiple males (and others get no matings) and males mate with one/few females (i.e., "sex-role reversed" species), these predictions from the Trivers–Willard hypothesis are reversed: parents in good condition will invest in daughters in order to have a daughter that can out-compete other females to attract multiple males, whereas parents in poor condition will avoid investing in daughters who are likely to get out-competed and will instead invest in sons in order to gain at least some grandchildren.

"Condition" can be assessed in multiple ways, including body size, parasite loads, or dominance, which has also been shown in macaques (Macaca sylvanus) to affect the sex of offspring, with dominant females giving birth to more sons and non-dominant females giving birth to more daughters. Consequently, high-ranking females give birth to a higher proportion of males than those who are low-ranking.

In their original paper, Trivers and Willard were not yet aware of the biochemical mechanism for the occurrence of biased sex ratios. Eventually, however, Melissa Larson et al. (2001) proposed that a high level of circulating glucose in the mother's bloodstream may favor the survival of male blastocysts. This conclusion is based on the observed male-skewed survival rates (to expanded blastocyst stages) when bovine blastocysts were exposed to heightened levels of glucose. As blood glucose levels are highly correlated with access to high-quality food, blood glucose level may serve as a proxy for "maternal condition". Thus, heightened glucose functions as one possible biochemical mechanism for observed Trivers–Willard effects.

Wild and West published a paper describing a mathematical model built on the Trivers–Willard hypothesis that allows precise predictions of alterations in sex-ratio under different circumstances.

🔗 Typography

Tiresias is a family of TrueType sans-serif typefaces that were designed with the aim of legibility by people with impaired vision at the Scientific Research Unit of Royal National Institute of Blind People in London. The font was originally designed for the RNIB by Chris Sharville of Laker Sharville Design Associates who was working with John Gill at the time.

The family includes

• Tiresias Infofont – for information labels, optimized for maximum legibility at a distance of 30–100 cm.
• Tiresias Keyfont – for labeling the tops of keys of keyboards, PIN pads, appliances, remote controls (features exaggerated punctuation marks, no descender on the J)
• Tiresias LPfont – for large-print publications. A wedge-serif design.
• Tiresias PCfont – for raster displays
• Tiresias Screenfont – for television subtitling and on-screen user interfaces
• Tiresias Signfont – a more open spacing for use on signs

In late 2007, all Tiresias fonts except Tiresias Screenfont were released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version.

The Tiresias Screenfont was sold by Bitstream Inc., who in 2012 were acquired by Monotype Corporation. The acquiring company continues to market Tiresias on its websites.

🔗 Chess 🔗 India

Shatranj (Arabic: شطرنج‎; Persian: شترنگ‎; from Middle Persian chatrang) is an old form of chess, as played in the Sasanian Empire. Its origins are in the Indian game of chaturaṅga. Modern chess gradually developed from this game, as it was introduced to the western world via contacts in Muslim Andalusia (modern Spain) and in Sicily in the 10th century.

🔗 Physiology 🔗 Physiology/neuro

The majority of studies on sleep creativity have shown that sleep can facilitate insightful behavior and flexible reasoning, and there are several hypotheses about the creative function of dreams. On the other hand, a few recent studies have supported a theory of creative insomnia, in which creativity is significantly correlated with sleep disturbance.