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🔗 Krukenberg procedure

🔗 Medicine

The Krukenberg procedure, also known as the Krukenberg operation, is a surgical technique that converts a forearm stump into a pincer. It was first described in 1917 by the German army surgeon Hermann Krukenberg. It remains in use today for certain special cases but is considered controversial and some surgeons refuse to perform it.

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🔗 Epiousios

🔗 Greece 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/Eastern Orthodoxy

Epiousios (ἐπιούσιος) is a Greek adjective used in the Lord's Prayer verse "Τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον" 'Give us today our epiousion bread'. Because the word is used nowhere else, its meaning is unclear. It is traditionally translated as "daily", but most modern scholars reject that interpretation.

Since it is a Koine Greek dis legomenon found only in the New Testament passages Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3, its interpretation relies upon morphological analysis and context. The traditional and most common English translation is daily, although most scholars today reject this in part because all other New Testament passages with the translation "daily" include the word hemera (ἡμέρᾱ, 'day').

The difficulty in understanding epiousios goes at least as far back as AD 382. At that time, St. Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus I to renew and consolidate the various collections of biblical texts in the Vetus Latina ("Old Latin") then in use by the Church. Jerome accomplished this by going back to the original Greek of the New Testament and translating it into Latin; his translation came to be known as the Vulgate. In the identical contexts of Matthew and Luke—that is, reporting the Lord's Prayer—Jerome translated epiousios in two different ways: by morphological analysis as 'supersubstantial' (supersubstantialem) in Matthew 6:11, but retaining 'daily' (quotidianum) in Luke 11:3.

The modern Catholic Catechism holds that there are several ways of understanding epiousios, including the traditional 'daily', but most literally as 'supersubstantial' or 'superessential', based on its morphological components. Alternative theories are that—aside from the etymology of ousia, meaning 'substance'—it may be derived from either of the verbs einai (εἶναι), meaning "to be", or ienai (ἰέναι), meaning both "to come" and "to go".:172

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🔗 Aptronym

🔗 Languages 🔗 Anthroponymy

An aptronym, aptonym or euonym is a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner.

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🔗 The Mummy!

🔗 Computing 🔗 Africa 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Egypt

The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century is an 1827 three-volume novel written by Jane Webb (later Jane C. Loudon). It concerns the Egyptian mummy of Cheops, who is brought back to life in the year 2126. The novel describes a future filled with advanced technology, and was the first English-language story to feature a reanimated mummy.

After her father's death, making her an orphan at the age of 17, Webb found that:

on the winding up of his affairs that it would be necessary to do something for my support. I had written a strange, wild novel, called the Mummy, in which I had laid the scene in the twenty-second century, and attempted to predict the state of improvement to which this country might possibly arrive.

She may have drawn inspiration from the general fashion for anything pharaonic, inspired by the French researches during the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt; the 1821 public unwrappings of Egyptian mummies in a theatre near Piccadilly, which she may have attended as a girl; and, very likely, the 1818 novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. As Shelley had written of Frankenstein's creation, "A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch," which may have triggered her later concept. In any case, at many points she deals in greater clarity with elements from the earlier book such as the loathing for the much-desired object and the immediate arrest for crime and attempt to lie one's way out of it. However, unlike the Frankenstein monster, the hideous revived Cheops is not shuffling around dealing out horror and death, but giving canny advice on politics and life to those who befriend him. In some ways The Mummy! may be seen as her reaction to themes in Frankenstein: her mummy specifically says he is allowed life only by divine favour, rather than being indisputably vivified only by mortal science, and so on, as Hopkins' 2003 essay covers in detail.

Unlike many early science fiction works (Shelley's The Last Man, and The Reign of King George VI, 1900–1925, written anonymously in 1763), Loudon did not portray the future as her own day with only political changes. She filled her world with foreseeable changes in technology, society, and even fashion. The hero, Edric Montague, lived in a peaceful and Catholic England under the rule of Queen Claudia. Her court ladies wear trousers and hair ornaments of controlled flame. Surgeons and lawyers may be steam-powered automatons. Air travel, by balloon, is commonplace. A kind of Internet is predicted in it. Besides trying to account for the revivification of the mummy in scientific terms—galvanic shock rather than incantations—"she embodied ideas of scientific progress and discovery, that now read like prophecies" to those later in the 19th century. Many of the incidents in the book can be seen as satirical or humorous. Her social attitudes have resulted in this book being ranked among feminist novels.

The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century was published anonymously in 1827 by Henry Colburn in three volumes, as was usual in that day so that each small volume could be easily carried around. It drew many favourable reviews, including one in 1829 in The Gardener's Magazine on the inventions proposed in it. In 1830, the 46-year-old reviewer, John Claudius Loudon, sought out the 22-year-old Webb, and they married the next year.

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🔗 K-anonymity

🔗 Internet 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

k-anonymity is a property possessed by certain anonymized data. The concept of k-anonymity was first introduced by Latanya Sweeney and Pierangela Samarati in a paper published in 1998 as an attempt to solve the problem: "Given person-specific field-structured data, produce a release of the data with scientific guarantees that the individuals who are the subjects of the data cannot be re-identified while the data remain practically useful." A release of data is said to have the k-anonymity property if the information for each person contained in the release cannot be distinguished from at least k 1 {\displaystyle k-1} individuals whose information also appear in the release.

K-anonymity received widespread media coverage in 2018 when British computer scientist Junade Ali used the property alongside cryptographic hashing to create a communication protocol to anonymously verify if a password was leaked without disclosing the searched password. This protocol was implemented as a public API in Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned? service and is consumed by multiple services including password managers and browser extensions. This approach was later replicated by Google's Password Checkup feature.

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🔗 Project Longshot: 100 Year probe mission to Alpha Centauri

🔗 United States 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Physics

Project Longshot was a conceptual interstellar spacecraft design. It would have been an unmanned probe, intended to fly to and enter orbit around Alpha Centauri B powered by nuclear pulse propulsion.

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🔗 Battle of Vukovar: how 1,800 fighters held off a force of 36,000

🔗 Serbia 🔗 Yugoslavia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Balkan military history 🔗 Croatia 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/Post-Cold War

The Battle of Vukovar was an 87-day siege of Vukovar in eastern Croatia by the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), supported by various paramilitary forces from Serbia, between August and November 1991. Before the Croatian War of Independence the Baroque town was a prosperous, mixed community of Croats, Serbs and other ethnic groups. As Yugoslavia began to break up, Serbia's President Slobodan Milošević and Croatia's President Franjo Tuđman began pursuing nationalist politics. In 1990, an armed insurrection was started by Croatian Serb militias, supported by the Serbian government and paramilitary groups, who seized control of Serb-populated areas of Croatia. The JNA began to intervene in favour of the rebellion, and conflict broke out in the eastern Croatian region of Slavonia in May 1991. In August, the JNA launched a full-scale attack against Croatian-held territory in eastern Slavonia, including Vukovar.

Vukovar was defended by around 1,800 lightly armed soldiers of the Croatian National Guard (ZNG) and civilian volunteers, against as many as 36,000 JNA soldiers and Serb paramilitaries equipped with heavy armour and artillery. During the battle, shells and rockets were fired into the town at a rate of up to 12,000 a day. At the time, it was the fiercest and most protracted battle seen in Europe since 1945, and Vukovar was the first major European town to be entirely destroyed since the Second World War. When Vukovar fell on 18 November 1991, several hundred soldiers and civilians were massacred by Serb forces and at least 20,000 inhabitants were expelled. Overall, around 3,000 people died during the battle. Most of Vukovar was ethnically cleansed of its non-Serb population and became part of the self-declared proto-state known as the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Several Serb military and political officials, including Milošević, were later indicted and in some cases jailed for war crimes committed during and after the battle.

The battle exhausted the JNA and proved a turning point in the Croatian War of Independence. A cease-fire was declared a few weeks later. Vukovar remained in Serb hands until 1998, when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia with the signing of the Erdut Agreement. It has since been rebuilt but has less than half of its pre-war population and many buildings are still scarred by the battle. Its two principal ethnic communities remain deeply divided and it has not regained its former prosperity.

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🔗 Quindar Tones

🔗 Spaceflight

Quindar tones, most often referred to as the "beeps" that were heard during the American Apollo space missions, were a means by which remote transmitters on Earth were turned on and off so that the capsule communicator (CapCom) could communicate with the crews of the spacecraft. It was a means of in-band signaling to simulate the action of the push-to-talk and release-to-listen (often referred to as PTT) button commonly found on two-way radio systems and walkie-talkies.

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🔗 Chrestomathy

🔗 Literature

A chrestomathy ( kreh-STOM-ə-thee; from the Ancient Greek χρηστομάθεια khrēstomátheia 'desire of learning', from χρηστός khrēstós 'useful' + μανθάνω manthánō 'learn') is a collection of selected literary passages (usually from a single author); a selection of literary passages from a foreign language assembled for studying the language; or a text in various languages, used especially as an aid in learning a subject.

In philology or in the study of literature, it is a type of reader which presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of language or literary style. It is different from an anthology because of its didactic purpose.

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🔗 Cassowary

🔗 Australia 🔗 Birds

Casuarius is a genus of birds in the order Casuariiformes, whose members are the cassowaries (Tok Pisin: muruk, Indonesian: kasuari). It is classified as a ratite (flightless bird without a keel on its sternum bone) and is native to the tropical forests of New Guinea (Papua New Guinea and East Indonesia), Aru Islands (Maluku), and northeastern Australia.

Three species are extant: The most common, the southern cassowary, is the third-tallest and second-heaviest living bird, smaller only than the ostrich and emu. The other two species are represented by the northern cassowary and the dwarf cassowary; the northern cassowary is the most recently discovered and the most threatened. A fourth but extinct species is represented by the pygmy cassowary.

Cassowaries feed mainly on fruit, although all species are truly omnivorous and take a range of other plant foods, including shoots and grass seeds, in addition to fungi, invertebrates, and small vertebrates. Cassowaries are very wary of humans, but if provoked, they are capable of inflicting serious, even fatal, injuries to both dogs and people. The cassowary has often been labeled "the world's most dangerous bird".

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