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🔗 United States 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 United States/Kentucky 🔗 United States/Louisville

The KFC Original Recipe is a secret mix of ingredients that fast food restaurant chain KFC uses to produce fried chicken.

By the very late 1930s, Harland Sanders' gas station in Corbin, Kentucky was so well known for its fried chicken that Sanders decided to remove the gas pumps and build a restaurant and motel in their place. While perfecting his secret recipe with 11 herbs and spices, Sanders found that pan frying chicken was too slow, requiring 30 minutes per order. Deep frying the chicken required half the time but produced dry, unevenly done chicken. In 1939, he found that using a pressure fryer produced tasty, moist chicken in eight or nine minutes. By July 1940, Sanders finalized what came to be known as his Original Recipe.

After Sanders formed a partnership with Pete Harman, they began marketing the chicken in the 1950s as Kentucky Fried Chicken; the company shipped the spices already mixed to restaurants to preserve the recipe's secrecy. He claimed that the ingredients "stand on everybody's shelf".

Sanders used vegetable oil for frying chicken. By 1993, for economic reasons, many KFC outlets had chosen to use a blend of palm and soybean oil. In Japan, the oil used is mainly the more expensive cottonseed and corn oil, as KFC Japan believes that this offers superior taste quality.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Glass

A glass knife is a knife with a blade made of glass, with a fracture line forming an extremely sharp cutting edge.

Glass knives were used in antiquity due to their natural sharpness and the ease with which they could be manufactured. In modern electron microscopy glass knives are used to make the ultrathin sections needed for imaging.

🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 Linux 🔗 Perl

Vim (; a contraction of Vi IMproved) is a clone, with additions, of Bill Joy's vi text editor program for Unix. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, based it upon the source code for a port of the Stevie editor to the Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. Vim is free and open-source software and is released under a license that includes some charityware clauses, encouraging users who enjoy the software to consider donating to children in Uganda. The license is compatible with the GNU General Public License through a special clause allowing distribution of modified copies "under the GNU GPL version 2 or any later version".

Since its release for the Amiga, cross-platform development has made it available on many other systems. In 2006, it was voted the most popular editor amongst Linux Journal readers; in 2015 the Stack Overflow developer survey found it to be the third most popular text editor, and the fifth most popular development environment in 2019.

🔗 China 🔗 Spirits

Baijiu (Chinese: 白酒; pinyin: báijiǔ; literally: 'white (clear) liquor'), also known as shaojiu (烧酒/燒酒), is a clear Chinese distilled liquor of typically 40%-50%. Each type of baijiu uses a distinct type of Qū during the fermentation process in the distillery for the distinct and characteristic flavour profile.

Báijiǔ is a clear liquid usually distilled from fermented sorghum, although other grains may be used; some southeastern Chinese styles may employ rice or glutinous rice, while other Chinese varieties may use wheat, barley, millet, or even Job's tears (Chinese: 薏苡 yìyǐ) in their mash bills. The qū starter culture used in the production of baijiu is usually made from pulverized wheat grain or steamed rice.

Because of its clarity, baijiu can appear similar to several other East Asian liquors, but it often has a significantly higher alcohol content than, for example, Japanese shōchū (25%) or Korean soju (20–45%). Despite being a white spirit, its flavour more closely resembles a rich spirit like whisky in terms of complexity of flavour and sensation.

Baijiu is the world's bestselling spirit, with five billion litres sold in 2016. That number was up to 10.8 billion liters sold in 2018, more than whisky, vodka, gin, rum and tequila combined. Baijiu's popularity in China makes it the world's most consumed spirit, but outside of China it is not well known.

🔗 United States 🔗 Trains 🔗 United States/Texas

Crush, Texas was a temporary "city" established as the site of a one-day publicity stunt in the U.S. state of Texas in 1896. William George Crush, general passenger agent of the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad (popularly known as the "Katy", from its "M-K-T" initials), conceived the idea in order to demonstrate a staged train wreck as a public spectacle. No admission was charged, and train fares to the crash site were offered at the reduced rate of US$2 (equivalent to $61.46 in 2019) from any location in Texas.

As a result, an estimated 40,000 people—more people than lived in the state's second-largest city at the time—attended the exhibition on Tuesday, September 15, 1896. The event planned to showcase the deliberate head-on collision of two unmanned locomotives at high speed; unexpectedly, the impact caused both engine boilers to explode, resulting in a shower of flying debris that killed two people and caused numerous injuries among the spectators.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Intelligence

The analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH) is a methodology for evaluating multiple competing hypotheses for observed data. It was developed by Richards (Dick) J. Heuer, Jr., a 45-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, in the 1970s for use by the Agency. ACH is used by analysts in various fields who make judgments that entail a high risk of error in reasoning. ACH aims to help an analyst overcome, or at least minimize, some of the cognitive limitations that make prescient intelligence analysis so difficult to achieve.

ACH was a step forward in intelligence analysis methodology, but it was first described in relatively informal terms. Producing the best available information from uncertain data remains the goal of researchers, tool-builders, and analysts in industry, academia and government. Their domains include data mining, cognitive psychology and visualization, probability and statistics, etc. Abductive reasoning is an earlier concept with similarities to ACH.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Solar System

The Pioneer anomaly or Pioneer effect was the observed deviation from predicted accelerations of the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft after they passed about 20 astronomical units (3×10⁹ km; 2×10⁹ mi) on their trajectories out of the Solar System. The apparent anomaly was a matter of much interest for many years but has been subsequently explained by an anisotropic radiation pressure caused by the spacecraft's heat loss.

Both Pioneer spacecraft are escaping the Solar System but are slowing under the influence of the Sun's gravity. Upon very close examination of navigational data, the spacecraft were found to be slowing slightly more than expected. The effect is an extremely small acceleration towards the Sun, of (8.74±1.33)×10⁻¹⁰ m/s², which is equivalent to a reduction of the outbound velocity by 1 km/h over a period of ten years. The two spacecraft were launched in 1972 and 1973. The anomalous acceleration was first noticed as early as 1980 but not seriously investigated until 1994. The last communication with either spacecraft was in 2003, but analysis of recorded data continues.

Various explanations, both of spacecraft behavior and of gravitation itself, were proposed to explain the anomaly. Over the period from 1998 to 2012, one particular explanation became accepted. The spacecraft, which are surrounded by an ultra-high vacuum and are each powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), can shed heat only via thermal radiation. If, due to the design of the spacecraft, more heat is emitted in a particular direction by what is known as a radiative anisotropy, then the spacecraft would accelerate slightly in the direction opposite of the excess emitted radiation due to the recoil of thermal photons. If the excess radiation and attendant radiation pressure were pointed in a general direction opposite the Sun, the spacecraft's velocity away from the Sun would be decreasing at a rate greater than could be explained by previously recognized forces, such as gravity and trace friction due to the interplanetary medium (imperfect vacuum).

By 2012 several papers by different groups, all reanalyzing the thermal radiation pressure forces inherent in the spacecraft, showed that a careful accounting of this explains the entire anomaly; thus the cause is mundane and does not point to any new phenomenon or need for a different physical paradigm. The most detailed analysis to date, by some of the original investigators, explicitly looks at two methods of estimating thermal forces, concluding that there is "no statistically significant difference between the two estimates and [...] that once the thermal recoil force is properly accounted for, no anomalous acceleration remains."

🔗 Biography 🔗 Connecticut

The Leatherman (c. 1839–1889) was a vagabond famous for his handmade leather suit of clothes who traveled through the northeastern United States on a regular circuit between the Connecticut River and the Hudson River from roughly 1857 to 1889. Of unknown origin, he was thought to be French-Canadian because of his fluency in the French language, his "broken English", and the French-language prayer book found on his person after his death. His identity remains unknown and controversial. He walked a repeating 365-mile (587 km) route year after year, which took him through certain towns in western Connecticut and eastern New York, returning to each town roughly every 34 days.

🔗 United States 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Anthropology

Nacirema ("American" spelled backwards) is a term used in anthropology and sociology in relation to aspects of the behavior and society of citizens of the United States of America. The neologism attempts to create a deliberate sense of self-distancing in order that American anthropologists might look at their own culture more objectively.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Germany 🔗 Politics 🔗 Cold War 🔗 European history

The Stalin Note, also known as the March Note, was a document delivered to the representatives of the Western Allies (the United Kingdom, France, and the United States) from the Soviet Union in Germany on 10 March 1952. Soviet general secretary and premier Joseph Stalin put forth a proposal for a German reunification and neutralisation with no conditions on economic policies and with guarantees for "the rights of man and basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, press, religious persuasion, political conviction, and assembly" and free activity of democratic parties and organizations.

James Warburg, a member of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, testified before the committee on 28 March 1952 and observed that the Soviet proposal might be a bluff, but he thought that it seemed "that our government is afraid to call the bluff for the fear that it may not be a bluff at all" and might lead to "a free, neutral, and demilitarised Germany", which might be "subverted into Soviet orbit". That led to an exchange of notes between the West and the Soviet Union, which eventually ended after the West had insistence for a unified Germany to be free to join the European Defence Community and to be rearmed, demands that Stalin rejected.

West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Western Allies characterised Stalin's move as an aggressive action that attempted to stall the reintegration of West Germany. However, there was later a debate on whether a chance for reunification had been missed. Six years after the exchange, two West German ministers, Thomas Dehler and Gustav Heinemann, blamed Adenauer for not having explored the chance of reunification.