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🔗 Judaism

Sabbath mode, also known as Shabbos mode (Ashkenazi pronunciation) or Shabbat mode, is a feature in many modern home appliances, including ovens and refrigerators, which is intended to allow the appliances to be used (subject to various constraints) by Shabbat-observant Jews on the Shabbat and Jewish holidays. The mode usually overrides the usual, everyday operation of the electrical appliance and makes the operation of the appliance comply with the rules of Halakha (Jewish law).

Musaeum Clausum (Latin for Sealed Museum), also known as Bibliotheca abscondita, is a tract written by Sir Thomas Browne which was first published posthumously in 1684. The tract contains short sentence descriptions of supposed, rumoured or lost books, pictures, and objects. The subtitle describes the tract as an inventory of remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living. Its date is unknown: however, an event from the year 1673 is cited.

Like his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Musaeum Clausum is a catalogue of doubts and queries, only this time, in a style which anticipates the 20th-century Argentinian short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges, who once declared: "To write vast books is a laborious nonsense; much better is to offer a summary as if those books actually existed."

Browne however was not the first author to engage in such fantasy. The French author Rabelais, in his epic Gargantua and Pantagruel, also penned a list of imaginary and often obscene book titles in his "Library of Pantagruel", an inventory which Browne himself alludes to in his Religio Medici.

As the 17th-century Scientific Revolution progressed the popularity and growth of antiquarian collections, those claiming to house highly improbable items grew. Browne was an avid collector of antiquities and natural specimens, possessing a supposed unicorn's horn, presented to him by Arthur Dee. Browne's eldest son Edward visited the famous scholar Athanasius Kircher, founder of the Museo Kircherano at Rome in 1667, whose exhibits included an engine for attempting perpetual motion and a speaking head, which Kircher called his Oraculum Delphinium. He wrote to his father of his visit to the Jesuit priest's "closet of rarities".

The sheer volume of book-titles, pictures and objects listed in Musaeum Clausum is testimony to Browne's fertile imagination. However, his major editors, Simon Wilkin in the nineteenth century (1834) and Sir Geoffrey Keynes in the twentieth (1924), summarily dismissed it. Keynes considered its humour too erudite and "not to everyone's taste".

Browne's miscellaneous tract may also be read as a parody of the rising trend of private museum collections with their curios of doubtful origin, and perhaps also of publications such as the so-called Museum Hermeticum (1678), one of the last great anthologies of alchemical literature, with their divulging of near common-place alchemical concepts and symbols.

🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Bible 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Cities

Ur was an important Sumerian city-state in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern Tell el-Muqayyar (Arabic: تل ٱلْمُقَيَّر) in south Iraq's Dhi Qar Governorate. Although Ur was once a coastal city near the mouth of the Euphrates on the Persian Gulf, the coastline has shifted and the city is now well inland, on the south bank of the Euphrates, 16 kilometres (9.9 miles) from Nasiriyah in modern-day Iraq. The city dates from the Ubaid period circa 3800 BC, and is recorded in written history as a city-state from the 26th century BC, its first recorded king being Mesannepada.

The city's patron deity was Nanna (in Akkadian, Sin), the Sumerian and Akkadian moon god, and the name of the city is in origin derived from the god's name, UNUG^KI, literally "the abode (UNUG) of Nanna". The site is marked by the partially restored ruins of the Ziggurat of Ur, which contained the shrine of Nanna, excavated in the 1930s. The temple was built in the 21st century BC (short chronology), during the reign of Ur-Nammu and was reconstructed in the 6th century BC by Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon. The ruins cover an area of 1,200 metres (3,900 ft) northwest to southeast by 800 metres (2,600 ft) northeast to southwest and rise up to about 20 metres (66 ft) above the present plain level.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Education 🔗 Toys

The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab was a toy lab set designed to allow children to create and watch nuclear and chemical reactions using radioactive material. The Atomic Energy Lab was released by the A. C. Gilbert Company in 1950.

🔗 Computing

In computer storage, Bélády's anomaly is the phenomenon in which increasing the number of page frames results in an increase in the number of page faults for certain memory access patterns. This phenomenon is commonly experienced when using the first-in first-out (FIFO) page replacement algorithm. In FIFO, the page fault may or may not increase as the page frames increase, but in Optimal and stack-based algorithms like LRU, as the page frames increase the page fault decreases. László Bélády demonstrated this in 1969.

In common computer memory management, information is loaded in specific-sized chunks. Each chunk is referred to as a page. Main memory can hold only a limited number of pages at a time. It requires a frame for each page it can load. A page fault occurs when a page is not found, and might need to be loaded from disk into memory.

When a page fault occurs and all frames are in use, one must be cleared to make room for the new page. A simple algorithm is FIFO: whichever page has been in the frames the longest is the one that is cleared. Until Bélády's anomaly was demonstrated, it was believed that an increase in the number of page frames would always result in the same number of or fewer page faults.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Africa 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Africa/Tanzania 🔗 Afghanistan 🔗 Africa/Kenya

M-Pesa (M for mobile, pesa is Swahili for money) is a mobile phone-based money transfer, financing and microfinancing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone for Safaricom and Vodacom, the largest mobile network operators in Kenya and Tanzania. It has since expanded to Afghanistan, South Africa, India and in 2014 to Romania and in 2015 to Albania. M-Pesa allows users to deposit, withdraw, transfer money and pay for goods and services (Lipa na M-Pesa) easily with a mobile device.

The service allows users to deposit money into an account stored on their cell phones, to send balances using PIN-secured SMS text messages to other users, including sellers of goods and services, and to redeem deposits for regular money. Users are charged a small fee for sending and withdrawing money using the service.

M-Pesa is a branchless banking service; M-Pesa customers can deposit and withdraw money from a network of agents that includes airtime resellers and retail outlets acting as banking agents.

M-Pesa has spread quickly, and by 2010 had become the most successful mobile-phone-based financial service in the developing world. By 2012, a stock of about 17 million M-Pesa accounts had been registered in Kenya. By June 2016, a total of 7 million M-Pesa accounts have been opened in Tanzania by Vodacom. The service has been lauded for giving millions of people access to the formal financial system and for reducing crime in otherwise largely cash-based societies.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Vasily Arkhipov (Russian: Василий Архипов) may refer to:

• Vasily Arkhipov (vice admiral) (1926–1998), Soviet Navy officer credited with casting the single vote that prevented a Soviet nuclear strike
• Vasily Arkhipov (general) (1906–1985), Commander of the 53rd Guards Tank Brigade of the Red Army during World War II, twice Hero of the Soviet Union

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Energy 🔗 International development 🔗 Mining

The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty or the poverty paradox, is the phenomenon of countries with an abundance of natural resources (such as fossil fuels and certain minerals) having less economic growth, less democracy, or worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. There are many theories and much academic debate about the reasons for and exceptions to the adverse outcomes. Most experts believe the resource curse is not universal or inevitable but affects certain types of countries or regions under certain conditions.

🔗 Economics 🔗 European history

The Price Revolution, sometimes known as the Spanish Price Revolution, was a series of economic events that occurred between the second half of the 15th century and the first half of the 17th century, and most specifically linked to the high rate of inflation that occurred during this period across Western Europe. Prices rose on average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to 1–1.5% per year, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century.

Generally it is thought that this high inflation was caused by the large influx of gold and silver from the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World, including Mexico, Peru, and the rest of the Spanish Empire.

Specie flowed through Spain, increasing Spanish prices, and then spread over Western Europe as a result of Spanish balance of payments deficit. This enlarged the monetary supply and price levels of many European countries. Combined with this influx of gold and silver, population growth and urbanization perpetuated the price revolution. According to this theory, too many people with too much money chased too few goods.

🔗 Video games

Core War is a 1984 programming game created by D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney in which two or more battle programs (called "warriors") compete for control of a virtual computer. These battle programs are written in an abstract assembly language called Redcode.