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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74. Over its more than thirty-year history, it has been used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists to create recordings, performances, and installations.

The Max program is modular, with most routines existing as shared libraries. An application programming interface (API) allows third-party development of new routines (named external objects). Thus, Max has a large user base of programmers unaffiliated with Cycling '74 who enhance the software with commercial and non-commercial extensions to the program. Because of this extensible design, which simultaneously represents both the program's structure and its graphical user interface (GUI), Max has been described as the lingua franca for developing interactive music performance software.

🔗 Biography

Joseph P. Nacchio (born June 22, 1949 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American executive who was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Qwest Communications International from 1997 to 2002. Nacchio was convicted of insider trading during his time heading Qwest. He claimed in court, with documentation, that his was the only company to demand legal authority for surreptitious mass surveillance demanded by the NSA which began prior to the 11 September 2001 attacks.

He was convicted of 19 counts of insider trading in Qwest stock on April 19, 2007 – charges his defense team claimed were U.S. government retaliation for his refusal to give customer data to the National Security Agency in February, 2001. This defense was not admissible in court because the U.S. Department of Justice filed an in limine motion, which is often used in national security cases, to exclude information which may reveal state secrets. Information from the Classified Information Procedures Act hearings in Nacchio's case was likewise ruled inadmissible.

On July 27, 2007, he was sentenced to six years in federal prison, and after appeals failed he reported to Federal Correctional Institution, Schuylkill in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania on April 14, 2009 to serve his sentence. Nacchio finished serving his sentence on September 20, 2013.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Military history 🔗 Death 🔗 Iran 🔗 Assyria 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Former countries/Ottoman Empire 🔗 Military history/Ottoman military history

The Sayfo or the Seyfo (lit. 'sword'; see below), also known as the Assyrian genocide, was the mass slaughter and deportation of Assyrian/Syriac Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Persia's Azerbaijan province by Ottoman forces and some Kurdish tribes during World War I.

The Assyrians were divided into mutually antagonistic churches, including the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Church of the East, and the Chaldean Catholic Church. Before World War I, they lived in mountainous and remote areas of the Ottoman Empire (some of which were effectively stateless). The empire's nineteenth-century centralization efforts led to increased violence and danger for the Assyrians.

Mass killing of Assyrian civilians began during the Ottoman occupation of Azerbaijan from January to May 1915, during which massacres were committed by Ottoman forces and pro-Ottoman Kurds. In Bitlis province, Ottoman troops returning from Persia joined local Kurdish tribes to massacre the local Christian population (including Assyrians). Ottoman forces and Kurds attacked the Assyrian tribes of Hakkari in mid-1915, driving them out by September despite the tribes mounting a coordinated military defense. Governor Mehmed Reshid initiated a genocide of all of the Christian communities in Diyarbekir province, including Syriac Christians, facing only sporadic armed resistance in some parts of Tur Abdin. Ottoman Assyrians living farther south, in present-day Iraq and Syria, were not targeted in the genocide.

The Sayfo occurred concurrently with and was closely related to the Armenian genocide, although the Sayfo is considered to have been less systematic. Local actors played a larger role than the Ottoman government, but the latter also ordered attacks on certain Assyrians. Motives for killing included a perceived lack of loyalty among some Assyrian communities to the Ottoman Empire and the desire to appropriate their land. At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the Assyro-Chaldean delegation said that its losses were 250,000 (about half the prewar population); the accuracy of this figure is unknown. They later revised their estimate to 275,000 dead at the Lausanne Conference in 1923. The Sayfo is less studied than the Armenian genocide. Efforts to have it recognized as a genocide began during the 1990s, spearheaded by the Assyrian diaspora. Although several countries acknowledge that Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire were victims of a genocide, this assertion is rejected by the Turkish government.

🔗 Biography 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Ships

The rescue of Roger Mallinson and Roger Chapman occurred between 29 August and 1 September 1973 after their Vickers Oceanics small submersible Pisces III was trapped on the seabed at a depth of 1,575 ft (480 m), 150 mi (240 km) off Ireland in the Celtic Sea. The 76-hour multinational rescue effort resulted in the deepest sub rescue in history.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines. They contain orders on what action to take in the event that an enemy nuclear strike has destroyed the British government and has killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and the "second person" (normally a high-ranking member of the Cabinet) whom the prime minister has designated to make a decision on how to act in the event of the prime minister's death. In the event that the orders are carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of Government of the United Kingdom.

The letters are stored inside two nested safes in the control room of each submarine. The letters are destroyed unopened after a prime minister leaves office, so their content remains known only to the prime minister who issued them.

🔗 Time 🔗 Writing

Kairos (Ancient Greek: καιρός) is an Ancient Greek word meaning the right, critical, or opportune moment. The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos (χρόνος) and kairos. The former refers to chronological or sequential time, while the latter signifies a proper or opportune time for action. While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature. Kairos also means weather in Modern Greek. The plural, καιροί (kairoi (Ancient and Modern Greek)) means the times. Kairos is a term, idea, and practice that has been applied in several fields including classical rhetoric, modern rhetoric, digital media, Christian theology, and science.

🔗 Star Trek

Star Trek Continues is an American fan-made web series set in the Star Trek universe. Produced by the nonprofit charity Trek Continues, Inc. and Dracogen, and initially co-produced by Far from Home LLC and Farragut Films, the series consists of 11 episodes released between 2013 and 2017. The series is an unofficial direct continuation of Star Trek: The Original Series, and emulates its visual and storytelling features to achieve the same look and feel. Those who made the show have said in interviews that the intent was to finish the original five-year mission of the show, and this is borne out in the plot lines of the final two episodes.

The series was fan-created and all episodes were released to watch on YouTube. As with all such Star Trek fan productions, use of copyrighted and trademarked properties from the original series was allowed so long as the production was not commercial. A portion of the funds necessary to produce the episodes was raised through successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, to which thousands of backers contributed.

Star Trek Continues won a Webby Award for "People's Choice – Long Form Drama" in 2016, a Geekie Award for "Best Web Series" in 2014, and numerous Telly and Accolade awards. The series was very positively received by critics, who praised the quality of the production and stated that the show set a new standard for Star Trek fan films.

After the 11th episode was released in late 2017, the Star Trek Continues series ended.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Languages

"The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (Spanish: "El idioma analítico de John Wilkins") is a short essay by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, first printed in La Nación on 8 February 1942 and subsequently published in Otras Inquisiciones (1937–1952). It is a critique of the English natural philosopher and writer John Wilkins's proposal for a universal language and of the representational capacity of language generally. In it, Borges imagines a bizarre and whimsical (and fictional) Chinese taxonomy later quoted by Michel Foucault, David Byrne, and others.

🔗 France 🔗 World Heritage Sites 🔗 Lighthouses

Cordouan lighthouse (French pronunciation: [kɔʁdwɑ̃]) is an active lighthouse located 7 kilometres (4.3 miles) at sea, near the mouth of the Gironde estuary in France. At a height of 67.5 metres (221 ft), it is the tenth-tallest "traditional lighthouse" in the world.

The Tour de Cordouan, the 'Patriarch of Lighthouses' is by far the oldest lighthouse in France, with construction starting in 1584 and finishing in 1611. Designed by leading Paris architect Louis de Foix, the lighthouse is something of a Renaissance masterpiece, drawing inspiration from Roman mausoleums, and the palaces, cathedrals, and forts of the Renaissance. Three stories were added in the 18th century.

Because of its outstanding Renaissance architecture and its testimony to the development of lighthouses, the Cordouan Lighthouse was listed as a historic monument in 1862, and recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2021.

🔗 United States 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative medicine 🔗 United States/Louisiana

Hadacol was a patent medicine marketed as a vitamin supplement. Its principal attraction, however, was that it contained 12 percent alcohol (listed on the tonic bottle's label as a "preservative"), which made it quite popular in the dry counties of the southern United States. It was the product of four-term Louisiana State Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Democrat from Erath in Vermilion Parish in southwestern Louisiana. He was not a medical doctor, nor a registered pharmacist, but had a strong talent for self-promotion. Time magazine once described him as "a stem-winding salesman who knows every razzle-dazzle switch in the pitchman's trade".