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🔗 India 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 India/Kerala

The Padmanabhaswamy temple treasure is a collection of valuable objects including gold thrones, crowns, coins, statues and ornaments, diamonds and other precious stones. It was discovered in some of the subterranean vaults of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, in the Indian state of Kerala, when five of its six (or possibly eight) vaults were opened on 27 June 2011. The vaults were opened on the orders of the Supreme Court of India, which was hearing a private petition seeking transparency in the running of the temple. The discovery of the treasure attracted widespread national and international media attention as it is considered to be the largest collection of items of gold and precious stones in the recorded history of the world. On the possibility of future appropriation of the wealth, for the need of a new management and proper inventorisation of the articles in the vaults, a public interest petition was registered with Supreme court of India. In 2020, the royal family won the rights to manage the temple, as well all its financial aspects. The Supreme Court of India overruled the Kerala High Court's legal jurisprudence based on regional facts and recognition of the nullified princely agreement based on "Ruler of Travancore."

🔗 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.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

SCOOP (Simple Concurrent Object Oriented Programming) is a concurrency model designed for the Eiffel programming language, conceived by Eiffel's creator and designer, Bertrand Meyer.

SCOOP defines a way for an object oriented program to be written without the concept of threads, locks, or other typical multiprogramming methods. This allows the compiler or runtime environment to optimize the amount of concurrency as well as eliminate typical design flaws such as deadlock.

The model was first designed in the early 1990s and published in 1993 in the Communications of the ACM An updated version was described in chapter 30 of the book Object-Oriented Software Construction. A prototype implementation was developed in 1995 by Eiffel Software. An article by Compton and Walker provides an overview of SCOOP and describes another early implementation. Nienaltowski, Arslan and Meyer have published a description of the model as of 2003. Work on SCOOP proceeded at the Chair of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich. SCOOP became available as a standard part of EiffelStudio early in 2011.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Science and technology 🔗 Japan/CJKV

Mojibake (Japanese: 文字化け; IPA: [mod͡ʑibake]) is the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, often from a different writing system.

This display may include the generic replacement character ("�") in places where the binary representation is considered invalid. A replacement can also involve multiple consecutive symbols, as viewed in one encoding, when the same binary code constitutes one symbol in the other encoding. This is either because of differing constant length encoding (as in Asian 16-bit encodings vs European 8-bit encodings), or the use of variable length encodings (notably UTF-8 and UTF-16).

Failed rendering of glyphs due to either missing fonts or missing glyphs in a font is a different issue that is not to be confused with mojibake. Symptoms of this failed rendering include blocks with the code point displayed in hexadecimal or using the generic replacement character. Importantly, these replacements are valid and are the result of correct error handling by the software.

🔗 England 🔗 Geography 🔗 Transport 🔗 UK geography 🔗 East Anglia 🔗 Hiking trails 🔗 East Anglia/Essex

The Broomway is a public right of way over the foreshore at Maplin Sands off the coast of Essex, England. Most of the route is classed as a Byway Open to All Traffic, with a shorter section of bridleway. When the tide is out, it provides access to Foulness Island, and indeed was the only access to Foulness on foot, and the only access at low tide, until a road bridge was built over Havengore Creek in 1922.

At over 600 years old, recorded as early as 1419, the Broomway runs for 6 miles (9.7 km) along the Maplin Sands, some 440 yards (400 m) from the present shoreline. It was named for the "brooms", bundles of twigs attached to short poles, with which the route was once marked. A number of headways or hards ran from the track to the shore, giving access to local farms. The track is extremely dangerous in misty weather, as the incoming tide floods across the sands at high speed, and the water forms whirlpools because of flows from the River Crouch and River Roach. Under such conditions, the direction of the shore cannot be determined. After the road bridge was opened in 1922, the Broomway ceased to be used, except by the military.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Visual arts

The Nebra sky disk is a bronze disk of around 30 centimeters (11 ³⁄₄ in) diameter and a weight of 2.2 kilograms (4.9 lb), having a blue-green patina and inlaid with gold symbols. These symbols are interpreted generally as the Sun or full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars (including a cluster of seven interpreted as the Pleiades). Two golden arcs along the sides, interpreted to mark the angle between the solstices, were added later. A final addition was another arc at the bottom surrounded with multiple strokes (of uncertain meaning, variously interpreted as a Solar Barge with numerous oars, the Milky Way, or a rainbow).

The disk is attributed to a site in present-day Germany near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, and dated by Archaeological association to c. 1600 BC. Researchers suggest the disk is an artifact of the Bronze Age Unetice culture.

The style in which the disk is executed was unlike any artistic style then known from the period, with the result that the object was initially suspected of being a forgery, but is now widely accepted as authentic.

The Nebra sky disk features the oldest concrete depiction of the cosmos yet known from anywhere in the world. In June 2013 it was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register and termed "one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century."

🔗 Philately 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Infrastructure 🔗 Japan/Law and government

The Japanese addressing system is used to identify a specific location in Japan. When written in Japanese characters, addresses start with the largest geographical entity and proceed to the most specific one. When written in Latin characters, addresses follow the convention used by most Western addresses and start with the smallest geographic entity (typically a house number) and proceed to the largest. The Japanese system is complex and idiosyncratic, the product of the natural growth of urban areas, as opposed to the systems used in cities that are laid out as grids and divided into quadrants or districts.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Rule of three ("Three strikes and you refactor") is a code refactoring rule of thumb to decide when similar pieces of code should be refactored to avoid duplication. It states that two instances of similar code don't require refactoring, but when similar code is used three times, it should be extracted into a new procedure. The rule was popularised by Martin Fowler in Refactoring and attributed to Don Roberts.

Duplication is considered a bad practice in programming because it makes the code harder to maintain. When the rule encoded in a replicated piece of code changes, whoever maintains the code will have to change it in all places correctly.

However, choosing an appropriate design to avoid duplication might benefit from more examples to see patterns in. Attempting premature refactoring risks selecting a wrong abstraction, which can result in worse code as new requirements emerge and will eventually need to be refactored again.

The rule implies that the cost of maintenance certainly outweighs the cost of refactoring and potential bad design when there are three copies, and may or may not if there are only two copies.

🔗 Food and drink

Portable soup was a kind of dehydrated food used in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was a precursor of meat extract and bouillon cubes, and of industrially dehydrated food. It is also known as pocket soup or veal glew. It is a cousin of the glace de viande of French cooking. It was long a staple of seamen and explorers, for it would keep for many months or even years. In this context, it was a filling and nutritious dish. Portable soup of less extended vintage was, according to the 1881 Household Cyclopedia, "exceedingly convenient for private families, for by putting one of the cakes in a saucepan with about a quart of water, and a little salt, a basin of good broth may be made in a few minutes."