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🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 London 🔗 Ecology 🔗 River Thames

The Great Stink was an event in central London in July and August 1858 during which the hot weather exacerbated the smell of untreated human waste and industrial effluent that was present on the banks of the River Thames. The problem had been mounting for some years, with an ageing and inadequate sewer system that emptied directly into the Thames. The miasma from the effluent was thought to transmit contagious diseases, and three outbreaks of cholera before the Great Stink were blamed on the ongoing problems with the river.

The smell, and fears of its possible effects, prompted action from the local and national administrators who had been considering possible solutions for the problem. The authorities accepted a proposal from the civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette to move the effluent eastwards along a series of interconnecting sewers that sloped towards outfalls beyond the metropolitan area. Work on high-, mid- and low-level systems for the new Northern and Southern Outfall Sewers started at the beginning of 1859 and lasted until 1875. To aid the drainage, pumping stations were placed to lift the sewage from lower levels into higher pipes. Two of the more ornate stations, Abbey Mills in Stratford and Crossness on the Erith Marshes, are listed for protection by English Heritage. Bazalgette's plan introduced the three embankments to London in which the sewers ran—the Victoria, Chelsea and Albert Embankments.

Bazalgette's work ensured that sewage was no longer dumped onto the shores of the Thames and brought an end to the cholera outbreaks; his actions are thought to have saved more lives than the efforts of any other Victorian official. His sewer system operates into the 21st century, servicing a city that has grown to a population of over eight million. The historian Peter Ackroyd argues that Bazalgette should be considered a hero of London.

🔗 Computing

A Gödel machine is a hypothetical self-improving computer program that solves problems in an optimal way. It uses a recursive self-improvement protocol in which it rewrites its own code when it can prove the new code provides a better strategy. The machine was invented by Jürgen Schmidhuber (first proposed in 2003), but is named after Kurt Gödel who inspired the mathematical theories.

The Gödel machine is often discussed when dealing with issues of meta-learning, also known as "learning to learn." Applications include automating human design decisions and transfer of knowledge between multiple related tasks, and may lead to design of more robust and general learning architectures. Though theoretically possible, no full implementation has been created.

The Gödel machine is often compared with Marcus Hutter's AIXItl, another formal specification for an artificial general intelligence. Schmidhuber points out that the Gödel machine could start out by implementing AIXItl as its initial sub-program, and self-modify after it finds proof that another algorithm for its search code will be better.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Russia/physical geography of Russia 🔗 Russia/economy of Russia

Kostroma Moose Farm (Russian: Костромска́я лосефе́рма) is an experimental farm in Kostroma Oblast, Russia, where a herd of moose is kept, primarily for milk production; the farm supplies moose's milk to a nearby sanitorium. It is located near the village of Sumarokovo in Krasnoselsky District of Kostroma Oblast, some 25 km east of the city of Kostroma.

🔗 Civil engineering 🔗 Water

A qanat or kariz is a gently sloping underground channel to transport water from an aquifer or water well to surface for irrigation and drinking, acting as an underground aqueduct. This is an old system of water supply from a deep well with a series of vertical access shafts. The qanats still create a reliable supply of water for human settlements and irrigation in hot, arid, and semi-arid climates, but the value of this system is directly related to the quality, volume, and regularity of the water flow. Traditionally qanats are built by a group of skilled laborers, muqannīs, with hand labor. The profession historically paid well and was typically handed down from father to son. According to most sources, the qanat technology was developed in ancient Iran by the Persian people sometime in the early 1st millennium BCE, and spread from there slowly westward and eastward. However, some other sources suggest a Southeast Arabian origin.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Judaism

Atbash (Hebrew: אתבש‎; also transliterated Atbaš) is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher originally used to encrypt the Hebrew alphabet. It can be modified for use with any known writing system with a standard collating order.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Crime

On April 16, 2013, a sophisticated assault was carried out on Pacific Gas and Electric Company's Metcalf Transmission Substation in Coyote, California, near the border of San Jose. The attack, in which gunmen fired on 17 electrical transformers, resulted in more than $15 million worth of equipment damage, but it had little impact on the station's electrical power supply.

🔗 Books 🔗 Food and drink

This Is the Boke of Cokery, or The Boke of Cokery, is believed to be the first cookery book printed in English. The name of the author is unknown. It was printed and published by Richard Pynson in 1500. The book remained in print for many years in the 16th century, but was superseded and forgotten by the 18th. The only known surviving copy of the book is in the possession of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat House, Wiltshire.

🔗 India 🔗 Numismatics

The Indian rupee sign (sign: ₹; code: INR) is the currency symbol for the Indian rupee, the official currency of India. Designed by Udaya Kumar, it was presented to the public by the Government of India on 15 July 2010, following its selection through an "open" competition among Indian residents. Before its adoption, the most commonly used symbols for the rupee were Rs, Re or, in texts in Indian languages, an appropriate abbreviation in the language used.

The design is based on the Devanagari letter "र" (ra) with a double horizontal line at the top. It also resembles the Latin capital letter "R", especially R rotunda (Ꝛ).

The Unicode character for the Indian rupee sign is U+20B9 ₹ INDIAN RUPEE SIGN. Other countries that use a rupee, such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal, still use the generic U+20A8 ₨ RUPEE SIGN character.

🔗 China 🔗 Central Asia 🔗 Languages

The Tocharian (sometimes Tokharian) languages ( or ), also known as Arśi-Kuči, Agnean-Kuchean or Kuchean-Agnean, are an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family spoken by inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, the Tocharians. The languages are known from manuscripts dating from the 5th to the 8th century AD, which were found in oasis cities on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (now part of Xinjiang in Northwest China) and the Lop Desert. The discovery of these languages in the early 20th century contradicted the formerly prevalent idea of an east–west division of the Indo-European language family as centum and satem languages, and prompted reinvigorated study of the Indo-European family. Scholars studying these manuscripts in the early 20th century identified their authors with the Tokharoi, a name used in ancient sources for people of Bactria (Tokharistan). Although this identification is now believed to be mistaken, "Tocharian" remains the usual term for these languages.

The discovered manuscripts record two closely related languages, called Tocharian A (also East Tocharian, Agnean or Turfanian) and Tocharian B (West Tocharian or Kuchean). The subject matter of the texts suggests that Tocharian A was more archaic and used as a Buddhist liturgical language, while Tocharian B was more actively spoken in the entire area from Turfan in the east to Tumshuq in the west. A body of loanwords and names found in Prakrit documents from the Lop Nor basin have been dubbed Tocharian C (Kroränian). A claimed find of ten Tocharian C texts written in Kharoṣṭhī script has been discredited.

The oldest extant manuscripts in Tocharian B are now dated to the 5th or even late 4th century AD, making Tocharian a language of Late Antiquity contemporary with Gothic, Classical Armenian, and Primitive Irish.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Law

Bleem! (styled as bleem!) is a commercial PlayStation emulator released by the Bleem! Company in 1999 for IBM-compatible PCs and Dreamcast. It is notable for being one of the few commercial software emulators to be aggressively marketed during the emulated console's lifetime, and was the center of multiple controversial lawsuits.