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🔗 Biography 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Biography/politics and government 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom

Count Binface is a satirical perennial candidate created by the British comedian Jonathan David Harvey in 2018. He was a candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the 2019 United Kingdom general election against the then prime minister, Boris Johnson. He also stood in the London Mayoral elections in 2021 and 2024.

In earlier elections, Harvey stood as Lord Buckethead, but was forced to change the character due to a copyright dispute with the American filmmaker Todd Durham, who created Lord Buckethead for his 1984 science fiction film Hyperspace. Since then Harvey has used the forced name change to his advantage by using the platform of Binface to promote electoral participation, with the slogan, "Make your vote COUNT".

In 2019, another individual contested the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat as Buckethead, representing the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, to which Binface said he "look[s] forward to both the hustings and to challenging [him] to take part in a receptacle-to-receptacle debate".

When Johnson resigned as an MP in 2023, Binface again stood as a candidate in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, finishing eighth of 17. Originally standing as an independent, since 2023 his affiliation has been given as Count Binface Party on ballot papers. Count Binface plans to contest the seat of current UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in Richmond and Northallerton, in the 2024 general election on 4 July.

🔗 History of Science 🔗 Robotics

Leachim was an early example of Diphone synthetic speech and demonstrated how voice branching could be done quickly via computer discs to create understandable speech (i.e. verbal output). This method combined phonemes, words, and sentences to form verbal responsive messages when prompted by the computer. The device received attention on a world-wide basis because hundreds of articles were written about it.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Photography 🔗 Africa/South Sudan

The Vulture and the Little Girl, also known as The Struggling Girl, is a photograph by Kevin Carter which first appeared in The New York Times on 26 March 1993. It is a photograph of a frail famine-stricken boy, initially believed to be a girl, who had collapsed in the foreground with a hooded vulture eyeing him from nearby. The child was reported to be attempting to reach a United Nations feeding centre about a half mile away in Ayod, Sudan (now South Sudan), in March 1993, and to have survived the incident. The picture won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography award in 1994. Carter took his own life four months after winning the prize.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing

BBCode ("Bulletin Board Code") is a lightweight markup language used to format messages in many Internet forum software. It was first introduced in 1998. The available "tags" of BBCode are usually indicated by square brackets ([ and ]) surrounding a keyword, and are parsed before being translated into HTML.

Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.

An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon's list of political opponents. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Chomsky's commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. An anti-Zionist, Chomsky considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African-style apartheid, and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.

Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. Chomsky remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, U.S. involvement and Israel's role in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mass media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Since 2017, he has been Agnese Helms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 United States/Texas 🔗 Biography/Actors and Filmmakers 🔗 Biography/Musicians 🔗 Westerns 🔗 Westerns/Biography

Audie Leon Murphy (20 June 1925 – 28 May 1971) was an American soldier, actor, and songwriter. He was widely celebrated as the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II, and has been described as the most highly decorated soldier in U.S. history. He received every military combat award for valor available from the United States Army, as well as French and Belgian awards for heroism. Murphy received the Medal of Honor for valor that he demonstrated at the age of 19 for single-handedly holding off a company of German soldiers for an hour at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, before leading a successful counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition.

Murphy was born into a large family of sharecroppers in Hunt County, Texas. After his father abandoned them, his mother died when he was a teenager. Murphy left school in fifth grade to pick cotton and find other work to help support his family; his skill with a hunting rifle helped feed his family.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Murphy's older sister helped him to falsify documentation about his birthdate in order to meet the minimum age requirement for enlisting in the military. Turned down initially for being underweight by the Army, Navy, and the Marine Corps, he eventually was able to enlist in the Army. He first saw action in the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily; then in 1944 he participated in the Battle of Anzio, the liberation of Rome, and the invasion of southern France. Murphy fought at Montélimar and led his men on a successful assault at L'Omet quarry near Cleurie in northeastern France in October. Despite suffering from multiple illnesses and wounds throughout his service, Murphy became one of the most praised and decorated soldiers of World War II. He is credited with killing 241 enemy soldiers.

After the war, Murphy embarked on a 21-year acting career. He played himself in the 1955 autobiographical film To Hell and Back, based on his 1949 memoirs of the same name, but most of his roles were in Westerns. He made guest appearances on celebrity television shows and starred in the series Whispering Smith. Murphy was a fairly accomplished songwriter. He bred quarter horses in California and Arizona, and became a regular participant in horse racing.

Because Murphy had what would today be described as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), then known as "battle fatigue", he slept with a loaded handgun under his pillow. He looked for solace in addictive sleeping pills. In his last few years, he was plagued by money problems but refused offers to appear in alcohol and cigarette commercials because he did not want to set a bad example. Murphy died in a plane crash in Virginia in 1971, shortly before his 46th birthday. He was interred with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery, where his grave is one of the most visited.

🔗 Sailing

The Vestas Sailrocket was built to capture the sailing speed record competing in the B-class for 150 to 235 square feet of sail. It is piloted by the project leader Paul Larsen and sponsored by Danish wind turbines manufacturer Vestas. In 2008 the first version reached a reported unofficial speed of 52.22 knots (96.71 km/h), before crashing.

After being upgraded to a second version, the Vestas Sailrocket 2 began a campaign to break speed records in November 2012 off Walvis Bay, Namibia. On 12 November, it made a 54.08 knots (100.16 km/h) run over a 500 metres (1,600 ft) distance, then 59.23 knots (109.69 km/h) on the 16th. It attained 55.32 knots (102.45 km/h) on a one-mile run on the 18th and simultaneously 59.38 knots (109.97 km/h) on 500m. On 24 November, with wind speeds at roughly 25 knots (46 km/h), it ran the 500m course at 65.45 knots (121.21 km/h) with a 68.01 knots (125.95 km/h) peak. Both records are ratified by the World Sailing Speed Record Council (WSSRC) for the 500m and the mile.

A Swiss team of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne university students and engineers, including members involved in the development of previous record-holder Hydroptère, formed in October 2019 to develop a new hydrofoil boat, SP80, to exceed the Vestas Sailrocket 2 record in 2022, with a target speed of 80 knots. As of April 2023, the speed record attempts were pushed back to 2024 and are scheduled to take place in Leucate.

🔗 Telecommunications

A dark fibre or unlit fibre is an unused optical fibre, available for use in fibre-optic communication. Dark fibre may be leased from a network service provider.

Dark fibre originally referred to the potential network capacity of telecommunication infrastructure. Because the marginal cost of installing additional fibre optic cables is very low once a trench has been dug or conduit laid, a great excess of fibre was installed in the US during the telecom boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This excess capacity was later referred to as dark fibre following the dot-com crash of the early 2000s that briefly reduced demand for high-speed data transmission.

These unused fibre optic cables later created a new market for unique private services that could not be accommodated on lit fibre cables (i.e., cables used in traditional long-distance communication).

🔗 Film 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Japan 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Japanese military history 🔗 Film/War films 🔗 Military history/War films 🔗 Anime and manga 🔗 Japan/Japanese cinema 🔗 Anime and manga/Studio Ghibli 🔗 Film/Japanese cinema 🔗 Film/Animated films

Grave of the Fireflies (Japanese: 火垂るの墓, Hepburn: Hotaru no Haka) is a 1988 Japanese animated war drama film written and directed by Isao Takahata, and produced by Studio Ghibli. It is based on the 1967 semi-autobiographical short story Grave of the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka.

The film stars Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi, Yoshiko Shinohara and Akemi Yamaguchi. Set in the city of Kobe, Japan, it tells the story of siblings and war orphans Seita and Setsuko, and their desperate struggle to survive during the final months of World War II. Universally acclaimed, Grave of the Fireflies has been ranked as one of the greatest war films of all time and is recognized as a major work of Japanese animation.