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🔗 Death 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Archaeology

The Hagia Triada Sarcophagus is a late Minoan 137 cm (54 in)-long limestone sarcophagus, dated to about 1400 BC or some decades later, excavated from a chamber tomb at Hagia Triada, Crete in 1903, and now on display in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum ("AMH") in Crete.

Uniquely for such a piece from this date on Crete, it is coated in plaster and painted in fresco on all faces. Otherwise the Minoans (unlike the ancient Egyptians) only used frescoes to decorate palaces and houses for the enjoyment of the living and not in funerary practice. It is the only limestone sarcophagus of its era discovered to date; there are a number of smaller terracotta "ash-chests" (larnax), painted far more crudely, usually in a single colour. It is the only object with a series of narrative scenes of Minoan funerary ritual (later sarcophagi found in the Aegean were decorated with abstract designs and patterns). It was probably originally used for the burial of a prince.

It provides probably the most comprehensive iconography of a pre-Homeric thysiastikis ceremony and one of the best pieces of information on noble burial customs when Crete was under Mycenaean rule, combining features of Minoan and Mycenaean style and subject matter, as well as probable influence from Ancient Egyptian religion.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Death 🔗 Lists 🔗 Photography 🔗 Photography/History of photography

This is a list of serious injuries and deaths in which one or more subjects of a selfie were killed or injured, either before, during or after having taken a photo of themselves, with the accident at least in part attributed to the taking of the photo.

The United States Department of Transportation estimated that during 2014, the so-called "year of the selfie", 33,000 people were injured while driving and using a cell-phone in some fashion, which can include talking, listening, and "manual button/control actuation" including taking, uploading, downloading, editing, or opening of selfies. A 2015 survey by Erie Insurance Group found that 4% of all drivers admitted to taking selfies while driving.

The Washington Post reported in January 2016 that "about half" of at least 27 "selfie related" deaths in 2015 had occurred in India. No official datasets on the number of people who died taking selfies in India exists, but reports show from 2014 up to August 2016, there have been at least 54 deaths in India while taking selfies. The Indian Ministry of Tourism asked states to identify and barricade 'selfie danger' areas, its first national attempt to deal with the selfie deaths. Mumbai Police identified at least 16 danger zones after a man drowned attempting to save a selfie-taker. No-selfie zones were also established in certain areas of the Kumbh Mela because organizers feared bottlenecks caused by selfie-takers could spark stampedes.

A 2018 study of news reports showed that between October 2011 and November 2017, there were 259 selfie deaths in 137 incidents reported globally, with the highest occurrences in India, followed by Russia, United States, and Pakistan. The mean age was 23 years old, with male deaths outnumbering female about three to one.

🔗 Computing

Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt, but can be also related to other technical endeavors) is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.

As with monetary debt, if technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate 'interest', making it harder to implement changes. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy. Technical debt is not necessarily a bad thing, and sometimes (e.g., as a proof-of-concept) is required to move projects forward. On the other hand, some experts claim that the "technical debt" metaphor tends to minimize the impact, which results in insufficient prioritization of the necessary work to correct it.

As a change is started on a codebase, there is often the need to make other coordinated changes in other parts of the codebase or documentation. Changes required that are not completed are considered debt, and until paid, will incur interest on top of interest, making it cumbersome to build a project. Although the term is used in software development primarily, it can also be applied to other professions.

🔗 Statistics

In statistics, Halton sequences are sequences used to generate points in space for numerical methods such as Monte Carlo simulations. Although these sequences are deterministic, they are of low discrepancy, that is, appear to be random for many purposes. They were first introduced in 1960 and are an example of a quasi-random number sequence. They generalize the one-dimensional van der Corput sequences.

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Theatre

In the theatre of ancient Greece, the eirôn (Ancient Greek: εἴρων) was one of three stock characters in comedy. The eirôn usually succeeded in bringing down his braggart opponent (the alazôn) by understating his own abilities.

🔗 Chemistry

Supramolecular chemistry refers to the branch of chemistry concerning chemical systems composed of a discrete number of molecules. The strength of the forces responsible for spatial organization of the system range from weak intermolecular forces, electrostatic charge, or hydrogen bonding to strong covalent bonding, provided that the electronic coupling strength remains small relative to the energy parameters of the component. While traditional chemistry concentrates on the covalent bond, supramolecular chemistry examines the weaker and reversible non-covalent interactions between molecules. These forces include hydrogen bonding, metal coordination, hydrophobic forces, van der Waals forces, pi–pi interactions and electrostatic effects.

Important concepts advanced by supramolecular chemistry include molecular self-assembly, molecular folding, molecular recognition, host–guest chemistry, mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures, and dynamic covalent chemistry. The study of non-covalent interactions is crucial to understanding many biological processes that rely on these forces for structure and function. Biological systems are often the inspiration for supramolecular research.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 France 🔗 France/Paris 🔗 Iran 🔗 Aviation/airport

Mehran Karimi Nasseri (Persian: مهران کریمی ناصری‎ pronounced [mehˈrɒn kæriˈmi nɒseˈri]; born 1946), also known as Sir Alfred Mehran, is an Iranian refugee who lived in the departure lounge of Terminal One in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 26 August 1988 until July 2006, when he was hospitalized. His autobiography was published as a book, The Terminal Man, in 2004. His story was the inspiration for the 2004 Steven Spielberg film The Terminal.

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Women's History 🔗 United States/U.S. presidential elections 🔗 United States/District of Columbia 🔗 Current events 🔗 Joe Biden 🔗 Women in Red

The inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States took place on January 20, 2021, before noon (EST), marking the commencement of the four-year term of Joe Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice president. The inaugural ceremony took place on the West Front of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. and was the 59th presidential inauguration. Biden took the presidential oath of office, before which Harris took the vice presidential oath of office.

The inauguration took place amidst extraordinary political, public health, economic, and national security crises, including outgoing President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, which incited a storming of the Capitol, Trump's unprecedented second impeachment, and a threat of widespread civil unrest, which stimulated a nationwide law enforcement response. Festivities were sharply curtailed by efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate the potential for violence near the Capitol. The live audience was limited to members of the 117th United States Congress and, for each, one guest of their choosing, resembling a State of the Union address. Public health measures such as mandatory face coverings, testing, temperature checks, and social distancing were used to protect participants in the ceremony.

"America United" and "Our Determined Democracy: Forging a More Perfect Union"—a reference to the Preamble to the United States Constitution—served as the inaugural themes.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Creative Writer is a word processor released by Microsoft Kids in 1993. Using this program, which is specifically targeted at children, it is possible to create documents such as letters, posters, flyers and stories complete with different fonts, Clip art, WordArt and effects. The interface and environment is especially targeted towards children and is set in Imaginopolis with the main helper being a character known as McZee. A sequel, Creative Writer 2, was released in 1996. Both are now discontinued, but can still be acquired from online stores and auction websites such as eBay.

The original Creative Writer was announced by Microsoft on 7 December 1993 and was released in 1994. It ran on both MS-DOS 3.2 and the Windows 3.1 operating system. A version was also released for the Apple Macintosh, compatible with computers running the classic Mac OS from the System 6 version up to Mac OS 9.

The program took place in the fictional place of Imaginopolis and had several levels of a building each with a different topic (e.g. one for plain writing, one for story templates, one for poster templates). The design of the program was very similar to that of its sister program Fine Artist. The program runs full screen and creates an all-inclusive environment. The interface was similar to a later product called Microsoft Bob.

Creative Writer featured many of the features found on Microsoft's Word for Windows product, including the WordArt feature used to create titles and headlines and the ability to add clip art. Creative Writer also used sounds heavily where each tool would make a different noise. Examples of this include a vacuum cleaner suction to delete and an explosion to denote deleting everything from a page.

🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America

The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various Indigenous peoples of North America: squash, maize ("corn"), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.

Indigenous peoples throughout North America cultivated different varieties of the Three Sisters, adapted to varying local environments. The individual crops and their use in polyculture originated in Mesoamerica; where squash was domesticated first, followed by maize and then beans, over a period of 5,000–6,500 years. European records from the sixteenth century describe highly productive Indigenous agriculture based on cultivation of the Three Sisters throughout what are now the Eastern United States and Canada, where the crops were used for both food and trade. Geographer Carl O. Sauer described the Three Sisters as "a symbiotic plant complex of North and Central America without an equal elsewhere".