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🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Animation

Robert Herman "Bob" Givens (March 2, 1918 – December 14, 2017) was an American animator, character designer, and layout artist. He worked for numerous animation studios during his career, including Walt Disney Animation Studios, Warner Bros. Cartoons, Hanna-Barbera, and DePatie–Freleng Enterprises, beginning his career during the late 1930s and continuing until the early 2000s. He was a frequent collaborator with director Chuck Jones, working with Jones both at Warner Bros. and Jones' own production company.

🔗 New York (state)

The Larkin Company, also known as the Larkin Soap Company, was a company founded in 1875 in Buffalo, New York as a small soap factory. It grew tremendously throughout the late 1800s and into the first quarter of the 1900s with an approach called "The Larkin Idea" that transformed the company into a mail-order conglomerate that employed 2,000 people and had annual sales of $28.6 million (equivalent to $434,986,000 in 2023) in 1920. The company's success allowed them to hire Frank Lloyd Wright to design the iconic Larkin Administration Building which stood as a symbol of Larkin prosperity until the company's demise in the 1940s.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Syria 🔗 Israel 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Explosives 🔗 Military history/Post-Cold War 🔗 Lebanon

On 17 September 2024, communication pagers simultaneously exploded across Lebanon and Syria in an apparent coordinated attack. Many of the pagers were owned by members of the Hezbollah militant group. Eighteen people were confirmed killed: eleven in Lebanon (including a child and at least two Hezbollah members) and seven in Syria. Around 4,000 people were reportedly injured, including Hezbollah members and civilians.

The blasts affected several Hezbollah strongholds, including Beirut's Dahieh suburb, southern Lebanon, and in the Beqaa Valley. Over 500 of the group's militants lost their eyesight. They called the incident the organization's "biggest security breach yet" and accused Israel of responsibility.

A day after Hamas launched its October 7 attacks on Israel in 2023, the Iranian-backed organization Hezbollah joined the conflict in support of Hamas by firing on Israel. This led to a series of cross-border military exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel. In February 2024, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, told the group's members to use pagers instead of cell phones, claiming that Israel had infiltrated their cell phone network. Hezbollah then bought a new brand of pagers that were recently imported to Lebanon.

Earlier on the day of the explosion, Israel's domestic security agency, the Shin Bet, announced it had thwarted a Hezbollah plot to assassinate a former senior defense official using an explosive device.

Around 150 hospitals across Lebanon received victims of the attack, which saw chaotic scenes.

🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Iran 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Stanford University

Maryam Mirzakhani (Persian: مریم میرزاخانی‎, pronounced [mæɾˈjæm miːɾzɑːxɑːˈniː]; 12 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research topics included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. In 2005, as a result of her research, she was honored in Popular Science's fourth annual "Brilliant 10" in which she was acknowledged as one of the top 10 young minds who have pushed their fields in innovative directions.

On 13 August 2014, Mirzakhani was honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. Thus, she became both the first, and to date, the only woman and the first Iranian to be honored with the award. The award committee cited her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".

On 14 July 2017, Mirzakhani died of breast cancer at the age of 40.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Disability 🔗 Neuroscience

Aphantasia is a condition where one does not possess a functioning mind's eye and cannot voluntarily visualize imagery. The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880 but has since remained largely unstudied. Interest in the phenomenon renewed after the publication of a study in 2015 conducted by a team led by Professor Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter, which also coined the term aphantasia. Research on the condition is still scarce.

🔗 United States 🔗 Saudi Arabia

In January 2020, the FTI Consulting company claimed that in May 2018 with "medium to high confidence" the phone of Jeff Bezos had been hacked by a file sent from the WhatsApp account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. The Saudi Arabian embassy to the United States has denied the allegations. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post newspaper and founder of the company Amazon, engaged FTI Consulting in February 2019 after the National Enquirer in January 2019 reported details of Bezos's affair. FTI Consulting did not link the National Enquirer to the hack. In December 2021, the FBI stated they could not find proof to substantiate claims that Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos phone, and has considered an investigation into those allegations a low priority.

NAR 2 (Serbian Nastavni Računar 2, en. Educational Computer 2) is a theoretical model of a 32-bit word computer created by Faculty of Mathematics of University of Belgrade professor Nedeljko Parezanović as an enhancement to its predecessor, NAR 1. It was used for Assembly language and Computer architecture courses. The word "nar" means Pomegranate in Serbian. Many NAR 2 simulators have been created — for instance, one was named "Šljiva" (en. plum) as that fruit grows in Serbia, while "nar" does not.

🔗 Mathematics

In geometry, Monge's theorem, named after Gaspard Monge, states that for any three circles in a plane, none of which is completely inside one of the others, the intersection points of each of the three pairs of external tangent lines are collinear.

For any two circles in a plane, an external tangent is a line that is tangent to both circles but does not pass between them. There are two such external tangent lines for any two circles. Each such pair has a unique intersection point in the extended Euclidean plane. Monge's theorem states that the three such points given by the three pairs of circles always lie in a straight line. In the case of two of the circles being of equal size, the two external tangent lines are parallel. In this case Monge's theorem asserts that the other two intersection points must lie on a line parallel to those two external tangents. In other words, if the two external tangents are considered to intersect at the point at infinity, then the other two intersection points must be on a line passing through the same point at infinity, so the line between them takes the same angle as the external tangent.

🔗 Sports

Naismith's rule helps with the planning of a walking or hiking expedition by calculating how long it will take to travel the intended route, including any extra time taken when walking uphill. This rule of thumb was devised by William W. Naismith, a Scottish mountaineer, in 1892. A modern version can be formulated as follows:

Allow one hour for every 3 miles (5 km) forward, plus an additional hour for every 2,000 feet (600 m) of ascent.

🔗 Netherlands

Broodfonds (English: "Bread fund") is a Dutch collective that allows independent entrepreneurs to provide each other with temporary sick leave. Those who wish to participate in a bread fund can join an existing group of likeminded entrepreneurs, or start one themselves. The recommended minimum is 25 people, the maximum size is 50 people to avoid a degree of anonymity. A 'broodfonds' organises solidarity by personal connections and networking and its members are self-governing.