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🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Aviation/aerospace biography 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Biography/sports and games 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin  (9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet Air Forces pilot and cosmonaut who became the first human to journey into outer space, achieving a major milestone in the Space Race; his capsule Vostok 1 completed one orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961. Gagarin became an international celebrity and was awarded many medals and titles, including Hero of the Soviet Union, his nation's highest honour.

Born in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (a town later renamed after him), in his youth Gagarin was a foundryman at a steel plant in Lyubertsy. He later joined the Soviet Air Forces as a pilot and was stationed at the Luostari Air Base, near the Norwegian border, before his selection for the Soviet space programme with five other cosmonauts. Following his spaceflight, Gagarin became deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre, which was later named after him. He was also elected as a deputy of the Soviet of the Union in 1962 and then to the Soviet of Nationalities, respectively the lower and upper chambers of the Supreme Soviet.

Vostok 1 was Gagarin's only spaceflight but he served as the backup crew to the Soyuz 1 mission, which ended in a fatal crash, killing his friend and fellow cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. Fearing for his life, Soviet officials permanently banned Gagarin from further spaceflights. After completing training at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy on 17 February 1968, he was allowed to fly regular aircraft. Gagarin died five weeks later when the MiG-15 training jet he was piloting with his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin crashed near the town of Kirzhach.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Time

The Antikythera mechanism (, ) is an ancient hand powered Greek analogue computer which has also been described as the first example of such device used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for calendar and astrological purposes decades in advance. It could also be used to track the four-year cycle of athletic games which was similar to an Olympiad, the cycle of the ancient Olympic Games.

This artefact was retrieved from the sea in 1901, and identified on 17 May 1902 as containing a gear by archaeologist Valerios Stais, among wreckage retrieved from a shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera. The instrument is believed to have been designed and constructed by Greek scientists and has been variously dated to about 87 BC, or between 150 and 100 BC, or to 205 BC, or to within a generation before the shipwreck, which has been dated to approximately 70–60 BC.

The device, housed in the remains of a 34 cm × 18 cm × 9 cm (13.4 in × 7.1 in × 3.5 in) wooden box, was found as one lump, later separated into three main fragments which are now divided into 82 separate fragments after conservation efforts. Four of these fragments contain gears, while inscriptions are found on many others. The largest gear is approximately 14 centimetres (5.5 in) in diameter and originally had 223 teeth.

It is a complex clockwork mechanism composed of at least 30 meshing bronze gears. A team led by Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth at Cardiff University used modern computer x-ray tomography and high resolution surface scanning to image inside fragments of the crust-encased mechanism and read the faintest inscriptions that once covered the outer casing of the machine.

Detailed imaging of the mechanism suggests that it had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the movements of the Moon and the Sun through the zodiac, to predict eclipses and even to model the irregular orbit of the Moon, where the Moon's velocity is higher in its perigee than in its apogee. This motion was studied in the 2nd century BC by astronomer Hipparchus of Rhodes, and it is speculated that he may have been consulted in the machine's construction.

The knowledge of this technology was lost at some point in antiquity. Similar technological works later appeared in the medieval Byzantine and Islamic worlds, but works with similar complexity did not appear again until the development of mechanical astronomical clocks in Europe in the fourteenth century. All known fragments of the Antikythera mechanism are now kept at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, along with a number of artistic reconstructions and replicas of the mechanism to demonstrate how it may have looked and worked.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Criminal Biography 🔗 United States/Colorado

Marvin John Heemeyer (October 28, 1951 – June 4, 2004) was an automobile muffler repair shop owner who demolished numerous buildings with a modified bulldozer in Granby, Colorado, on June 4, 2004.

Heemeyer had feuded with Granby town officials, particularly over fines for violating city health ordinances after local officials disconnected Heemeyer's business from the city sewage system to make way for a concrete plant on an adjacent parcel. He was subsequently fined for improperly dumping sewage from his business instead of connecting to the city sewer system. Over about eighteen months Heemeyer had secretly modified a Komatsu D355A bulldozer by adding layers of steel and concrete, intended to serve as armor. On June 4, 2004, Heemeyer's feud with Granby culminated in a spree in which he used the armored bulldozer to demolish the Granby town hall, the former mayor's house, and several other buildings. Heemeyer's rampage concluded with his suicide, after his bulldozer became trapped in the basement of a hardware store he had been in the process of destroying.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Books 🔗 Novels/Short story 🔗 Horror

The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The British first edition was published by Chatto & Windus in 1895 (316 pages).

The book contains nine short stories and a sequence of poems; while the first stories belong to the genres of supernatural horror and weird fiction, The King in Yellow progressively transitions towards a more light-hearted tone, ending with romantic stories devoid of horror or supernatural elements. The horror stories are highly esteemed, and it has been described by critics such as E. F. Bleiler, S. T. Joshi, and T. E. D. Klein as a classic in the field of the supernatural. Lin Carter called it "an absolute masterpiece, probably the single greatest book of weird fantasy written in this country between the death of Poe and the rise of Lovecraft", and it was an influence on Lovecraft himself.

The book is named for the eponymous play within the stories which recurs as a motif through the first four stories, a forbidden play which induces madness in those who read it.

🔗 United States 🔗 Film 🔗 Library of Congress 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Film/Silent films 🔗 Film/Documentary films 🔗 United States/Film - American cinema

A Trip Down Market Street is a 13-minute actuality film recorded by placing a movie camera on the front of a cable car as it traveled down San Francisco’s Market Street. The film shows many details of daily life in a major early 20th century American city, including the transportation, fashions and architecture of the era. The film begins at 8th Street and continues eastward to the cable car turntable, at The Embarcadero, in front of the Ferry Building. Landmarks passed in the latter part of the first half include the Call Building (then San Francisco's tallest) and the Palace Hotel (both on the right; Lotta's Fountain is on the left between the two but is in the shade). The film was produced by the four Miles brothers: Harry, Herbert, Earle and Joe. It is notable for capturing San Francisco four days before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which started on the morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906.

The Miles brothers had been producing films in New York including films shot in San Francisco. In September 1905 they shot the fight between Oscar "Battling" Nelson and Jimmy Britt in Colma, California, just south of San Francisco city limits. The Miles brothers established a studio at 1139 Market Street in San Francisco in early 1906. They shot a railroad descent down Mount Tamalpais as well as the Market Street film. On April 17, Harry and Joe Miles boarded a train for New York, taking the two films with them, but they heard about the earthquake and sent the films to New York while they boarded another train headed back to San Francisco. The Turk Street house of Earle Miles survived the earthquake and subsequent catastrophic fire but the studio did not. The Miles brothers based their business out of Earle's home, and shot more film of post-earthquake scenes; some of this footage, including that of a second trip down a now devastated Market Street, reemerged in 2016. It is likely that the Market Street film survives today because it was sent away before the fire.

Several 35mm prints exist with slight changes in footage. Copies are held at the Library of Congress and the Prelinger Archives. A digital version is viewable online at Internet Archive, YouTube and Wikimedia Commons. In 2010, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

🔗 Time

The Pax calendar was invented by James A. Colligan, SJ in 1930 as a perennializing reform of the annualized Gregorian calendar.

🔗 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.

🔗 Korea 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Korea/North Korea

North Korea has several restaurants serving pizza. Most people in the country cannot afford pizza, and it is mostly available for the elite. Pyongyang has five restaurants that serve pizza, including Pizza Restaurant on Kwangbok Street and Italy Pizza on Mirae Scientists Street. Kim Jong Il hired Italian chefs to train North Koreans in pizza making and introduced it to the country.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Biology 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 United States History 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine

Unethical human experimentation in the United States describes numerous experiments performed on human test subjects in the United States that have been considered unethical, and were often performed illegally, without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects. Such tests have occurred throughout American history, but particularly in the 20th century. The experiments include: the exposure of humans to many chemical and biological weapons (including infection with deadly or debilitating diseases), human radiation experiments, injection of toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children, the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of "medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities, or prisoners.

Funding for many of the experiments was provided by the United States government, especially the United States military, the Central Intelligence Agency, or private corporations involved with military activities. The human research programs were usually highly secretive, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.

The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant, and led to many institutions and policies that attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outrage in the late 20th century over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission, both of 1975, and the 1994 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, among others.

🔗 Holidays

System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day, SysAdminDay, is an annual event created by system administrator Ted Kekatos. The event exists to show appreciation for the work of sysadmins and other IT workers. It is celebrated on the last Friday in July.