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🔗 United States 🔗 United States/Washington - Seattle 🔗 United States/Washington

Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine was a Coke vending machine in Capitol Hill, Seattle, that was in operation since at least the early 1990s until its disappearance in 2018. It is unknown who stocked the machine.

🔗 United States 🔗 Germany 🔗 Canada 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Canada/Ontario 🔗 Hawaii

Hawaiian pizza is a pizza topped with tomato sauce, cheese, pineapple, and ham.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Websites 🔗 Websites/Computing

Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, allowing users to organize their bookmarks and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.

Musaeum Clausum (Latin for Sealed Museum), also known as Bibliotheca abscondita, is a tract written by Sir Thomas Browne which was first published posthumously in 1684. The tract contains short sentence descriptions of supposed, rumoured or lost books, pictures, and objects. The subtitle describes the tract as an inventory of remarkable books, antiquities, pictures and rarities of several kinds, scarce or never seen by any man now living. Its date is unknown: however, an event from the year 1673 is cited.

Like his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Musaeum Clausum is a catalogue of doubts and queries, only this time, in a style which anticipates the 20th-century Argentinian short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges, who once declared: "To write vast books is a laborious nonsense; much better is to offer a summary as if those books actually existed."

Browne however was not the first author to engage in such fantasy. The French author Rabelais, in his epic Gargantua and Pantagruel, also penned a list of imaginary and often obscene book titles in his "Library of Pantagruel", an inventory which Browne himself alludes to in his Religio Medici.

As the 17th-century Scientific Revolution progressed the popularity and growth of antiquarian collections, those claiming to house highly improbable items grew. Browne was an avid collector of antiquities and natural specimens, possessing a supposed unicorn's horn, presented to him by Arthur Dee. Browne's eldest son Edward visited the famous scholar Athanasius Kircher, founder of the Museo Kircherano at Rome in 1667, whose exhibits included an engine for attempting perpetual motion and a speaking head, which Kircher called his Oraculum Delphinium. He wrote to his father of his visit to the Jesuit priest's "closet of rarities".

The sheer volume of book-titles, pictures and objects listed in Musaeum Clausum is testimony to Browne's fertile imagination. However, his major editors, Simon Wilkin in the nineteenth century (1834) and Sir Geoffrey Keynes in the twentieth (1924), summarily dismissed it. Keynes considered its humour too erudite and "not to everyone's taste".

Browne's miscellaneous tract may also be read as a parody of the rising trend of private museum collections with their curios of doubtful origin, and perhaps also of publications such as the so-called Museum Hermeticum (1678), one of the last great anthologies of alchemical literature, with their divulging of near common-place alchemical concepts and symbols.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 Lithuania 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages 🔗 Beer

Kvass is a fermented cereal-based non-alcoholic or low alcoholic (0.5–1.0% or 1–2 proof) beverage with a slightly cloudy appearance, light-dark brown colour and sweet-sour taste. It may be flavoured with berries, fruits, herbs, honey

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

Timsort is a hybrid stable sorting algorithm, derived from merge sort and insertion sort, designed to perform well on many kinds of real-world data. It was implemented by Tim Peters in 2002 for use in the Python programming language. The algorithm finds subsequences of the data that are already ordered (runs) and uses them to sort the remainder more efficiently. This is done by merging runs until certain criteria are fulfilled. Timsort has been Python's standard sorting algorithm since version 2.3. It is also used to sort arrays of non-primitive type in Java SE 7, on the Android platform, in GNU Octave, on V8, and Swift.

It uses techniques from Peter McIlroy's 1993 paper "Optimistic Sorting and Information Theoretic Complexity".

🔗 Caves

Snottite, also snoticle, is a microbial mat of single-celled extremophilic bacteria which hang from the walls and ceilings of caves and are similar to small stalactites, but have the consistency of nasal mucus. In the Frasassi Caves in Italy, over 70% of cells in Snottite have been identified as Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans, with smaller populations including an archaeon in the uncultivated 'G-plasma' clade of Thermoplasmatales (>15%) and a bacterium in the Acidimicrobiaceae family (>5%).

The bacteria derive their energy from chemosynthesis of volcanic sulfur compounds including H₂S and warm-water solution dripping down from above, producing sulfuric acid. Because of this, their waste products are highly acidic (approaching pH=0), with similar properties to battery acid. Researchers at the University of Texas have suggested that this sulfuric acid may be a more significant cause of cave formation than the usual explanation offered of the carbonic acid formed from carbon dioxide dissolved in water.

Snottites were brought to attention by researchers Diana Northup and Penny Boston studying them (and other organisms) in a toxic sulfur cave called Cueva de Villa Luz (Cave of the Lighted House), in Tabasco, Mexico. Snottites were first discovered in this cave by Jim Pisarowicz in 1986, who also coined the term.

The BBC series Wonders of the Solar System saw Professor Brian Cox examining snottites and positing that if there is life on Mars, it may be similarly primitive and hidden beneath the surface of the Red Planet.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Glass

A glass knife is a knife with a blade made of glass, with a fracture line forming an extremely sharp cutting edge.

Glass knives were used in antiquity due to their natural sharpness and the ease with which they could be manufactured. In modern electron microscopy glass knives are used to make the ultrathin sections needed for imaging.

Alternative Title: Just because you have some money, that doesn't mean that you have to spend it.

In biology, the hallmarks of an aggressive cancer include limitless multiplication of ordinarily beneficial cells, even when the body signals that further multiplication is no longer needed. The Wikipedia page on the wheat and chessboard problem explains that nothing can keep growing forever. In biology, the unwanted growth usually terminates with the death of the host. Ever-increasing spending can often lead to the same undesirable result in organizations.

🔗 Computer graphics

Pixel-art scaling algorithms are graphical filters that are often used in video game console emulators to enhance hand-drawn 2D pixel art graphics. The re-scaling of pixel art is a specialist sub-field of image rescaling.

As pixel-art graphics are usually in very low resolutions, they rely on careful placing of individual pixels, often with a limited palette of colors. This results in graphics that rely on a high amount of stylized visual cues to define complex shapes with very little resolution, down to individual pixels. This makes image scaling of pixel art a particularly difficult problem.

A number of specialized algorithms have been developed to handle pixel-art graphics, as the traditional scaling algorithms do not take such perceptual cues into account.

Since a typical application of this technology is improving the appearance of fourth-generation and earlier video games on arcade and console emulators, many are designed to run in real time for sufficiently small input images at 60 frames per second. This places constraints on the type of programming techniques that can be used for this sort of real-time processing. Many work only on specific scale factors: 2× is the most common, with 3×, 4×, 5× and 6× also present.