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🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Chicago 🔗 Armenia

Alexander (Smbat) Abian (January 1, 1923 – July 24, 1999) was an Iranian-born Armenian-American mathematician who taught for over 25 years at Iowa State University and became notable for his frequent posts to various Usenet newsgroups, and his advocacy for the destruction of the Moon.

🔗 Canada 🔗 Appalachia 🔗 Canada/British Columbia

Anvil firing (also known as anvil launching or anvil shooting) is the practice of firing an anvil into the air with gunpowder.

In the UK, the term refers to a method of testing anvils. Black powder was poured onto the top of the anvil and ignited. If the anvil did not shatter it was deemed safe to use.

🔗 Crime 🔗 Mining

Sand theft or unauthorised or illegal sand mining leads to a widely unknown global example of natural and non-renewable resource depletion problem comparable in extent to global water scarcity. Beach theft is illegal removal of large quantities of sand from a beach leading to full or partial disappearance of the beach.

🔗 United States 🔗 Business 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages

Between 1886 and 1959, the price of a 6.5-oz glass or bottle of Coca-Cola was set at five cents, or one nickel, and remained fixed with very little local fluctuation. The Coca-Cola Company was able to maintain this price for several reasons, including bottling contracts the company signed in 1899, advertising, vending machine technology, and a relatively low rate of inflation. The fact that the price of the drink was able to remain the same for over seventy years is especially significant considering the events that occurred during that period, including the founding of Pepsi, World War I, Prohibition, changing taxes, a caffeine and caramel shortage, World War II, and the company's desire to raise its prices. Much of the research on this subject comes from "The Real Thing": Nominal Price Rigidity of the Nickel Coke, 1886–1959, a 2004 paper by economists Daniel Levy and Andrew Young.

🔗 Mathematics

The expression "casting out nines" may refer to any one of three arithmetical procedures:

• Adding the decimal digits of a positive whole number, while optionally ignoring any 9s or digits which sum to a multiple of 9. The result of this procedure is a number which is smaller than the original whenever the original has more than one digit, leaves the same remainder as the original after division by nine, and may be obtained from the original by subtracting a multiple of 9 from it. The name of the procedure derives from this latter property.
• Repeated application of this procedure to the results obtained from previous applications until a single-digit number is obtained. This single-digit number is called the "digital root" of the original. If a number is divisible by 9, its digital root is 9. Otherwise, its digital root is the remainder it leaves after being divided by 9.
• A sanity test in which the above-mentioned procedures are used to check for errors in arithmetical calculations. The test is carried out by applying the same sequence of arithmetical operations to the digital roots of the operands as are applied to the operands themselves. If no mistakes are made in the calculations, the digital roots of the two resultants should be the same. If they are different, therefore, one or more mistakes must have been made in the calculations.

🔗 United States 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Canada 🔗 Canada/British Columbia 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 Mythology 🔗 United States/Washington

"Thunderbird and Whale" is an indigenous myth belonging to the mythological traditions of a number of tribes from the Pacific Northwest.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory

Fifth-generation warfare (5GW) is warfare that is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, misinformation, cyberattacks, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. Fifth generation warfare has been described by Daniel Abbot as a war of "information and perception". There is no widely agreed upon definition of fifth-generation warfare, and it has been rejected by some scholars, including William S. Lind, who was one of the original theorists of fourth-generation warfare.

🔗 Horticulture and Gardening 🔗 Occupations

Garden hermits or ornamental hermits were hermits encouraged to live in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy landowners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to dress like druids and remain permanently on site, where they could be fed, cared for, and consulted for advice, or viewed for entertainment.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy

In astrophysics and physical cosmology, Olbers' paradox, named after the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840), also known as the "dark night sky paradox", is the argument that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. In the hypothetical case that the universe is static, homogeneous at a large scale, and populated by an infinite number of stars, then any line of sight from Earth must end at the (very bright) surface of a star and hence the night sky should be completely illuminated and very bright. This contradicts the observed darkness and non-uniformity of the night.

The darkness of the night sky is one of the pieces of evidence for a dynamic universe, such as the Big Bang model. That model explains the observed non-uniformity of brightness by invoking spacetime's expansion, which lengthens the light originating from the Big Bang to microwave levels via a process known as redshift; this microwave radiation background has wavelengths much longer than those of visible light, so appears dark to the naked eye. Other explanations for the paradox have been offered, but none have wide acceptance in cosmology.