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🔗 Cetaceans 🔗 Energy

Spermaceti is a waxy substance found in the head cavities of the sperm whale (and, in smaller quantities, in the oils of other whales). Spermaceti is created in the spermaceti organ inside the whale's head. This organ may contain as much as 1,900 litres (500 US gal) of spermaceti. It has been extracted by whalers since the 17th century for human use in cosmetics, textiles, and candles.

Theories for the spermaceti organ's biological function suggest that it may control buoyancy, may act as a focusing apparatus for the whale's sense of echolocation, or possibly both. There has been concrete evidence to support both theories. The buoyancy theory holds that the sperm whale is capable of heating the spermaceti, lowering its density and thus allowing the whale to float; in order for the whale to sink again, it must take water into its blowhole which cools the spermaceti into a denser solid. This claim has been called into question by recent research which indicates a lack of biological structures to support this heat exchange, as well as the fact that the change in density is too small to be meaningful until the organ grows to huge size. Measurement of the proportion of wax esters retained by a harvested sperm whale accurately described the age and future life expectancy of a given individual. The proportion of wax esters in the spermaceti organ increases with the age of the whale: 38–51% in calves, 58–87% in adult females, and 71–94% in adult males.

Spermaceti wax is extracted from sperm oil by crystallisation at 6 °C (43 °F), when treated by pressure and a chemical solution of caustic alkali. Spermaceti forms brilliant white crystals that are hard but oily to the touch, and are devoid of taste or smell, making it very useful as an ingredient in cosmetics, leatherworking, and lubricants. The substance was also used in making candles of a standard photometric value, in the dressing of fabrics, and as a pharmaceutical excipient, especially in cerates and ointments.

The whaling industry in the 17th and 18th centuries was developed to find, harvest and refine the contents of the head of a sperm whale. The crews seeking spermaceti routinely left on three-year tours on several oceans. Cetaceous lamp oil was a commodity that created many maritime fortunes. The light produced by a single pure spermaceti source (candle) became the standard measurement of "candlepower" for another century. Candlepower, a photometric unit defined in the United Kingdom Act of Parliament Metropolitan Gas Act 1860 and adopted at the International Electrotechnical Conference of 1883, was based on the light produced by a pure spermaceti candle.

🔗 Italy 🔗 Geography

The Aosta Valley (Italian: Valle d'Aosta [ˈvalle daˈɔsta] (official) or Val d'Aosta (usual); French: Vallée d'Aoste; Arpitan: Val d'Outa; Walser: Augschtalann or Ougstalland; Piedmontese: Val d'Osta) is a mountainous autonomous region in northwestern Italy. It is bordered by Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France, to the west, Valais, Switzerland, to the north, and by Piedmont, Italy, to the south and east. The regional capital is Aosta.

Covering an area of 3,263 km² (1,260 sq mi) and with a population of about 128,000 it is the smallest, least populous, and least densely populated region of Italy. The province of Aosta having been dissolved in 1945, the Aosta Valley region was the first region of Italy to abolish provincial subdivisions. Provincial administrative functions are provided by the regional government. The region is divided into 74 comuni (French: communes).

Italian and French are the official languages, though the native population also speak Valdôtain, a dialect of Franco-Provençal. Italian is spoken as a mother tongue by 77.29% of population, Valdôtain by 17.91%, and French by 1.25%. In 2009, reportedly 50.53% of the population could speak all three languages.

🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Video games 🔗 Chess

Battle Chess is a computer game version of chess in which the chess pieces come to life and battle one another when capturing. It was originally developed and released by Interplay Entertainment for the Amiga in 1988 and subsequently on many other systems, including 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, Acorn Archimedes, Amiga CD32, Amiga CDTV, Apple IIGS, Apple IIe, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, FM Towns, NES, Mac OS, NEC PC-9801, X68000 and Microsoft Windows. In 1991, Battle Chess Enhanced was released by Interplay for the PC, featuring improved VGA graphics and a symphonic musical score that played from the CD-ROM.

Battle Chess was critically acclaimed and commercially successful, resulting in two official follow-ups as well as several inspired games. Its remake, Battle Chess: Game of Kings, was released on Steam on December 11, 2015.

🔗 United States 🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 United States/Film - American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Comedy 🔗 20th Century Studios

Idiocracy is a 2006 American science fiction comedy film co-produced and directed by Mike Judge from a screenplay written by Judge and Etan Cohen based on a story written by Judge. The plot follows United States Army librarian Joe Bauers and prostitute Rita, who undergo a government hibernation experiment. Joe and Rita awake five hundred years later in a dystopian anti-intellectual society. The cast includes Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, Terry Crews, David Herman, Justin Long, Andrew Wilson, and Brad Jordan.

The concept of Idiocracy dates back to a concept Judge envisioned in 1996. Judge finished a script with the working title 3001 in 2001, rewriting the film a year later. Filming took place throughout 2004 at Austin Studios and other cities in Texas. Idiocracy serves as a social satire that touches on issues including anti-intellectualism, commercialism, consumerism, dysgenics, voluntary childlessness, and overpopulation. 20th Century Fox was hesitant to promote the film, refusing to grant it a wide release, and did not screen the film for critics. The decision not to market Idiocracy was seen as unexpected, following the success of Office Space (1999), and led to speculation. According to Crews, the film's satirical depiction of corporations made the film financially unviable, while Judge attributed 20th Century Fox's decision to negative test screenings; Judge stated that 20th Century Fox believed that the film would develop a cult following through its DVD release, similar to Office Space.

The film was released in the United States on September 1, 2006. Despite its lack of a major theatrical release, which resulted in a $495,000 gross at the box office, the film received positive reviews from critics and has since become a cult film.

🔗 Estonia 🔗 Festivals 🔗 Regional and national music

The Estonian Song Festival (in Estonian: laulupidu, Estonian pronunciation: [ˈlɑu.luˈpi.du]) is one of the largest choral events in the world, a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. It is held every five years in July on the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds (Lauluväljak) simultaneously with the Estonian Dance Festival. The joint choir has comprised more than 30,000 singers performing to an audience of 80,000.

Almost every Festival features famous Estonian songs "Ta lendab mesipuu poole", the unofficial national anthem "Mu isamaa on minu arm" and the national anthem "Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm".

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 United States/FBI

Main Core is the code name of an American governmental database that is believed to have been in existence since the 1980s. It is believed that Main Core is a federal database containing personal and financial data of millions of United States citizens believed to be threats to national security.

🔗 Science

The Salmon Protocol is a message exchange protocol running over HTTP designed to decentralize commentary and annotations made against newsfeed articles such as blog posts. It allows a single discussion thread to be established between the article's origin and any feed reader or "aggregator" which is subscribing to the content. Put simply, that if an article appeared on 3 sites: A (the source), B and C (the aggregates), that members of all 3 sites could see and contribute to a single thread of conversation regardless of site they were viewing from.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Disability

Working memory training is intended to improve a person's working memory. Working memory is a central intellectual faculty, linked to IQ, ageing, and mental health. It has been claimed that working memory training programs are effective means, both for treating specific medical conditions associated with working memory deficit, and for general increase in cognitive capacity among healthy neurotypical adults.

Individual studies of the topic show different, and sometime contradictory, results, and as one meta study puts it, asking the question “Does cognitive training improve intelligence?” is as inappropriate as asking “Does medicine cure disease?”, since none of them specify which particular intervention (which medicine or working memory training program) is being evaluated, for alleviating which condition is it applied (ADHD, stroke, general cognitive improvement etc.), and under what circumstances is it administered (selection criteria, adherence rate, outcome variables etc.).

In an influential metastudy from 2012, highly critical to cognitive training, analysed 23 studies with 30 group comparisons, and concluded that clinical memory training programs produce reliable short-term improvements in working memory skills in children and adults with ADHD, but also that there is no evidence that such effects can be maintained long-term without additional follow-up training. Three years later, another metastudy reached the opposite conclusion, that working memory training does have consistent and useful effects, not just on the type of working memory tests that are practiced, but also at other non-trained tasks and everyday life. Since then, a range of additional clinical experiments have been completed, with larger sample sizes, clearly defined control groups, and more uniform treatment of outcome variables. While the evidence is still far from unanimous, there are several experimental studies of working memory training that have shown beneficial effects for people with ADHD, those who have suffered stroke or traumatic brain injury, children who have undergone cancer treatment, as well as for normally developing children.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

Alexey Yakovlevich Chervonenkis (Russian: Алексей Яковлевич Червоненкис; 7 September 1938 – 22 September 2014) was a Soviet and Russian mathematician, and, with Vladimir Vapnik, was one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory, also known as the "fundamental theory of learning" an important part of computational learning theory. Chervonenkis held joint appointments with the Russian Academy of Sciences and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Alexey Chervonenkis got lost in Losiny Ostrov National Park on 22 September 2014, and later during a search operation was found dead near Mytishchi, a suburb of Moscow. He had died of hypothermia.

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Mills

The Hierapolis sawmill was a Roman water-powered stone sawmill at Hierapolis, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). Dating to the second half of the 3rd century AD, the sawmill is considered the earliest known machine to combine a crank with a connecting rod to form a crank slider mechanism.

The watermill is evidenced by a raised relief on the sarcophagus of a certain Marcus Aurelius Ammianos, a local miller. On the pediment a waterwheel fed by a mill race is shown powering via a gear train two frame saws cutting rectangular blocks by the way of connecting rods and, through mechanical necessity, cranks (see diagram). The accompanying inscription is in Greek and attributes the mechanism to Ammianos' "skills with wheels".