Informational & Curiosity

Pictured: a young, wrathful Frederick Douglass.

“Little Eichmanns” is a term used to describe people whose actions, while on an individual scale may seem relatively harmless even to themselves, taken collectively create destructive and immoral systems in which they are actually complicit. The name comes from Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust, but claimed that he did so without feeling anything about his actions, merely following the orders given to him.

The Royal Indian Navy mutiny was a failed insurrection of Indian naval ratings, soldiers, police personnel and civilians against the British government in India in February 1946. From the initial flashpoint in Bombay (now Mumbai), the revolt spread and found support throughout British India, from Karachi to Calcutta (now Kolkata), and ultimately came to involve over 10,000 sailors in 56 ships and shore establishments. The mutiny failed to turn into a revolution because sailors were asked to surrender after the British authorities had assembled superior forces to suppress the mutiny.

A door knocker is an item of door furniture that allows people outside a house or other dwelling or building to alert those inside to their presence. A door knocker has a part fixed to the door, and a part (usually metal) which is attached to the door by a hinge, and may be lifted and used to strike a plate fitted to the door, or the door itself, making a noise. The struck plate, if present, would be supplied and fitted with the knocker. Door knockers are often ornate, but may be no more than a simple fitting with a metal bob, or ring.

If we believed in bears more, would they exist more in the world?

A tree may explode when stresses in its trunk increase due to extreme cold, heat, or lightning, causing it to split suddenly.

I needed to replace the display on my daughter’s A13. When I went to check if I had bought the correct replacement I saw that the original display didn’t have any of the numbers associated with the A13.

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The night ride to Kaifeng was a viral trend in which university students rode shared bikes from Zhengzhou to Kaifeng in Henan province, China. The trend started on June 18, 2024, and peaked with an estimated 100,000–200,000 participants on November 8, 2024. Authorities halted the trend from November 9, 2024.

https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth#240

The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs also wiped out all songbirds, except for in (ark) Australia. Australian songbirds then spread out to rest of the planet.

Victorian headless portraits were a fad in Britain in the late 19th century. In the photographs, the model’s head appears separated from the body; often the sitter holds it in their own hands.[1] Although this genre is called headless portraiture, it is the head that is always present in the photograph, and the body may be absent.

Martian lava tubes are volcanic caverns on Mars that are believed to form as a result of fast-moving, basaltic lava flows associated with shield volcanism.

A conchoidal fracture is a break or fracture of a brittle material that does not follow any natural planes of separation. Mindat.org defines conchoidal fracture as follows: “a fracture with smooth, curved surfaces, typically slightly concave, showing concentric undulations resembling the lines of growth of a shell”.

Professor Jay Van Bavel (*New York University*) convened 120 researchers. He had them evaluate claims about smartphones and social media.

The buy nothing project promotes sharing anything within communities, with the one condition that everything must be completely free.

EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use.

Crimes de la Commune is a series of photomontages produced by French photographer Ernest-Charles Appert at the end of the Paris Commune. A Parisian photographer accredited to the Tribunal de la Seine, and sometimes cited as the forerunner of bertillonage, he photographed Communards incarcerated in Versailles and used these portraits in photomontages. This practice of committed photomontage is the subject of much debate.

And if the US congress gets its way, this might be a route to secure communication after they ban VPNs

Which is the best?

Why? Do they think this is a videogame??

Sometimes science can be painfully slow.

Shoot, shovel, and shut up, also known as the 3-S treatment, refers to a method for dealing with unwanted or unwelcome animals primarily in rural areas. There have been reports of the frequently illegal triple-step procedure being used to dispatch mischievous pets, endangered species, and even sick livestock.

Recently died, RIP

A pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years.

Came across this article a while back, and its a really interesting read. Since today is MLK day it seems like an appropriate day to share this. It’s an especially important moment in history to remember and honor an American patriot who refused to be silent even when he became the target of a man who abused his powerful position in the federal government while hiding behind lies about protecting liberty and justice.

An archaeologist studying 1,000-year-old dog burials reflects on the need for imagination in archaeology.

🐮 !

In 2022, the documentary 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture explains how the American committee behind the Revised Standard Version Bible first translated two Greek words referring to abusive behavior and exploitative relationships as homosexual in 1946. From then on, other translations, such as the New International Version of the 1970s, decided to use the term “homosexual”, thus propagating social exclusion. The Revised Standard Version translation committee corrected this error in 1971 by using the word “sexual perverts” in the publication of a revision. But 25 years later, millions of Bibles had been sold with this error. The documentary also highlights other errors in English translations of other passages, such as Leviticus 18:22 which was translated as “Man shall not lie with man, for it is an abomination”, while the same passage taking into account the sacred prostitution context of the time was translated into German: “Man shall not lie with young boys as he does with a woman, for it is an abomination.” Finally, the documentary shows how these translation and interpretation errors have fueled anti-LGBT rhetoric around the world.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day (officially Birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.,[1] and often referred to shorthand as MLK Day) is a federal holiday in the United States observed on the third Monday of January each year. King was the chief spokesperson for nonviolent activism in the civil rights movement, which protested legalized racial discrimination in federal and state law and civil society. The movement led to several groundbreaking legislative reforms in the United States.

From 1704 to 1709, the island was home to the marooned Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who at least partially inspired novelist Daniel Defoe’s fictional Robinson Crusoe in his 1719 novel, although the novel is explicitly set in the Caribbean. This was just one of several survival stories from the period of which Defoe would have been aware. To reflect the literary lore associated with the island and attract tourists, the Chilean government renamed it Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.