en.wikipedia.org

Panettone is an Italian type of sweet bread and fruitcake, originally from Milan, Italy, usually prepared and enjoyed for Christmas and New Year in Western, Southern, and Southeastern Europe

The Krampus is a horned anthropomorphic figure who, in the Central and Eastern Alpine folkloric tradition, is said to accompany Saint Nicholas on visits to children during the night of 5 December… immediately before the Feast of St. Nicholas on 6 December. In this tradition, Saint Nicholas rewards well-behaved children with small gifts, while Krampus punishes badly behaved ones with birch rods.

“a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.”

The Ussuri tube-nosed bat or Forest tube-nosed bat (Murina ussuriensis) is a species of vesper bat in the family Vespertilionidae. It is threatened by habitat loss. It is the only species of bat that hibernates in snowbanks.

Why MAGA supporters are never genises?

A Caganer (Catalan pronunciation: [kəɣəˈne]) is a figurine depicted in the act of defecation appearing in nativity scenes in Catalonia and neighbouring areas such as Andorra, Valencia, Balearic Islands, and Northern Catalonia (in southern France). It is most popular and widespread in these areas, but can also be found in other areas of Spain (Murcia), Portugal, and Southern Italy (Naples).

The wenis, sometimes spelled weenus or weenis, is a loose flap of skin underneath the joint of a human elbow.

Antidisestablishmentarianism is the position that a state church (the “established church") should not be disestablished (i.e., be separated from the state).

Image of the lab:

Generally, I like Scottish people (I remember that nice little lady in Dr Findlay's casebook) so I expect Anthony (for that is his name) has nice legs and looks very dashing in his kilt when throwing telegraph poles about, which seems to be one of their extraordinary national pastimes. (quite why one hesitates to imagine)

Dickens described him as a “wry-necked, blubbering red-headed boy in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke … playing in an adjacent gutter”.

A random ballot or random dictatorship is a randomized electoral system where the election is decided on the basis of a single randomly selected ballot. [...] Random dictatorship was first described in 1977 by Allan Gibbard, who showed it to be the unique social choice rule that treats all voters equally while still being strategyproof in all situations. Its application to elections was first described in 1984 by Akhil Reed Amar. The rule is rarely, if ever, proposed as a genuine electoral system, as such a method (in Gibbard's words) "leaves too much to chance". However, the rule is often used as a tiebreaker to encourage voters to cast honest ballots, and is sometimes discussed as a thought experiment. ...

Canadian syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of writing systems used with a number of indigenous Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Eskaleut, and (formerly) Athabaskan language families. These languages had no formal writing system previously. They are valued for their distinctiveness from the Latin script and for the ease with which literacy can be achieved.

Also called Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), it affects like 1 in 5,000 people who contract measles (vaccinated), but jumps to 1 in 609 in the unvaccinated.

Core war is a programming combat game, where players make MIPS-like assembly programs to fight eachother for control over a virtual system.

Three centuries after Aristotle’s *Poetics*, the meaning of *mimesis* as a literary method had shifted from “imitation of nature” to “imitation of other authors”. For Dionysian *imitatio*, the object of imitation was not a single author but the qualities of many.

The Royal Game of Ur is a two-player strategy race board game of the tables family that was first played in ancient Mesopotamia during the early third millennium BC. The game was popular across the Middle East among people of all social strata, and boards for playing it have been found at locations as far away from Mesopotamia as Crete and Sri Lanka. One board, held by the British Museum, is dated to c. 2600 – c. 2400 BC, making it one of the oldest game boards in the world.

Acronym for a common strategy of abusers

2023 proposal by Donald Trump

Ive noticed several posts here linking to politico articles, which I find strange for this community given their history and affiliations.

This history of genocidal attacks against the Kalinago has led to perceptions that “there are no indigenous peoples left in the Caribbean.”

Ecology proposition

Humans and many organisms do not look at a scene in steadiness; instead, the eyes move around, locating interesting parts of the scene and building up a three-dimensional ‘map’ corresponding to the scene.

The Trier Gold Hoard is a hoard of 2516 (or 2518) gold coins with a weight of 18.5 kg found in Trier, Germany, in September 1993 during construction works. It is described as the largest preserved Roman gold hoard worldwide.

When I read that a dude ‘self-crucified’, and that it was ruled a suicide, I laughed. But it looks like he really did it.

Presented as a gift in 1848 to Thomas Francis Meagher from a small group of French women sympathetic to Irish nationalism,[3] it was intended to symbolise the inclusion and hoped-for union between Roman Catholics (symbolised by the green colour) and Protestants (symbolised by the orange colour).

Since October 2000, mindat.org has been an important resource for mineral related fields. Its original purpose was to share information about minerals, their properties and where they are found. Today, it is the world’s largest public database of mineral information supported worldwide by volunteers adding and verifying new information daily.

Ukraine began its involvement in the Iraq War on 5 June 2003, shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As part of the Multi-National Force – Iraq, they engaged in combat with Iraqi insurgents. On 9 December 2008, Ukraine formally withdrew its last forces from Iraq, ending its participation in the Iraq War. Prior to the Russo-Ukrainian War, Ukraine’s involvement in the Iraq War was the largest military operation ever performed by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Over 6,000 Ukrainians performed military service in Iraq and Kuwait during the war, including a permanent presence of 1,600, with more than 40 Ukrainians wounded and 18 killed in action.

A way to combat [chaos in discussions] is to imagine all the potential contributors are standing in a circle. The person who starts the debate (by nominating an article for deletion, say) throws a ball into the circle. The game is meant to be that you catch it, throw it to someone else, and then sit down. Games get so complicated though...

Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St. John’s Dance, tarantism and St. Vitus’ Dance) was a phenomenon that may have had biological causes, which occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected adults and children who danced until, allegedly, they collapsed from exhaustion and injuries, and sometimes died.

Socotra, locally known as Saqatri, is a Yemeni island in the Indian Ocean. Situated between the Guardafui Channel and the Arabian Sea near major shipping routes. The largest of the six islands in the Socotra archipelago, it comprises around 95% of the landmass of the archipelago. It lies 380 kilometres (205 nautical miles) south of the Arabian Peninsula and 232 km (125 nmi) east of the Horn of Africa. The inhabitants of the island are called Socotrans, and they speak Arabic and Soqotri.

>Geller has claimed his feats are the result of paranormal powers[13] given to him by extraterrestrials.[36] The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) was a prominent early critic of Geller.[11] Skeptics such as James Randi have shown that Geller’s tricks can be replicated with stage magic techniques.[15][16][17][37][38][18]

This article points out some of the common tells of AI writing.

In 1889, William Bateson observed in detail the way that decorator crabs fix materials on their backs. He noted that “the whole proceeding is most human and purposeful”, and that if a Stenorhynchus crab is cleaned, it will “immediately begin to clothe itself again with the same care and precision as before”.

The best example i can think of this is in the game barotrauma, someone once asked “why do you grief?” The question itself is best answered by Bartle’s Multiplayer Psychology maxim. We all lean toward some aspects of basic multiplayer motivations: Socialites, Explorers, Achievers or Killers. If you don’t have much ‘killer’ (defined as someone who gets their fun by causing a negative reaction in others) in you, then it’s hard to understand that motivation. Of course, few griefers will admit to that need. No-one is 100% one motivation, but Our Explorers lean toward Engineer roles, our Socialites are Medics or Captains, while our Achievers and more balanced motivation players tend toward Captains and Security.

The best example i can think of this is in the game barotrauma, someone once asked “why do you grief?” The question itself is best answered by Bartle’s Multiplayer Psychology maxim. We all lean toward some aspects of basic multiplayer motivations: Socialites, Explorers, Achievers or Killers. If you don’t have much ‘killer’ (defined as someone who gets their fun by causing a negative reaction in others) in you, then it’s hard to understand that motivation. Of course, few griefers will admit to that need. No-one is 100% one motivation, but Our Explorers lean toward Engineer roles, our Socialites are Medics or Captains, while our Achievers and more balanced motivation players tend toward Captains and Security.

Gift-giving festival and economic system

The imperial boomerang is the thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens. This concept originates with Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) where it is called the terrific boomerang to explain the origins of European fascism in the first half of the 20th century.[1][2] Hannah Arendt agreed with this usage, calling it the boomerang effect in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).[3][4][5] According to both writers, the methods of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were not exceptional from a world-wide view because European colonial empires had been killing millions of people worldwide as part of the process of colonization for a very long time. Rather, they were exceptional in that they were applied to Europeans within Europe, rather than to colonized populations in the Global South.[6] It is sometimes called Foucault’s boomerang even though Michel Foucault did not originate the term.

The Soviet system used psychiatry as a weapon by diagnosing political opponents as mentally ill in order to confine them as patients instead of trying them in court. Anyone who challenged the state such as dissidents, writers, would-be emigrants, religious believers, or human rights activists could be branded with fabricated disorders like sluggish schizophrenia. This turned normal political disagreement into supposed medical pathology and allowed the state to present dissent as insanity.