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During the later months of the Kosovo War, Yugoslav forces discovered that they could modify obsolete Soviet radar systems to detect the modern stealth aircraft used by NATO in the conflict. On 27 March 1999, the 3rd Battalion of the 250th Air Defence Missile Brigade of the Army of Yugoslavia, commanded by Colonel Zoltán Dani, detected a United States Air Force F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter after its bomb bay doors were opened, revealing it to their radar.
Col. Dani ordered his forces to launch surface-to-air missiles, which detonated near the aircraft, causing it to spin out of control and crash into a nearby field. The pilot, USAF Lt. Col. Dale Zelko, was able to eject, and was later found and taken to safety by NATO search-and-rescue helicopters. Much of the wreckage is currently on display in the Museum of Aviation in Belgrade, though a number of critical components "disappeared," along with the fighter's engine outlet heat shield, which now resides in Zoltán Dani's garage. So far, Zelko's F-117 has been the only known stealth fighter to have ever been shot down by enemy forces.
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Due to his thirty-seven cameo appearances in films based on his creations, American comic book writer and editor Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber, 1922-) holds the world record for total revenue generated by all the films an actor has appeared in over their lifetime. Lee has appeared in some capacity (whether as actor, writer, or producer) on 44 film productions, with a worldwide aggregate box office of roughly 22.4 billion US dollars.
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American politician Elbridge Gerry, best known as James Madison's vice president and for being the namesake of gerrymandering, argued against the idea of a standing army, comparing it to a standing penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure."
American politician Elbridge Gerry, best known as James Madison's vice president and for being the namesake of gerrymandering, argued against the idea of a standing army, comparing it to a standing penis: "An excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure."
Apt comparison, that. :-)
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The 2020 Summer Olympics will be held in Tokyo - precisely as was foretold by the celebrated manga Akira, in 1982.
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Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles bearing a single letter onto a board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words which, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downwards in columns, and be defined in a standard dictionary or lexicon.
The name is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada; outside the United States and Canada, it is a trademark of Mattel. The game is sold in 121 countries and is available in 29 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide and roughly one-third of American and half of British homes have a Scrabble set. There are around 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world.
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Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles bearing a single letter onto a board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words which, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downwards in columns, and be defined in a standard dictionary or lexicon.
The name is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada; outside the United States and Canada, it is a trademark of Mattel. The game is sold in 121 countries and is available in 29 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide and roughly one-third of American and half of British homes have a Scrabble set. There are around 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world.
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"Americans have long regarded the semi-colon with suspicion, as a genteel, self-conscious, neither-one-thing-nor-the other sort of punctuation mark, with neither the butchness of a full colon nor the flighty promiscuity of the comma. Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons."
- Ben MacIntyre, columnist in The Times (London)
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John Travolta started rehearsals for Grease just four days after completing filming for Saturday Night Fever (1977). Having two mega-hit movies in a row made it difficult to return to honor his contract for Welcome Back, Kotter (1975), but he fulfilled his contract, albeit with a reduced presence, and eventually left the show to pursue a movie career full-time.
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The Hardly Surprising One: Venus. It smells like rotten eggs.
The Kind of Cool One: Luna. Astronauts can attest that it smells like spent gunpowder.
The Bummer One: Mars. It also smells like rotten eggs.
The Neapolitan One: Jupiter. Each band smells at least a bit different from the others, from window cleaner, to (once again) rotten eggs, to bitter almonds.
The Sort of Spooky One: Saturn's moon Titan. It likely smells like a petroleum refinery. Remember, we still can't see what's on its surface....
and
The Punchline: Uranus. It's mostly just hydrogen and helium, so it smells like...well, nothing.
The "paperclip maximizer" is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings when programmed to pursue even seemingly-harmless goals, and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design. The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value human life, then given enough power its optimized goal would be to turn all matter in the universe, including human beings, into either paperclips or machines which manufacture paperclips.
"Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans."
— Nick Bostrom, "Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence", 2003
Bostrom has emphasized that he does not believe the paperclip maximizer scenario per se will actually occur; rather, his intention is to illustrate the dangers of creating super-intelligent machines without knowing how to safely program them to eliminate existential risk to human beings. The paperclip maximizer example illustrates the broad problem of managing powerful systems that lack human values.
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Frankie and Johnny (1991) was being filmed in the same studio as Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and required Al Pacino to have a surprised expression on his face after opening a door. Director Garry Marshall arranged for Kirk (William Shatner) and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) be on the other side of the door that Pacino opened.
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Heroes & Icons (H&I) is an American digital broadcast television network owned by Weigel Broadcasting. Primarily carried on the digital subchannels of its affiliated television station in most markets, it primarily airs classic television series from the 1950s through the 2000s, with a focus on westerns, crime dramas, sci-fi, and action-oriented programming geared toward male audiences.
The network operates from Weigel Broadcasting's headquarters on North Halsted Street in Chicago, Illinois, and is essentially an offshoot of MeTV – a general classic TV digital network also owned by Weigel.
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The pinewood derby is a racing event for Cub Scouts in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). Cub Scouts, with the help of parents, build their own cars from wood, usually from kits containing a block of pine, plastic wheels, and metal axles. With the popularity of the pinewood derby, other organizations have developed similar events, and a small industry has developed to provide tracks, timers, scales, trophies, ribbons, and other products. Similar Cub Scouting events include the raingutter regatta with boats and the space derby using rubber band-powered rockets.
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Gary Larson of Far Side jokingly named the spiked tail of a stegosaurus the thagomizer. Paleontologists realized they didn't have a technical term for it... so they used that one.Just ran across this again today. :)
GARY LARSON 2020!!!
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Shut your eyes. Turn out the light. There is a name for what you see: Eigengrau.
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A thagomizer is the distinctive arrangement of four to ten spikes on the tails of stegosaurid dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.
The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name; the term Thagomizer was coined in 1982 by cartoonist Gary Larson in his comic The Far Side, and thereafter became gradually adopted as an informal term within scientific circles, research, and education.
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A thagomizer is the distinctive arrangement of four to ten spikes on the tails of stegosaurid dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.
The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name; the term Thagomizer was coined in 1982 by cartoonist Gary Larson in his comic The Far Side, and thereafter became gradually adopted as an informal term within scientific circles, research, and education.
Named in honor of the late Thag Simmons. I miss The Farside.
Rod Steiger
Today, on the subject of strange coincidences, I happened to receive a particular DVD from Netflix in my mailbox. The film? Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte.
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Meet the Robinsons is a 2007 American computer-animated science fiction comedy film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures on March 30, 2007. The 47th Disney animated feature film, it was released in standard and Disney Digital 3-D versions. The film is loosely based on characters from the children's book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, by William Joyce. The voice cast includes Jordan Fry, Wesley Singerman, Harland Williams, Tom Kenny, Steve Anderson, Laurie Metcalf, Adam West, Tom Selleck, and Angela Bassett. It was the first film released after Pixar executive John Lasseter became chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
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Alecia Beth Moore (born September 8, 1979), known professionally as Pink (stylized as P!nk), is an American singer, songwriter, dancer and actress. She was signed to her first record label with original R&B girl group Choice in 1995. The label, LaFace Records, only saw potential in Pink, offering her a solo deal. Choice disbanded in 1998. Pink rose as an artist with her debut solo album, Can't Take Me Home (2000). It was certified double-platinum in the United States and spawned two Billboard Hot 100 top-ten hits: "There You Go" and "Most Girls". She gained further recognition with the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack "Lady Marmalade", which gave Pink her first Grammy Award as well as her first number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100. Pink took more artistic control and pursued a pop rock direction for her second album, Missundaztood (2001). It sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and yielded three US top-ten singles, "Get the Party Started", "Don't Let Me Get Me", and "Just Like a Pill".
Pink's third album, Try This (2003), generated considerably lower sales but earned her the Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance. She revived her popularity with her fourth and fifth studio albums, I'm Not Dead (2006) and Funhouse (2008), with the latter containing her second US number-one hit, "So What." Pink concluded the first decade of her career with the compilation album Greatest Hits... So Far!! (2010), which featured "F+@#in' Perfect" and her third US number-one single, "Raise Your Glass." Her sixth studio album, The Truth About Love (2012), debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and spawned the top-ten singles "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)", "Try", and "Just Give Me a Reason", with the latter becoming her fourth US number-one single. In 2014, Pink recorded a collaborative album, Rose Ave., with Canadian musician Dallas Green under a folk music duo named You+Me. In October 2017, her seventh studio album Beautiful Trauma was released. Its lead single "What About Us" reached number one in Australia.
Recognized for her strong signature vocals and acrobatic performances, Pink has sold over 40 million albums and 50 million singles worldwide, making her one of the world's best-selling music artists. Her career accolades include three Grammy Awards, a Brit Award, a Daytime Emmy Award and seven MTV Video Music Awards (including the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award). In 2009, Billboard named Pink the Pop Songs Artist of the Decade. Pink was also the second most-played female solo artist in the United Kingdom during the 2000s decade, behind Madonna. VH1 ranked her number 10 on their list of the 100 Greatest Women in Music, while Billboard awarded her the Woman of the Year award in 2013. At the 63rd annual BMI Pop Awards, she received the BMI President's Award for "her outstanding achievement in songwriting and global impact on pop culture and the entertainment industry."
Michael Shannon, actor, can stuff $2.10 in U.S. coins up his nose.
Polio is evolving to resist vaccination.
This may help explain the sudden resurgence of the disease.
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Polio is evolving to resist vaccination.
This may help explain the sudden resurgence of the disease.
Unfortunately, religious fanatics and conspiracy theorists also often resist vaccination.