Today I Learned

Since donning the burka, the woman said she had been taunted by neighbours who called her a "smelly Arab" and that Israeli soldiers had asked to see her identification papers to prove she was not a Muslim. They backed down, she said, when she showed them that her children were clearly Jewish.

The trend has also caused tensions in family life. One man went to a rabbinical court in an attempt to get a ruling to force his wife to stop wearing the burka.

The plan backfired, however. The court ruled that that woman's behaviour was so "extreme" that it ordered the couple to undergo an immediate religious divorce.

It's a notoriously shitty game, but I was surprised when I saw that, despite being a side-scrolling "action" game, it uses WASD for movement on the Amiga and Apple IIgs.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/110/dark-castle/screenshots/

Shows the elevation of the martian landscape.

red = hill, blue = valley

the big blue crater at 60°E, 45°S is probably an old impact crater from an asteroid and is 4 km deep!

The highest mountain on Mars is olympus mons at 20°N, 130°W with an altitude of 21 km above planet-wide average.

Source: NASA, Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter

Also we have a whole Mars community here: !mars@discuss.tchncs.de
In case you want to know more about the planet, please feel free to ask :)

Source is Part III § 2 of the US flag code enshrined by 4 U.S.C. § 5.

On the admission of a new State into the Union one star shall be added to the union of the flag; and such addition shall take effect on the fourth day of July then next succeeding such admission.

This isn't legally binding – you can fly a US flag with five stars representing the CCP and its four governed social classes if you want. But it does represent official federal guidance on the design of the US flag. So if Washington, D.C. were added as a state, you wouldn't see the 51st star appear on federal buildings until the subsequent Independence Day.

I knew a lot of the ocean was unknown but I didn't know that it was this much crowded and unknown

n 1976, a horrifying discovery was made at the Nu-Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach, California.

A camera crew for the television show The Six Million Dollar Man was visiting the park to film a scene in the funhouse. While preparing the set for filming, one of the crew members went to move what he thought was a mannequin hanging from a noose.

From Wikipedia

At the time it was built, it was the heaviest self-propelled ship of any kind. With a laden draft of 24.6 m (81 ft) and a length of 458.45 m (1,504.1 ft), the ship was incapable of navigating the English Channel,[6] the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal. It is generally considered the largest self-propelled ship ever built.[7][8]

Programmers often discover solutions while explaining a problem to someone else, even to people with no programming knowledge. Describing the code, and comparing to what it actually does, exposes inconsistencies. Explaining a subject also forces the programmer to look at it from new perspectives and can provide a deeper understanding.

Faced with an illiteracy rate of more than 20% when they overthrew the Battista regime in 1959, the members of the new government set about trying to eradicate it altogether. On September 26 1960, Castro declared in the United Nations that "Cuba will be the first country in America that in a few months' time will be able to say that it does not have a single illiterate person".

The campaign, which caught the imagination of Cubans and has since achieved mythic status, mobilized 234,000 people of all ages, from students to pensioners, to go into the countryside and teach. The scale of the operation was obviously beyond the scope of the country's existing 34,000 teaching workforce, but Castro determined to do it in a year. By day they worked alongside peasant farmers and fishermen and in the evenings instructed them in the rudiments of reading and writing. The symbol of the campaign was the kind of paraffin lantern used to light these basic literacy classes in village homes without electricity. China donated 100,000 of them to the cause. The story is told in evocative photographs at the National Museum of the Literacy Campaign - not, it must be said, yet on the Havana tourist trail. The student volunteers were typically aged only 14 to 16 when they set off - often with trepidation - on the campaign, which began on January 1 1961.

Some received death threats, and the Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles resulted in the deaths of 10 "martyrs". For the aims of the campaign were avowedly political as well as educational.

Volunteers were equipped with two small booklets promoting the themes of the revolution, as well as a structured course and vocabulary. The first three vowel sounds introduced were O, E, A - initials of the Organizacion de Estados Americanos (Organisation of American States), from which, ironically, Cuba was soon to be expelled. Other sounds were identified with through words like Cuba, Fidel or Raul (his younger brother).

The "pupils'" final assignment was to write a letter to Castro and these have been lovingly collected at the museum, including the childlike scrawl of an 86-year-old man. He wasn't the oldest though - she was 106 and her 14-year-old granddaughter was one of the teaching volunteers. Some said simply: "I am very proud to know how to read and write." Another wrote: "I never felt Cuban until I learned to read and write."

In my defence, I only remembered the melody and I didn't know the name of the song until I heard it again today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enola_Gay_(song)

The lyric to the song reflects on the decision to use the bomb and asks the listener to consider whether the bombings were necessary ("It shouldn't ever have to end this way").[15] The phrase "Is mother proud of Little Boy today?", is an allusion to both the nickname of the uranium bomb and pilot Paul Tibbets naming the aircraft after his mother. The phrase, "It's 8:15, and that's the time that it's always been", refers to the time of detonation over Hiroshima at 8:15 am JST; as many timepieces were "frozen" by the effects of the blast, it becomes "the time that it's always been". It is identified as an "anti-war" track,[b] although McCluskey stated he "wasn't really politically motivated to write the song", which was informed by a fascination with World War II bombers. He hoped it "conveyed an ambivalence about whether it was the right or the wrong thing to do".

"Enola Gay" is popular with early home computer enthusiasts, being used in demos such as Swinth (Commodore 64).[73] Hackers have also enjoyed the song; it can be found as the "music bed" for numerous mega-demos and "cracktro" found on releases by warez groups like the Beastie Boys.[74] The song was featured in the 2015 film Ex Machina, a sci-fi thriller about the implications of artificial intelligence.

Missouri Executive Order 44 (eat your heart out, George) was signed by Lilburn Boggs on October 23, 1838, and ordered that Mormons in the state be "exterminated" or exiled. This destroyed Boggs' political career, but the order wasn't formally rescinded until 1976 as a goodwill gesture by Governor Kit Bond. Zombie laws and orders are a hell of a drug that I imagine keep lawyers up at night.