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He describes how, even before it was completed (in 1607), gangs hid out in and around it, robbing and murdering people. It remained a dangerous place even as it became busier. For a long time, the bridge even had its own gallows.

This did not prevent people from congregating there, drawn by various stands and street performers (acrobats, fire-eaters, musicians, etc.). Charlatans and quacks of various sorts were also common, as well as the hustlers (shell game hucksters, etc.) and pickpockets often found in crowds – not to mention a lively trade in prostitution. Among the many businesses which, however, unofficially set up there, were several famous tooth pullers.

One finds on the Pont-Neuf an infinity of people who give tickets, some put fallen teeth back in, and others make crystal eyes; there are those who cure incurable illnesses; those who claim to have discovered the virtues of some powdered stones to white and to beautify the face. This one claims he makes old men young; there are those who remove wrinkles from the forehead and the eyes, who make wooden legs to repair the violence of bombs; finally everybody is so applied to work, so strongly and continually, that the devil can tempt no one but on Holidays and Sundays.

"So central an artery is the Pont Neuf, that it used to be a saying with the Parisian police, that if, after watching three days, they did not see a man cross the bridge, he must have left Paris."

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Pickles (1962 – 1967) was a black and white collie dog, known for his role in finding the stolen Jules Rimet Trophy in March 1966, four months before the 1966 FIFA World Cup was scheduled to begin in England.

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Đorđe Martinović (1929 – 6 September 2000) was a Serb farmer from Kosovo who was at the center of a notorious incident in May 1985, when he was treated for injuries caused by the insertion of a glass bottle into his anus. The "Martinović affair", as it became known, turned into a cause célèbre in Yugoslav politics. Although the facts of the incident remained in dispute for years afterwards, it played a role in worsening ethnic tensions between Kosovo's Serb and Albanian populations.

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The term "Jesus clip" is a comical reference given to it due to its tendency to come loose and launch itself at high speed while removing or installing it, often leading to the remark "Oh Jesus, where did it go man?"

A circlip (a portmanteau of "circle" and "clip"), also known as a C-clip, snap ring, or Jesus clip, is a type of fastener or retaining ring that consists of a semi-flexible metal ring with open ends that can be snapped into place into a machined groove on a dowel pin or other part to permit rotation but to prevent axial movement.

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Morning Glory cloud (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by merde@sh.itjust.works to c/wikipedia@sh.itjust.works
 
 

A Morning Glory cloud is a roll cloud, or arcus cloud, that can be up to 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) long, 1 to 2 kilometres (0.62 to 1.24 mi) high, often only 100 to 200 metres (330 to 660 ft) above the ground. The cloud often travels at the rate of 10 to 20 metres per second. Sometimes there is only one cloud, sometimes there are up to ten consecutive roll clouds.

They have been called "the biggest waves on the planet". The wave may occur without the appearance of any clouds.

The local Garrwa Aboriginal people called it kangólgiRoyal Australian Air Force pilots first reported this phenomenon in 1942.

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A blue box is an electronic device that produces tones used to generate the in-band signaling tones formerly used within the North American long-distance telephone network to send line status and called number information over voice circuits. During that period, charges associated with long-distance calling were commonplace and could be significant, depending on the time, duration and destination of the call. A blue box device allowed for circumventing these charges by enabling an illicit user, referred to as a "phreaker", to place long-distance calls, without using the network's user facilities, that would be billed to another number or dismissed entirely by the telecom company's billing system as an incomplete call. A number of similar "color boxes" were also created to control other aspects of the phone network.

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The digital dark age is a lack of historical information in the digital age, which is a direct result of outdated file formats, software, or hardware that becomes corrupt, scarce, or inaccessible as technologies evolve and data decays

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The Salmon problem is an outdated argument in favour of placing the Indo-European urheimat in the Baltic region, as opposed to the Eurasian Steppe

see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_homeland

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The Enforcement Act of 1871 (17 Stat. 13), also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, Third Enforcement Act,[2] Third Ku Klux Klan Act,[3] Civil Rights Act of 1871, or Force Act of 1871,[4] is an Act of the United States Congress that was intended to combat the paramilitary vigilantism of the Ku Klux Klan. The act made certain acts committed by private persons federal offenses including conspiring to deprive citizens of their rights to hold office, serve on juries, or enjoy the equal protection of law. The Act authorized the President to deploy federal troops to counter the Klan and to suspend the constitutional right of habeas corpus to make arrests without charge.[5][6]

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The dividing line between metals and nonmetals can be found, in varying configurations, on some representations of the periodic table of the elements (see mini-example, right). Elements to the lower left of the line generally display increasing metallic behaviour; elements to the upper right display increasing nonmetallic behaviour. When presented as a regular stair-step, elements with the highest critical temperature for their groups (Li, Be, Al, Ge, Sb, Po) lie just below the line.[1]

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An affinity group is a group formed around a shared interest or common goal, to which individuals formally or informally belong. Affinity groups are generally precluded from being under the aegis of any governmental agency, and their purposes must be primarily non-commercial. Examples of affinity groups include private social clubs, fraternities, writing or reading circles, hobby clubs, and groups engaged in political activism.

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The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a part of the prefrontal cortex in the mammalian brain. The ventral medial prefrontal is located in the frontal lobe at the bottom of the cerebral hemispheres and is implicated in the processing of risk and fear, as it is critical in the regulation of amygdala activity in humans. It also plays a role in the inhibition of emotional responses, and in the process of decision-making and self-control. It is also involved in the cognitive evaluation of morality.

The vmPFC is connected to and receives input from the ventral tegmental area, amygdala, the temporal lobe, the olfactory system, and the dorsomedial thalamus. It, in turn, sends signals to many different brain regions including; The temporal lobe, amygdala, the lateral hypothalamus, the hippocampal formation, the cingulate cortex, and certain other regions of the prefrontal cortex. This huge network of connections affords the vmPFC the ability to receive and monitor large amounts of sensory data and to affect and influence a plethora of other brain regions, particularly the amygdala.

Patients with bilateral lesions of the vmPFC develop severe impairments in personal and social decision-making even though most of their intellectual ability is preserved. For instance, they have difficulties in choosing between options with uncertain outcomes, whether the uncertainty is in the form of a risk or of an ambiguity. After their lesion, these patients have an impaired capacity to learn from their mistakes, making the same decisions again and again even though they lead to negative consequences. These patients choose alternatives that give immediate rewards, but seem to be blind to the future consequences of their actions. However, the underlying mechanisms of this behavior are not yet fully understood.

Emotions and an understanding of social norms are used to provide reasoning of the moral nature on our behaviors, beliefs, and the people around us. The vmPFC works as the neural basis in allowing emotion to influence moral judgement. In functional imaging studies, increased activity in the vmPFC is associated with thinking of these personal moral situations, while making harmless decisions does not. Patients with vmPFC lesions made the same decision in impersonal and personal dilemmas. Dysfunction of the vmPFC causes failure in using correct moral emotion, which explains why these patients showed less emotional responses when facing these dilemmas.

The vmPFC plays an important role in regulating and inhibiting our response to emotions. VmPFC seems to use our emotional reactions to model our behavior and control emotional reactions in certain social situations. The inputs of the vmPFC provide it with information from the environment and the plans of the frontal lobe, and its outputs allow the vmPFC to control different physiological responses and behaviors. The role of the vmPFC is especially highlighted in people with damage to this region. A damaged vmPFC causes impairments of behavioral control and decision making, consequences which are rooted in emotional dysregulation.

The first and most famous case of someone with defects to this region was Phineas Gage, a railroad construction foreman who had his vmPFC bilaterally destroyed in an accident in 1848. Before his accident, Gage was described as “serious, industrious and energetic. Afterward he became childish, irresponsible, and thoughtless of others.” Another patient with vmPFC damage wasted away his life savings on foolish investments and failed to make appropriate decisions in his personal life. In patients with vmPFC damage, evidence shows that there is a correlation between emotional disregulation and dysfunction in real world competencies.

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3
Sinhala Only Act (en.wikipedia.org)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) by imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works to c/wikipedia@sh.itjust.works
 
 

The Official Language Act (No. 33 of 1956), commonly referred to as the Sinhala Only Act, was an act passed in the Parliament of Ceylon in 1956. The act replaced English with Sinhala as the sole official language of Ceylon, with the exclusion of Tamil from the act.

At the time, Sinhala (also known as Sinhalese) was the language of Ceylon's majority Sinhalese people, who accounted for around 70% of the country's population. Tamil was the first language of Ceylon's three largest minority ethnic groups, the Indian Tamils, Sri Lankan Tamils and Moors, who together accounted for around 29% of the country's population.

The act was controversial as its supporters saw it as an attempt by a community that had just gained independence to distance themselves from their colonial masters, while its opponents viewed it as an attempt by the linguistic majority to oppress and assert dominance on minorities. The Act symbolizes the post-independent Sinhalese majority's determination to assert Ceylon's identity as a Sinhala Buddhist nation state, and for Tamils, it became a symbol of minority oppression and a justification for them to demand a separate nation-state, Tamil Eelam, which was a factor in the emergence of the decades-long Sri Lankan Civil War.

The policy turned out to be "severely discriminatory" and placed the Tamil-speaking population at a "serious disadvantage". As a Sinhalese academic A. M. Navaratna Bandara writes: "The Tamil-speaking people were given no option but to learn the language of the majority if they wanted to get public service employment. [...] A large number of Tamil public servants had to accept compulsory retirement because of their inability to prove proficiency in the official language [....]" It also entailed that a Sinhalese officer working in Tamil areas was exempted from learning Tamil, but a Tamil officer working in even Tamil areas had to learn Sinhala. The effects of these policies were dramatic as shown by the drastic drop of Tamil representation in public sector: "In 1956, 30 percent of the Ceylon administrative service, 50 percent of the clerical service, 60 percent of engineers and doctors, and 40 percent of the armed forces were Tamil. By 1970 those numbers had plummeted to 5 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent, and 1 percent, respectively." For much of the 1960s government forms and services were virtually unavailable to Tamils, and this situation only partly improved with later relaxations of the law.

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Military-age male (abbreviated as "MAM," plural "MAMs") is a term used to refer to men at ages where they are generally capable of military service. In some cases the media has used the term to describe male migrant civilians to dehumanize civilians or immigrants and whitewash civilian deaths in the face of public criticism.[1]

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On 26 July 1184, in the German city of Erfurt, approximately sixty local nobles died when the floor of a building collapsed through the ground floor and into the latrine cesspit below. They were attending a Hoftag ("court day") conducted by King Henry VI when their combined weight caused the floor of the building to collapse. Some of the attendees drowned in human waste after falling into the cesspit.

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Text of his most famous poem below

Do not go gentle into that good night


Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.


Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.


Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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The his genitive is a means of forming a genitive construction by linking two nouns with a possessive adjective such as "his" (e.g. "my friend his car" instead of "my friend's car"). The construction enjoyed only a brief heyday in English in the late 16th century and the 17th century but is common in some varieties of a number of Germanic languages and is standard in Afrikaans.

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The abbreviation or acronym RITA (sometimes written in low case, "rita") stands for "Resistance Inside the Army", "Resister Inside the Army", or "Resist! Inside the Army".[1]

It was first invented by the American Private Richard (Dick) Perrin[2] in September 1967. It was soon widely used to describe "the resistance inside the American military" during the Vietnam War, and up to the present as a concept for similar "Resistance" movements in other armies. The term is also sometimes projected backward historically, to earlier wars when the term did not yet exist, but the phenomenon arguably already did.

Such RITA movements distinguish themselves from other components of anti-war movements, such as draft resistance or desertion, by the fact of their activists being soldiers and intending to go on being soldiers.

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F.T.A. ("Fuck the Army") is a 1972 American documentary film starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland and directed by Francine Parker, which follows a 1971 anti-Vietnam War road show for G.I.s

The film is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyWSi-5G_JU

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This is a list of minerals which have Wikipedia articles.

Minerals are distinguished by various chemical and physical properties. Differences in chemical composition and crystal structure distinguish the various species. Within a mineral species there may be variation in physical properties or minor amounts of impurities that are recognized by mineralogists or wider society as a mineral variety.

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Text generated by large language models (LLMs)[1] often violates several of Wikipedia's core content policies. For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited, save for the exceptions given below.

This page in a nutshell: Don't use large language models (LLMs) to generate article content. Editors are permitted to use LLMs to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, and to incorporate some of them after human review, provided the LLM does not introduce content of its own. Caution is required, because LLMs can go beyond what you ask of them and change the meaning of the text such that it is not supported by the sources cited.

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The Fanjul family —Cuban-born siblings Alfonso "Alfy" Fanjul Jr., Lillian "Lian" Fanjul de Azqueta, José "Pepe" Fanjul, Alexander Fanjul, and Andres Fanjul—are owners of Fanjul Corp., a vast sugar and real estate conglomerate. It comprises the subsidiaries Domino Sugar, Florida Crystals, C&H Sugar, Redpath Sugar, former Tate & Lyle sugar companies,[1] and American Sugar Refining. Fanjul Corp. also owns a 35% stake in Central Romana Corporation of La Romana, Dominican Republic.

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The Cultural Cold War was in a set of propaganda campaigns waged by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, with each country promoting their own culture, arts, literature, and music. In addition, less overtly, their opposing political choices and ideologies at the expense of the other. Many of the battles were fought in Europe or in European Universities,[1] with Communist Party leaders depicting the United States as a cultural black hole while pointing to their own cultural heritage as proof that they were the inheritors of the European Enlightenment.[2] The U.S. responded by accusing the Soviets of "disregarding the inherent value of culture," and subjugating art to the controlling policies of a totalitarian political system, even as they felt saddled with the responsibility of preserving and fostering Western civilization's best cultural traditions, given the many European artists who took refuge in the United States before, during, and after World War II.[2] Through officially sponsored programs and covert initiatives, both superpowers tried to persuade foreign audiences that their political and economic systems represented the future of modern civilization[1]

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Since the late 1980s, there have been several attempts to investigate the possibility of harvesting lightning energy. A single bolt of lightning carries a relatively large amount of energy (approximately 5 gigajoules[1] or about the energy stored in 38 Imperial gallons or 172 litres of gasoline). However, this energy is concentrated in a small location and is passed during an extremely short period of time (microseconds[2]); therefore, extremely high electrical power is involved.[3] It has been proposed that the energy contained in lightning be used to generate hydrogen from water, to harness the energy from rapid heating of water due to lightning,[4] or to use a group of lightning arresters to harness a strike, either directly or by converting it to heat or mechanical energy,[citation needed] or to use inductors spaced far enough away so that a safe fraction of the energy might be captured.[5]

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You Are Jeff Bezos is a satirical text adventure game, developed and released in 2018 by indie developer and writer Kris Lorischild, then known as Kris Ligman. The game's premise involves the player waking up one morning as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and being tasked with spending his entire US$156 billion fortune.

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