Today I Learned

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.

I think I'll join!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius

It looks very plausible that stretching before you exercise doesn't do much for you. Multiple older surveys suggested this.

Annoyingly, the studies linked in the previous paragraph are 2 decades old, and somehow I can't find a large, well controlled, trial.

Here's the first episode's monologue by Tina Fey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=712AlPYYDNE

Constantinople, a name rooted in Greek and Roman history, was seen as representing the city’s imperial past before the rise of the Turkish nation-state. Istanbul, a name already used colloquially among Turks for centuries, became the official name. The government then encouraged and pressured foreign countries and mapmakers to adopt this new name as well.

Wow, great job, you save him from suicide... by killing him... 🤦‍♂️

Hall was born Chen Zhi Bo (Chinese: 陈志波) on October 31, 2001, in Shanghai, China. Shortly after his first birthday, he was adopted by Gareth J. Hall and Fe Hall, who are of African and Latino and Filipino descent respectively. He had his name officially changed to Christian Joseph Hall. As a child, he was diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder and later depression.

On December 30, 2020, Hall was dropped off at his workplace at a convenience store by his mother. He walked to an overpass of Pennsylvania Route 33 above Interstate 80 near mile marker 302A, and at 1:30 p.m., Hall called emergency services to report a "suicider", resulting in the arrival of police. Footage of the scene showed him pacing around and clutching what appears to be a gun. Initial reports said Hall placed it on the ground after being ordered to do so, and began negotiating with the officers, but soon picked it up again. Around 1:38 p.m., Hall was shot seven times by the troopers.

He was taken to the Lehigh Valley Hospital-Pocono in East Stroudsburg, where he later died from his injuries.

Initial reports from authorities stated that when the officers told Hall to put the gun on the ground, he complied, but at one point during negotiations, he picked up the gun and pointed it in the direction of the police, causing them to shoot him. A video of the incident with evidence contradicting the claims surfaced in February 2021. The video shows Hall raising his hands before he is shot and falls.

According to his family, Hall reported that he had been experiencing a mental health problem. Fe Hall told WNEP-TV, "He needed help. He was looking for help, but instead of getting help, he was killed in cold blood by those who were supposed to help him." Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump also stated that Hall was in need of help and seemed to be contemplating suicide.

Also, I think my mom would've read this story and be like: "Is this what you want your future to be?"

Like... the fuck? You think I chose depression? Jesus christ...

Also: I wanna comment on the adoption thing...

Dude must've have an identity crisis lol... I mean I as an ethnic Chinese still have my Bio-parents and I already sort of have an identity crisis for being so young when I arrived in the US...

Him having different ethnicity parents must be extremely confusing coupled with the adoption thing, and being in a white majority country and facing perpetual foreigner stereotype and racism while simultaneously having zero connections to your ancestral culture...

I needed a QR Code generator for a document. After long wandering on the web without finding a QR Code generator that doesn't use a proprietary URL shortener, I discovered that you can easily do it inside LibreOffice.

Did Canada really become poorer than Alabama?

Author Len Deighton has passed away, and his obituary on the BBC mentioned his novel SS-GB (1977) (I read it in the 80s, and saw the miniseries maybe 8~9 years ago) predated fellow alternate history Fatherland (by Robert Harris, 1992) by multiple years.

I thought "surely The Man in the High Castle (1962) and The Iron Dream (1972) preceded both" and started wondering when was the first alternate history with a Nazi victory.

Turns out it was in 1937! The book was Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin (although she used the pen name Murray Constantine & the author's true identity was only uncovered in the mid-1980s).

It has been described as "the most original of all the many anti-fascist dystopias of the late 1930s" and contains many elements seen a decade later in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: the past has been destroyed and history is rewritten, language is distorted, few books exist apart from propaganda, and a secret book is the only witness to the past.

• Internet Archive - Swastika Night