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November 21

Foxboro Stadium, host venue of MLS Cup 1999

MLS Cup 1999 was the fourth edition of the MLS Cup, the championship match of Major League Soccer (MLS), the top-level soccer league of the United States. It took place on November 21, 1999, at Foxboro Stadium (pictured) in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and was contested by D.C. United and the Los Angeles Galaxy in a rematch of the inaugural 1996 final played at the same venue. Both teams finished atop their respective conferences during the regular season under new head coaches and advanced through the first two rounds of the playoffs. D.C. United won 2–0 with first-half goals from Jaime Moreno and Ben Olsen for their third MLS Cup victory in four years; Olsen was named the most valuable player of the match for his winning goal. The final was played in front of 44,910 spectators – a record for the MLS Cup – and drew 1.16 million viewers on its ABC television broadcast. It was also the first MLS match to be played with a standard game clock and without a tiebreaker shootout. (Full article...)

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April 21

The Krag-Jørgensen is a repeating bolt action rifle designed by the Norwegians Ole Herman Johannes Krag and Erik Jørgensen in the late 19th century. It was adopted as a standard arm by Denmark, the United States and Norway. The most distinctive feature of the Krag-Jørgensen action was its magazine. While other rifles of its era used a box magazine, the magazine of the Krag-Jørgensen was integral with the receiver, featuring an opening on the right hand side with a hinged cover. The cartridges were inserted through the side opening, and were pushed up, around, and into the action by a spring follower. This presented both advantages and disadvantages compared with the standard top-loading "box" magazine; among other things, using a "stripper clip" to reload was impossible. At the same time, unlike a top-loading magazine, the Krag-Jørgensen's magazine could be topped up without opening the rifle's bolt. Today, the Krag-Jørgensen is a popular collector's rifle, and is valued by shooters for its smooth action. (more...)

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March 21

Isaac Asimov was a Russian-born American author and biochemist, a highly successful and exceptionally prolific writer best known for his works of science fiction and for his science books for the lay person. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series, which he later combined with two of his other series, the Galactic Empire Series and Robot series. He also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as a great amount of non-fiction. In fact, he wrote or edited over 500 volumes and an estimated 90,000 letters or postcards, and has works in every major category of the Dewey Decimal System except Philosophy. Asimov received HIV infected blood during heart bypass surgery in 1983. His death in 1992 was from AIDS-related complications, although this was kept secret by his widow for over a decade after his death. Asimov was a long-time member of Mensa, albeit reluctantly (he described them as "intellectually combative"). The asteroid 5020 Asimov is named in his honor, as is Honda's humanoid prototype robot ASIMO. (more...)

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February 21

The Liberal Party of Utah, along with the People's Party, was a local political party that flourished in Utah Territory in the latter 19th century before Democrats and Republicans established themselves in Utah in the early 1890s. The Liberal Party was formed in 1870 to oppose The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS Church; popularly known as the "Mormons"), which dominated local politics. Thus, the Liberal Party represented the non-Mormon side in religiously-charged Utah government. Though vastly outnumbered, the Liberal Party offered an opposing voice and successfully won several local elections. Anti-Mormonism was a central theme of the party until it disbanded in 1893 and was absorbed by the national parties. (more...)

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January 21

The gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold. When several nations are using such fixed unit of account then the rates of exchange among national currencies effectively becomes fixed. The gold standard can also be viewed as a monetary system in which changes in the supply and demand of gold determine the value of goods and services in relation to their supply and demand. Because of its rarity and durability, gold has long been used as a means of payment. The exact nature of the evolution of money varies significantly across time and place, though it is believed by historians that gold's high value for its utility, density, resistance to corrosion, uniformity, and easy divisibility made it useful both as a store of value and as a unit of account for stored value of other kinds. When used as part of a hard-money system, the function of paper currency is to reduce the danger of transporting gold, reduce the possibility of debasement of coins, and avoid the reduction in circulating medium to hoarding and losses. (more...)

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December 21

Free will is the philosophical doctrine that our choices are, ultimately, "up to us." Consequently, an unfree action must be somehow "up to" something else. The phrase "up to us" is vague and, just like free will itself, admits of a variety of interpretations. Determinism holds that each state of affairs is necessitated (determined) by the states of affairs that preceded it. Indeterminism holds that determinism is false, and that there are events which are not entirely determined by previous states of affairs. The idea of determinism is sometimes illustrated by the story of Laplace's demon, who knows all the facts about the past and present and all the natural laws that govern our world, and uses this knowledge to foresee the future, down to every detail. Some philosophers hold that determinism is at odds with free will, a doctrine known as incompatibilism. (more...)

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November 21

ROT13 replaces each letter by its partner 13 characters further along the alphabet

ROT13 is a simple Caesar cipher for obscuring text by replacing each letter with the letter thirteen places down the alphabet. A becomes N, B becomes O and so on. The algorithm is used in online forums as a means of hiding joke punchlines, puzzle solutions, movie and story spoilers and offensive materials from the casual glance. ROT13 has been described as the "Usenet equivalent of a magazine printing the answer to a quiz upside down." ROT13 originated in Usenet Internet discussions in the early 1980s, and has become a de facto standard. As a Caesar cipher, ROT13 provides no real cryptographic security and is not used for such; in fact it is often used as the canonical example of weak encryption. Because ROT13 scrambles only letters, more complex schemes have been proposed to handle numbers and punctuation, or arbitrary binary data. (more...)

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October 21

Jazz is a musical art form, commonly characterized by blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms and improvisation. It has been called the first original art form to develop in the United States of America. Jazz is rooted in West African cultural and musical expression and in African American music traditions, in folk blues and ragtime. Originating in African American communities near the beginning of the 20th century, by the 1920s it had gained international popularity. Since then, jazz has had a profoundly pervasive influence on other musical styles worldwide. The word jazz itself is rooted in American slang, but is of unknown origin, despite many theories about its source. Rather than being a single, narrowly definable style, in the early 21st century jazz is an ever-growing family of musical styles, many of which continue to develop. (more...)

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September 21

The Coronation of the British monarch is a ceremony in which the monarch is formally crowned and invested with regalia. The coronation usually takes place several months after the death of the previous monarch, for the coronation is considered a joyous occasion that would be inappropriate when mourning still continues. For example, Elizabeth II was crowned on June 2, 1953, having ascended to the throne on February 6, 1952. The ceremony is officiated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most senior cleric of the Church of England. Many other government officials and guests attend. (more...)

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September 6

The Warsaw Uprising was an armed struggle during the Second World War by the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) to liberate Warsaw from German occupation and Nazi rule. It started on August 1, 1944 as a part of a nationwide uprising, Operation Tempest. The Polish troops resisted the German-led forces until October 2. An estimated 85% of the city was destroyed during the urban guerrilla war and after the end of hostilities. The Uprising started at a crucial point in the war as the Soviet army was approaching Warsaw. Although the Soviet army was within a few hundred metres of the city from September 16 onward, the link between the uprising and the advancing army was never made. This failure and the reasons behind it have been a matter of controversy ever since. (more...)

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August 21

The Data Encryption Standard, or DES, is a cipher selected as an official FIPS standard for the United States in 1976, and which has subsequently enjoyed widespread use internationally. The algorithm was initially controversial, with classified design elements, a relatively short key length, and continuing suspicions about a National Security Agency (NSA) backdoor. DES consequently came under intense academic scrutiny, and motivated the modern understanding of block ciphers and their cryptanalysis. Due to its short key length, DES is considered to be insecure for many applications, and has in recent years been superseded by the Advanced Encryption Standard. (more...)

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July 21

The auto rickshaw is a vehicle for hire that is one of the chief modes of transport in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It is a motorised version of the traditional rickshaw, a small two- or three-wheeled cart pulled by a person, and the velotaxi. The auto rickshaw is also related to its Thai cousin, the Tuk-Tuk. In many cities in Southern India, auto rickshaws have a notorious reputation as the vehicle of operation in shady criminal activities, which range from petty thievery and "chain snatching" (slang for stealing the necklaces worn by Indian women) to murder. (more...)

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June 21

The London Underground is a public transport network, composed of electrified railways (that is, a metro system) that run underground in tunnels in central London and above ground in the London suburbs. It is the oldest city underground network in the world. Lines on the Underground can be classified into two types: sub-surface and deep level. The sub-surface lines were dug by the cut-and-cover method, with the tracks running about 5 metres below the surface. The deep-level or "tube" lines, bored using a tunnelling shield, run about 20 metres below the surface (although this varies considerably), with each track running in a separate tunnel lined with cast-iron rings. Today there are 275 stations and over 408 km of active lines, with 3 million passenger journeys made each day. (more...)

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May 21

Crash test dummies have saved countless lives

Crash test dummies are full-scale replicas of human beings, weighted and articulated to simulate the behavior of a human body in a vehicle mishap, and instrumented to record as much data as possible on variables such as speed of impact, crushing force, bending, folding, or torquing of the body, and deceleration rates during a collision. In modern times, they remain indispensable in the development of new makes and models of all types of vehicles, from family sedans to fighter aircraft. (more...)

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April 21

James Bulger was a toddler who was abducted and murdered by two ten year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, on Merseyside, in the United Kingdom. The murder of a child by two other children caused an immense public outpouring of shock, outrage and grief, particularly in Liverpool and surrounding towns. At the boys' trial in November 1993 they received a minimum term of eight years detention. (more...)

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March 21

Punk rock is the anti-establishment music movement of the period 1976–1980, exemplified by the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash and The Ramones, and to subsequent music scenes that share key characteristics with these first-generation "punks." The term is sometimes also applied to the fashions or the irreverent "do-it-yourself" attitude associated with this musical movement. The term "Punk rock" was originally used to describe the primitive guitar-based rock and roll of untutored U.S. bands of the mid-1960s. (more...)

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