A cult is a religion with no political power. -- Tom Wolfe
On this beautiful day of
Wednesday
27
November
23:11 UTC
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World of fiction
Our culture is full of fiction, entire fictional universes inhabited by millions of fictional characters. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that seeks to describe facts and opinions about reality. When writing about fiction, please be sure to establish the necessary context for the reader, so that it is clear that the article describes a fictional entity from a specific work. It is also often a good idea to combine many minor fictional characters or places into a single article about the fictional realm in question, especially when there is only a very limited amount that could be said about each of them.
Mary Jackson (1921–2005) was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and its successor, NASA. She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. In 1958, after taking engineering classes, she became NASA's first black female engineer. Jackson had earned the most senior engineering title available by 1979 and realized she could not earn further promotions without becoming a supervisor. She accepted a demotion to become a manager of both NASA's federal women's program and the affirmative action program. Her work sought to influence the career paths of women in science, engineering, and mathematics positions at NASA. Jackson is one of the leading characters in the 2016 book Hidden Figures and one of the three protagonists in the book's film adaptation, released the same year. This NASA photograph of Jackson was taken in 1979.Photograph credit: NASA; restored by Adam Cuerden
Ice eggs, also known as ice balls, are a rare phenomenon caused by a process in which small pieces of sea ice in open water are rolled over by wind and currents in freezing conditions and grow into spheroid pieces of ice. They sometimes collect into heaps of balls on beaches where they pack together in striking patterns. The gentle churn of water, blown by a suitably stiff breeze, makes concentric layers of ice form on a seed particle that then grows into the floating ball as it rolls through the freezing currents. This formation of ice eggs was photographed in 2014 on Stroomi Beach in Tallinn, Estonia. The temperature was around −20 to −15 °C (−4 to 5 °F), and the diameter of each ball around 5 to 10 centimetres (2 to 4 in).
Thecacera pennigera, also known as the winged thecacera, is a species of sea slug in the family Polyceridae. It has a cosmopolitan distribution, being found in temperate waters on either side of the North Atlantic Ocean, in the Mediterranean Sea, around South and West Africa, Brazil, Japan, Korea, Pakistan and more recently in Australia and New Zealand. There is a significant difference in colouring between Atlantic populations and Pacific specimens, however. Thecacera pennigera has a typical adult length between 15 millimetres (0.6 in) and 30 millimetres (1.2 in), featuring a short, wide head with two lateral flaps and two sheathed olfactory organs called rhinophores. The body is wedge shaped, being wide at the front and ending in a slender foot with a lateral keel on either side. The general colour of the body is translucent white and the upper side is covered with orange splotches and small black spots. Like other sea slugs, T. pennigera is a hermaphrodite with internal fertilisation and a mating mechanism whereby pairs of animals exchange packets of sperm. This T. pennigera was photographed in the Mar Piccolo of Taranto, Italy.