Some people will read anything
FiveFingers are a type of shoe manufactured by Vibram. Originally developed as a ‘barefoot alternative’ for sailing and climbing, the footwear has thin, flexible soles that are contoured to the shape of the human foot, including visible individual sections for the toes. Vibram FiveFingers are meant to replicate being barefoot and allow for the natural biomechanics of the foot to work.
The Heineken WOBO (World Bottle) was a beer bottle designed for use as a building material in the developing world.
A Mickey Finn (or simply Mickey) is a slang term for a drink laced with a drug (especially chloral hydrate) given to someone without their knowledge in order to incapacitate them. Serving someone a Mickey Finn is most commonly referred to as ‘slipping a mickey.’
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To grok is to share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity. Author Robert A. Heinlein coined the term in his best-selling 1961 book ‘Stranger in a Strange Land.’ In Heinlein’s view, grokking is the intermingling of intelligence that necessarily affects both the observer and the observed.
In sports science theory, supercompensation is the post training period during which the trained function/parameter has a higher performance capacity than it did prior to the training period. First put forth by Hungarian scientist Nikolai Jakowlew in 1976, this theory is a basic principle of athletic training.
Cabinet noir (French for ‘black room’) was the name given in France to the office where the letters of suspected persons were opened and read by public officials before being forwarded to their destination. This practice had been in use since the establishment of posts, and was frequently used by the ministers of Louis XIII and Louis XIV; but it was not until the reign of Louis XV that a separate office for this purpose was created. Although declaimed against at the time of the French Revolution, it was used both by the revolutionary leaders and by Napoleon.
Room 641A is an intercept facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), beginning in 2003. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic and, therefore, presumably has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building.The existence of the room was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, and was the subject of a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) against AT&T. Klein claims he was told that similar black rooms are operated at other facilities around the country.
