Everything is Interesting
Pininfarina is an Italian car design firm and coachbuilder in Cambiano, Italy. Founded in 1930 by automobile designer and builder Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina, the company has been employed by a wide variety of high-end automobile manufacturers, including Ferrari, Maserati, Rolls-Royce, Cadillac, Jaguar, Volvo, Alfa Romeo, and Lancia. It also has designed trams in France, high-speed trains in Holland, and trolleys in the USA.
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Karst [kahrst] topography is characterized by subterranean limestone caverns, carved by groundwater. It is a landscape shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, usually carbonate rock such as limestone or dolomite. Due to subterranean drainage, there may be very limited surface water, even to the absence of all rivers and lakes. Many karst regions display distinctive surface features, with sinkholes or dolines being the most common.
Some karst regions include thousands of caves, even though evidence of caves that are big enough for human exploration is not a required characteristic of karst. Serbian geographer, Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927) is recognized as the father of karst geomorphology. The international community has settled on ‘karst,’ the German name for Kras, a region in Slovenia partially extending into Italy, where it is called ‘Carso’ and where the first scientific research of a karst topography was made. The name has an Indo-European origin (from ‘karra’ meaning ‘stone’).
Phong Nha – Ke Bang is a national park in north-central Vietnam, about 500 km south of the nation’s capital, Hanoi. The park was created to protect one of the world’s two largest karst regions (landscapes shaped by the dissolution of a layer soluble bedrock) with 300 caves and grottoes and also protects the ecosystem of limestone forest of the Annamite Range region in north central coast of Vietnam.
Phong Nha-Ke Bang area is noted for its cave and grotto systems as it is composed of 300 caves and grottos with a total length of about 126 km, of which only 20 have been surveyed by Vietnamese and British scientists; 17 of these are in located in the Phong Nha area and three in the Ke Bang area. Before discovery of the nearby, Son Doong Cave in 2009, Phong Nha was the largest cave in the world.
David Goggins is a Navy SEAL, who served in Afghanistan, and an ultramarathon runner. After several of his friends died in the war, Goggins began long-distance running to raise money. In 2005, Goggins entered the 24 hour race in San Diego and was able to run 100 miles in under 19 hours, despite never having run a marathon before. Since then, Goggins competed in many different long distance running events such as the Las Vegas Marathon and the Badwater 135 miler, where he placed highly.
Laban [ley-buhn] Movement Analysis is a way and language for interpreting, describing, visualizing and notating all ways of human movement. Created by Rudolf Laban, LMA draws on his theories of effort and shape to describe, interpret and document human movement. Used as a tool by dancers, athletes, physical and occupational therapists, it is one of the most widely used systems of human movement analysis.
Rudolf Laban (1879–1958) was a dance artist and theorist whose work laid the foundations for dance notation. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in the history of dance and fencing.
Love Jihad (also known as Romeo Jihad) is an alleged activity under which some young Muslim boys in Southern India reportedly targeted college girls belonging to non-Muslim communities for conversion to Islam by feigning love. A Love Jihad was alleged to be conducted in Kerala and Mangalore in the coastal Karnataka region. According to Kerala Catholic Bishops Council, up to 4,500 girls in Kerala have been targeted, whereas Hindu Janajagruthi Samiti claimed that 30,000 girls have been converted in Karnataka alone.
The practice is said to be popular on college campuses, and it was on one such that in early September 2009 two girls — one Hindu and one Christian — indicated that they had been forced to convert by two Muslim youths. The young men, both of whom were members of the Muslim Popular Front of India’s student organisation Campus Front were subsequently arrested and held without bail.
Cassini–Huygens is a joint NASA/ European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft mission currently studying the planet Saturn and its many natural satellites. The spacecraft consists of two main elements: the NASA-designed and -constructed Cassini orbiter, named for the Italian-French astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini, and the ESA-developed Huygens probe, named for the Dutch astronomer, mathematician and physicist Christiaan Huygens. Cassini is the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter orbit.
The complete spacecraft was launched in 1997 and entered into orbit around Saturn in 2004. Shortly after arrival, the Huygens probe separated from the orbiter and headed for Saturn’s moon Titan. In 2005, it descended into Titan’s atmosphere, and downward to the surface, radioing scientific information back to the Earth by telemetry. This was the first landing in the outer solar system.
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