title: Heretics of Dune

text: Much has changed in the millennium and a half since the death of the God Emperor. Sandworms have reappeared on Arrakis (now called Rakis), each containing a fragment of the God Emperor's consciousness, and have renewed the flow of the all-important spice melange to the galaxy. With Leto's death, the complex economic system built on spice collapsed, resulting in a period of famine followed by trillions of people leaving known space in a great Scattering.


title: Heretics of Dune

text: A new civilization has risen, with three dominant powers: the Ixians, whose no-ships are capable of piloting between the stars and are invisible to outside detection; the Bene Tleilax, who have learned to manufacture spice in their axlotl tanks and have created a new breed of Face Dancers; and the Bene Gesserit, a matriarchal order of subtle political manipulators who possess superhuman abilities. However, people from the Scattering are returning with their own peculiar powers. The most powerful of these forces are the Honored Matres, a violent society of women bred and trained for combat and the sexual control of men.


title: Heretics of Dune

text: On Rakis, a girl who can control the giant worms called Sheeana (later revealed to be a descendant of Siona from the previous novel) has been discovered. The Bene Gesserit intends to use a Tleilaxu-provided Duncan Idaho ghola to gain control of this sandrider, and the religious forces of humanity who they know will ultimately worship her. The Tleilaxu have altered the ghola to bring its physical reflexes up to modern standards. The Bene Gesserit leader, Mother Superior Taraza, brings Miles Teg (also descended from Siona) to guard the new Idaho. Taraza also sends Reverend Mother Darwi Odrade to take command of the Bene Gesserit keep on Rakis. Odrade is a loose cannon; she does not obey normal Bene Gesserit prohibitions about love, and is also Teg's biological daughter.


title: Heretics of Dune

text: Bene Gesserit Imprinter Lucilla (yet another descendant of Siona's) is also sent by Taraza to bind Idaho's loyalty to the Sisterhood with her sexual talents. However, Lucilla must deal with Reverend Mother Schwangyu, head of the ghola project but also the leader of a faction within the Bene Gesserit who feel the gholas are a danger. Above the planet Gammu (formerly known as Giedi Prime), Taraza is captured and held hostage by the Honored Matres aboard an Ixian no-ship. The Honored Matres insist Taraza invite Teg to the ship, hoping to gain control of the ghola project. Teg manages to turn the tables on the Matres, and rescues the Mother Superior and her party.


title: Heretics of Dune

text: An attack is then made on Sheeana on Rakis, which is prevented by the intervention of the Bene Gesserit. Odrade starts training Sheeana as a Bene Gesserit. At about the same time an attempt is made on the life of Idaho, but Teg is able to defeat it. Teg flees with Duncan and Lucilla into the countryside. In an ancient Harkonnen no-globe, Teg proceeds to awaken Idaho's original memories, but does so before Lucilla can imprint Duncan and thus tie him to the Sisterhood.


title: Heretics of Dune

text: In the meantime, Taraza has sent her trusted general Burzmali to search for Teg and his party, who finally establishes contact with Teg, his former mentor. During the operation, however, Teg and his companions are ambushed. Teg is captured while Lucilla and Duncan escape. Teg is tortured by a T-Probe, but under pressure discovers new abilities: drastically increased physical capabilities and an uncertain type of prescience, which he uses to easily escape. At the same time, Idaho is ambushed and taken hostage. Taraza arranges a meeting with the Tleilaxu Master Waff, who is soon forced to tell her what he knows about the Honored Matres. When pressed on the issue of Idaho, he also admits that the Bene Tleilax have conditioned their own agenda into him.


title: Heretics of Dune

text: As the meeting draws to a close, Taraza accidentally divines that Waff is a Zensunni, giving the Bene Gesserit a lever to understand their ancient competitor. She and Odrade meet Waff again on Rakis. He tries to assassinate Taraza but Odrade convinces him that the Sisterhood shares the religious beliefs of the Bene Tleilax. Taraza offers full alliance with them against the onslaught of forces out of the Scattering. This agreement causes consternation among the Bene Gesserit, but Odrade realizes that Taraza's plan is to destroy Rakis. By destroying the planet, the Bene Gesserit would be dependent on the Tleilaxu for the spice, ensuring an alliance.


title: Heretics of Dune

text: Lucilla arrives at a Bene Gesserit safe house to discover it has been taken over by a young Honored Matre named Murbella, who has partially subdued Idaho. After being defeated in a quick bout of personal combat, Murbella assumes that Lucilla is the Great Honored Matre, and allows Lucilla and Burzmali to watch through the window of a locked room while she completes the sexual enslavement of the ghola. However, hidden Tleilaxu conditioning kicks in, and Duncan responds with an equal technique, one that overwhelms Murbella; the experience restores in him the entire memories from all of the hundreds of previous Idaho gholas. Stunned and exhausted, Murbella dimly realizes that the man is the ghola they had been warned to search for, and unlocks the door to the room to gain Lucilla's assistance in killing him. But Lucilla says, "We will kill no one. This ghola goes to Rakis."


title: Heretics of Dune

text: The Honored Matres attack Rakis, killing Taraza. Odrade becomes temporary leader of the Bene Gesserit before escaping with Sheeana into the desert on a worm. Teg also goes to a supposed safe house, only to discover the Honored Matres. He unleashes himself upon the complex, and finds that his prescient powers allow him to 'see' shielded no-ships; he captures one and locates Duncan and Lucilla. They are taken to Rakis with him and the now-hostage Murbella. When they arrive, Teg intercepts Odrade and Sheeana and their giant worm, having seen Taraza's master plan with his new vision. He loads them all up in his no-ship, finally leading his troops out on a last suicidal defense of Rakis, designed to attract the rage of the Honored Matres.


title: Heretics of Dune

text: The Honored Matres attack Rakis, destroying the planet and the sandworms except for the one the Bene Gesserit escape with. They intend to drown the worm in a mixture of water and spice, turning it into sandtrout which will turn the secret Bene Gesserit planet Chapterhouse into another Dune, but with the collective consciousness of the God Emperor diluted into just one sandworm, freeing humanity from the shadow of his prescience forever.


title: Heretics of Dune

text: Frank Herbert wrote much of the initial draft of "Heretics of Dune" in Hawaii, using a Compaq word processor. According to his son Brian, Herbert's time spent writing the draft would be "exceedingly arduous and much slower for him [Herbert] than usual, because of all the time he had to spend out of his study tending to the medical crises of my mother, Beverly Herbert."


title: Heretics of Dune

text: "Heretics of Dune" was ranked as the No. 13 hardcover fiction best seller of 1984 by "The New York Times".


title: Industrial metal

text: Industrial metal is the fusion of heavy metal and industrial music, typically employing repeating metal guitar riffs, sampling, synthesizer or sequencer lines, and distorted vocals. Prominent industrial metal acts include Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Rammstein, Godflesh, and Fear Factory.


title: Industrial metal

text: Industrial metal developed in the late 1980s, as industrial and metal began to fuse into a common genre. Industrial metal did well in the early 1990s, particularly in North America, with the success of groups such as Nine Inch Nails, but its popularity began to fade in the latter half of the 1990s.


title: Industrial metal

text: Though electric guitars had been used by industrial artists since the early days of the genre, archetypal industrial groups such as Throbbing Gristle displayed a strong anti-rock stance. British post-punk band Killing Joke pioneered the crossing over between styles and was an influence on major acts associated with industrial metal such as Ministry, Godflesh, and Nine Inch Nails. Another pioneer industrial rock group, Big Black, also impacted some later groups.


title: Industrial metal

text: By the late 1980s industrial and heavy metal began to fuse into a common genre, with Godflesh's self-titled EP and Ministry's "The Land of Rape and Honey" at the forefront. Godflesh was founded by former Napalm Death guitarist Justin Broadrick. Drawing from a wide array of influences—power electronics forefathers Whitehouse, noise rock band Swans, ambient music creator Brian Eno and fellow Birmingham hard rockers Black Sabbath—the Godflesh sound was once described as ""Pornography"-era The Cure on Quaaludes". Though not a top seller, Godflesh nonetheless became an influential act, their name mentioned by Korn, Metallica, Danzig, Faith No More, and Fear Factory.


title: Industrial metal

text: Ministry emerged from the scene surrounding Wax Trax! Records, a Chicago indie label dedicated to industrial music. Ministry's initial foray into guitar rock happened during a recording session of "The Land of Rape and Honey" on Southern Studios, in London. The band's frontman, the Cuban-born Al Jourgensen, explained this transition:


title: Industrial metal

text: Jourgensen seemed particularly fond of thrash metal. After the release of "Land", he recruited guitarist Mike Scaccia from Texas thrashers Rigor Mortis. On one occasion, Jourgensen told the press that Sepultura was his favorite band. He also expressed the desire to produce a Metallica album. Jourgensen's interest in dance-oriented electronic music did not entirely fade, however; he also formed the side-project Revolting Cocks, a more electronic body music-inflected collaboration with Richard23 of Front 242.


title: Industrial metal

text: German band KMFDM was another seminal industrial metal group. Although not a metal fan, KMFDM leader Sascha Konietzko's "infatuation with ripping off metal licks" stemmed from his experiments with E-mu's Emax sampler in late 1986. He told "Guitar World" that,


title: Industrial metal

text: A Swiss trio, The Young Gods, brushed with the style on their second album, "L'Eau Rouge" (1989). Prior to its release, singer Franz Treichler declared:


title: Industrial metal

text: Canadian thrash metal band Malhavoc became one of the earlier acts of the genre when they began to mix extreme metal with industrial music in the late 1980s.


title: Industrial metal

text: Pigface, formed by Martin Atkins and including Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin, emerged as an industrial metal collective of sorts, participating with many figures from the noise rock and industrial worlds. Nine Inch Nails, the "one-man-band" formed by Trent Reznor, brought the genre to mainstream audiences with albums such as the Grammy-winning "Broken" and the best-selling "The Downward Spiral", accompanied by their groundbreaking performance at Woodstock '94. The rivethead subculture also developed at this time, along with the so-called "coldwave" subgenre, which encompassed Chemlab, 16 Volt, and Acumen Nation. Some electro-industrial groups adopted industrial metal techniques in this period, including Skinny Puppy (on their "Rabies", co-produced by Jourgensen), and Front Line Assembly.


title: Industrial metal

text: British band Pitchshifter, formed in 1989 by brothers Jon and Mark Clayden, also started as an industrial metal band. The band later included elements of drum and bass. Frontman JS mentions:


title: Industrial metal

text: Industrial metal's popularity led a number of successful thrash metal groups, including Megadeth, Sepultura, and Anthrax, to request remixes by "industrial" artists. Some musicians emerging from the death metal scene, such as Fear Factory, Nailbomb, Autokrator and Meathook Seed, also began to experiment with industrial. Fear Factory, from Los Angeles, were initially influenced by the Earache roster (namely Godflesh, Napalm Death and Bolt Thrower). The German band Oomph! after their second album Sperm started to play industrial metal combined with elements of death metal and groove metal until the album Plastik. Sepultura singer Max Cavalera's Nailbomb, a collaboration with Alex Newport, also practiced a combination of extreme metal and industrial production techniques. A lesser-known example of industrial death metal is Meathook Seed, made up of members of Napalm Death and the Florida death metal group Obituary. An industrial music fan, Obituary guitarist Trevor Peres suggested drum machines for "The End Complete", Obituary's most successful album. The other band members' refusal led him to form Meathook Seed.


title: Industrial metal

text: In the early years of the 21st century, groups from the black metal scene began to incorporate elements of industrial music. Mysticum, formed in 1991, was the first of these groups. DHG (Dødheimsgard), Thorns from Norway and Blut Aus Nord, N.K.V.D. and Blacklodge from France, have been acclaimed for their incorporation of industrial elements. Other industrial black metal musicians include Samael, The Axis of Perdition, Aborym, and ...And Oceans. In addition, The Kovenant, Mortiis and Ulver emerged from the Norwegian black metal scene, but later chose to experiment with industrial music.


title: Industrial metal

text: Several artists with their roots in progressive music, though not often associated with industrial metal scene, also incorporated industrial textures into their music. Later-era King Crimson, whose 2000s albums were referred as "industrial art metal", and OSI can be named as examples of progressive industrial metal. Several acts associated with extreme metal subgenres also mix progressive and avant-garde metal with industrial, those include the Hungarian experimental metal act Thy Catafalque, Blut aus Nord and Norwegian band Shining with their critically acclaimed "Blackjazz" album, which blended progressive rock, black metal, free jazz and industrial. Canadian artist Devin Townsend, the founder of industrial thrash metal band Strapping Young Lad, later fused industrial with progressive metal during his prolific solo career.


title: Industrial metal

text: Coldwave is a sub-genre of industrial metal originating in the 1990s. It has its roots in acts like Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. The style focuses on heavier, punk-based guitars, sampled hard rock-like guitars, synthesizer accompaniment, and acid house elements. Lyrical content is typically cyberpunk-oriented with pop music sensibilities, although it can vary.


title: Industrial metal

text: Chemlab's 1993 album Burn Out at the Hydrogen Bar is often considered the album that defined the coldwave style.


title: Industrial metal

text: The coldwave style began to wane rapidly when industrial music in general started to lose popularity in the latter half of the 1990s-early 2000's. Many artists within the genre moved on to different styles that included; Hard rock, heavy metal, nu metal, synth-metal, synth-rock, and synth-pop among other genres.


title: Industrial metal

text: Coldwave today is a small, niche scene within industrial music. Very few bands today describe themselves or are described as coldwave. Bands like Cyanotic and Medicant Downline are perhaps the exception.


title: Industrial metal

text: Industrial metal blossomed in the early 1990s, particularly in North America, where it would eventually sell close to 35 million units. It first became a commercial force in 1992 when Nine Inch Nails' "Broken" and Ministry's "" went platinum in America, though the latter took three years to reach that status. Both groups were nominated for the Best Metal Performance in the 1992 Grammy Awards, with Nine Inch Nails winning. Two years later, Nine Inch Nails released "The Downward Spiral", which debuted at No. 2, and would eventually go quadruple-platinum. This record is considered by "AllMusic" as "one of the bleakest multi-platinum albums ever".


title: Industrial metal

text: Following Nine Inch Nails' success, Marilyn Manson, led by a protégé of Reznor's, came to prominence. The group's live performance and its transgressive appeal was often more commented on than their music.


title: Industrial metal

text: Industrial metal reached its commercial zenith in the latter half of the 1990s – according to the RIAA databases, its top-selling artists sold around 17.5 million units combined. Records by major industrial metal artists routinely debuted on the top spots of the "Billboard" 200 chart: Rob Zombie's "Hellbilly Deluxe" (No. 5), Marilyn Manson's "Antichrist Superstar" (No. 3), and Nine Inch Nails' "The Fragile" (No. 1). A number of industrial metal albums performed well on Billboard's "Heatseekers" chart: Filter's "Short Bus" (No. 3), Stabbing Westward's "Wither Blister Burn + Peel" (No. 1), Rammstein's "Sehnsucht" (No. 2), Orgy's "Candyass" (No. 1), and Static-X's "Wisconsin Death Trip" (No. 1).


title: Industrial metal

text: During this era, Trent Reznor was chosen by "Time" as one of the most influential Americans of 1997. The genre's popularity was such that established glam metal groups, including Guns N' Roses and Mötley Crüe, began to dabble in the style. Figures from the hip hop scene also began to seek out collaborations with and remixes from industrial metal musicians.


title: Industrial metal

text: When industrial metal climbed the charts of the late 1990s, its sudden popularity was met with negative reactions from the early innovators of industrial music. Peter Christopherson told "The Wire" that he no longer felt any kinship with the industrial scene: "this is not me, this is not what I'm about". Lustmord, a prominent early industrial musician, declared that "Ministry just doesn't interest [him]" and "[he has] no time for all this rock and roll shit they're doing now." Skinny Puppy frontman Nivek Ogre dismissed Nine Inch Nails as "cock rock" but have since patched things up and have even performed on stage together.


title: Industrial metal

text: Industrial metal suffered a critical backlash at the turn of the millennium. In an April 2000 review for the "Chicago Sun Times", Jim DeRogatis dismissed Nine Inch Nails' new music as a "generic brand of industrial thrash" and accused Ministry of repeating an act that "was old by 1992". Although "The Fragile" reached the top spot of the "Billboard" 200 and went on to earn double platinum status, DeRogatis considered it a "flop" nonetheless.


title: Industrial metal

text: Around this time, veteran industrial metal artists (Ministry, Godflesh, and White Zombie) began to repudiate the industrial label. Sales remained high throughout 2000–2005; at least 10 million records were sold during that time frame. Many groups began to take influence from hip hop and electronic music, in addition to industrial metal. As a result, acts like Powerman 5000 are often described as industrial metal as well as nu metal.


title: Industrial metal

text: Several industrial metal groups have produced eye-catching videos. These include Godflesh's collaboration with Andres Serrano, Aidan Hughes's graphics for KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails' work with Mark Romanek, Rob Zombie's visual work for White Zombie (for which he received the MTV Video Music Award for Best Hard Rock Video), and Marilyn Manson's output with Richard Kern and Floria Sigismondi. NIN later collaborated with Bill Viola for live accompaniment. Trent Reznor also produced the soundtracks for the films "Natural Born Killers" and "Lost Highway", and served as "musical consultant" for "Man on Fire". Rob Zombie has directed three films. In 2009, Marilyn Manson was in the process of directing "". The movie has since languished in development hell. Other films that have included prominent contributions from industrial metal artists include "The Crow", "Johnny Mnemonic", "Mortal Kombat", "The Matrix", "Blair Witch" and "A.I. Artificial Intelligence".


title: Industrial metal

text: Its emphasis on transgressive themes has made a few industrial metal groups vulnerable to attack from American social conservatives. For example, Sen. Bob Dole, then head of the Republican Party, sharply criticized Time Warner after a meeting between Michael J. Fuchs (head of the Warner Music Group), William Bennett, and C. Delores Tucker, at which Tucker and Bennett demanded that Fuchs read lyrics from NIN's "Big Man with a Gun". A year later, Bennett, Tucker, and Joseph Lieberman launched a similar campaign against MCA Records for their distribution of Marilyn Manson's music. Many of his concerts were cancelled by authorities after this uproar. In addition, Dennis Cooper cited Ministry's video for "Just One Fix", which featured footage of William S. Burroughs, as an early example of heroin chic. Some initial reports claimed that Columbine High School shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were Marilyn Manson fans. In fact, they preferred KMFDM and Rammstein. Asa Coon, another school shooter, was a Manson fan.


title: Industrial metal

text: Manson, a former journalist, published a detailed response to the controversy following the Columbine shootings in an article published in "Rolling Stone". It concluded:


title: Industrial metal

text: Sascha Konietzko reported that KMFDM was "sick and appalled" by the shootings, issuing a statement the following day saying:


title: Industrial metal

text: Rammstein stated that they "have no lyrical content or political beliefs that could have possibly influenced such behavior". Rammstein have also been controversial for their use of Nazi imagery, including footage shot by Leni Riefenstahl for "Olympia" in their video for "Stripped". Alec Empire, a German digital hardcore musician, declared that "[Rammstein is] successful for all the wrong reasons. I think they're not a fascist band at all, but I think in Germany there's a lot of misunderstanding and that's why they sell records and I think that's dangerous." In response to the controversy, Rammstein stated that "We are not Nazis, Neo-Nazis, or any other kind of Nazi. We are against racism, bigotry or any other type of discrimination." The band went on to create the song "Links 2-3-4", released in 2001, which responded to the Nazi allegations by insinuating that they reside left on the political spectrum.


title: Global Liveability Ranking

text: The Global Livability Ranking is a yearly assessment published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), ranking 172 global cities (previously 140) for their urban quality of life based on assessments of stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Austria's capital, Vienna, was ranked the most liveable city in 2022 among the 172 cities surveyed by The Economist Intelligence Unit, having previously won in 2018 and 2019.


title: Global Liveability Ranking

text: The Syrian capital, Damascus, was ranked the least liveable city of the 140 assessed in 2018 and 2019, reflecting the ongoing conflict in the country.


title: Global Liveability Ranking

text: Before 2011, Vancouver, Canada, was ranked the EIU's most liveable city from 2002 to 2010. In 2011 the EIU stated that a highway closure on Vancouver Island (separated from Vancouver by the Strait of Georgia and not connected by a bridge) resulted in the "small adjustment" to Vancouver's rating, suggesting a possible error in the 2011 rankings.


title: Global Liveability Ranking

text: Cities from Australia, Canada, western Europe and New Zealand typically dominate the top 10, reflecting their widespread availability of goods and services, low personal risk, and an effective infrastructure. A 2010 opinion piece in "The New York Times" criticized the Economist Intelligence Unit for being overly Anglocentric, stating that: "The Economist equates liveability with speaking English."


title: Global Liveability Ranking

text: The EIU also publishes a Worldwide Cost of Living Survey that compares the cost of living in a range of global cities.


title: Nyan Cat

text: Nyan Cat is a YouTube video uploaded in April 2011, which became an internet meme. The video merged a Japanese pop song with an animated cartoon cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso flying through space and leaving a rainbow trail behind. The video ranked at number five on the list of most viewed YouTube videos in 2011.


title: Nyan Cat

text: On April 2, 2011, the GIF animation of the cat was posted by 25-year-old Christopher Torres of Dallas, Texas, who uses the name "prguitarman", on his website "LOL-Comics". Torres explained in an interview where the idea for the animation came from: "I was doing a donation drive for the Red Cross and in-between drawings in my Livestream video chat, two different people mentioned I should draw a 'Pop Tart' and a 'cat'." In response, he created a hybrid image of a Pop-Tart and a cat, which was developed a few days later into the animated GIF.


title: Nyan Cat

text: Nyan Cat was based on a real cat: Torres' pet cat Marty, who died in November 2012 from feline infectious peritonitis.


title: Nyan Cat

text: The original version of the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" was uploaded by user "daniwell" to the Japanese video site Niconico on July 25, 2010. The song features the Vocaloid virtual singer Hatsune Miku. The Japanese word is onomatopoeic, imitating the call of a cat (equivalent to English "meow"). The song was later included in the rhythm game "", released by Sega in August 2012.


title: Nyan Cat

text: On January 30, 2011, a user named "Momomomo" uploaded a cover of "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" featuring the UTAU voice Momone Momo. The voice source used to create the Momone Momo voice was a Japanese woman named Momoko Fujimoto.


title: Nyan Cat

text: YouTube user "saraj00n" (whose real name is Sara June) combined the cat animation with the "Momomomo" version of the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!", and uploaded it to YouTube on April 5, 2011, three days after Torres had uploaded his animation, giving it the title "Nyan Cat". The video rapidly became a success after being featured on websites including G4 and CollegeHumor. Christopher Torres said: "Originally, its name was Pop Tart Cat, and I will continue to call it so, but the Internet has reached a decision to name it Nyan Cat, and I'm happy with that choice, too."


title: Nyan Cat

text: In March 2019, ownership of the YouTube channel hosting the original Nyan Cat video was transferred to Means TV, a worker-owned video streaming service.


title: Nyan Cat

text: In February 2021, it was reported that the gif's original creator, Chris Torres, had created an updated version and sold it as a non-fungible token (NFT) for 300 ether, the equivalent of US$587,000 at the time of sale.


title: Nyan Cat

text: The Nyan Cat music video reached ninth place in "Business Insider"s top ten viral videos of April 2011, with 7.2 million total views. The original YouTube video has received 199 million views . Nyan Cat won a Webby Award in 2012 for "Meme of the Year".


title: Nyan Cat

text: Due to the video's popularity, many new remixes and cover versions have been made, some several hours long. There are also ringtones, wallpapers and applications created for operating systems and devices, including a progress bar substitute for Windows which would show up in various places such as the file transfer progress indicator in Windows Explorer, following a request on the subreddit "Somebody Make This". Video games were developed for iPhone, iPad, Symbian, Android, Windows Phone, and HP webOS, and a variety of flash games such as "Snake" replicas using the cat's rainbow tail. "Nyan Cat Adventure", by 21st Street Games, is an officially licensed game. An officially licensed cryptocurrency entitled "Nyancoin" with the domain name nyanco.in (later nyan-coin.org) was launched in January 2014.


title: Nyan Cat

text: Christopher Torres initially criticized the website www.nyan.cat, which originally featured a similar-looking cat with the pop tart replaced by a slice of toast, and the same background music. The site, which uses the .cat sponsored top-level domain, was described by Torres as "plagiarized". Since 2012 the website has been operated by Torres, and shows the authentic version of the cat.


title: Nyan Cat

text: On June 27, 2011, the original YouTube video was taken down from the site following a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint from someone claiming to be Torres. Torres immediately issued a statement on his website "LOL-comics" denying that he was the source of the complaint, and contacted Saraj00n and daniwell, who hold the copyright for the video and the song, in order to file a counter-complaint to YouTube. During the period that the video was unavailable for viewing, Torres received numerous abusive e-mails from people who wrongly believed that he had filed the DMCA complaint. On June 28, 2011, the Nyan Cat video was restored to YouTube.


title: Nyan Cat

text: In May 2013, Christopher Torres and Charles Schmidt, the creators of Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat respectively, jointly sued 5th Cell and Warner Bros. for copyright infringement and trademark infringement over the appearance of these characters without permission in the "Scribblenauts" series of video games. Torres and Schmidt have registered copyrights on their characters and have pending trademark applications on the names. Torres released a statement saying that he had tried to obtain compensation from 5th Cell and Warner Bros. for commercial use of the character, but was "disrespected and snubbed" multiple times. The suit was settled in September 2013, with Torres and Schmidt being paid for the use of the characters.


title: Rattan

text: Rattan, also spelled ratan, is the name for roughly 600 species of Old World climbing palms belonging to subfamily Calamoideae. The greatest diversity of rattan palm species and genera are in the closed-canopy old-growth tropical forests of Southeast Asia, though they can also be found in other parts of tropical Asia and Africa. Most rattan palms are ecologically considered lianas due to their climbing habits, unlike other palm species. A few species also have tree-like or shrub-like habits.


title: Rattan

text: Around 20% of rattan palm species are economically important and are traditionally used in Southeast Asia in producing wickerwork furniture, baskets, canes, woven mats, cordage, and other handicrafts. Rattan canes are one of the world's most valuable non-timber forest products. Some species of rattan also have edible scaly fruit and heart of palm. Despite increasing attempts in the last 30 years at commercial cultivation, almost all rattan products still come from wild-harvested plants. Rattan supplies are now rapidly threatened due to deforestation and overexploitation. Rattan were also historically known as Malacca cane or Manila cane, based on their trade origins, as well as numerous other trade names for individual species.


title: Rattan

text: Most rattan palms are classified ecologically as lianas, because most mature rattan palms have a vine-like habit, scrambling through and over other vegetation. But they differ from true woody lianas in several ways. Because rattans are palms, they do not branch and they rarely develop new root structures upon contact of the stem with soil. They are also monocots and thus do not exhibit secondary growth. This means, the diameter of the rattan stem is always constant. The width of juvenile rattan palms is the same as adult palms, usually around in diameter, with long internodes between the leaves. This also means juvenile rattan palms are rigid enough to remain free-standing, unlike true lianas which always need structural support, even when young. Many rattans also have spines which act as hooks to aid climbing over other plants, and to deter herbivores. The spines also give rattans the ability to climb wide-diameter trees, unlike other vines which use tendrils or twining which can only climb narrower supports. Rattans have been known to grow up to hundreds of metres long.


title: Rattan

text: A few species of rattans are non-climbing. These range from free-standing tree-like species (like "Retispatha dumetosa") to acaulescent shrub-like species with short subterranean stems (like "Calamus pygmaeus").


title: Rattan

text: Rattans can also be solitary (single-stemmed), clustering (clump-forming), or both. Solitary rattan species grow into a single stem. Clustering rattan, on the other hand, develop clumps of up to 50 stems via suckers, similar to bamboo and bananas. These clusters can produce new stems continually as individual stems die. The impact of harvesting is much greater in solitary species, since the whole plant dies when harvested. An example of a commercially important single-stemmed species is "Calamus manan". Clustering species, on the other hand, have more potential to become sustainable if the rate of harvesting does not exceed the rate of stem replacement via vegetative reproduction.


title: Rattan

text: Rattans also display two types of flowering: hapaxanthy and pleonanthy. All the species of the genera "Korthalsia", "Laccosperma", "Plectocomia", "Plectocomiopsis", and "Myrialepis" are hapaxanthic; as well as a few species of "Daemonorops". This means they only flower and fruit once then die. All other rattan species are pleonanthic, being able to flower and fruit continually. Most commercially harvested species are pleonanthic, because hapaxanthic rattans tend to have soft piths making them unsuitable for bending.


title: Rattan

text: Calamoideae also includes tree palms such as Raphia ("Raffia") and "Metroxylon" (Sago palm) and shrub palms such as "Salacca" (Salak) (Uhl & Dransfield 1987 "Genera Palmarum"). The climbing habit in palms is not restricted to Calamoideae, but has also evolved in three other evolutionary lines—tribes Cocoseae ("Desmoncus" with c. 7–10 species in the New World tropics) and Areceae ("Dypsis scandens" in Madagascar) in subfamily Arecoideae, and tribe Hyophorbeae (climbing species of the large genus "Chamaedorea" in Central America) in subfamily Ceroxyloideae. They do not have spinose stems and climb by means of their reflexed terminal leaflets. Of these only "Desmoncus" spp. furnish stems of sufficiently good quality to be used as rattan cane substitutes.


title: Rattan

text: There are 13 different genera of rattans that include around 600 species. Some of the species in these "rattan genera" have a different habit and do not climb, they are shrubby palms of the forest undergrowth; nevertheless they are close relatives to species that are climbers and they are hence included in the same genera. The largest rattan genus is "Calamus", distributed in Asia except for one species represented in Africa. From the remaining rattan genera, "Ceratolobus, Korthalsia, Plectocomia, Plectocomiopsis, Myrialepis, Calospatha, Pogonotium" and "Retispatha", are centered in Southeast Asia with outliers eastwards and northwards; and three are endemic to Africa: "Laccosperma" (syn. "Ancistrophyllum"), "Eremospatha" and "Oncocalamus".


title: Rattan

text: In Uhl & Dransfield (1987 "Genera Palmarum", 2ºed. 2008), and also Dransfield & Manokaran (1993), a great deal of basic introductory information is available.


title: Rattan

text: The major commercial species of rattan canes as identified for Asia by Dransfield and Manokaran (1993) and for Africa, by Tuley (1995) and Sunderland (1999) ("Desmoncus" not treated here):


title: Rattan

text: The name "rattan" is first attested in English in the 1650s. It is derived from the Malay name "rotan". Probably ultimately from "rautan" (from "raut", "to trim" or "to pare").


title: Rattan

text: Many rattan species also form mutualistic relationships with ant species. They provide ant shelters (myrmecodomatia) like hollow spines, funnel-shaped leaves, or leaf sheath extensions (ochreae). The rattans in turn, gain protection from herbivores.


title: Rattan

text: Rattans are threatened with overexploitation, as harvesters are cutting stems too young and reducing their ability to resprout. Unsustainable harvesting of rattan can lead to forest degradation, affecting overall forest ecosystem services. Processing can also be polluting. The use of toxic chemicals and petrol in the processing of rattan affects soil, air and water resources, and also ultimately people's health. Meanwhile, the conventional method of rattan production is threatening the plant's long-term supply, and the income of workers.


title: Rattan

text: Rattans also exhibit rapid population growths in disturbed forest edges due to higher light availability than in the closed-canopy old-growth tropical forests. Although this can mean increased rattan abundance for economic exploitation, it can also be problematic in long-term conservation efforts.


title: Rattan

text: Rattan harvesting from the wild in most rattan-producing countries requires permits. These include the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, Malaysia, Laos, Ghana, and Cameroon. In addition, the Philippines also imposes an annual allowable cut in an effort to conserve rattan resources. Rattan cultivation (both monoculture and intercropping) is also being researched and pioneered in some countries, though it is still a young industry and only constitutes a minority of the rattan resources harvested annually.


title: Rattan

text: In forests where rattan grows, its economic value can help protect forest land, by providing an alternative to loggers who forgo timber logging and harvest rattan canes instead. Rattan is much easier to harvest, requires simpler tools and is much easier to transport. It also grows much faster than most tropical wood. This makes it a potential tool in forest maintenance, since it provides a profitable crop that depends on rather than replaces trees. It remains to be seen whether rattan can be as profitable or useful as the alternatives.


title: Rattan

text: Cleaned rattan stems with the leaf sheaths removed are superficially similar to bamboo. Unlike bamboo, rattan stems are not hollow. Most (70%) of the world's rattan population exist in Indonesia, distributed among the islands Borneo, Sulawesi, and Sumbawa. The rest of the world's supply comes from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Assam, India.


title: Rattan

text: Some rattan fruits are edible, with a sour taste akin to citrus. The fruit of some rattans exudes a red resin called dragon's blood; this resin was thought to have medicinal properties in antiquity and was used as a dye for violins, among other things. The resin normally results in a wood with a light peach hue. In the Indian state of Assam, the shoot is also used as vegetable.


title: Rattan

text: The stem tips are rich in starch, and can be eaten raw or roasted. Long stems can be cut to obtain potable water. The palm heart can also be eaten raw or cooked.


title: Rattan

text: In early 2010, scientists in Italy announced that rattan wood would be used in a new "wood to bone" process for the production of artificial bone. The process takes small pieces of rattan and places it in a furnace. Calcium and carbon are added. The wood is then further heated under intense pressure in another oven-like machine, and a phosphate solution is introduced. This process produces almost an exact replica of bone material. The process takes about 10 days. At the time of the announcement the bone was being tested in sheep, and there had been no signs of rejection. Particles from the sheep's bodies have migrated to the "wood bone" and formed long, continuous bones. The new bone-from-wood programme is being funded by the European Union. Implants into humans were anticipated to start in 2015.


title: Rattan

text: Rattans are extensively used for making baskets and furniture. When cut into sections, rattan can be used as wood to make furniture. Rattan accepts paints and stains like many other kinds of wood, so it is available in many colours, and it can be worked into many styles. Moreover, the inner core can be separated and worked into wicker. A typical braiding pattern is called "Wiener Geflecht", Viennese Braiding, as it was invented in 18th century Vienna and later most prominently used with the Thonet coffeehouse chair.


title: Rattan

text: Generally, raw rattan is processed into several products to be used as materials in furniture making. From a strand of rattan, the skin is usually peeled off, to be used as rattan weaving material. The remaining "core" of the rattan can be used for various purposes in furniture making. Rattan is a very good material, mainly because it is lightweight, durable, and, to a certain extent, flexible and suitable for outdoor use.


title: Rattan

text: Traditionally, the women of the Wemale ethnic group of Seram Island, Indonesia wore rattan girdles around their waist.


title: Rattan

text: Thin rattan canes were the standard implement for school corporal punishment in England and Wales, and are still used for this purpose in schools in Malaysia, Singapore, and several African countries. The usual maximum number of strokes was six, traditionally referred to as getting "Six of the best". Similar canes are used for military punishments in the Singapore Armed Forces. Heavier canes, also of rattan, are used for judicial corporal punishments in Aceh, Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore.


title: Rattan

text: Rattan is the preferred natural material used to wick essential oils in aroma reed diffusers (commonly used in aromatherapy, or merely to scent closets, passageways, and rooms), because each rattan reed contains 20 or more permeable channels that wick the oil from the container up the stem and release fragrance into the air, through an evaporation diffusion process. In contrast, reeds made from bamboo contain nodes that inhibit the passage of essential oils.


title: Rattan

text: Many of the properties of rattan that make it suitable for furniture also make it a popular choice for handicraft and art pieces. Uses include rattan baskets, plant containers, and other decorative works.


title: Rattan

text: Due to its durability and resistance to splintering, sections of rattan can be used as canes, crooks for high-end umbrellas, or staves for martial arts. Rattan sticks long, called "baston", are used in Filipino martial arts, especially Arnis/Eskrima/Kali and for the striking weapons in the Society for Creative Anachronism's full-contact "armoured combat".


title: Rattan

text: Along with birch and bamboo, rattan is a common material used for the handles in percussion mallets, especially mallets for keyboard percussion, "e.g.", marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, etc.


title: Rattan

text: Most natives or locals from the rattan rich countries employ the aid of this sturdy plant in their home building projects. It is heavily used as a housing material in rural areas. The skin of the plant or wood is primarily used for weaving.


title: Rattan

text: Rattan cane is also used traditionally to make polo mallets, though only a small portion of cane harvested (roughly 3%) is strong, flexible, and durable enough to be made into sticks for polo mallets, and popularity of rattan mallets is waning next the more modern variant, fibrecanes.


title: Rattan

text: Fire-hardened rattan were commonly used as the shafts of Philippine spears collectively known as "sibat". They were fitted with a variety of iron spearheads and ranged from short throwing versions to heavy thrusting weapons. They were used for hunting, fishing, or warfare (both land and naval warfare). The rattan shafts of war spears are usually elaborately ornamented with carvings and metal inlays. Arnis also makes prominent use of rattan as "arnis sticks", commonly called "yantok" or "baston". Their durability and weight makes it ideal for training with complex execution of techniques as well as being a choice of weapon, even against bladed objects.


title: Rattan

text: Rattan can also be used to build a functional sword that delivers a non-lethal but similar impact compared to steel counterparts.


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: Aleksandr Fyodorovich Akimov (; 6 May 1953 – 11 May 1986) was a Soviet engineer who was the supervisor of the shift that worked at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Reactor Unit 4 on the night of the Chernobyl disaster, 26 April 1986


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: In 1976, Akimov graduated from the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, with the degree of specialist in engineering and automation of heat and power processes.


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: He began his career at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in September 1979. During his first years at Chernobyl, he held positions of senior turbine management engineer and shift supervisor of the turbine hall.


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: In his personal life, Akimov enjoyed reading historical biographies and hunting. He was well liked by his colleagues but could be pushed around by his superiors.


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: On the night of 26 April 1986, Akimov was on duty as the shift supervisor of the 4th power unit. The reactor power level had been reduced, preparing for a planned safety test. The reactor stalled unexpectedly during test preparations, however, reportedly due to a mistake made by Leonid Toptunov. Raising power after this point put the reactor into a potentially dangerous state, due to design flaws in the reactor unbeknownst to the operators. During the test, Akimov called for the AZ-5 (scram) button to be pressed to shut down the reactor. Due to a design flaw, the descending control rods momentarily accelerated the nuclear reaction and caused the reactor to explode. The communications networks were suddenly flooded with calls and information. Akimov heard reports of massive reactor damage, but did not believe it, and as a result, relayed false information about the state of the reactor for hours thereafter.


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: Akimov worked with his crew in the reactor building after he learned the extent of the accident. They tried to pump water into the exposed reactor core until the morning. He worked with Toptunov to manually open water valves in an attempt to increase water supply to the reactor, during which time they began to notice acute radiation syndrome on themselves and were sent to the infirmary. Akimov was exposed during his work to a lethal dose of 15-20 Gy of radiation.


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: He was admitted to Pripyat Hospital but was quickly transferred to Moscow Hospital 6. By 28 April, the symptoms of radiation sickness had mostly worn away. His wife visited him in hospital and while aware he might not survive, he told her that he would give up working in the nuclear industry. During his stay, he discussed possible causes of the accident with Toptunov and Dyatlov but they were mystified. Toptunov and Akimov received a bone marrow transplant in an attempt to restore their immune systems. Akimov's condition quickly worsened. By the time accident investigator Sergei Yankovsky questioned him, Akimov could barely speak and was not able to provide much more information. Akimov eventually succumbed to acute radiation syndrome two weeks after the disaster at the age of 33. His family was informed that his death was the only reason he was not prosecuted for the accident.


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: While the initial Soviet investigation put almost all the blame on the operators, later findings by the IAEA found that the reactor design and how the operators were informed of safety information was more significant. Nonetheless, the operators were found to have deviated from operational procedures, changing test protocols on the fly, as well as having made "ill judged" actions, making human factors a major contributing factor.


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: In 2008, Akimov was posthumously awarded with the 3rd degree Order For Courage by Viktor Yushchenko, the then President of Ukraine.


title: Aleksandr Akimov

text: He was portrayed by actor Aleksandr Khoroshko in the 2004 "Zero Hour" television series, by Alex Lowe in the 2006 BBC production "Surviving Disaster: Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster" and by Sam Troughton in the 2019 HBO miniseries "Chernobyl".


title: Tf–idf

text: In information retrieval, tf–idf (also TF*IDF, TFIDF, TF–IDF, or Tf–idf), short for term frequency–inverse document frequency, is a numerical statistic that is intended to reflect how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus. It is often used as a weighting factor in searches of information retrieval, text mining, and user modeling.


title: Tf–idf

text: The tf–idf value increases proportionally to the number of times a word appears in the document and is offset by the number of documents in the corpus that contain the word, which helps to adjust for the fact that some words appear more frequently in general. tf–idf is one of the most popular term-weighting schemes today. A survey conducted in 2015 showed that 83% of text-based recommender systems in digital libraries use tf–idf.


title: Tf–idf

text: Variations of the tf–idf weighting scheme are often used by search engines as a central tool in scoring and ranking a document's relevance given a user query. tf–idf can be successfully used for stop-words filtering in various subject fields, including text summarization and classification.


title: Tf–idf

text: One of the simplest ranking functions is computed by summing the tf–idf for each query term; many more sophisticated ranking functions are variants of this simple model.


title: Tf–idf

text: Suppose we have a set of English text documents and wish to rank them by which document is more relevant to the query, "the brown cow". A simple way to start out is by eliminating documents that do not contain all three words "the", "brown", and "cow", but this still leaves many documents. To further distinguish them, we might count the number of times each term occurs in each document; the number of times a term occurs in a document is called its "term frequency". However, in the case where the length of documents varies greatly, adjustments are often made (see definition below). The first form of term weighting is due to Hans Peter Luhn (1957) which may be summarized as:


title: Tf–idf

text: Because the term "the" is so common, term frequency will tend to incorrectly emphasize documents which happen to use the word "the" more frequently, without giving enough weight to the more meaningful terms "brown" and "cow". The term "the" is not a good keyword to distinguish relevant and non-relevant documents and terms, unlike the less-common words "brown" and "cow". Hence, an "inverse document frequency" factor is incorporated which diminishes the weight of terms that occur very frequently in the document set and increases the weight of terms that occur rarely.


title: Tf–idf

text: Karen Spärck Jones (1972) conceived a statistical interpretation of term-specificity called Inverse Document Frequency (idf), which became a cornerstone of term weighting:


title: Tf–idf

text: where is the "raw count" of a term in a document, i.e., the number of times that term occurs in document . Note the denominator is simply the total number of terms in document (counting each occurrence of the same term separately). There are various other ways to define term frequency:


title: Tf–idf

text: The inverse document frequency is a measure of how much information the word provides, i.e., if it is common or rare across all documents. It is the logarithmically scaled inverse fraction of the documents that contain the word (obtained by dividing the total number of documents by the number of documents containing the term, and then taking the logarithm of that quotient):


title: Tf–idf

text: A high weight in tf–idf is reached by a high term frequency (in the given document) and a low document frequency of the term in the whole collection of documents; the weights hence tend to filter out common terms. Since the ratio inside the idf's log function is always greater than or equal to 1, the value of idf (and tf–idf) is greater than or equal to 0. As a term appears in more documents, the ratio inside the logarithm approaches 1, bringing the idf and tf–idf closer to 0.


title: Tf–idf

text: Idf was introduced as "term specificity" by Karen Spärck Jones in a 1972 paper. Although it has worked well as a heuristic, its theoretical foundations have been troublesome for at least three decades afterward, with many researchers trying to find information theoretic justifications for it.


title: Tf–idf

text: Spärck Jones's own explanation did not propose much theory, aside from a connection to Zipf's law. Attempts have been made to put idf on a probabilistic footing, by estimating the probability that a given document contains a term as the relative document frequency,


title: Tf–idf

text: This probabilistic interpretation in turn takes the same form as that of self-information. However, applying such information-theoretic notions to problems in information retrieval leads to problems when trying to define the appropriate event spaces for the required probability distributions: not only documents need to be taken into account, but also queries and terms.


title: Tf–idf

text: Both term frequency and inverse document frequency can be formulated in terms of information theory; it helps to understand why their product has a meaning in terms of joint informational content of a document. A characteristic assumption about the distribution formula_13 is that:


title: Tf–idf

text: This assumption and its implications, according to Aizawa: "represent the heuristic that tf–idf employs."


title: Tf–idf

text: The conditional entropy of a "randomly chosen" document in the corpus formula_15, conditional to the fact it contains a specific term formula_16 (and assuming that all documents have equal probability to be chosen) is:


title: Tf–idf

text: In terms of notation, formula_18 and formula_19 are "random variables" corresponding to respectively draw a document or a term. The mutual information can be expressed as


title: Tf–idf

text: The last step is to expand formula_21, the unconditional probability to draw a term, with respect to the (random) choice of a document, to obtain:


title: Tf–idf

text: This expression shows that summing the Tf–idf of all possible terms and documents recovers the mutual information between documents and term taking into account all the specificities of their joint distribution. Each Tf–idf hence carries the "bit of information" attached to a term x document pair.


title: Tf–idf

text: Suppose that we have term count tables of a corpus consisting of only two documents, as listed on the right.


title: Tf–idf

text: In its raw frequency form, tf is just the frequency of the "this" for each document. In each document, the word "this" appears once; but as the document 2 has more words, its relative frequency is smaller.


title: Tf–idf

text: An idf is constant per corpus, and accounts for the ratio of documents that include the word "this". In this case, we have a corpus of two documents and all of them include the word "this".


title: Tf–idf

text: So tf–idf is zero for the word "this", which implies that the word is not very informative as it appears in all documents.


title: Tf–idf

text: The idea behind tf–idf also applies to entities other than terms. In 1998, the concept of idf was applied to citations. The authors argued that "if a very uncommon citation is shared by two documents, this should be weighted more highly than a citation made by a large number of documents". In addition, tf–idf was applied to "visual words" with the purpose of conducting object matching in videos, and entire sentences. However, the concept of tf–idf did not prove to be more effective in all cases than a plain tf scheme (without idf). When tf–idf was applied to citations, researchers could find no improvement over a simple citation-count weight that had no idf component.


title: Tf–idf

text: A number of term-weighting schemes have derived from tf–idf. One of them is TF–PDF (term frequency * proportional document frequency). TF–PDF was introduced in 2001 in the context of identifying emerging topics in the media. The PDF component measures the difference of how often a term occurs in different domains. Another derivate is TF–IDuF. In TF–IDuF, idf is not calculated based on the document corpus that is to be searched or recommended. Instead, idf is calculated on users' personal document collections. The authors report that TF–IDuF was equally effective as tf–idf but could also be applied in situations when, e.g., a user modeling system has no access to a global document corpus.


title: Be Right Back

text: "Be Right Back" is the first episode of the second series of British science fiction anthology series "Black Mirror". It was written by series creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker, directed by Owen Harris, and first aired on Channel 4 on 11 February 2013.


title: Be Right Back

text: The episode tells the story of Martha (Hayley Atwell), a young woman whose boyfriend Ash Starmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car accident. As she mourns him, she discovers that technology now allows her to communicate with an artificial intelligence imitating Ash, and reluctantly decides to try it. "Be Right Back" had two sources of inspiration: the question of whether to delete a dead friend's phone number from one's contacts, and the idea that Twitter posts could be made by software mimicking dead people.


title: Be Right Back

text: "Be Right Back" explores the theme of grief; it is a melancholy story similar to the previous episode, "The Entire History of You". The episode received positive reviews, with the performances of Atwell and Gleeson receiving universal acclaim. Some critics believe it to be the best episode of "Black Mirror", though the ending was met with criticism. Several real-life artificial intelligence products have been compared to the one shown in the episode, including a Luka chatbot that was partially inspired by the episode, and a planned Amazon Alexa feature designed to imitate dead loved ones.


title: Be Right Back

text: Martha Powell (Hayley Atwell) and Ash Starmer (Domhnall Gleeson) are a young couple who have moved to Ash's remote family house in the countryside. The day after moving in, Ash is killed while returning the hired van. At the funeral, Martha's friend Sarah (Sinead Matthews) talks about a new online service which helped her in a similar situation. Martha yells at her, but Sarah signs Martha up anyway. After discovering she is pregnant, Martha reluctantly tries it out. Using all of Ash's past online communications and social media profiles, the service creates a new virtual "Ash". Starting out with instant messaging, Martha uploads more videos and photos and begins to talk with the artificial Ash over the phone. Martha takes it on countryside walks, talking to it constantly while neglecting her sister's messages and calls.


title: Be Right Back

text: At a checkup, Martha hears her child's heartbeat, and on her way out accidentally drops her phone and temporarily loses contact with the artificial Ash. After consoling her, the artificial Ash tells her about the service's experimental stage. Following his instructions, Martha turns a blank, synthetic body into an android that looks almost exactly identical to Ash. From the moment the android is activated, Martha is uncomfortable and struggles to accept its existence. Despite the android satisfying her sexually, she is concerned by his inability to sleep and absence of Ash's negative personality traits. One night, she orders the robot Ash to leave and is annoyed that he does so, as the real Ash would have resisted. The next morning, Martha takes the artificial Ash to a cliff and orders him to jump off. As he begins to follow the order, Martha expresses her frustration that Ash would not have simply obeyed. The android begs for its life. Martha screams.


title: Be Right Back

text: Several years later, it is Martha's daughter's (Indira Ainger) birthday. Martha keeps the Ash android locked in the attic and only allows her daughter to see the android on weekends, but she makes an exception for her birthday. Her daughter chats away to the android while Martha stands at the bottom of the attic steps, and forces herself to join them.


title: Be Right Back

text: "Be Right Back" was the first episode of the second series of "Black Mirror", produced by Zeppotron for Endemol. It aired on Channel 4 on 11 February 2013. On 22 January 2013, a trailer for the second series was released, featuring "a dream sequence", a "repetitive factory setting" and a "huge dust cloud". The advert ran on Channel 4 and in cinemas. A trailer for "Be Right Back" first aired on 1 February 2013. The episode's title was later invoked as a tagline for the interactive film "".


title: Be Right Back

text: The episode was written by series creator Charlie Brooker. A few months after the death of a person he knew, Brooker was removing unneeded contacts from his phone, and considered it to be "weirdly disrespectful" to delete their name. This idea later became an inspiration for "Be Right Back", along with another idea Brooker had when using Twitter: "what if these people were dead and it was software emulating their thoughts?"


title: Be Right Back

text: Prior to the writing of "Be Right Back", Brooker had read about the 1960s artificial intelligence program ELIZA, and how the creator's secretary was engaged in a very personal conversation with ELIZA within minutes of first testing it. Brooker also considered the inauthenticity of social media users, commenting in another interview that "I found myself being inauthentic on there and it reminded me of writing columns for a newspaper". In 2013, Brooker said that he rationed his Twitter usage as it caused him unhappiness.


title: Be Right Back

text: The episode was written shortly after Brooker had his first child with Konnie Huq. The couple took it in turns to watch the baby whilst the other slept, and Brooker wrote the episode during his shifts. The script was written quickly, and Brooker commented that having recently had a baby led the writing to be "more soppy and emotional" than it may otherwise have been.


title: Be Right Back

text: In a British Film Institute panel, Brooker notes that the episode mirrors stages of internet dating, progressing from text conversations to phone calls to real-life interactions, and believes the "biggest leap" to be the synthetic flesh version of Ash, while the rest is "not that far-fetched". Executive producer Annabel Jones compares the technology to mediumship, as both are used for comfort.


title: Be Right Back

text: An unused idea for the episode was to emphasise the financial nature of the artificial intelligence company. Brooker says in an interview that "there was a point where she runs out of credit and has to top it up. I think that was even shot". Another idea was for the episode to feature other characters and their android replacements of loved ones.


title: Be Right Back

text: Hayley Atwell, who plays Martha, was a fan of the first series of the show, calling it "inventive and very smart", so she asked her agent to get her a part in the second series. Atwell's first impression of the script was that it was "really poignant, but it still had the wit." Asked in a 2013 interview, Atwell said that she was a heavy user of the internet. Domhnall Gleeson plays Ash, and said in a 2018 interview that the role led him to try to use his phone less, with a stage direction where he frantically searches his phone particularly resonating with him.


title: Be Right Back

text: The episode was directed by Owen Harris, who later directed the series-three episode "San Junipero" – an episode which Harris described as "strangely similar" to this one as both are "relationship-led". Harris was drawn to "Be Right Back" by its "intimate" exploration of "grander themes of love and death and loss". Brooker believes that Harris is "very good with performers" and "gravitates" towards "Black Mirror" episodes that are "more tender". Brooker praises Harris' "good eye for those authentic, bittersweet and painful moments." He describes that the story "on the one hand is about technology and on the other hand is about grief". Vince Pope composed the episode's soundtrack.


title: Be Right Back

text: Atwell was keen to keep Martha grounded and use naturalism to emphasise Martha's grief and aid plausibility of the science fiction concepts. Harris describes Martha as a "girl next door" character, whose goal was to lead a "simple life" with Ash. Before filming, Atwell and Gleeson met at Dans le Noir, a restaurant in which food is served in darkness.


title: Be Right Back

text: Harris wished to make the episode appear as if it could be possible in the near future, as if one could "walk into the Mac store tomorrow and it wouldn't be out of place to see people trialling software like this". Production designer Joel Collins said in 2018 that the technology is "almost real now", but "seemed fantastical" at the time. The petrol station has "micro cars", which Collins suggests are electric cars that could be a part of a "simple, small, eco-friendly" future. A touch-screen easel is shown briefly in the episode. Brooker commented that "the design team had a field day with that easel" and that they suggested copyrighting the idea. Brooker wished to avoid a trope of "histrionic" technology interfaces in television, using more subtle cues such as Martha deleting an email on her touch-free laptop with a simple hand movement. One email sent to Martha is a targeted advertisement for books about dealing with grief.


title: Be Right Back

text: Harris has said that different endings were discussed, but that "I think we pretty much ended up where we'd started". Harris suggested a family dinner downstairs, but Brooker and Jones preferred for Martha to allow her daughter to see Ash once per week. Atwell described the ending as "very pessimistic", calling her character "numb" and perhaps "medicated". During filming for the final scene, Gleeson had begun to grow a beard for another project; though there was debate over whether the android could have a beard to mark the passage of time, it was removed in editing. This was a difficult and expensive process, as Ash has to talk and walk through shadows and light.


title: Be Right Back

text: "Be Right Back" has grief as a central concept, according to Emily Yoshida of "Grantland" and James Hibberd of "Entertainment Weekly". Luke Owen of "Flickering Myth" summarised the episode as a "sombre, low-key and all together depressing affair about grief and how people deal with it in different ways", with Giles Harvey of "The New Yorker" commenting on the episode's exploration of postmodern grief possibilities, suggesting that a targeted email to Martha about grief "stands for an accumulation of such intrusive moments—the death of solitude by a thousand digital cuts". Other themes in the episode are also present. Ryan Lambie of "Den of Geek" believed the episode's theme to be "technology's effects on relationships". Johnston noted that in addition to grief, the episode explores how people behave in "increasingly mediated public spaces".


title: Be Right Back

text: The episode was described by Brooker as "a ghost story" and many critics have commented on its tone. David Sims of "The A.V. Club" described it as a "spare, haunting piece", though Megan Logan of "Inverse" said that whilst episode is tragic it does contain a "deep-seated optimism". Focusing on the interconnection of content and tone, Charles Bramesco of "Vulture" wrote that the episode amalgamates a "cerebral sci-fi thought [experiment]" and a "sentimental core", making it a "high-concept tearjerker". Tom Sutcliffe of "The Independent" connected the episode's tone to a development in Brooker's writing since his marriage and first child, calling it "tender" and "wistful".


title: Be Right Back

text: Unlike past episodes of "Black Mirror", "Be Right Back" features a character beginning to use a technology, rather than one who is used to it. According to Daniel M. Swain of "HuffPost", the episode is a "powerful reminder to the soullessness of social media", and Sameer Rahim of "The Daily Telegraph" wrote that the episode contains ideas about the falsity of social media personas and growing addiction to the internet. Roxanne Sancto of "Paste" said the episode "examines our own mortality and our desire to play God", and demonstrates how humans have a "desperate need to reverse a natural and necessary part of life without considering the consequences".


title: Be Right Back

text: Other critics posed their thoughts more on the relationship in the episode, and suggested it was relationship-led. According to Lambie, Ash is "an affectionate boyfriend" and Martha is "blissfully in love", though Ash is easily distracted by his phone; Martha and Ash only appear together in a few scenes, but we see their love through "little in-jokes, shared love of cheesy 70s tunes and childhood memories". Bojalad wrote that they are "one of the most realistically comfortable and happy couples" in the series, and Owen agreed, writing that though the relationship has little screentime, the audience feel "an instant connection with them". These scenes are later mirrored: examples include the android Ash disliking the Bee Gees and engaging in sex that feels "robotic". Ash's cause of death is "neither clear nor important", though Sims and Sancto thought that it relates to him checking his phone while driving.


title: Be Right Back

text: Yoshida said that the presence of the android Ash is "menacing" though he has a "docile" demeanour, further commenting that Martha is unable to resist him, despite her repulsion at the situation. Sims stated that the replica of Ash is "self-aware", as it "knows it cannot replace Ash fully". Sims also described the robotic Ash as "like a lost puppy" who follows Martha obediently. Swain noted this non-humanness, too, writing that though the android Ash is witty, his personality lacks meaning, with Morgan Jeffery of "Digital Spy" calling him "hollow" and commenting that he is missing "so much of what made Ash the man he was". Logan said the episode is about "the intangibles of humanness that make up the people we love". Sutcliffe believed the robotic Ash fails as a replacement because humans miss their loved ones' "sourness" as well as their "sweetness".


title: Be Right Back

text: In contrast to the previous series opener, "The National Anthem", Brooker described "Be Right Back" as "more earnest than people might expect" as well as "melancholy" and "very intimate and personal". Lambie made similar comments. Lambie and Jeffery both compared the episode to "The Entire History of You", an episode from the first series written by Jesse Armstrong. Yoshida noted that "The Entire History of You" begins with Liam obsessing over a job interview, which he is able to replay through his grain device. Yoshida compared his inability to drop the matter with Martha's choice to "forever nurse herself on a slow drip of delayed acceptance" by replacing Ash with an android. Maura Johnston of "The Boston Globe" said that both episodes have memory as a central concept and "[play] on the ideas of love and the ideal".


title: Be Right Back

text: Richard Hand of "The Conversation" described the episode as a "clever reworking" of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein". Yoshida compared the artificial Ash to Frankenstein's monster, with Hand making the same comparison, writing that both are "resurrected figure[s]" that "can never be human". While "Frankenstein" demonstrates that the "vital essence of humanity" is more than a collection of body parts, "Be Right Back" shows it is not the "digital presence" of a person.


title: Be Right Back

text: Reviewers have used the analogy of "Be Right Back" being like "The Monkey's Paw" with futuristic technology. Lambie compared the storyline to "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick and the 1984 film "Starman", and the cinematography to 2010 film "Never Let Me Go". "TheWrap" noted that the episode "shares some similarities" with 2013 film "Her".


title: Be Right Back

text: In 2015, Luka co-founder Eugenia Kuyda used her AI startup resources to build an online service using chat logs from her late friend Roman Mazurenko; "Be Right Back" was one of the sources of inspiration for the project. Having seen the episode after her friend's death, she questioned of the concept: "Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic?" The Roman Mazurenko chatbot was launched in May 2016 and was met with mostly positive responses, though four of Kuyda's friends were disturbed by the project and one commented that she had "failed to learn the lesson of the "Black Mirror" episode". Another company, Eterni.me, also produces AI that has been compared to the robot Ash in "Be Right Back"; cofounder Marius Ursache has commented that the company is trying to avoid "the concept that it's a way for grieving loved ones to stall moving on" and that the AI depicted in this episode is a "creepier version" of their ideas. Similar bots such as BINA48, made public in 2010 by Martine Rothblatt, or the 2017 "DadBot" made by journalist James Vlahos, have also been compared to the central conceit in this episode.


title: Be Right Back

text: Comparisons were drawn from a planned feature for Amazon's voice assistant Alexa to "Be Right Back" in June 2022, after a demonstration at their Re:MARS conference. Functionality under development would allow Alexa to impersonate a person's voice from around a minute of audio. The executive introducing the plans, Rohit Prasad, recommended that it be used to mimic dead loved ones; an example was shown of Alexa imitating a grandmother's voice to read a story to a grandchild. He said, "While AI can't eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last".


title: Be Right Back

text: One professor of internet studies, Tama Leaver, compared the planned Alexa concept to the episode and said he understood how the feature would be tempting. However, he raised concerns over people conflating machines with people, a lack of consent of the person whose voice is featured, and audio ownership rights issues. The computer science professor Subbarao Kambhampati said that the potential to help people grieve—as with replaying videos of dead loved ones—needed to be assessed against moral questions raised by the technology. Other criticism focuses on potential applications for cybercriminals and fraudsters, who use deepfake technology that adds somebody's likeness to audio or video. Hamish Hector of "TechRadar" reviewed that "blurring the lines between life and death doesn't seem like the healthiest way to deal with loss" and that the technology differs from reviewing old photos and videos due to consent of the depicted and the absence of fabrication in the content.


title: Be Right Back

text: First airing on Channel 4 on 11 February 2013 at 10 p.m., the episode garnered 1.6 million viewers, a 9% share of the audience. This was 14% higher than the time slot's average for the channel, but a lower figure than the 1.9 million viewers who watched "The National Anthem", the previous series' first episode. In 2014, the episode was nominated for a British Academy Television Craft Award in the category Best Single Drama.


title: Be Right Back

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the episode holds an approval rating of 92% based on 13 reviews, with an average rating of 8.30/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "'Be Right Back' tones down "Black Mirror"s typically dark humour, but its examination of grief in the age of social media makes it an exceptionally powerful episode." "The A.V. Club" gave the episode an A− rating. Out of five stars, the episode received four stars in "The Daily Telegraph" and "Digital Spy". "Empire" ranked the first meeting between Martha and the Ash android as one of the 50 greatest sci-fi moments in fiction. Prior to the premiere of series 3, Logan claimed that the episode was "the best episode of the series so far" and the "most heartbreaking". Rahim said that the episode is "a touching exploration of grief" and opined that "it's the best thing Brooker has done". Following the fourth series, Alec Bojalad of "Den of Geek" opined that it is the best episode of the show.


title: Be Right Back

text: Logan praised the storyline as a "stunning, linear meditation on grief and love". Lambie believed that the limited scope of the episode "intensifies its dramatic strength", and praised it as "appropriately haunting". Contrastingly, Mike Higgins of "The Independent" criticised that the episode failed in its aims as a "social-media satire". Jeffery praised the tone as "creepy and moving in equal measure". Sims commented that the narrative arc is "engrossing" despite its predictability.


title: Be Right Back

text: Jeffery criticised the episode's ending as a "cop-out" from Brooker because "like Martha, you get the feeling that he doesn't quite know what to do with Ash now that he's created him." Owen found that the ending "doesn't really conclude any of Martha's character progression", while Higgins wrote that "Ash has become just another sci-fi stock robot". However, Sims praised the final scene as emotive and "melancholy".


title: Be Right Back

text: Owen reviewed that Hayley Atwell's performance as Martha was the best in "Black Mirror" up to that point in the programme, with Lambie agreeing that it was one of the best. Lambie wrote that Atwell is "the hub of almost every scene" and Sims found that she "almost never [lets] her grief feel cartoonish or clichéd". Owen called Domnhall Gleeson's acting as Ash "equally as great", while Sims commented of the climax that "[i]t's amazing to watch Gleeson turn the emotions on after keeping them bottled in for an entire episode". Lambie opined that Ash and Martha have "a real spark" and Jeffery praised that the episode "has real heart and characters that live and breathe".


title: Be Right Back

text: Owen praised Owen Harris' directing, reviewing that the familiar surroundings and credible technology "[added] to the believability of the story." Bojalad wrote that the scene in which the police arrive to inform Martha of Ash's death is "among the most artful and devastating moments "Black Mirror" has ever presented". Higgins praised the cinematography in the countryside scene.


title: Be Right Back

text: "Be Right Back" appeared on many critics' rankings of the 19 episodes in "Black Mirror", from best to worst:


title: Be Right Back

text: Instead of by quality, Proma Khosla of Mashable ranked the episodes by tone, concluding that "Be Right Back" is the fourth-least pessimistic episode of the show.


title: Be Right Back

text: Other reviewers ranked the seven episodes produced under Channel 4. "Be Right Back" is listed fifth in a "Metro" article by Jon O'Brien, and ranked sixth-best by Roxanne Sancto of "Paste".


title: You People

text: You People is an upcoming American buddy comedy film directed by Kenya Barris, which he co-wrote with Jonah Hill. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Eddie Murphy, Hill, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lauren London, Sam Jay, Molly Gordon, Mike Epps, Nia Long, Deon Cole, Rhea Perlman, and David Duchovny.


title: You People

text: In June 2021, it was reported that Jonah Hill would star in a Netflix comedy film directed by Kenya Barris from a script written by Hill and Barris. In August 2021, it was announced that Eddie Murphy would star in the film. In September 2021, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lauren London, Sam Jay, and Molly Gordon joined the cast. In October 2021, more cast members joined the film, including David Duchovny, Nia Long, Travis Bennett, Andrea Savage, Rhea Perlman, La La Anthony, and Deon Cole. In November 2021, Emily Arlook, Bryan Greenberg, Andrew Schulz, and Jordan Firstman joined the cast.


title: Hornblower (TV series)

text: Hornblower is a series of British historical fiction war television films based on three of C. S. Forester's ten novels about the fictional character Horatio Hornblower, a Royal Navy officer during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.


title: Hornblower (TV series)

text: The series ran from 7 October 1998 until 6 January 2003, with Ioan Gruffudd in the title role. It was produced by the British broadcaster ITV Meridian, and was shown on ITV in the UK and A&E in the US. It is often repeated on ITV4.


title: Hornblower (TV series)

text: Other well-known actors appeared in guest roles, including Michael Byrne, Denis Lawson, Antony Sher, Ian McNeice, Andrew Tiernan, Samuel West, Christian Coulson, Cherie Lunghi, Greg Wise and Ronald Pickup.


title: Hornblower (TV series)

text: The series consists of eight television films, which are notable for their high production values. All were later released on DVD (with the original aspect ratio of widescreen in Europe and in the US). In the US, the series was retitled "Horatio Hornblower", and some of the films were known by different titles. The eight films cover the events of just three of the ten novels ("Mr. Midshipman Hornblower", "Lieutenant Hornblower", and "Hornblower and the Hotspur"), and various alterations and additions are made to the source material (e.g., the recurring characters of Lt. Archie Kennedy, Matthews and Styles).


title: Hornblower (TV series)

text: Captain Pellew's ship, , is represented by the "Grand Turk", a modern copy of the frigate built in 1741. To represent Hornblower's ship, HMS "Hotspur", the "Earl of Pembroke", a civilian ship, underwent some conversion. The Baltic trading schooner "Julia" and the brig "Phoenix of Dell Quay" were used to represent the smaller vessels. No real 74-gun ship existed any longer at the time of production (the last one, HMS "Implacable", was scuttled in 1949), so HMS "Justinian" and HMS "Renown" had to be recreated as models. For the first series a quarter of a 74-gun ship (one exterior side and three open sides to shoot live action on several decks) called the "pontoon" was built. Later live action on the quarterdeck or the gundeck below was shot on the actual HMS "Victory". Eleven scale models, ranging from 4.5 to 7 m in length, were used for the battle scenes, the largest weighing 1400 kg, and made with working rigging and cannons that were fired by remote control. Shooting locations included the Black Sea, the Livadia Palace, Portugal, and the former administration (Melville) building of the Royal William Yard and the Barbican, Plymouth in England.


title: Hornblower (TV series)

text: Ioan Gruffudd had shown interest in participating in more "Hornblower" films. In 2007, he reportedly discussed the possibility of a big-screen version of "Hornblower", and had been attempting to gain the rights to the books by C. S. Forester."


title: Flume (musician)

text: Harley Edward Streten (born 5 November 1991), known professionally as Flume, is an Australian DJ and music producer. He is regarded as a pioneer of future bass who helped popularise the genre. His self-titled debut studio album, "Flume", was released in 2012 to positive reviews, topping the ARIA Albums Chart and reaching double-platinum accreditation in Australia.


title: Flume (musician)

text: Flume has remixed songs from such artists as Lorde, Sam Smith, Arcade Fire, Hermitude and Disclosure. His second studio album, "Skin", was released in 2016, again topping the ARIA Albums Chart. The album won the Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2017 Grammy Awards. The album gained international recognition from the album's first single, "Never Be like You", which was nominated for Best Dance Recording. After the release of "Skin", Flume released "Skin Companion EP 1" in November 2016 and "Skin Companion EP 2" in February 2017 as the album's B-side EPs. In 2019, he released a mixtape, "Hi This Is Flume", to positive reviews. His third studio album, "Palaces", was released in May 2022.


title: Flume (musician)

text: Harley Edward Streten was born on 5 November 1991 in Sydney. His father, Glen Streten, is a filmmaker and record producer, and his mother, Lyndall, is a horticulturist and former teacher. He grew up on the Northern Beaches of Sydney with a younger sister and brother, and attended Seaforth Public School for primary school and St Augustine's College, Brookvale and Mosman High School for secondary school. He began composing music at the age of 11, with a basic DJ and mixing program CD for windows that was packaged in a box of Kelloggs' Nutrigrain. The disk showed how music was layered and gave Flume a new perspective that jump-started his music production. In 2010, Flume began producing house music under his initials, HEDS. He created two tracks, "Flow" and "Fizz", in addition to several remixes.


title: Flume (musician)

text: Flume had his first radio play with the song "Possum", which had been uploaded to Triple J Unearthed, and was signed in 2011 through an original artists competition managed by the Australian record company Future Classic. He submitted the tracks "Sleepless", "Over You" and "Paper Thin" to finish second in the competition. Nathan McLay, founder of Future Classic and now Flume's manager, assisted with the release of his first EP, titled "Sleepless", which contained the three original tracks. He opted for the moniker "Flume" after the Bon Iver song of the same name.


title: Flume (musician)

text: Flume's self-titled debut album was released on 9 November 2012. The album has 15 songs and is 49 minutes long. It was done on his first laptop that he had ever purchased. He finished the album on this laptop while he was on a low-budget trip to London. The album's production saw Flume collaborating with vocal artists Moon Holiday, Jezzabell Doran, Chet Faker, and New York rapper T-shirt. It debuted on the ARIA Albums Chart at number two, behind One Direction's "Take Me Home". In December 2012, Flume signed with Mom + Pop Music and announced the North American release of his self-titled debut studio album. The album was released in the US on 21 February 2013 and received strong support from American critics, averaging a score of 73 out of 100 on review aggregate site Metacritic.


title: Flume (musician)

text: On Australia Day 2013, four of Flume's songs (including a remix) were listed on Triple J Hottest 100 for 2012. His album's breakthrough song "Holdin On" was listed at number four, the highest-charting Australian song. Other inclusions were "Sleepless" and his remix of "Hyperparadise" by Hermitude, both in the top 20 (numbers 12 and 18, respectively), and "On Top" at number 67. Flume's voted songs placed higher on the ARIA Singles Chart. "Holdin On" returned to the top 50 chart in the spot of number 17, its highest-ever placement. His "Hyperparadise" remix also debuted in the top 50 at number 38. "Sleepless" and "On Top" debuted at numbers 53 and 75, respectively. Flume's debut studio album reached number one on the ARIA Albums Chart.


title: Flume (musician)

text: In February 2013, Flume announced his first national headlining Australian tour, entitled the "Infinity Prism Tour". It occurred during April and May 2013, and according to a later interview, the tour sold 40,000 tickets. In March 2013, Flume was named one of Fuse TV's 30 "Must-See Acts" at the SXSW festival. Flume spent the beginning of 2014 touring internationally, including stops at Lollapalooza in South America and Coachella where he debuted his remix of Lorde's "Tennis Court". In 2015, Flume released his first original track since his debut studio album, "Some Minds", featuring vocals from Miike Snow's Andrew Wyatt.


title: Flume (musician)

text: With Sydney DJ and record producer Emoh Instead, Flume formed the duo What So Not in 2011. On 21 February 2015, Streten announced that he had left the project, saying: "Emoh and I have been moving in different directions creatively, we haven't made any music together in quite a while. Our final joint project is a soon-to-be-released EP that we completed last year. That will be the last What So Not project I'll be creatively involved with."


title: Flume (musician)

text: In early January 2016, Flume released a four-and-a-half-minute preview of his second studio album, "Skin". The following month, the first single, "Never Be like You", featuring vocals from Canadian singer Kai, reached number one in Australia, making it Flume's first chart-topping song. In April, Flume released his second official single, "Say It", featuring the Swedish singer and songwriter Tove Lo. Later in May 2016, the track list for the album was unveiled, revealing that Vic Mensa, Allan Kingdom, Raekwon, Little Dragon, AlunaGeorge, MNDR and Beck were among the other collaborators to be featured on "Skin". On 27 May 2016, Flume released his second studio album, "Skin". The album is one hour long and has 16 songs. The album received positive reviews from critics, with an aggregate score of 75 out of 100 from Metacritic. At the ARIA Music Awards of 2016, Flume won eight awards, including Album of the Year and Best Male Artist. The album won the Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2017 Grammy Awards. The album gained international recognition from the album's first single, "Never Be like You", which was nominated for Best Dance Recording.


title: Flume (musician)

text: Flume has released two B-side EPs for "Skin", titled "Skin Companion EP 1" and "Skin Companion EP 2", in November 2016 and February 2017 respectively. On 26 January 2017, it was announced that his single "Never Be Like You" was Triple J's Hottest 100 of 2016, taking the number one spot. It received a total of 2.2 million votes, the most votes in a Triple J's Hottest 100 so far. Flume also became the first electronic producer to top the list. Also featured in the list were his songs "Say It", coming in at number eight, "Smoke & Retribution", coming in at number 37 and "Lose It" at number 95. On 5 May 2017, Flume released a bonus single of his "Skin Companion EP 2" titled "Hyperreal".


title: Flume (musician)

text: Flume contributed productions for Lorde and Vince Staples' albums "Melodrama" and "Big Fish Theory" respectively. "Melodrama" was released on 16 June 2017 while Staples' "Big Fish Theory" was released the following week on 23 June 2017. Flume helped Lorde produce the track "The Louvre" on the New Zealander's second album. On 28 November 2017, Flume was a presenter at the ARIA Music Awards of 2017.


title: Flume (musician)

text: On 19 March 2019, Flume announced the release of new music on his Twitter page. His mixtape premiered on YouTube only a day after via a livestream. "Hi This Is Flume" consists of 17 songs, featuring collaborations with Kučka, Eprom, JPEGMafia, Sophie, HWLS and Slowthai. It was his first solo project since the release of "Skin Companion EP 2" in 2017. The mixtape is 38 minutes long and is accompanied by a visualiser from Australian artist Jonathan Zawada. The experimental mixtape was released to generally positive reviews from critics, debuted at number 9 on the Dance/Electronic Albums chart and peaked at number 185 on the "Billboard" 200. The mixtape was nominated at the 62 Annual Grammy Awards for the Best Dance/Electronic Album, becoming Flume's second nomination in the category. On 11 March 2020 Flume released a new single called "The Difference" featuring Toro y Moi. On 3 July 2020, Flume released a remix of Eiffel 65's "Blue (Da Ba Dee)". Flume's third studio album, "Palaces", was released on 20 May 2022.


title: Flume (musician)

text: A viral Instagram video shared by Streten's then-girlfriend actress Paige Elkington on 2 September 2019 with the caption 'Sorry Mom' showed Streten performing anilingus on her during a performance at Burning Man in Black Rock City, Nevada. Although quickly removed from the platform, the post was circulated widely on social media and shared by a range of news outlets. Despite the many reactions from the video and how it was negatively portrayed in tabloids, the publicity had a positive influence on his career. In an interview about the incident hosted by Elkington, he said "I got the opposite of being canceled." As of May 2019, Flume was living in Los Angeles, California, but returned to Australia in some capacity a year later.


title: Flume (musician)

text: The Australian Independent Record Awards (commonly known informally as AIR Awards) is an annual awards night to recognise, promote and celebrate the success of Australia's Independent Music sector.


title: Flume (musician)

text: The APRA Music Awards are annual awards to celebrate excellence in contemporary music, which honour the skills of member composers, songwriters, and publishers who have achieved outstanding success in sales and airplay performance. They commenced in 1982.


title: Flume (musician)

text: The ARIA Music Awards is an annual awards ceremony that recognises excellence, innovation, and achievement across all genres of Australian music. They commenced in 1987.


title: Flume (musician)

text: The Helpmann Awards is an awards show, celebrating live entertainment and performing arts in Australia, presented by industry group "Live Performance Australia" since 2001. Note: 2020 and 2021 were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Flume (musician)

text: The J Awards are an annual series of Australian music awards that were established by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's youth-focused radio station Triple J. They commenced in 2005.


title: Flume (musician)

text: The MTV Europe Music Awards is an award presented by Viacom International Media Networks to honour artists and music in pop culture. They commenced in 2013.


title: Flume (musician)

text: The National Live Music Awards (NLMAs) are a broad recognition of Australia's diverse live industry, celebrating the success of the Australian live scene. The awards commenced in 2016.


title: Boston Strangler

text: The Boston Strangler is the name given to the murderer of 13 women in the Boston, Massachusetts area during the early 1960s. The crimes were attributed to Albert DeSalvo based on his confession, details revealed in court during a separate case, and DNA evidence linking him to the final victim.


title: Boston Strangler

text: In the years following DeSalvo's conviction – but prior to the emergence of this DNA evidence – various parties investigating the crimes suggested that the murders (sometimes referred to as the "Silk Stocking Murders") were committed by more than one person.


title: Boston Strangler

text: Initially, the crimes were assumed to be the work of one unknown person dubbed "The Mad Strangler of Boston". On July 8, 1962, the "Sunday Herald" wrote that "[a] mad strangler is loose in Boston" in an article titled "Mad Strangler Kills Four Women in Boston". The killer was also known as the "Phantom Fiend" or "Phantom Strangler", due to his ability to get women to allow him into their apartments. In 1963, two investigative reporters for the "Record American", Jean Cole and Loretta McLaughlin, wrote a four-part series about the killer, dubbing him "The Boston Strangler". By the time that DeSalvo's confession was aired in open court, the name "Boston Strangler" had become part of crime lore.


title: Boston Strangler

text: Between June 14, 1962, and January 4, 1964, 13 single women between the ages of 19 and 85 were murdered in the Boston area. Most were sexually assaulted and strangled in their apartments; police believe that one man was the perpetrator. With no sign of forced entry into their homes, the women were assumed to have let their assailant in, either because they knew him or because they believed him to be an apartment maintenance man, delivery man, or other service man. The attacks continued despite extensive media publicity after the first few murders. Many residents purchased tear gas and new locks and deadbolts for their doors. Some women moved out of the area.


title: Boston Strangler

text: The murders occurred in several cities, including Boston, complicating jurisdictional oversight for prosecution of the crimes. Massachusetts Attorney General Edward W. Brooke helped to coordinate the various police forces. He permitted parapsychologist Peter Hurkos to use his alleged extrasensory perception to analyze the cases, for which Hurkos claimed that a single person was responsible. This decision was controversial. Hurkos provided a "minutely detailed description of the wrong person", and the press ridiculed Brooke. The police were not convinced that all the murders were the actions of one person, although much of the public believed so. The apparent connections between a majority of the victims and hospitals were widely discussed.


title: Boston Strangler

text: The murders of Margaret Davis, 60, of Roxbury and Cheryl Laird, 14, of Lawrence were originally attributed to the Boston Strangler, but were later found to be unrelated.


title: Boston Strangler

text: On October 27, 1964, a stranger entered a young woman's home posing as a detective. He tied the victim to her bed, sexually assaulted her, and suddenly left, saying "I'm sorry" as he went. The woman's description of her attacker led police to identify the assailant as DeSalvo. When his photo was published, many women identified him as the man who had assaulted them. Earlier on October 27, DeSalvo had posed as a motorist with car trouble and attempted to enter a home in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The homeowner, future Brockton police chief Richard Sproules, became suspicious and eventually fired a shotgun at DeSalvo.


title: Boston Strangler

text: DeSalvo was not initially suspected of being involved with the strangling murders. After he was charged with rape, he gave a detailed confession of his activities as the Boston Strangler. He initially confessed to fellow inmate George Nassar. Nassar reported the confession to his attorney F. Lee Bailey, who also took on the defense of DeSalvo. The police were impressed at the accuracy of DeSalvo's descriptions of the crime scenes. There were some inconsistencies, but DeSalvo was able to cite details that had been withheld from the public. Bailey states in his 1971 book, "The Defense Never Rests", that DeSalvo got one detail right that one of the victims was wrong about: DeSalvo described a blue chair in the woman's living room. She stated it was brown. Photographic evidence proved DeSalvo was correct.


title: Boston Strangler

text: No physical evidence substantiated his confession. Because of that, he was tried on charges for earlier, unrelated crimes of robbery and sexual offenses, in which he was known as "The Green Man" and "The Measuring Man", respectively. Bailey brought up DeSalvo's confession to the murders as part of his client's history at the trial in order to assist in gaining a "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict to the sexual offenses, but it was ruled as inadmissible by the judge.