IRC poker
IRC poker was a form of poker played over the IRC chat protocol before the surge in popularity of online poker in the early 2000s. A computer program was used to deal and manage the games. Commands could be typed in directly with a standard IRC client but point-and-click graphical clients were soon developed. The ability to message the dealer program directly before one's turn to act made games flow more quickly than face to face games.
IRC poker was played with imaginary money, but attracted a devoted following of experts. World Series of Poker champion Chris Ferguson got his start playing IRC poker.
IRC poker offered limit Texas hold 'em, limit Omaha hold 'em (Hi-Lo), no-limit Texas hold 'em, and tournaments. Each account was limited to "buying" 1000 chips per day, but there were no restrictions on creating new accounts so some players created multiple accounts and "harvested" the chips in fake games.
Players in no-limit automatically bought in for the full value of their account; the most successful accumulated over one million chips and joked about selling their accounts.
Internet Relay Chat
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an application layer protocol that facilitates communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client/server networking model. IRC clients are computer programs that a user can install on their system. These clients communicate with chat servers to transfer messages to other clients. IRC is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-on-one communication via private messages as well as chat and data transfer, including file sharing.
Client software is available for every major operating system that supports Internet access. As of April 2011, the top 100 IRC networks served more than half a million users at a time, with hundreds of thousands of channels operating on a total of roughly 1,500 servers out of roughly 3,200 servers worldwide.
IRC usage has been declining since 2003, losing 60% of its users (from 1 million to about 400,000 in 2014) and half of its channels (from half a million in 2003).
Setmelanotide
Setmelanotide (INN, USAN) (code name RM-493, formerly BIM-22493, IRC-022493) is a peptide drug and investigational anti-obesity medication which acts as a selective agonist of the MC4 receptor. Its peptide sequence is Ac-Arg-Cys(1)-D-Ala-His-D-Phe-Arg-Trp-Cys(1)-NH2. It is being researched by Rhythm Pharmaceuticals for the treatment of obesity and diabetes. In addition, Rhythm Pharmaceuticals is conducting trials of setmelanotide for the treatment of Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS), a genetic disorder which includes MC4 receptor deficiency and associated symptoms such as excessive appetite and obesity. As of December 2014, the drug is in phase II clinical trials for obesity and PWS.
Setmelanotide binds to and activates MC4 receptors in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) of the hypothalamus and in the lateral hypothalamic area (LHA), areas involved in the regulation of appetite, and this action is thought to underlie its appetite suppressant effects. In addition to reducing appetite, setmelanotide increases resting energy expenditure in both obese animals and humans. Importantly, unlike certain other MC4 receptor agonists, such as LY-2112688, setmelanotide has not been found to produce increases in heart rate or blood pressure.
Nu Aquilae
Nu Aquilae (ν Aql, ν Aquilae) is the Bayer designation for a double star in the constellation of Aquila and lies close to the celestial equator. It has an apparent visual magnitude of 4.72 and so is visible to the naked eye.
The spectrum of ν Aql A matches a stellar classification of F3, with the luminosity class of Ib indicating this is a supergiant. It has over twelve times the mass of the Sun and 78 times the Sun's radius. The outer atmosphere has an effective temperature of 6,900 K and it is radiating 11,800 times as much light as the Sun. At this heat, it has the yellow-white hue of an F-type star. Based upon an annual parallax shift of only 1.15 mas (with a 23% margin of error), it is approximately 2,800 light-years (860 parsecs) from Earth.
ν Aql B is a tenth magnitude star 220 arc-seconds distant. Little is known about it except an approximate spectral classification
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