The Persian Tobacco Protest (Persian: نهضت تنباکو, romanized: nehzat-e tanbāku) was a Twelver Shia Muslim revolt in Qajar Iran against an 1890 tobacco concession granted by Emperor Naser al-Din Shah Qajar to the British Empire, granting control over growth, sale, and export of tobacco to an Englishman, Major G. F. Talbot. The protest was held by merchants in major cities such as Tehran, Shiraz, Mashhad, and Isfahan in solidarity with the clerical establishment. It climaxed in a widely obeyed December 1891 fatwa against tobacco use issued by Grand Ayatollah Mirza Shirazi. == Background == Beginning...

A microlife is a unit of risk representing half an hour change of life expectancy. Discussed by David Spiegelhalter and Alejandro Leiva, and also used by Lin et al. for decision analysis, microlives are intended as a simple way of communicating the impact of a lifestyle or environmental risk factor, based on the associated daily proportional effect on expected length of life. Similar to the micromort (one in a million probability of death) the microlife is intended for "rough but fair comparisons between the sizes of chronic risks". This is to avoid the biasing effects of describing risks in relative...

A digital piano is a type of electronic keyboard instrument designed to serve primarily as an alternative to the traditional acoustic piano, both in how it feels to play and in the sound it produces. Digital pianos use either synthesized emulation or recorded samples of an acoustic piano, which are played through one or more internal loudspeakers. They also incorporate weighted keys, which recreate the feel of an acoustic piano. Some digital pianos are designed to also look like an upright or grand piano. Others may be very simple, without a stand. While digital pianos may sometimes fall short...