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🔗 Spaceflight

The colonization of Venus is the proposed process of establishing human settlements on the planet Venus. Due to the planet's extremely hostile surface environment, proposals for settling Venus focus on habitats floating in the upper-middle atmosphere or on settlement of the surface contingent on first terraforming the planet.

The colonization of Venus has been a subject of many works of science fiction since before the dawn of spaceflight, and is still discussed from both a fictional and a scientific standpoint.

🔗 Dogs

The turnspit dog was a short-legged, long-bodied dog bred to run on a wheel, called a turnspit or dog wheel, to turn meat. It is mentioned in Of English Dogs in 1576 under the name "Turnespete". William Bingley's Memoirs of British Quadrupeds (1809) also talks of a dog employed to help chefs and cooks. It was also known as the Kitchen Dog, the Cooking Dog, or the Wheeling Dog. In Linnaeus's 18th-century classification of dogs it is listed as Canis vertigus (also used as Latin name for the Dachshund). The breed was lost, since it was considered to be such a lowly and common dog that no record was effectively kept of it. Some sources consider the turnspit dog a kind of Glen of Imaal Terrier, while others make it a relative of the Welsh Corgi.

With advancements in kitchen technology, the need for turnspit dogs declined. Over time, they were no longer bred for their specific function, and their numbers dwindled, eventually leading to their extinction.

A preserved example of a turnspit dog is displayed at Abergavenny Museum in Abergavenny, Wales.

🔗 Film 🔗 Military history 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Military history/War films

Colossus: The Forbin Project (originally released as Colossus) is a 1970 American science-fiction thriller film from Universal Pictures, produced by Stanley Chase, directed by Joseph Sargent, and starring Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, Gordon Pinsent, and William Schallert. It is based on the 1966 science-fiction novel Colossus by Dennis Feltham Jones.

The film is about an advanced American defense system, named Colossus, which becomes sentient. After being given full control, Colossus' draconian logic expands on its original nuclear defense directives to assume total control of the world and end all warfare for the good of humankind, despite its creators' orders to stop.

🔗 Business 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Law and government 🔗 Japan/Business and economy

The Employment Ice Age (Japanese: 就職氷河期, romanized: Shūshoku Hyōgaki) is a term in Japan that refers to a period starting around 1994 and ending by 2004 where young graduates, as well as those who had lost their first jobs due to the Bubble Economy collapsing, were unable to find stable sources of employment. This phenomenon took place during the Lost Decades, and the cohort affected, Generation X, came to be referred to as the “Lost Generation” or the “Ice Age Generation”.

The phenomenon was triggered by the burst of the Japanese “Bubble Economy”, which although initially believed to be a temporary recession, by 1994 saw long-term economic stagnation in the Japanese economy, ushering in the uncertainties of the “Lost Decade”. To cut costs and protect older workers, companies offered limited numbers of jobs, shutting recent graduates out of the workforce, thus triggering the “Employment Ice Age”.

Those affected by the Employment Ice Age became accustomed to unstable and temporary employment, if any at all. The period severely affected Generation X (people in their 40s and 50s in 2020), encouraging social issues such as the development of the hikikomori, a spike in suicide rates, and the phenomenon of jōhatsu, as well as impacting their financial well-being, health, outlook, and ability to start families.

Given Japan's aging population, there is concern that government focus on the elderly has overshadowed those too poor to have ever started a family, who themselves will be moving into old age largely devoid of the financial resources other generations had. Government efforts on this matter have been deemed far too little and too late, and Nikkei writers claim that lawmakers remain unaware of the gravity of the situation.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Materials

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) are alloys that are formed by mixing equal or relatively large proportions of (usually) five or more elements. Prior to the synthesis of these substances, typical metal alloys comprised one or two major components with smaller amounts of other elements. For example, additional elements can be added to iron to improve its properties, thereby creating an iron-based alloy, but typically in fairly low proportions, such as the proportions of carbon, manganese, and others in various steels. Hence, high-entropy alloys are a novel class of materials. The term "high-entropy alloys" was coined by Taiwanese scientist Jien-Wei Yeh because the entropy increase of mixing is substantially higher when there is a larger number of elements in the mix, and their proportions are more nearly equal. Some alternative names, such as multi-component alloys, compositionally complex alloys and multi-principal-element alloys are also suggested by other researchers. Compositionally complex alloys (CCAs) are an up-and-coming group of materials due to their unique mechanical properties. They have high strength and toughness, the ability to operate at higher temperatures than current alloys, and have superior ductility. Material ductility is important because it quantifies the permanent deformation a material can withstand before failure, a key consideration in designing safe and reliable materials. Due to their enhanced properties, CCAs show promise in extreme environments. An extreme environment presents significant challenges for a material to perform to its intended use within designated safety limits. CCAs can be used in several applications such as aerospace propulsion systems, land-based gas turbines, heat exchangers, and the chemical process industry.

These alloys are currently the focus of significant attention in materials science and engineering because they have potentially desirable properties. Furthermore, research indicates that some HEAs have considerably better strength-to-weight ratios, with a higher degree of fracture resistance, tensile strength, and corrosion and oxidation resistance than conventional alloys. Although HEAs have been studied since the 1980s, research substantially accelerated in the 2010s.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Philosophy/Modern philosophy

Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement of people from aspects of their essential human nature as a consequence of living in a society structured by private property and wage labour. Developed by the German philosopher Karl Marx and first articulated in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the theory is a foundational concept of Marxism. At its core, it posits that under the capitalist mode of production, workers are inevitably separated from the products they create, the activity of production, their fellow human beings, and their own creative potential.

The theory has roots in a long intellectual tradition, particularly in the work of the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For Hegel, alienation was a necessary stage in the development of Spirit (Geist), in which it externalises itself in the material world to achieve self-awareness. Marx adapted Hegel's dialectical framework but rejected its idealism, grounding the concept in material reality. Influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of religious alienation, Marx argued that alienation was not an abstract philosophical condition but a concrete, historical consequence of the capitalist system that could be overcome.

In his analysis, Marx identified four key aspects of alienated labour. First, the worker is alienated from the product of their labour, which is appropriated by the capitalist and confronts the worker as a hostile power. Second, they are alienated from the activity of production itself, which is experienced not as a fulfilling expression of creativity but as coerced, meaningless toil. Third, this leads to alienation from their own human nature, or species-being (Gattungswesen), as free, conscious activity is reduced to a mere means of survival. Finally, the worker is alienated from other people, as social relationships become reified and mediated by market exchange, fostering competition and indifference rather than community.

A long-standing scholarly debate exists over the theory's place in Marx's work, with some arguing he abandoned the humanistic concept in his later, more "scientific" writings. However, many analysts contend that the theory remained a central, unifying concept throughout his intellectual development. They argue that concepts in his mature work, such as the fetishism of commodities in Das Kapital, represent a deeper elaboration of the alienation theme. For Marx, the overcoming of alienation could only be achieved through communism, a revolutionary transformation of society that would abolish private property and allow for the free, collective development of human potential.

🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Sweden 🔗 Norse history and culture

The England runestones (Swedish: Englandsstenarna) are a group of about 30 runestones in Scandinavia which refer to Viking Age voyages to England. They constitute one of the largest groups of runestones that mention voyages to other countries, and they are comparable in number only to the approximately 30 Greece Runestones and the 26 Ingvar Runestones, of which the latter refer to a Viking expedition to the Caspian Sea region. They were engraved in Old Norse with the Younger Futhark.

The Anglo-Saxon rulers paid large sums, Danegelds, to Scandinavian Vikings who arrived to the English shores during the 990s and the first decades of the 11th century. Some runestones relate of these Danegelds, such as the Yttergärde runestone, U 344, which tells of Ulf of Borresta who received the danegeld three times, and the last one he received from Canute the Great. Canute sent home most of the Vikings who had helped him conquer England, but he kept a strong bodyguard, the Thingmen, and its members are also mentioned on several runestones.

The vast majority of the runestones, 27, were raised in modern-day Sweden and 17 in the Swedish provinces around lake Mälaren. In contrast, modern-day Denmark has no such runestones, but there is a runestone in Scania which mentions London. There is also a runestone in Norway and a Swedish one in Schleswig, Germany.

Some Vikings, such as Guðvér did not only attack England, but also Saxony, as reported by the Grinda Runestone Sö 166 in Södermanland:

Below follows a presentation of the England Runestones based on information collected from the Rundata project, organized according to location. The transcriptions from runic inscriptions into standardized Old Norse are in the Swedish and Danish dialect to facilitate comparison with the inscriptions, while the English translation provided by Rundata give the names in standard dialect (the Icelandic and Norwegian dialect).

"Houses are for living, not for speculation" (Chinese: 房子是用来住的，不是用来炒的; pinyin: Fángzǐ shì yònglái zhùde, bùshì yònglái chǎode) is a Chinese political slogan to curb excessive speculation in the real estate market. The phrase was first coined by Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in December 2016, and later became the guiding policy of the Chinese government towards the real estate sector.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Yabasic (Yet Another BASIC) is a free, open-source BASIC interpreter for Microsoft Windows and Unix platforms. Yabasic was originally developed by Marc-Oliver Ihm. From version 2.77.1, the project adopted the MIT License and the source code was moved to GitHub to encourage others to participate in its development.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Comedy

Dark Star is a 1974 American independent science fiction comedy film produced, scored and directed by John Carpenter and co-written with Dan O'Bannon. It follows the crew of the deteriorating starship Dark Star, twenty years into their mission to destroy unstable planets that might threaten future colonization of other planets.

Beginning as a University of Southern California (USC) student film produced from 1970 to 1972, it was gradually expanded with reshoots in 1973, eventually appearing in its current feature-length form at Filmex in March 1974, and subsequently received a limited theatrical release in 1975. Its final budget is estimated at $60,000. While initially unsuccessful with audiences, it was relatively well received by critics, and continued to be shown in theaters as late as 1980. The home video revolution of the early 1980s helped the movie achieve "cult classic" status. O'Bannon collaborated with home video distributor VCI in the production of releases on VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, and eventually Blu-ray.

Dark Star was Carpenter's feature directorial debut; he also scored the film. It was also the feature debut for O'Bannon, who also served as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, and appeared as Sergeant Pinback.