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🔗 Biography 🔗 China 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Yuan Longping (Chinese: 袁隆平; September 7, 1930 – May 22, 2021) was a Chinese agronomist, member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, known for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s.

Hybrid rice has since been grown in dozens of countries in Africa, America, and Asia—providing a robust food source in areas with a high risk of famine. For his contributions, Yuan is always called the "Father of Hybrid Rice" by the Chinese media. On May 22, 2021, Yuan Longping died of multiple organ failure at the age of 90.

🔗 Typography

Tiresias is a family of TrueType sans-serif typefaces that were designed with the aim of legibility by people with impaired vision at the Scientific Research Unit of Royal National Institute of Blind People in London. The font was originally designed for the RNIB by Chris Sharville of Laker Sharville Design Associates who was working with John Gill at the time.

The family includes

• Tiresias Infofont – for information labels, optimized for maximum legibility at a distance of 30–100 cm.
• Tiresias Keyfont – for labeling the tops of keys of keyboards, PIN pads, appliances, remote controls (features exaggerated punctuation marks, no descender on the J)
• Tiresias LPfont – for large-print publications. A wedge-serif design.
• Tiresias PCfont – for raster displays
• Tiresias Screenfont – for television subtitling and on-screen user interfaces
• Tiresias Signfont – a more open spacing for use on signs

In late 2007, all Tiresias fonts except Tiresias Screenfont were released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version.

The Tiresias Screenfont was sold by Bitstream Inc., who in 2012 were acquired by Monotype Corporation. The acquiring company continues to market Tiresias on its websites.

🔗 Linguistics

Initial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English that moves stress to the first syllable of verbs when they are used as nouns or adjectives. (This is an example of a suprafix.) This process can be found in the case of several dozen verb-noun and verb-adjective pairs and is gradually becoming more standardized in some English dialects, but it is not present in all. The list of affected words differs from area to area, and often depends on whether a word is used metaphorically or not. At least 170 verb-noun or verb-adjective pairs exist. Some examples are:

• record.

as a verb, "Remember to recórd the show!".

as a noun, "I'll keep a récord of that request."

• permit.

as a verb, "I won't permít that."

as a noun, "We already have a pérmit."

🔗 India 🔗 Visual arts

Mauryan polish describes one of the frequent characteristics of architecture and sculptures of the Maurya Empire in India (325 to 185 BCE), which gives a very smooth and shiny surface to the stone material, generally of sandstone or granite. Mauryan polish is found especially in the Ashoka Pillars as well as in some constructions like the Barabar Caves. The technique did not end with the empire, but continued to be "used on occasion up to the first or second century A.D.", although the presence of the polish sometimes complicates dating, as with the Didarganj Yakshi. According to the archaeologist John Marshall: the "extraordinary precision and accuracy which characterizes all Mauryan works, and which has never, we venture to say, been surpassed even by the finest workmanship on Athenian buildings".

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Common User Access (CUA) is a standard for user interfaces to operating systems and computer programs. It was developed by IBM and first published in 1987 as part of their Systems Application Architecture. Used originally in the MVS/ESA, VM/CMS, OS/400, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows operating systems, parts of the CUA standard are now implemented in programs for other operating systems, including variants of Unix. It is also used by Java AWT and Swing.

🔗 Sweden 🔗 Scouting

The Wallenberg family are a prominent Swedish family, Europe's pre-eminent, most powerful business family and dynasty, renowned as bankers, industrialists, politicians, bureaucrats, and diplomats.

The Wallenberg sphere's holdings employ about 600,000 people and have sales of $154 billion a year.

The Wallenberg empire consists of 16 Wallenberg Foundations, Foundation Asset Management (FAM), Investor AB, Patricia Industries and Wallenberg Investments AB.

The Wallenbergs control and are majority owners of most large Swedish industrial groups, such as world leading telecommunication multinational Ericsson, Scandinavian and Baltic bank giant Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, one of the world's largest paper and pulp multinationals Stora Enso, Wärtsilä, world's second largest appliance maker Electrolux, one of the world's largest power, automation and robotics multinationals ABB, one of Europe's largest aerospace and arms manufacturers SAAB, SAS Group, world's largest ball-bearing company SKF, Atlas Copco, pharmaceutical multinational Astra Zeneca, Nasdaq, Inc., Husqvarna, the Stockholm football club AIK, investment company Investor AB, the Grand Group hotel, BraunAbility, Epiroc, world's largest powdered metal company Höganäs AB, IPCO, Laborie, EQT Partners, Nefab, Permobil, Piab, Sobi, Sarnova, 3 Scandinavia, Kopparfors Skogar, Hylte Bruk AB and so on.

Former holdings include among others Scania AB and Saab Automobile.

In the 1970s, the Wallenberg family businesses employed 40% of Sweden's industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the Stockholm stock market.

Wallenbergs, through the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, allocate annually SEK 2 billion to science and research, which makes the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation one of the largest private research foundations in Europe, and has, until 2020, awarded SEK 31.2 billion in grants.

The most famous of the Wallenbergs, Raoul Wallenberg, a diplomat, worked in Budapest, Hungary, during World War II to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. Between July and December 1944, he issued protective passports and housed Jews, saving tens of thousands of Jewish lives.

🔗 Law 🔗 Wisconsin

A Frankenstein veto occurs when an American state Governor selectively deletes words from a bill, stitching together the remainder (à la Victor Frankenstein) to form a new bill different from that passed by the legislature.

In 2008, the state Constitution of Wisconsin was amended to place certain restrictions on the Frankenstein veto. With those changes, the governor of Wisconsin still has far greater veto powers than any other governor in the United States of America.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Medicine 🔗 New York City

The doctors' riot was an incident that occurred in April 1788 in New York City, where the illegal procurement of corpses from the graves of the recently deceased caused a mass expression of discontent from poorer New Yorkers that was directed primarily at physicians and medical students.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Literature 🔗 Linguistics

"The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of English has with learning German as a second language.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Organizations 🔗 Game theory

Braess' paradox is the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it. The paradox was postulated in 1968 by German mathematician Dietrich Braess, who noticed that adding a road to a particular congested road traffic network would increase overall journey time.

The paradox may have analogies in electrical power grids and biological systems. It has been suggested that in theory, the improvement of a malfunctioning network could be accomplished by removing certain parts of it. The paradox has been used to explain instances of improved traffic flow when existing major roads are closed.