To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment

The Onion Futures Act is a United States law banning the trading of futures contracts on onions as well as "motion picture box office receipts".

In 1955, two onion traders, Sam Siegel and Vincent Kosuga, cornered the onion futures market on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The resulting regulatory actions led to the passing of the act on August 28, 1958. As of January 2020, it remains in effect.

🔗 Television

Slow television, or slow TV (Norwegian: Sakte-TV), is a term used for a genre of "marathon" television coverage of an ordinary event in its complete length. Its name is derived both from the long endurance of the broadcast as well as from the natural slow pace of the television program's progress. It was popularised in the 2000s by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), beginning with the broadcast of a 7-hour train journey in 2009.

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Geology 🔗 Mining 🔗 Lakes

Lake Peigneur (locally pronounced [pæ̃j̃æ̹ɾ]) is a brackish lake in the U.S. state of Louisiana, 1.2 miles (1.9 kilometers) north of Delcambre and 9.1 mi (14.6 km) west of New Iberia, near the northernmost tip of Vermilion Bay. With a maximum depth of 200 feet (60 meters), it is the deepest lake in Louisiana.

It was a 10-foot-deep (3 m) freshwater body, popular with sportsmen, until an unusual man-made disaster on November 20, 1980 changed its structure and the surrounding land.

🔗 Spaceflight

Space Infrastructure Servicing (SIS) is a spacecraft being developed by Canadian aerospace firm MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates to operate as a small-scale in-space refueling depot for communication satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

In June 2017, SSL announced its first commercial customer, Luxembourg-based satellite owner/operator SES S.A.

In computational learning theory, induction of regular languages refers to the task of learning a formal description (e.g. grammar) of a regular language from a given set of example strings. Although Mark E. Gold has shown that not every regular language can be learned this way (see language identification in the limit), approaches have been investigated for a variety of subclasses. They are sketched in this article. For learning of more general grammars, see Grammar induction.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy

Airglow (also called nightglow) is a faint emission of light by a planetary atmosphere. In the case of Earth's atmosphere, this optical phenomenon causes the night sky never to be completely dark, even after the effects of starlight and diffused sunlight from the far side are removed.

🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology

In the Abilene paradox, a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and, therefore, does not raise objections. A common phrase relating to the Abilene paradox is a desire not to "rock the boat". This differs from groupthink in that the Abilene paradox is characterized by an inability to manage agreement.

🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Radio 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Engineering

In radio communications, an evolved antenna is an antenna designed fully or substantially by an automatic computer design program that uses an evolutionary algorithm that mimics Darwinian evolution. This procedure has been used in recent years to design a few antennas for mission-critical applications involving stringent, conflicting, or unusual design requirements, such as unusual radiation patterns, for which none of the many existing antenna types are adequate.

🔗 Death 🔗 Korea 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Korea/Korean popular culture working group

Fan death is a widely held belief in Korean culture, where it is thought that running an electric fan in a closed room with unopened or no windows will prove fatal. Despite no concrete evidence to support the concept, belief in fan death persists to this day in Korea, and also to a lesser extent in Japan and Russia.

🔗 Mathematics

In a foundational controversy in twentieth-century mathematics, L. E. J. Brouwer, a supporter of intuitionism, opposed David Hilbert, the founder of formalism.