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pattern parsing virtual machine (previously called 'chomski' after Noam Chomsky) and pp (the pattern parser, also a provisional name) refer to both a command line computer language and utility (interpreter for that language) which can be used to parse and transform text patterns and (formal mathematical) languages. The utility reads input files character by character (sequentially), applying the operation which has been specified via the command line or a pp script, and then outputs the line. It was developed from 2006 in the C language. Pp has derived a number of ideas and syntax elements from Sed, a command line text stream editor.

🔗 Companies 🔗 England 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Brands

Bovril is the trademarked name of a thick and salty meat extract paste similar to a yeast extract, developed in the 1870s by John Lawson Johnston. It is sold in a distinctive, bulbous jar, and also as cubes and granules. Bovril is owned and distributed by Unilever UK.

Bovril can be made into a drink by diluting with hot water or, less commonly, with milk. It can be used as a flavouring for soups, broth, stews or porridge, or as a spread, especially on toast in a similar fashion to Marmite and Vegemite.

🔗 Spaceflight

OSCAR I (aka OSCAR 1) is the first amateur radio satellite launched by Project OSCAR into low Earth orbit. OSCAR I was launched December 12, 1961, by a Thor-DM21 Agena B launcher from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Lompoc, California. The satellite, a rectangular box (30 x 25 x 12 cm) weighing 10 kg., was launched as a secondary payload (ballast) for Corona 9029, also known as Discoverer 36, the eighth and final launch of a KH-3 satellite.

The satellite had a battery-powered 140 mW transmitter operating in the 2-meter band (144.983 MHz), employed a monopole transmitting antenna 60 cm long extended from the center of the convex surface, but had no attitude control system. Like Sputnik 1, Oscar 1 carried only a simple beacon. For three weeks it transmitted its Morse Code message "HI". To this day, many organizations identify their Morse-transmitting satellites with "HI", which also indicates laughter in amateur telegraphy.

OSCAR I lasted 22 days ceasing operation on January 3, 1962, and re-entered January 31, 1962.

The uniqueness of the OSCAR-1 spacecraft was not only that it was built by amateurs, only about four years after the launch of Sputnik-1, but that it was the world's first piggyback satellite and the world's first private non-government spacecraft.

Immediately following the launch of OSCAR-1, United States vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, honored it with a congratulatory telegram to the group sponsoring this momentous event in the history of Amateur Radio. It read: “For me this project is symbolic of the type of freedom for which this country stands — freedom of enterprise and freedom of participation on the part of individuals throughout the world.”

The original backup of OSCAR-1 has been restored and is fully operational, running off AC power. As of 2011 it is on display at ARRL HQ in Newington, Connecticut and continues to broadcast "HI" in Morse Code at 145 MHz.

🔗 Education 🔗 Toys

The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab is a toy lab set that was produced by Alfred Carlton Gilbert, who was an American athlete, magician, toy-maker, business man, and inventor of the well-known Erector Set. The Atomic Energy Lab was released by the A. C. Gilbert Company in 1950. The kit's intention was to allow children to create and watch nuclear and chemical reactions using radioactive material.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software

A Turing tarpit (or Turing tar-pit) is any programming language or computer interface that allows for flexibility in function but is difficult to learn and use because it offers little or no support for common tasks. The phrase was coined in 1982 by Alan Perlis in the Epigrams on Programming:

54. Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.

In any Turing complete language, it is possible to write any computer program, so in a very rigorous sense nearly all programming languages are equally capable. Showing that theoretical ability is not the same as usefulness in practice, Turing tarpits are characterized by having a simple abstract machine that requires the user to deal with many details in the solution of a problem. At the extreme opposite are interfaces that can perform very complex tasks with little human intervention but become obsolete if requirements change slightly.

Some esoteric programming languages, such as Brainfuck, are specifically referred to as "Turing tarpits" because they deliberately implement the minimum functionality necessary to be classified as Turing complete languages. Using such languages is a form of mathematical recreation: programmers can work out how to achieve basic programming constructs in an extremely difficult but mathematically Turing-equivalent language.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software

xv6 is a modern reimplementation of Sixth Edition Unix in ANSI C for multiprocessor x86 and RISC-V systems. It is used for pedagogical purposes in MIT's Operating Systems Engineering (6.828) course as well as Georgia Tech's (CS 3210) Design of Operating Systems Course, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Delhi and as well as many other institutions.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Cold War

The Corona program was a series of American strategic reconnaissance satellites produced and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology with substantial assistance from the U.S. Air Force. The Corona satellites were used for photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union (USSR), the People's Republic of China, and other areas beginning in June 1959 and ending in May 1972.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Military history/Classical warfare

Polybolos, meaning "multi thrower" in Greek, was an ancient Greek repeating ballista reputedly invented by Dionysius of Alexandria, a 3rd-century BC Greek engineer at the Rhodes arsenal, and used in antiquity.

Philo of Byzantium encountered and described a weapon similar to the polybolos, a catapult that like a modern machine gun could fire again and again without a need to reload. Philo left a detailed description of the gears that powered its chain drive, the oldest known application of such a mechanism, and that placed bolt after bolt into its firing slot.

🔗 Constructed languages 🔗 Graphic design

Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) is a method of showing social, technological, biological, and historical connections in pictorial form. It consists of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik), due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Social and Economic Museum of Vienna) between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. Gerd Arntz was the artist responsible for realising the graphics. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.

🔗 Computing

Seed7 is an extensible general-purpose programming language designed by Thomas Mertes. It is syntactically similar to Pascal and Ada. Along with many other features, it provides an extension mechanism. Seed7 supports introducing new syntax elements and their semantics into the language, and allows new language constructs to be defined and written in Seed7. For example, programmers can introduce syntax and semantics of new statements and user defined operator symbols. The implementation of Seed7 differs significantly from that of languages with hard-coded syntax and semantics.