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🔗 Apple Inc.

SWEET16 is an interpreted byte-code instruction set invented by Steve Wozniak and implemented as part of the Integer BASIC ROM in the Apple II series of computers. It was created because Wozniak needed to manipulate 16-bit pointer data, and the Apple II was an 8-bit computer.

SWEET16 was not used by the core BASIC code, but was later used to implement several utilities. Notable among these was the line renumbering routine, which was included in the Programmer's Aid #1 ROM, added to later Apple II models and available for user installation on earlier examples.

SWEET16 code is executed as if it were running on a 16-bit processor with sixteen internal 16-bit little-endian registers, named R0 through R15. Some registers have well-defined functions:

• R0 – accumulator
• R12 – subroutine stack pointer
• R13 – stores the result of all comparison operations for branch testing
• R14 – status register
• R15 – program counter

The 16 virtual registers, 32 bytes in total, are located in the zero page of the Apple II's real, physical memory map (at $00–$1F), with values stored as low byte followed by high byte. The SWEET16 interpreter itself is located from $F689 to $F7FC in the Integer BASIC ROM.

According to Wozniak, the SWEET16 implementation is a model of frugal coding, taking up only about 300 bytes in memory. SWEET16 runs at about one-tenth the speed of the equivalent native 6502 code.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Eclipses

A total solar eclipse will occur at the Moon's descending node of the orbit on Wednesday, August 12, 2026, 2 days past perigee (Perigee on Monday, August 10, 2026), in North America and Europe. The total eclipse will pass over the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland, Atlantic Ocean and northern Spain. The points of greatest duration and greatest eclipse will be just 45 km off the western coast of Iceland by 65°10.3' N and 25°12.3' W, where the totality will last 2m 18.21s. It will be the first total eclipse visible in Iceland since June 30, 1954, also Solar Saros series 126 (descending node), and the only one to occur in the 21st century as the next one will be in 2196.

Occurring only 2.3 days after perigee (Perigee on August 10, 2026), the Moon's apparent diameter will be larger. Lunar Perigee will occur on Monday, August 10, 2026, two days before the total solar eclipse.

The total eclipse will pass over northern Spain from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean coast as well as the Balearic Islands. The total eclipse will be visible from the cities of Valencia, Zaragoza, Palma and Bilbao but both Madrid and Barcelona will be just outside the path of totality.

The last total eclipse in continental Europe occurred on March 29, 2006 and in continental part of European Union it occurred on August 11, 1999. The last total solar eclipse happened in Spain on August 30, 1905 and followed a similar path across the country. The next total eclipse visible in Spain will happen less than a year later on 2 August 2027. A partial eclipse will cover more than 90% of the area of the sun in Ireland, Great Britain, Portugal, France, Italy, the Balkans and North Africa and to a lesser extent in most of Europe, North Africa and North America.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Novels/Short story

"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" is a post-apocalyptic science fiction short story by American writer Harlan Ellison. It was first published in the March 1967 issue of IF: Worlds of Science Fiction.

It won a Hugo Award in 1968. The name was also used for a short story collection of Ellison's work, featuring this story. It was reprinted by the Library of America, collected in volume two (Terror and the Uncanny, from the 1940s to Now) of American Fantastic Tales.

🔗 United States 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Canada 🔗 Canada/British Columbia 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 Mythology 🔗 United States/Washington

"Thunderbird and Whale" is an indigenous myth belonging to the mythological traditions of a number of tribes from the Pacific Northwest.

🔗 Sociology 🔗 Urban studies and planning

In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place"). Examples of third places include churches, cafes, clubs, public libraries, gyms, bookstores, stoops and parks. In his book The Great Good Place (1989), Ray Oldenburg argues that third places are important for civil society, democracy, civic engagement, and establishing feelings of a sense of place.

Robert Putnam addressed issues related to third place, but without using the term, in Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital (1995, 2000).

🔗 Technology

A blast valve is used to protect a shelter, such as a fallout shelter or bunker, from the effects of sudden outside air pressure changes. A nuclear weapon creates a shock wave, which may produce sudden pressure changes of more than an atmosphere (about 1 bar) even several kilometres from the detonation point. After the shock wave passes, a sudden negative pressure follows.

If such pressure waves enter a shelter, they will likely do substantial harm to occupants and equipment. A blast valve is placed in air intake/exhaust pipes, that remains open normally, but automatically closes when strong pressure is applied in either direction. Blast dampers operate in the same fashion and are related or identical to blast valves, the former name however is generally used to describe blast mitigation devices, for more conventional explosive events.

A typical blast valve has entries of 15–30 cm diameter, and a larger centre section. Within the centre section is a disk mounted on an axle, with weak springs that keep it centred, away from both entries. Pressure displaces the disk along the axle, until it plugs one entry or the other. After the blast, the springs return the disk to the centre, re-opening the valve.

Another type of blast valve employs rounded metal tubes held in place by springs. As pressure rises it pushes the tubes against the frame of the valve closing the opening. These valves are typically unidirectional in airflow and are employed in large wall structures where large amounts of airflow is required.

One form of blast valve, popularized by the book Nuclear War Survival Skills and tested by ORNL is worn flat rubber tire treads nailed or bolted to frames strong enough to resist the maximum overpressure, with tested closing times cited as being identical to commercial grade blast valves, however the use of this form of blast valve design must also take the risk of the flammable rubber catching fire into consideration.

🔗 Internet

Web Environment Integrity (WEI) is a controversial API proposal currently being developed for Google Chrome. As of August 2023, a Web Environment Integrity prototype exists in Chromium, but has not shipped in any browser.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Word2vec is a technique for natural language processing (NLP) published in 2013. The word2vec algorithm uses a neural network model to learn word associations from a large corpus of text. Once trained, such a model can detect synonymous words or suggest additional words for a partial sentence. As the name implies, word2vec represents each distinct word with a particular list of numbers called a vector. The vectors are chosen carefully such that they capture the semantic and syntactic qualities of words; as such, a simple mathematical function (cosine similarity) can indicate the level of semantic similarity between the words represented by those vectors.

🔗 Trains 🔗 Trains/UK Railways 🔗 Trains/Rail transport in Germany

Railway time was the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840, the first recorded occasion when different local mean times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. The key goals behind introducing railway time were to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop along the expanding railway network and to reduce the incidence of accidents and near misses, which were becoming more frequent as the number of train journeys increased.

Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following seven years. The schedules by which trains were organised and the time station clocks displayed were brought in line with the local mean time for London or "London Time", the time set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory, which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

The development of railway networks in North America in the 1850s, India in around 1860, and in Europe, prompted the introduction of standard time influenced by geography, industrial development, and political governance.

The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from local people who refused to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time. As a consequence, two different times would be displayed in the town and in use, with the station clocks and the times published in train timetables differing by several minutes from that on other clocks. Despite this early reluctance, railway time rapidly became adopted as the default time across the whole of Great Britain, although it took until 1880 for the government to legislate on the establishment of a single standard time and a single time zone for the country.

Some contemporary commentators referred to the influence of railway time on encouraging greater precision in daily tasks and the demand for punctuality.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Phonetics 🔗 Opera

The vocal fry register (also known as pulse register, laryngealization, pulse phonation, creaky voice, creak, croak, popcorning, glottal fry, glottal rattle, glottal scrape) is the lowest vocal register and is produced through a loose glottal closure that permits air to bubble through slowly with a popping or rattling sound of a very low frequency. During this phonation, the arytenoid cartilages in the larynx are drawn together, which causes the vocal folds to compress rather tightly and become relatively slack and compact. This process forms a large and irregularly vibrating mass within the vocal folds that produces the characteristic low popping or rattling sound when air passes through the glottal closure. The register (if well controlled) can extend far below the modal voice register, in some cases up to 8 octaves lower, such as in the case of Tim Storms who holds the world record for lowest frequency note ever produced by a human, a G₋₇, which is only 0.189 Hz, inaudible to the human ear.

Vocal fry is thought to have become more common among young female speakers of American English in the early 21st century, with the style of speaking being considered informal, nonaggressive and urban-oriented.