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🔗 Google

Sensorvault is an internal Google database that contains records of users' historical geo-location data.^: 1

It has been used by law enforcement to obtain a geo-fence warrant and to search for all devices within the vicinity of a crime, (within a geo-fenced area)^{: 1 : 1} and after looking at those devices' movements and narrowing those devices down to potential suspects or witnesses, then asking Google for the information about the owners of those devices.^{: 1 : 1}

🔗 Books

Tsundoku (Japanese: 積ん読) is acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them.

The term originated in the Meiji era (1868–1912) as Japanese slang. It combines elements of tsunde-oku (積んでおく, to pile things up ready for later and leave) and dokusho (読書, reading books). It is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf. As currently written, the word combines the characters for "pile up" (積) and the character for "read" (読).

The American author and bibliophile A. Edward Newton commented on a similar state.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Writing systems

The orthographic depth of an alphabetic orthography indicates the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter–phoneme correspondence. It depends on how easy it is to predict the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling: shallow orthographies are easy to pronounce based on the written word, and deep orthographies are difficult to pronounce based on how they are written.

In shallow orthographies, the spelling-sound correspondence is direct: from the rules of pronunciation, one is able to pronounce the word correctly. In other words, shallow (transparent) orthographies, also called phonemic orthographies, have a one-to-one relationship between its graphemes and phonemes, and the spelling of words is very consistent. Such examples include Hindi, Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, Latin and Italian.

In contrast, in deep (opaque) orthographies, the relationship is less direct, and the reader must learn the arbitrary or unusual pronunciations of irregular words. In other words, deep orthographies are writing systems that do not have a one-to-one correspondence between sounds (phonemes) and the letters (graphemes) that represent them. They may reflect etymology (English, Faroese, Mongolian script, Thai, French, or Franco-Provençal) or be morphophonemic (Korean or Russian).

Written Korean represents an unusual hybrid; each phoneme in the language is represented by a letter but the letters are packaged into "square" units of two to four phonemes, each square representing a syllable. Korean has very complex phonological variation rules, especially regarding the consonants rather than the vowels, in contrast to English. For example, the Korean word 훗일, which should be pronounced as [husil] based on standard pronunciations of the components of the grapheme, is actually pronounced as [hunnil]. Among the consonants of the Korean language, only one is always pronounced exactly as it is written.

Italian offers clear examples of differential directionality in depth. Even in a very shallow orthographic system, spelling-to-pronunciation and pronunciation-to-spelling may not be equally clear. There are two major imperfect matches of vowels to letters: in stressed syllables, e can represent either open [ɛ] or closed [e], and o stands for either open [ɔ] or closed [o]. According to the orthographic principles used for the language, [ˈsɛtta] 'sect', for example, with open [ɛ] can only be spelled setta, and [ˈvetta] 'summit' with closed [e] can only be vetta — if a listener can hear it, they can spell it. But since the letter e is assigned to represent both [ɛ] and [e], there is no principled way to know whether to pronounce the written words setta and vetta with [ɛ] or [e] — the spelling does not present the information needed for accurate pronunciation. A second lacuna in Italian's shallow orthography is that although stress position in words is only very partially predictable, it is normally not indicated in writing. For purposes of spelling, it makes no difference which syllable is stressed in the place names Arsoli and Carsoli, but the spellings offer no clue that they are ARsoli and CarSOli (and as with the letter e above, the stressed o of Carsoli, which is [ɔ], is unknown from the spelling).

🔗 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.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/rotorcraft

Jesus nut is a slang term for the main rotor retaining nut or mast nut, which holds the main rotor to the mast of some helicopters. The related slang term Jesus pin refers to the lock pin used to secure the retaining nut. More generally, Jesus nut (or Jesus pin) has been used to refer to any component that is a single point of failure which results in catastrophic consequences.

🔗 Computing

Malbolge () is a public domain esoteric programming language invented by Ben Olmstead in 1998, named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante's Inferno, the Malebolge.

Malbolge was specifically designed to be almost impossible to use, via a counter-intuitive 'crazy operation', base-three arithmetic, and self-altering code. It builds on the difficulty of earlier, challenging esoteric languages (such as Brainfuck and Befunge), but takes this aspect to the extreme, playing on the entangled histories of computer science and encryption. Despite this design, it is possible (though very difficult) to write useful Malbolge programs.

🔗 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.

🔗 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).

🔗 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.