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🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Celts 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Ireland 🔗 Medieval Scotland

Ogham (Modern Irish: [ˈoː(ə)mˠ]; Middle Irish: ogum, ogom, later ogam [ˈɔɣəmˠ]) is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language (in the "orthodox" inscriptions, 4th to 6th centuries AD), and later the Old Irish language (scholastic ogham, 6th to 9th centuries). There are roughly 400 surviving orthodox inscriptions on stone monuments throughout Ireland and western Britain, the bulk of which are in southern Munster. The largest number outside Ireland are in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

The vast majority of the inscriptions consist of personal names.

According to the High Medieval Bríatharogam, the names of various trees can be ascribed to individual letters. For this reason, ogam is sometimes known as the Celtic tree alphabet.

The etymology of the word ogam or ogham remains unclear. One possible origin is from the Irish og-úaim 'point-seam', referring to the seam made by the point of a sharp weapon.

🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Iran 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Stanford University

Maryam Mirzakhani (Persian: مریم میرزاخانی‎, pronounced [mæɾˈjæm miːɾzɑːxɑːˈniː]; 12 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research topics included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. In 2005, as a result of her research, she was honored in Popular Science's fourth annual "Brilliant 10" in which she was acknowledged as one of the top 10 young minds who have pushed their fields in innovative directions.

On 13 August 2014, Mirzakhani was honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. Thus, she became both the first, and to date, the only woman and the first Iranian to be honored with the award. The award committee cited her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".

On 14 July 2017, Mirzakhani died of breast cancer at the age of 40.

🔗 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.

🔗 Electronic music 🔗 R&B and Soul Music

Woo! Yeah! is a drum break that includes James Brown's ("Woo!") and Bobby Byrd's ("Yeah!") voices which has been widely sampled in popular music, often in the form of a loop. The drum break was performed by John "Jabo" Starks. It originates from the 1972 Lyn Collins recording "Think (About It)", a song written and produced by Brown, and is just one of a few other frequently used breaks contained in the recording, often collectively known as the Think Break.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics

Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially. The name comes from the term "users network".

A major difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store and forward messages to one another via "news feeds". Individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server, which may be operated by anyone.

Usenet is culturally and historically significant in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ", "flame", sockpuppet, and "spam". In the 1990s, before access to the Internet became commonly affordable, Usenet connections via Fidonet's dial-up BBS networks made long-distance or worldwide discussions and other communication widespread, not needing a server, just (local) telephone service.

🔗 Science

The Salmon Protocol is a message exchange protocol running over HTTP designed to decentralize commentary and annotations made against newsfeed articles such as blog posts. It allows a single discussion thread to be established between the article's origin and any feed reader or "aggregator" which is subscribing to the content. Put simply, that if an article appeared on 3 sites: A (the source), B and C (the aggregates), that members of all 3 sites could see and contribute to a single thread of conversation regardless of site they were viewing from.

The photophone is a telecommunications device that allows transmission of speech on a beam of light. It was invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter on February 19, 1880, at Bell's laboratory at 1325 L Street in Washington, D.C. Both were later to become full associates in the Volta Laboratory Association, created and financed by Bell.

On June 3, 1880, Bell's assistant transmitted a wireless voice telephone message from the roof of the Franklin School to the window of Bell's laboratory, some 213 meters (about 700 ft.) away.

Bell believed the photophone was his most important invention. Of the 18 patents granted in Bell's name alone, and the 12 he shared with his collaborators, four were for the photophone, which Bell referred to as his "greatest achievement", telling a reporter shortly before his death that the photophone was "the greatest invention [I have] ever made, greater than the telephone".

The photophone was a precursor to the fiber-optic communication systems that achieved worldwide popular usage starting in the 1980s. The master patent for the photophone (U.S. Patent 235,199 Apparatus for Signalling and Communicating, called Photophone) was issued in December 1880, many decades before its principles came to have practical applications.

🔗 Crime 🔗 Organized crime 🔗 Belgium

The Brabant killers, also named the Nijvel Gang in Dutch-speaking media (Dutch: De Bende van Nijvel), and the mad killers of Brabant in French-speaking media (French: Les Tueurs fous du Brabant), are believed to be responsible for a series of violent attacks that mainly occurred in the Belgian province of Brabant between 1982 and 1985. A total of 28 people died and 22 were injured. The actions of the gang, believed to consist of a core of three men, made it Belgium's most notorious unsolved crime spree. The active participants were known as The Giant (a tall man who may have been the leader); the Killer (the main shooter) and the Old Man (a middle aged man who drove). The identities and whereabouts of the "Brabant killers" are unknown. Although significant resources are still dedicated to it, the most recent arrests in the case were of the now-retired original senior detectives. Failure to catch the gang resulted in a parliamentary inquiry. There have been many theories of ulterior motives behind the crimes.

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Environment 🔗 Transport 🔗 Urban studies and planning

Peak car (also peak car use or peak travel) is a hypothesis that motor vehicle distance traveled per capita, predominantly by private car, has peaked and will now fall in a sustained manner. The theory was developed as an alternative to the prevailing market saturation model, which suggested that car use would saturate and then remain reasonably constant, or to GDP-based theories which predict that traffic will increase again as the economy improves, linking recent traffic reductions to the Great Recession of 2008.

The theory was proposed following reductions, which have now been observed in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Iceland, Japan (early 1990s), New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom (many cities from about 1994) and the United States. A study by Volpe Transportation in 2013 noted that average miles driven by individuals in the United States has been declining from 900 miles (1,400 km) per month in 2004 to 820 miles (1,320 km) in July 2012, and that the decline had continued since the recent upturn in the US economy.

A number of academics have written in support of the theory, including Phil Goodwin, formerly Director of the transport research groups at Oxford University and UCL, and David Metz, a former Chief Scientist of the UK Department of Transport. The theory is disputed by the UK Department for Transport, which predicts that road traffic in the United Kingdom will grow by 50% by 2036, and Professor Stephen Glaister, Director of the RAC Foundation, who say traffic will start increasing again as the economy improves. Unlike peak oil, a theory based on a reduction in the ability to extract oil due to resource depletion, peak car is attributed to more complex and less understood causes.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Rekursiv was a computer processor designed by David M. Harland in the mid-1980s for Linn Smart Computing in Glasgow, Scotland. It was one of the few computer architectures intended to implement object-oriented concepts directly in hardware, a form of high-level language computer architecture. The Rekursiv operated directly on objects rather than bits, nibbles, bytes and words. Virtual memory was used as a persistent object store and unusually, the processor instruction set supported recursion (hence the name).

The project originated in an initiative within the hi-fi manufacturer Linn Products to improve its manufacturing automation systems, which at the time ran on a DEC VAX minicomputer. This resulted in the design of Lingo, an object-oriented programming language derived from Smalltalk and ALGOL. Due to the poor performance of Lingo on the VAX, a subsidiary company, Linn Smart Computing Ltd., was formed to develop a new processor to efficiently run Lingo.

The Rekursiv processor consisted of four gate-array chips named Numerik (32-bit ALU), Logik (instruction sequencer), Objekt (object-oriented memory management unit) and Klock (processor clock and support logic). A small number of prototype VMEbus boards, called Hades, comprising these four chips plus 80 MB of RAM were produced. These were intended for installation in a host system such as a Sun-3 workstation.

Although the Rekursiv was never fully developed and was not a commercial success, several Hades boards were used in academic research projects in the UK. The last known copy of a Rekursiv computer ended up at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde canal in Glasgow.