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

XeTeX ( ZEE-tekh or ; see also Pronouncing and writing "TeX") is a TeX typesetting engine using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType, Graphite and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT). It was originally written by Jonathan Kew and is distributed under the X11 free software license.

Initially developed for Mac OS X only, it is now available for all major platforms. It natively supports Unicode and the input file is assumed to be in UTF-8 encoding by default. XeTeX can use any fonts installed in the operating system without configuring TeX font metrics, and can make direct use of advanced typographic features of OpenType, AAT and Graphite technologies such as alternative glyphs and swashes, optional or historic ligatures, and variable font weights. Support for OpenType local typographic conventions (locl tag) is also present. XeTeX even allows raw OpenType feature tags to be passed to the font. Microtypography is also supported. XeTeX also supports typesetting mathematics using Unicode fonts that contain special mathematical features, such as Cambria Math or Asana Math as an alternative to the traditional mathematical typesetting based on TeX font metrics.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Switzerland

Credit Suisse Group AG is a global investment bank and financial services firm founded and based in Switzerland. Headquartered in Zürich, it maintains offices in all major financial centers around the world and is one of the nine global "bulge bracket" banks providing services in investment banking, private banking, asset management, and shared services. It is known for strict bank–client confidentiality and banking secrecy. The Financial Stability Board considers it to be a global systemically important bank. Credit Suisse is also a primary dealer and Forex counterparty of the Federal Reserve in the United States.

Credit Suisse was founded in 1856 to fund the development of Switzerland's rail system. It issued loans that helped create Switzerland's electrical grid and the European rail system. In the 1900s, it began shifting to retail banking in response to the elevation of the middle class and competition from fellow Swiss banks UBS and Julius Bär. Credit Suisse partnered with First Boston in 1978 before buying a controlling share of the bank in 1988. From 1990 to 2000, the company purchased institutions such as Winterthur Group, Swiss Volksbank, Swiss American Securities Inc. (SASI), and Bank Leu. The biggest institutional shareholders of Credit Suisse include the Saudi National Bank (9.88%), the Qatar Investment Authority and BlackRock (about 5% each), Dodge & Cox, Norges Bank and the Saudi Olayan Group.

The company was one of the least affected banks during the global financial crisis, but afterwards began shrinking its investment business, executing layoffs and cutting costs. The bank was at the center of multiple international investigations for tax avoidance which culminated in a guilty plea and the forfeiture of US$2.6 billion in fines from 2008 to 2012. In 2021, Credit Suisse had assets under management (AuM) of over CHF 1.6 trillion.

UBS announced its intent to acquire Credit Suisse for $2 billion on March 19, 2023.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Death 🔗 China/Chinese history 🔗 China 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Geology 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Geology/Meteorites 🔗 Military history/Chinese military history 🔗 Explosives 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System

The Wanggongchang Explosion (Chinese: 王恭廠大爆炸), also known as the Great Tianqi Explosion (天啟大爆炸), Wanggongchang Calamity (王恭廠之變) or Beijing Explosive Incident in Late Ming (晚明北京爆炸事件), was an unexplained catastrophic explosion that occurred on May 30 of the Chinese calendar in 1626 AD during the late reign of Tianqi Emperor, at the heavily populated Ming China capital Beijing, and had reportedly killed around 20,000 people. The nature of the explosion is still unclear to this day, as it is estimated to have released energy equivalent to about 10-20 kiloton of TNT, similar to that of the Hiroshima bombing.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing

The FM Towns (Japanese: エフエムタウンズ, Hepburn: Efu Emu Taunzu) is a Japanese personal computer built by Fujitsu from February 1989 to the summer of 1997. It started as a proprietary PC variant intended for multimedia applications and PC games, but later became more compatible with IBM PC compatibles. In 1993, the FM Towns Marty was released, a game console compatible with existing FM Towns games.

The "FM" part of the name means "Fujitsu Micro" like their earlier products, while the "Towns" part is derived from the code name the system was assigned while in development, "Townes". This refers to Charles Townes, one of the winners of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics, following a custom of Fujitsu at the time to code name PC products after Nobel Prize winners. The e in "Townes" was dropped when the system went into production to make it clearer that the term was to be pronounced like the word "towns" rather than the potential "tow-nes".

🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, (43 Stat. 253, enacted June 2, 1924) was an Act of the United States Congress that granted US citizenship to the indigenous peoples of the United States. While the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution defines a citizen as any persons born in the United States and subject to its laws and jurisdiction, the amendment had previously been interpreted by the courts not to apply to Native peoples.

The act was proposed by Representative Homer P. Snyder (R-NY), and signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on June 2, 1924. It was enacted partially in recognition of the thousands of Native Americans who served in the armed forces during the First World War.

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

The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), originally referred to as the Manned Orbital Laboratory, was a never-flown part of the United States Air Force's human spaceflight program, a successor to the canceled Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar military reconnaissance space plane project. The project was developed from several early Air Force and NASA concepts of crewed space stations to be used for reconnaissance purposes. MOL evolved into a single-use laboratory, with which crews would be launched on 40-day missions and return to Earth using a Gemini B spacecraft, derived from NASA's Project Gemini.

The MOL program was announced to the public on 10 December 1963 as an inhabited platform to prove the utility of putting people in space for military missions. Astronauts selected for the program were later told of the reconnaissance mission for the program. The contractor for the MOL was the Douglas Aircraft Company. The Gemini B was externally similar to NASA's Gemini spacecraft, although it underwent several modifications, including the addition of a circular hatch through the heat shield, which allowed passage between the spacecraft and the laboratory.

MOL was canceled in 1969, during the height of the Apollo program, when it was shown that uncrewed reconnaissance satellites could achieve the same objectives much more cost-effectively. U.S. space station development was instead pursued with the civilian NASA Skylab (Apollo Applications Program) which flew in the mid-1970s.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union launched three Almaz military space stations, similar in intent to the MOL, but cancelled the program in 1977 for the same reasons.

There is a MOL space suit on display at the Oklahoma City Science Museum, presumably never used.

🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Assyria 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Phoenicia

The Amarna letters (; sometimes referred to as the Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets, and cited with the abbreviation EA, for "El Amarna") are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru, or neighboring kingdom leaders, during the New Kingdom, spanning a period of no more than thirty years between c. 1360–1332 BC (see here for dates). The letters were found in Upper Egypt at el-Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten, founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350s–1330s BC) during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are written not in the language of ancient Egypt, but in cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia. Most are in a variety of Akkadian sometimes characterised as a mixed language, Canaanite-Akkadian; one especially long letter—abbreviated EA 24—was written in a late dialect of Hurrian, and is the longest contiguous text known to survive in that language.

The known tablets total 382, of which 358 have been published by the Norwegian Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon in his work, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, which came out in two volumes (1907 and 1915) and remains the standard edition to this day. The texts of the remaining 24 complete or fragmentary tablets excavated since Knudtzon have also been made available.

The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics because they shed light on the culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in this time period. Though most are written in Akkadian, the Akkadian of the letters is heavily colored by the mother tongue of their writers, who probably spoke an early form of Proto-Canaanite, the language(s) which would later evolve into the daughter languages of Hebrew and Phoenician. These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation.

🔗 Psychology

A cognitive distortion is an exaggerated or irrational thought pattern involved in the onset and perpetuation of psychopathological states, especially those more influenced by psychosocial factors, such as depression and anxiety. Psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck laid the groundwork for the study of these distortions, and his student David D. Burns continued research on the topic. Burns, in The Feeling Good Handbook (1989), described personal and professional anecdotes related to cognitive distortions and their elimination.

Cognitive distortions are thoughts that cause individuals to perceive reality inaccurately. According to the cognitive model of Beck, a negative outlook on reality, sometimes called negative schemas (or schemata), is a factor in symptoms of emotional dysfunction and poorer subjective well-being. Specifically, negative thinking patterns reinforce negative emotions and thoughts. During difficult circumstances, these distorted thoughts can contribute to an overall negative outlook on the world and a depressive or anxious mental state.

Challenging and changing cognitive distortions is a key element of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Electrical engineering

An asynchronous circuit, or self-timed circuit, is a sequential digital logic circuit which is not governed by a clock circuit or global clock signal. Instead it often uses signals that indicate completion of instructions and operations, specified by simple data transfer protocols. This type of circuit is contrasted with synchronous circuits, in which changes to the signal values in the circuit are triggered by repetitive pulses called a clock signal. Most digital devices today use synchronous circuits. However asynchronous circuits have the potential to be faster, and may also have advantages in lower power consumption, lower electromagnetic interference, and better modularity in large systems. Asynchronous circuits are an active area of research in digital logic design.

🔗 Judaism

Sabbath mode, also known as Shabbos mode (Ashkenazi pronunciation) or Shabbat mode, is a feature in many modern home appliances, including ovens and refrigerators, which is intended to allow the appliances to be used (subject to various constraints) by Shabbat-observant Jews on the Shabbat and Jewish holidays. The mode usually overrides the usual, everyday operation of the electrical appliance and makes the operation of the appliance comply with the rules of Halakha (Jewish law).