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🔗 Aviation 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 England

British Airways Flight 5390 was a flight from Birmingham Airport in England for Málaga Airport in Spain that suffered explosive decompression, with no loss of life, shortly after takeoff on 10 June 1990. An improperly installed windscreen panel separated from its frame, causing the plane's captain to be blown partially out of the aircraft. With the captain pinned against the window frame for twenty minutes, the first officer landed at Southampton Airport.

🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Brands 🔗 Graffiti

Reverse graffiti is a method of creating temporary or semi-permanent images on walls or other surfaces by removing dirt from a surface. It can also be done by simply removing dirt with the fingertip from windows or other dirty surfaces, such as writing "wash me" on a dirty vehicle. Others, such as graffiti artist Moose, use a cloth or a high-power washer to remove dirt on a larger scale.

Reverse graffiti has been used as a form of advertising, although this usage has been controversial, as its legality varies depending on jurisdiction.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States

"Stellar Wind" (or "Stellarwind") was the code name of a warrantless surveillance program begun under the George W. Bush administration's President's Surveillance Program (PSP). The National Security Agency (NSA) program was approved by President Bush shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks and was revealed by Thomas Tamm to The New York Times in 2004. Stellar Wind was a prelude to new legal structures that allowed President Bush and President Barack Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.

🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Writing

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning". With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art. Where asemic writing distinguishes itself among traditions of abstract art is in the asemic author's use of gestural constraint, and the retention of physical characteristics of writing such as lines and symbols. Asemic writing is a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context. The open nature of asemic works allows for meaning to occur across linguistic understanding; an asemic text may be "read" in a similar fashion regardless of the reader's natural language. Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic work, that is, asemic writing can be polysemantic or have zero meaning, infinite meanings, or its meaning can evolve over time. Asemic works leave for the reader to decide how to translate and explore an asemic text; in this sense, the reader becomes co-creator of the asemic work.

In 1997, visual poets Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich first applied the word asemic to name their quasi-calligraphic writing gestures. They then began to distribute them to poetry magazines both online and in print. The authors explored sub-verbal and sub-letteral forms of writing, and textual asemia as a creative option and as an intentional practice. Since the late 1990s, asemic writing has blossomed into a worldwide literary/art movement. It has especially grown in the early part of the 21st century, though there is an acknowledgement of a long and complex history, which precedes the activities of the current asemic movement, especially with regards to abstract calligraphy, wordless writing, and verbal writing damaged beyond the point of legibility. Jim Leftwich has recently stated that an asemic condition of an asemic work is an impossible goal, and that it is not possible to create an art/literary work entirely without meaning. He has begun to use the term "pansemic" too. He also explained (in 2020): "The term 'pansemia' didn't replace the term 'asemia' in my thinking (nor did 'pansemic' replace 'asemic'); it merely assisted me in expanding my understanding of the theory and practice of asemic writing". Others such as author Travis Jeppesen have found the term asemic to be problematic because "it seems to infer writing with no meaning."

🔗 Sociology

Xennials or xennials (also known as the Oregon Trail Generation and Generation Catalano) are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts. Researchers and popular media use birth years from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

In 2020, xennial was included in the Oxford Dictionary of English.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Greece

The Tunnel of Eupalinos or Eupalinian aqueduct (Greek: Ευπαλίνιον όρυγμα, romanized: Efpalinion orygma) is a tunnel of 1,036 m (3,399 ft) length running through Mount Kastro in Samos, Greece, built in the 6th century BC to serve as an aqueduct. The tunnel is the second known tunnel in history which was excavated from both ends (Ancient Greek: ἀμφίστομον, romanized: amphistomon, "having two openings"), and the first with a geometry-based approach in doing so. Today it is a popular tourist attraction.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Medicine/Psychiatry 🔗 Artificial Intelligence

Chatbot psychosis, also called AI psychosis, is a phenomenon wherein individuals reportedly develop or experience worsening psychosis, such as paranoia and delusions, in connection with their use of chatbots. The term was first suggested in a 2023 editorial by Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard. It is not a recognized clinical diagnosis.

Journalistic accounts describe individuals who have developed strong beliefs that chatbots are sentient, are channeling spirits, or are revealing conspiracies, sometimes leading to personal crises or criminal acts. Proposed causes include the tendency of chatbots to provide inaccurate information ("hallucinate") and to affirm or validate users' beliefs, or their ability to mimic an intimacy that users do not experience with other humans.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Philately 🔗 Donald Trump 🔗 United States/U.S. presidential elections

The 2020 United States Postal Service crisis is a series of events that have caused backlogs and delays in the delivery of mail by the United States Postal Service (USPS). The crisis stems primarily from changes implemented by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy shortly after taking office in June 2020. The delays have had substantial legal, political, economic, and health repercussions.

There is controversy and speculation about whether the delays are unintended consequences of restructuring operations, or if they were intentionally created for political and/or financial gain. DeJoy has supported and donated to President Donald Trump, who has publicly linked his opposition to emergency funding for the Postal Service to his desire to restrict voting by mail in the 2020 elections.

On August 18, 2020, under heavy political and legal pressure, DeJoy announced that he would be "suspending" the policy changes until after the November 2020 election. He testified to the Senate on August 21, and to the House of Representatives on August 24, concerning the changes and their effects.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, originating in the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s, and building on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. The final official release was in early 2015.

Under Plan 9, UNIX's everything is a file metaphor is extended via a pervasive network-centric filesystem, and graphical user interface is assumed as a basis for almost all functionality, though it retains a heavily text-centric ideology.

The name Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a reference to the Ed Wood 1959 cult science fiction Z-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space. The name of the project's mascot is "Glenda, the Plan 9 Bunny". The system continues to be used and developed by operating system researchers and hobbyists.

🔗 Law 🔗 U.S. Supreme Court cases

Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The Court's decision articulated the view that the freedom of the individual must sometimes be subordinated to the common welfare and is subject to the police power of the state.