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🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Car

Kei car (or keijidōsha, kanji: 軽自動車, "light automobile", pronounced [keːdʑidoːɕa]), known variously outside Japan as Japanese city car, ultramini, or Japanese microcar, is the Japanese vehicle category for the smallest highway-legal passenger cars. Similar Japanese categories exist for microvans, and kei trucks. These vehicles are most often the Japanese equivalent of the EU A-segment (city cars).

The kei-car category was created by the Japanese government in 1949, and the regulations have been revised several times since. These regulations specify a maximum vehicle size, engine capacity, and power output, so that owners may enjoy both tax and insurance benefits. In most rural areas they are also exempted from the requirement to certify that adequate parking is available for the vehicle.

Kei cars have become very successful in Japan, consisting of over one-third of domestic new-car sales in fiscal 2016, despite dropping from a record 40% market share in 2013, after the government increased the kei-car tax by 50% in 2014. In 2018, seven of the 10 top-selling models were kei cars, including the top four, all boxy passenger vans: Honda N-Box, Suzuki Spacia, Nissan Dayz, and Daihatsu Tanto. Isuzu is the only manufacturer that has never offered a kei-sized vehicle for either private ownership or commercial trucks and microvans.

In export markets, though, the genre is generally too specialized and too small for most models to be profitable. Notable exceptions exist, though, for instance the Suzuki Alto and Jimny models, which were exported consistently from around 1980. Kei cars are not only popular with the elderly, but they are also popular with youths because of their affordability.

Nearly all kei cars have been designed and manufactured in Japan, but a version of the French-made Smart was briefly imported and officially classified as a kei car, and since then, the British Caterham 7 160 has also received such classification.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The Honeywell 316 was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by Honeywell starting in 1969. It is part of the Series 16, which includes the Models 116 (1965, discrete^: 4), 316 (1969), 416 (1966), 516 (1966) and DDP-716 (1969). They were commonly used for data acquisition and control, remote message concentration, clinical laboratory systems, Remote Job Entry and time-sharing. The Series-16 computers are all based on the DDP-116 designed by Gardner Hendrie at Computer Control Company, Inc. (3C) in 1964.

The 516 and later the 316 were used as Interface Message Processors (IMP) for the American ARPANET and the British NPL Network.

A light-on-dark color scheme (dark mode, night mode) is available to Wikipedia's smartphone apps and website (for users using the default skins) since July 2024.

In addition to this there is a gadget on English Wikipedia, and various volunteer-written CSS files that allow customization for logged-in users.

🔗 Education 🔗 Homeschooling 🔗 Alternative education

Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschooling students learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, conventional grading methods, and other features of traditional schooling in the education of each unique child.

The term "unschooling" was coined in the 1970s and used by educator John Holt, widely regarded as the father of unschooling. While unschooling is often considered a subset of homeschooling and homeschooling has been subject to widespread public debate, little media attention has been given to unschooling in particular.

Critics of unschooling see it as an extreme educational philosophy, with concerns that unschooled children will lack the social skills, structure, and motivation of their schooled peers, while proponents of unschooling say exactly the opposite is true: that self-directed education in a natural environment better equips a child to handle the "real world."

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

The Gopher protocol is a communications protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.

The protocol was invented by a team led by Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota. It offers some features not natively supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on the documents it stores. Its text menu interface is well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote text-oriented computer terminals, which were still common at the time of its creation in 1991, and the simplicity of its protocol facilitated a wide variety of client implementations. More recent Gopher revisions and graphical clients added support for multimedia. Gopher was preferred by many network administrators for using fewer network resources than Web services.

Gopher's hierarchical structure provided a platform for the first large-scale electronic library connections. The Gopher protocol is still in use by enthusiasts, and although it has been almost entirely supplanted by the Web, a small population of actively-maintained servers remains.

🔗 Pharmacology

Eroom's law is the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology (such as high-throughput screening, biotechnology, combinatorial chemistry, and computational drug design), a trend first observed in the 1980s. The cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years (inflation-adjusted). In order to highlight the contrast with the exponential advancements of other forms of technology (such as transistors) over time, the law was deliberately spelled as Moore's law spelled backwards.

The article proposing and naming the law attributes it to four main causes.

• the 'better than the Beatles' problem: the sense that new drugs only have modest incremental benefit over drugs already widely considered as successful, such as Lipitor, and treatment effects on top of already effective treatments are smaller than treatment effects versus placebo. The smaller size of these treatment effects mandates an increase in clinical trial sizes to show the same level of efficacy. This problem was phrased as "better than the Beatles" to highlight the fact that it would be difficult to come up with new successful pop songs if all new songs had to be better than the Beatles.
• the 'cautious regulator' problem: the progressive lowering of risk tolerance seen by drug regulatory agencies that makes R&D both costlier and harder. After older drugs (such as Thalidomide or Vioxx) are removed from the market due to safety reasons, the bar on safety for new drugs is increased.
• the 'throw money at it' tendency: the tendency to add human resources and other resources to R&D, which may lead to project overrun.
• the 'basic research–brute force' bias: the tendency to overestimate the ability of advances in basic research and brute force screening methods to show a molecule as safe and effective in clinical trials. From the 1960s to the 1990s (and later), drug discovery has shifted from whole-animal classical pharmacology testing methods (phenotypic screening) to reverse pharmacology target-approaches that result in the discovery of drugs that may tightly bind with high-affinity to target proteins, but which still often fail in clinical trials due to an under-appreciation of the complexity of the whole organism. Furthermore, drug discovery techniques have shifted from small-molecule and iterative low-throughput search strategies to target-based high-throughput screening (HTS) of large compound libraries. But despite being faster and cheaper, HTS approaches may be less productive.

While some suspect a lack of "low-hanging fruit" as a significant contribution to Eroom's law, this may be less important than the four main causes, as there are still many decades' worth of new potential drug targets relative to the number of targets which already have been exploited, even if the industry exploits 4 to 5 new targets per year. There is also space to explore selectively non-selective drugs (or "dirty drugs") that interact with several molecular targets, and which may be particularly effective as central nervous system (CNS) therapeutics, even though few of them have been introduced in the last few decades.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 Sociology

The term physics envy is used to criticize modern writing and research of academics working in areas such as "softer sciences", liberal arts, business studies, and humanities. The term argues that writing and working practices in these disciplines have overused confusing jargon and complicated mathematics to seem more 'rigorous' and like mathematics-based subjects like physics.

🔗 Songs

"Hitler Has Only Got One Ball", sometimes known as "The River Kwai March", is a World War II British song, the lyrics of which, sung to the tune of the World War I-era "Colonel Bogey March", impugn the masculinity of Nazi leaders by alleging they had missing, deformed, or undersized testicles. Multiple variant lyrics exist, but the most common version refers to rumours that Adolf Hitler had monorchism ("one ball"), and accuses Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler of microorchidism ("two but very small") and Joseph Goebbels of anorchia ("no balls at all"). An alternative version suggests Hitler's missing testicle is displayed as a war trophy in the Royal Albert Hall.

The author of the lyrics is unknown, though several claims have been made. The song first appeared among British soldiers in 1939 and was quickly taken up by Allied military and civilians. Its familiarity increased after its use in a scene in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai. The song has been cited as an example of morally-correct disrespect that used political mockery to boost morale in wartime.

🔗 Birds

Brood parasites are organisms that rely on others to raise their young. The strategy appears among birds, insects and fish. The brood parasite manipulates a host, either of the same or of another species, to raise its young as if it were its own, using brood mimicry, for example by having eggs that resemble the host's (egg mimicry).

Brood parasitism relieves the parasitic parents from the investment of rearing young or building nests for the young, enabling them to spend more time on other activities such as foraging and producing further offspring. Bird parasite species mitigate the risk of egg loss by distributing eggs amongst a number of different hosts. As this behaviour damages the host, it often results in an evolutionary arms race between parasite and host as the pair of species coevolve.

The strength of defenses and counter-adaptation rely on the host/parasitic species' ability to evolve; some host species have very strong rejection defenses resulting in the parasitic species evolving to have very close mimicry. In other species, hosts do not show rejection defenses and as a result, the parasitic species will show no evolved trait (example: egg mimicry).

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Pirate Politics 🔗 Elections and Referendums 🔗 Politics/Political parties

The United States Pirate Party (USPP) is an American political party founded in 2006 by Brent Allison and Alex English. The party's platform is aligned with the global Pirate movement, and supports reform of copyright laws to reflect open source and free culture values, government transparency, protection of privacy and civil liberties. The United States Pirate Party also advocates for evidence-based policy, egalitarianism, meritocracy and the hacker ethic as well as the rolling back of corporate personhood and corporate welfare. The USPP has also made a priority to advocate for changes in the copyright laws and removal of patents. It is the belief of the party that these restrictions greatly hinder the sharing and expansion of knowledge and resources.

The party's national organization has existed in multiple incarnations since its 2006 founding. Its most recent is the Pirate National Committee (PNC), formed in 2012 as a coalition of state parties. The PNC officially recognizes Pirate parties from 8 states, and tracks and assists in the growth of more state parties throughout the United States. The board of the USPP is the board of the PNC. The current Chair of the Pirate National Committee is Lindsay-Anne Gorski (née Brunner).