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🔗 Film 🔗 France 🔗 France/Paris 🔗 Film/French cinema

100 Years is an upcoming science fiction film written by John Malkovich and directed by Robert Rodriguez. Advertised in 2015 with the tagline "The Movie You Will Never See", it is due to be released on November 18, 2115. The 100 year span matches the time it takes for a bottle of Louis XIII Cognac to be properly aged before its release to consumers. The film stars an international ensemble, with American actor John Malkovich, Taiwanese actress Shuya Chang, and Chilean actor Marko Zaror.

100 Years will apparently be a short film, Rodriguez having stated in a 2019 interview with French YouTuber InThePanda: "I was making several short films for them, and I finished that one first, we shot that one first, I thought that was gonna be a commercial or something. And then I showed them the movie and they said 'Yeah, that's great, that's great. That's the one we lock away.' And I said 'What? That's the one you lock away? What about the other one with the future--' 'No, that's the commercial.' [...] The one that I was most attached to was the one they locked away."

🔗 Typography

Irony punctuation is any proposed form of notation used to denote irony or sarcasm in text. Written English lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed. Among the oldest and most frequently attested is the percontation point proposed by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s, and the irony mark, used by Marcellin Jobard and French poet Alcanter de Brahm during the 19th century. Both marks take the form of a reversed question mark, "⸮".

Irony punctuation is primarily used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. A bracketed exclamation point or question mark as well as scare quotes are also occasionally used to express irony or sarcasm.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Libraries 🔗 Peru 🔗 Animals

Juliane Koepcke (born 1954), also known by her married name Juliane Diller, is a German Peruvian mammalogist. As a teenager in 1971, Koepcke was the lone survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash, then survived eleven days alone in the Amazon rainforest.

🔗 Electronics

An antifuse is an electrical device that performs the opposite function to a fuse. Whereas a fuse starts with a low resistance and is designed to permanently break an electrically conductive path (typically when the current through the path exceeds a specified limit), an antifuse starts with a high resistance, and programming it converts it into a permanent electrically conductive path (typically when the voltage across the antifuse exceeds a certain level). This technology has many applications.

🔗 Civil engineering 🔗 Netherlands

The Maeslantkering ("Maeslant barrier" in Dutch) is a storm surge barrier on the Nieuwe Waterweg, in South Holland, Netherlands. It was constructed from 1991 to 1997. As part of the Delta Works the barrier responds to water level predictions calculated by a centralized computer system called BOS. It automatically closes when Rotterdam (especially the Port of Rotterdam) is threatened by floods.

Maeslantkering has two 210-metre long barrier gates, with two 237-metre long steel trusses holding each. When closed, the barrier will protect the entire width (360 metres) of the Nieuwe Waterweg, the main waterway of Port of Rotterdam. It is one of the largest moving structures on Earth, rivalling the Green Bank Telescope in the United States and the Bagger 288 excavator in Germany.

🔗 Computer graphics

Pixel-art scaling algorithms are graphical filters that are often used in video game console emulators to enhance hand-drawn 2D pixel art graphics. The re-scaling of pixel art is a specialist sub-field of image rescaling.

As pixel-art graphics are usually in very low resolutions, they rely on careful placing of individual pixels, often with a limited palette of colors. This results in graphics that rely on a high amount of stylized visual cues to define complex shapes with very little resolution, down to individual pixels. This makes image scaling of pixel art a particularly difficult problem.

A number of specialized algorithms have been developed to handle pixel-art graphics, as the traditional scaling algorithms do not take such perceptual cues into account.

Since a typical application of this technology is improving the appearance of fourth-generation and earlier video games on arcade and console emulators, many are designed to run in real time for sufficiently small input images at 60 frames per second. This places constraints on the type of programming techniques that can be used for this sort of real-time processing. Many work only on specific scale factors: 2× is the most common, with 3×, 4×, 5× and 6× also present.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Fashion

The Berlin Gold Hat or Berlin Golden Hat (German: Berliner Goldhut) is a Late Bronze Age artefact made of thin gold leaf. It served as the external covering on a long conical brimmed headdress, probably of an organic material. It is now in the Neues Museum on Museum Island in Berlin, in a room by itself with an elaborate explanatory display.

The Berlin Gold Hat is the best preserved specimen among the four known conical golden hats known from Bronze Age Europe so far. Of the three others, two were found in southern Germany, and one in the west of France. All were found in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is generally assumed that the hats served as the insignia of deities or priests in the context of a sun cult that appears to have been widespread in Central Europe at the time. The hats are also suggested to have served astronomical/calendrical functions.

The Berlin Gold Hat was acquired in 1996 by the Berlin Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte as a single find without provenance. A comparative study of the ornaments and techniques in conjunction with dateable finds suggests that it was made in the Late Bronze Age, circa 1,000 to 800 BC.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Education 🔗 Homeschooling 🔗 Alternative education

The Montessori method of education is a type of educational method that involves children's natural interests and activities rather than formal teaching methods. A Montessori classroom places an emphasis on hands-on learning and developing real-world skills. It emphasizes independence and it views children as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a sufficiently supportive and well-prepared learning environment. It discourages some conventional measures of achievement, such as grades and tests.

The method was started in the early 20th century by Italian physician Maria Montessori, who developed her theories through scientific experimentation with her students; the method has since been used in many parts of the world, in public and private schools alike.

A range of practices exist under the name "Montessori", which is not trademarked. Popular elements include mixed-age classrooms, student freedom (including their choices of activity), long blocks of uninterrupted work time, specially trained teachers and prepared environment. Scientific studies regarding the Montessori method are mostly positive, with a 2017 review stating that "broad evidence" exists for its efficacy.

🔗 Extinction 🔗 Birds 🔗 Scottish Islands

The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) is a species of flightless alcid that became extinct in the mid-19th century. It was the only modern species in the genus Pinguinus. It is not closely related to the birds now known as penguins, which were discovered later by Europeans and so named by sailors because of their physical resemblance to the great auk.

It bred on rocky, remote islands with easy access to the ocean and a plentiful food supply, a rarity in nature that provided only a few breeding sites for the great auks. When not breeding, they spent their time foraging in the waters of the North Atlantic, ranging as far south as northern Spain and along the coastlines of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Ireland, and Great Britain.

The great auk was 75 to 85 centimetres (30 to 33 inches) tall and weighed about 5 kilograms (11 pounds), making it the largest alcid to survive into the modern era, and the second-largest member of the alcid family overall (the prehistoric Miomancalla was larger). It had a black back and a white belly. The black beak was heavy and hooked, with grooves on its surface. During summer, great auk plumage showed a white patch over each eye. During winter, the great auk lost these patches, instead developing a white band stretching between the eyes. The wings were only 15 cm (6 in) long, rendering the bird flightless. Instead, the great auk was a powerful swimmer, a trait that it used in hunting. Its favourite prey were fish, including Atlantic menhaden and capelin, and crustaceans. Although agile in the water, it was clumsy on land. Great auk pairs mated for life. They nested in extremely dense and social colonies, laying one egg on bare rock. The egg was white with variable brown marbling. Both parents participated in the incubation of the egg for around 6 weeks before the young hatched. The young left the nest site after 2–3 weeks, although the parents continued to care for it.

The great auk was an important part of many Native American cultures, both as a food source and as a symbolic item. Many Maritime Archaic people were buried with great auk bones. One burial discovered included someone covered by more than 200 great auk beaks, which are presumed to be the remnants of a cloak made of great auks' skins. Early European explorers to the Americas used the great auk as a convenient food source or as fishing bait, reducing its numbers. The bird's down was in high demand in Europe, a factor that largely eliminated the European populations by the mid-16th century. Scientists soon began to realize that the great auk was disappearing and it became the beneficiary of many early environmental laws, but this proved ineffectual.

Its growing rarity increased interest from European museums and private collectors in obtaining skins and eggs of the bird. On 3 June 1844, the last two confirmed specimens were killed on Eldey, off the coast of Iceland, ending the last known breeding attempt. Later reports of roaming individuals being seen or caught are unconfirmed. A record of one great auk in 1852 is considered by some to be the last sighting of a member of the species. The great auk is mentioned in several novels, and the scientific journal of the American Ornithological Society was named The Auk (now Ornithology) in honour of the bird until 2021.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Tokyo

The X-Seed 4000 is a visionary skyscraper for what would be, if it was built, the tallest building in the world. The idea was initially created and developed by Peter Neville. Its proposed 4-kilometre (2.5 mi) height, 6-kilometre-wide (3.7 mi) sea-base, and 800-floor capacity could accommodate 500,000 to 1,000,000 inhabitants. This structure would be composed of over 3,000,000 tons of pure steel.

It was designed for Tokyo, Japan by the Taisei Corporation in 1995 as a futuristic environment combining ultra-modern living and interaction with nature. Methods of transportation within the X-seed would most likely include MagLev trains.

The X-Seed 4000 "is never meant to be built," says Georges Binder, managing director of Buildings & Data, a firm which compiles data banks on buildings worldwide. "The purpose of the plan was to earn some recognition for the firm, and it worked."

Unlike conventional skyscrapers, to remain habitable the (X-Seed 4000) would be forced to actively protect its occupants from considerable internal air pressure and external air pressure gradations and weather fluctuations that its massive elevation would cause. Its design calls for the use of solar power to maintain internal environmental conditions. As the proposed site for the structure is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire, the most active volcano range in the world, the X-Seed 4000 would be subject to earthquakes and tsunamis.

A sea-based location and a Mount Fuji shape are some of this building's other major design features—the real Mount Fuji is land-based and is 3,776 metres (12,388 ft) high so is 224 metres (735 ft) shorter than the X-Seed 4000.

The X-Seed 4000 is projected to be twice the height of the Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid at 2,004 metres (6,575 ft). The Shimizu Mega-City Pyramid (proposed in 2007, also planned for Tokyo, Japan) faces most of the same problems as the X-Seed. Other projects that may be in the top five man made structures are the Ultima Tower 3,218 metres (10,558 ft) in San Francisco, Dubai City Tower 2,400 metres (7,900 ft) and the Bionic Tower 1,228 metres (4,029 ft) in either Hong Kong or Shanghai.