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🔗 Biography 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Literature 🔗 Poland 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

Stanisław Herman Lem (Polish: [staˈɲiswaf ˈlɛm] (listen); 12 or 13 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire. Lem's books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 45 million copies. From the 1950s to 2000s, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. The total print of Lem's books is over 30 million copies.

Lem's works explore philosophical themes through speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books.

Translating his works is difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, idiomatic wordplay, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.

🔗 France 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Catholicism

The Cathedral of Saint Peter of Beauvais (French: Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais) is a Roman Catholic church in the northern town of Beauvais, Oise, France. It is the seat of the Bishop of Beauvais, Noyon and Senlis.

The cathedral is in the Gothic style, and consists of a 13th-century choir, with an apse and seven polygonal apsidal chapels reached by an ambulatory, joined to a 16th-century transept.

It has the highest Gothic choir in the world: (48.50 m) under vault. From 1569 to 1573 the cathedral of Beauvais was, with its tower of 153 meters, the highest human construction of the world. Its designers had the ambition to make it the largest gothic cathedral in France ahead of Amiens. Victim of two collapses, one in the 13th century, the other in the 16th century, it remains unfinished today; only the choir and the transept have been built.

The planned nave of the cathedral was never constructed. The remnant of the previous 10th-century Romanesque cathedral, known as the Basse Œuvre ("Lower Work"), still occupies the intended site of the nave.

🔗 Birds

Crop milk is a secretion from the lining of the crop of parent birds in some species that is regurgitated to young birds. It is found among all pigeons and doves where it is also referred to as pigeon milk. Crop milk is also secreted from the crop of flamingos and the male emperor penguin, suggesting independent evolution of this trait. Unlike in mammals where only females produce milk, crop milk is produced by both males and females in pigeons and flamingos; and in penguins, only by the male. Lactation in birds is controlled by prolactin, which is the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals. Crop milk is a holocrine secretion, unlike in mammals where milk is an exocrine secretion. Crop milk contains both fat and protein, as with mammalian milk, but unlike mammalian milk, it contains no carbohydrates.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Computing/Networking

The Hayes command set (also known as the AT command set) is a specific command language originally developed by Dale Heatherington and Dennis Hayes for the Hayes Smartmodem in 1981.

The command set consists of a series of short text strings that can be combined to produce commands for operations such as dialing, hanging up, and changing the parameters of the connection. The vast majority of dial-up modems use the Hayes command set in numerous variations.

The command set covered only those operations supported by the earliest 300 bit/s modems. When new commands were required to control additional functionality in higher-speed modems, a variety of one-off standards emerged from each of the major vendors. These continued to share the basic command structure and syntax, but added any number of new commands using some sort of prefix character – & for Hayes and USRobotics, and \ for Microcom, for instance. Many of these were re-standardized on the Hayes extensions after the introduction of the SupraFAXModem 14400 and the market consolidation that followed.

The term Hayes compatible was and as of 2018 still is important within the industry.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

A door in a bulletin board system (BBS) is an interface between the BBS software and an external application. The term is also used to refer to the external application, a computer program that runs outside of the main bulletin board program. Sometimes called external programs, doors are the most common way to add games, utilities, and other extensions to BBSes. Because BBSes typically depended on the telephone system, BBSes and door programs tended to be local in nature, unlike modern Internet games and applications.

From the 1990s on, most BBS software had the capability to "drop to" doors. Several standards were developed for passing connection and user information to doors; this was usually done with "dropfiles", small binary or text files dropped into known locations in the BBS's file system. Most doors were responsible for operating the serial port or other communications device directly until returning control to the BBS. Later development of FOSSIL drivers have allowed both BBSes and their doors to communicate without being responsible for direct operation of the communications hardware.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Trade 🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Taxation

The Chicken Tax is a 25 percent tariff on light trucks (and originally on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy) imposed in 1964 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by France and West Germany on importation of U.S. chicken. The period from 1961–1964 of tensions and negotiations surrounding the issue was known as the "Chicken War," taking place at the height of Cold War politics.

Eventually, the tariffs on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy were lifted, but since 1964 this form of protectionism has remained in place to give U.S. domestic automakers an advantage over competition (e.g., from Japan, Turkey, China, and Thailand). Though concern remains about its repeal, a 2003 Cato Institute study called the tariff "a policy in search of a rationale."

As an unintended consequence, several importers of light trucks have circumvented the tariff via loopholes, known as tariff engineering. Ford (ostensibly a company that the tax was designed to protect), imported its first-generation Transit Connect light trucks as "passenger vehicles" to the U.S. from Turkey, and immediately stripped and shredded portions of their interiors (e.g., installed rear seats, seatbelts) in a warehouse outside Baltimore. To import vans built in Germany, Mercedes "disassembled them and shipped the pieces to South Carolina, where American workers put them back together in a small kit assembly building." The resulting vehicles emerge as locally manufactured, free from the tariff.

🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Engineering

The Sinclair C5 is a small one-person battery electric velomobile, technically an "electrically assisted pedal cycle". It was the culmination of Sir Clive Sinclair's long-running interest in electric vehicles. Although widely described as an "electric car", Sinclair characterised it as a "vehicle, not a car".

Sinclair had become one of the UK's best-known millionaires, and earned a knighthood, on the back of the highly successful Sinclair Research range of home computers in the early 1980s. He hoped to repeat his success in the electric vehicle market, which he saw as ripe for a new approach. The C5 emerged from an earlier project to produce a small electric car called the C1. After a change in the law, prompted by lobbying from bicycle manufacturers, Sinclair developed the C5 as an electrically powered tricycle with a polypropylene body and a chassis designed by Lotus Cars. It was intended to be the first in a series of increasingly ambitious electric vehicles, but the development of the follow-up C10 and C15 models never got further than the drawing board.

On 10 January 1985, the C5 was unveiled at a glitzy launch event but it received a less than enthusiastic reception from the British media. Its sales prospects were blighted by poor reviews and safety concerns expressed by consumer and motoring organisations. The vehicle's limitations – a short range, a maximum speed of only 15 miles per hour (24 km/h), a battery that ran down quickly and a lack of weatherproofing – made it impractical for most people's needs. It was marketed as an alternative to cars and bicycles, but ended up appealing to neither group of owners, and it was not available in shops until several months after its launch. Within three months of the launch, production had been slashed by 90%. Sales never picked up despite Sinclair's optimistic forecasts and production ceased entirely by August 1985. Out of 14,000 C5s made, only 5,000 were sold before its manufacturer, Sinclair Vehicles, went into receivership.

The C5 became known as "one of the great marketing bombs of postwar British industry" and a "notorious ... example of failure". Despite its commercial failure, the C5 went on to become a cult item for collectors. Thousands of unsold C5s were purchased by investors and sold for hugely inflated prices – as much as £5,000, compared to the original retail value of £399. Enthusiasts have established owners' clubs and some have modified their vehicles substantially, adding monster wheels, jet engines, and high-powered electric motors to propel their C5s at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour (240 km/h).

🔗 Video games 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Fictional characters 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Musical Instruments 🔗 Electronic music 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Science and technology 🔗 Video games/Sega 🔗 Anime and manga 🔗 Women in Music 🔗 Video games/Video game characters 🔗 Japan/Music

Hatsune Miku (Japanese: 初音ミク, [hatsɯ̥ne miꜜkɯ]), officially code-named CV01, is a Vocaloid voicebank and software application developed by Crypton Future Media. Her voice is generated using vocal sound samples provided by Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita. The software is personified by an official mascot character depicted as a 16-year-old girl with turquoise twintails. Marketed as a virtual idol, Miku has performed at live virtual concerts as an animated projection.

Released in August 2007, Hatsune Miku was the second product built on Yamaha Corporation's Vocaloid 2 engine and the first Japanese voicebank for the platform. Subsequent updates have expanded her functionality across Vocaloid 3, Vocaloid 4, and Vocaloid 6 technology, alongside Crypton's proprietary Piapro Studio editor.

The name of the character comes from merging the Japanese words for first (初, hatsu), sound (音, ne), and future (ミク, miku), thus meaning "the first sound of the future", which, along with her code name, refers to her position as the first of Crypton's "Character Vocal Series" (abbreviated "CV Series"), preceding Kagamine Rin/Len (code-named CV02) and Megurine Luka (code-named CV03). The number 01 can be seen on her left shoulder in official artwork.

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

netcat (often abbreviated to nc) is a computer networking utility for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP. The command is designed to be a dependable back-end that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and investigation tool, since it can produce almost any kind of connection its user could need and has a number of built-in capabilities.

Its list of features includes port scanning, transferring files, and port listening, and it can be used as a backdoor.

🔗 Automobiles