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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Sixel, short for "six pixels", is a bitmap graphics format supported by terminals and printers from DEC. It consists of a pattern six pixels high and one wide, resulting in 64 possible patterns. Each possible pattern is assigned an ASCII character, making the sixels easy to transmit on 7-bit serial links.

Sixel was first introduced as a way of sending bitmap graphics to DEC dot matrix printers like the LA50. After being put into "sixel mode" the following data was interpreted to directly control six of the pins in the nine-pin print head. A string of sixel characters encodes a single 6-pixel high row of the image.

The system was later re-used as a way to send bitmap data to the VT200 series and VT320 terminals when defining custom character sets. A series of sixels are used to transfer the bitmap for each character. This feature is known as soft character sets or dynamically redefinable character sets (DRCS). With the VT240, VT241, VT330, and VT340, the terminals could decode a complete sixel image to the screen, like those previously sent to printers.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Early Modern warfare 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/Anabaptist 🔗 Military history/European military history

The German Peasants' War, Great Peasants' War or Great Peasants' Revolt (German: Deutscher Bauernkrieg) was a widespread popular revolt in some German-speaking areas in Central Europe from 1524 to 1525. It was Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising before the French Revolution in 1789. The revolt failed because of intense opposition from the aristocracy, who slaughtered up to 100,000 of the 300,000 poorly armed peasants and farmers. The survivors were fined and achieved few, if any, of their goals. Like the preceding Bundschuh movement and the Hussite Wars, the war consisted of a series of both economic and religious revolts involving peasants and farmers, sometimes supported by radical clergy like Thomas Müntzer. The fighting was at its height in the middle of 1525.

The war began with separate insurrections, beginning in the southwestern part of what is now Germany and Alsace, and spread in subsequent insurrections to the central and eastern areas of Germany and present-day Austria. After the uprising in Germany was suppressed, it flared up briefly in several cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy.

In mounting their insurrection, peasants faced insurmountable obstacles. The democratic nature of their movement left them without a command structure and they lacked artillery and cavalry. Most of them had little, if any, military experience. Their opposition had experienced military leaders, well-equipped and disciplined armies, and ample funding.

The revolt incorporated some principles and rhetoric from the emerging Protestant Reformation, through which the peasants sought influence and freedom. Some Radical Reformers, most famously Thomas Müntzer, instigated and supported the revolt. In contrast, Martin Luther and other Magisterial Reformers condemned it and sided with the aristocrats. In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, Luther condemned the violence as the devil's work and called for the aristocrats to put down the rebels like mad dogs. The movement was supported by Huldrych Zwingli, but the condemnation by Luther contributed to its defeat. While around 20 veterans of the war went on to become leading figures in the Anabaptist movement, James Stayer notes that "no large number of known Anabaptists can be identified by name as participants in the 1525 upheaveal".

🔗 Video games 🔗 Lists

This is a list of video games that multiple video game journalists and critics have considered to be among the best of all time. The games listed here are included on at least six separate "best/greatest of all time" lists from different publications, as chosen by their editorial staffs.

🔗 Linguistics

A Wanderwort (German: [ˈvandɐˌvɔɐt], 'wandering word', plural Wanderwörter; capitalized like all German nouns) is a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another, usually in connection with trade. As such, Wanderwörter are a curiosity in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics within a wider study of language contact. At a sufficient time depth, it can be very difficult to establish in which language or language family it originated and in which it was borrowed.

🔗 Computing

The Curta is a small mechanical calculator developed by Curt Herzstark. The Curta's design is a descendant of Gottfried Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner and Charles Thomas's Arithmometer, accumulating values on cogs, which are added or complemented by a stepped drum mechanism. It has an extremely compact design: a small cylinder that fits in the palm of the hand.

Curtas were considered the best portable calculators available until they were displaced by electronic calculators in the 1970s.

🔗 China 🔗 Economics

Made in China 2025 (Chinese: 中国制造2025; pinyin: Zhōngguózhìzào èrlíng'èrwǔ) (MIC25, MIC 2025, or MIC2025) is a national strategic plan and industrial policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to further develop the manufacturing sector of China, issued by CCP general secretary Xi Jinping and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's cabinet in May 2015. As part of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Five-year Plans, China aims to move away from being the "world's factory"—a producer of cheap low-tech goods facilitated by lower labour costs and supply chain advantages. The industrial policy aims to upgrade the manufacturing capabilities of Chinese industries, growing from labor-intensive workshops into a more technology-intensive powerhouse.

Made in China 2025's goals include increasing the Chinese-domestic content of core materials to 40 percent by 2020 and 70 percent by 2025. To help achieve independence from foreign suppliers, the initiative encourages increased production in high-tech products and services, with its semiconductor industry central to the industrial plan, partly because advances in chip technology may "lead to breakthroughs in other areas of technology, handing the advantage to whoever has the best chips – an advantage that currently is out of Beijing’s reach."

Since 2018, following a backlash from the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, the phrase "MIC 2025" has been de-emphasized in government and other official communications, while the program remains in place. The Chinese government continues to invest heavily in identified technologies. In 2018, the Chinese government committed to investing roughly US$300 billion into achieving the industrial plan. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, at least an additional $1.4 trillion was also invested into MIC 2025 initiatives. Given China's current middle income country status, the practicality of its disproportionate expenditure on pioneering new technologies has been called into question.

🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Animals 🔗 Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology

Bioluminescence is the production and emission of light by living organisms. It is a form of chemiluminescence. Bioluminescence occurs widely in marine vertebrates and invertebrates, as well as in some fungi, microorganisms including some bioluminescent bacteria, and terrestrial arthropods such as fireflies. In some animals, the light is bacteriogenic, produced by symbiotic bacteria such as those from the genus Vibrio; in others, it is autogenic, produced by the animals themselves.

In a general sense, the principal chemical reaction in bioluminescence involves a light-emitting molecule and an enzyme, generally called luciferin and luciferase, respectively. Because these are generic names, luciferins and luciferases are often distinguished by the species or group, e.g. firefly luciferin. In all characterized cases, the enzyme catalyzes the oxidation of the luciferin.

In some species, the luciferase requires other cofactors, such as calcium or magnesium ions, and sometimes also the energy-carrying molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP). In evolution, luciferins vary little: one in particular, coelenterazine, is found in 11 different animal phyla, though in some of these, the animals obtain it through their diet. Conversely, luciferases vary widely between different species, which is evidence that bioluminescence has arisen over 40 times in evolutionary history.

Both Aristotle and Pliny the Elder mentioned that damp wood sometimes gives off a glow. Many centuries later Robert Boyle showed that oxygen was involved in the process, in both wood and glowworms. It was not until the late nineteenth century that bioluminescence was properly investigated. The phenomenon is widely distributed among animal groups, especially in marine environments. On land it occurs in fungi, bacteria and some groups of invertebrates, including insects.

The uses of bioluminescence by animals include counterillumination camouflage, mimicry of other animals, for example to lure prey, and signaling to other individuals of the same species, such as to attract mates. In the laboratory, luciferase-based systems are used in genetic engineering and biomedical research. Researchers are also investigating the possibility of using bioluminescent systems for street and decorative lighting, and a bioluminescent plant has been created.

🔗 Physics

A Halbach array (German: [ˈhalbax]) is a special arrangement of permanent magnets that augments the magnetic field on one side of the array while cancelling the field to near zero on the other side. This is achieved by having a spatially rotating pattern of magnetisation.

The rotating pattern of permanent magnets (on the front face; on the left, up, right, down) can be continued indefinitely and have the same effect. The effect of this arrangement is roughly similar to many horseshoe magnets placed adjacent to each other, with similar poles touching.

This magnetic orientation process replicates that applied by a magnetic recording tape head to the magnetic tape coating during the recording process. The principle was further described by James (Jim) M. Winey of Magnepan in 1970, for the ideal case of continuously rotating magnetization, induced by a one-sided stripe-shaped coil.

The effect was also discovered by John C. Mallinson in 1973, and these "one-sided flux" structures were initially described by him as a "curiosity", although at the time he recognized from this discovery the potential for significant improvements in magnetic tape technology.

Physicist Klaus Halbach, while at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory during the 1980s, independently invented the Halbach array to focus particle accelerator beams.

🔗 Technology

Deep borehole disposal (DBD) is the concept of disposing high-level radioactive waste from nuclear reactors in extremely deep boreholes instead of in more traditional deep geological repositories that are excavated like mines. Deep borehole disposal seeks to place the waste as much as five kilometres (3.1 mi) beneath the surface of the Earth and relies primarily on the thickness of the natural geological barrier to safely isolate the waste from the biosphere for a very long period of time so that it should not pose a threat to humans and the environment. The concept was originally developed in the 1970s, but in 2014 a proposal for a first experimental borehole was proposed by a consortium headed by Sandia National Laboratories.

The waste would be put into the lower mile of such a hole, within crystalline rock to isolate it from the environment. The upper two miles of the borehole would be filled with protective layers including asphalt, bentonite, concrete and crushed rock that are expected to protect the environment during geologic time, and the hole would be lined with steel casing.

A pair of proposed test boreholes in the United States were cancelled due to public opposition and lack of funding in 2016 and 2017.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Hugin () is a cross-platform open source panorama photo stitching and HDR merging program developed by Pablo d'Angelo and others. It is a GUI front-end for Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools and Andrew Mihal's Enblend and Enfuse. Stitching is accomplished by using several overlapping photos taken from the same location, and using control points to align and transform the photos so that they can be blended together to form a larger image. Hugin allows for the easy (optionally automatic) creation of control points between two images, optimization of the image transforms along with a preview window so the user can see whether the panorama is acceptable. Once the preview is correct, the panorama can be fully stitched, transformed and saved in a standard image format.