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Inferno is the fifth studio album by Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada, released on 29 May 2026 by Warp. It marks the duo's first studio album in thirteen years, following Tomorrow's Harvest (2013). An ambient and electronic album described as hauntology and IDM, the album was noted as the duo's response to a darker zeitgeist. Its instrumentation contains guitars, live drums, and synths, adopting a live sound. Recorded at Hexagon Sun studio in Pentland Hills, Scotland, both members are credited on the album as instrumentalists and sound designers; writing and production is credited solely to Mike Sandison.

The promotional campaign began in April 2026, with VHS tapes being mailed out to fans, and the track "Tape 05" being shared online later that month before the album was properly announced. The single "Introit / Prophecy at 1420 MHz" was released in early May, accompanied by a music video directed by Robert Beatty. Listening sessions occurred in various places across the world later that month. A day prior to release, use of the album's music and aesthetic was co-opted by the White House, which was received negatively by the public and denounced by Warp. Anticipated widely for release, Inferno received praise as a relevant return for Boards of Canada, and for its subject matter, musicality, and thematic content.

The Vulcan salutation is a hand gesture popularized by the 1960s television series Star Trek. It consists of a raised hand with the palm forward and the thumb extended, while the fingers are parted between the middle and ring finger.

A qanat or kariz is a gently sloping underground channel to transport water from an aquifer or water well to surface for irrigation and drinking, acting as an underground aqueduct. This is an old system of water supply from a deep well with a series of vertical access shafts. The qanats still create a reliable supply of water for human settlements and irrigation in hot, arid, and semi-arid climates, but the value of this system is directly related to the quality, volume, and regularity of the water flow. Traditionally qanats are built by a group of skilled laborers, muqannīs, with hand labor. The profession historically paid well and was typically handed down from father to son. According to most sources, the qanat technology was developed in ancient Iran by the Persian people sometime in the early 1st millennium BCE, and spread from there slowly westward and eastward. However, some other sources suggest a Southeast Arabian origin.

The theory of belief functions, also referred to as evidence theory or Dempster–Shafer theory (DST), is a general framework for reasoning with uncertainty, with understood connections to other frameworks such as probability, possibility and imprecise probability theories. First introduced by Arthur P. Dempster in the context of statistical inference, the theory was later developed by Glenn Shafer into a general framework for modeling epistemic uncertainty—a mathematical theory of evidence. The theory allows one to combine evidence from different sources and arrive at a degree of belief (represented by a mathematical object called belief function) that takes into account all the available evidence.

In a narrow sense, the term Dempster–Shafer theory refers to the original conception of the theory by Dempster and Shafer. However, it is more common to use the term in the wider sense of the same general approach, as adapted to specific kinds of situations. In particular, many authors have proposed different rules for combining evidence, often with a view to handling conflicts in evidence better. The early contributions have also been the starting points of many important developments, including the transferable belief model and the theory of hints.

The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels was changed. Some consonant sounds changed as well, particularly those that became silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is sometimes used to include these consonant changes.

English spelling began to become standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often considerably deviate from how they represent pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.

Veblen goods are types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.

Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.

Abnormal behavior of birds in captivity has been found to occur among both domesticated and wild birds. Abnormal behavior can be defined in several ways. Statistically, 'abnormal' is when the occurrence, frequency or intensity of a behaviour varies statistically significantly, either more or less, from the normal value. This means that theoretically, almost any behaviour could become 'abnormal' in an individual. Less formally, 'abnormal' includes any activity judged to be outside the normal behaviour pattern for captive birds of that particular class or age. For example, running rather than flying may be a normal behaviour and regularly observed in one species, however, in another species it might be normal but becomes 'abnormal' if it reaches a high frequency, or in another species it is rarely observed and any incidence is considered 'abnormal'. This article does not include 'one-off' behaviours performed by individual birds that might be considered abnormal for that individual, unless these are performed repeatedly by other individuals in the species and are recognised as part of the ethogram of that species.

Most abnormal behaviours can be categorised collectively (e.g., eliminative, ingestive, stereotypies), however, many abnormal behaviours fall debatably into several of these categories and categorisation is therefore not attempted in this article. Abnormal behaviours here are considered to be related to captive housing but may also be due to medical conditions. The article does not include behaviours in birds that are genetically modified to express abnormal behaviour.

Rongorongo (; Rapa Nui: [ˈɾoŋoˈɾoŋo]) is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that appears to be writing or proto-writing. Numerous attempts at decipherment have been made, none successfully. Although some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, none of these glyphs can actually be read. If rongorongo does prove to be writing and proves to be an independent invention, it would be one of very few independent inventions of writing in human history.

Two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo inscriptions, some heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged, were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections. None remain on Easter Island. The objects are mostly tablets shaped from irregular pieces of wood, sometimes driftwood, but include a chieftain's staff, a bird-man statuette, and two reimiro ornaments. There are also a few petroglyphs which may include short rongorongo inscriptions. Oral history suggests that only a small elite was ever literate and that the tablets were sacred.

Authentic rongorongo texts are written in alternating directions, a system called reverse boustrophedon. In a third of the tablets, the lines of text are inscribed in shallow fluting carved into the wood. The glyphs themselves are outlines of human, animal, plant, artifact and geometric forms. Many of the human and animal figures, such as glyphs 200 and 280 , have characteristic protuberances on each side of the head, possibly representing eyes.

Individual texts are conventionally known by a single uppercase letter and a name, such as Tablet C, the Mamari Tablet. The somewhat variable names may be descriptive or indicate where the object is kept, as in the Oar, the Snuffbox, the Small Santiago Tablet, and the Santiago Staff.

Null Island is a name for the area around the point where the prime meridian and the equator cross, located in international waters in the Gulf of Guinea (Atlantic Ocean) off the west African coast. In the WGS84 datum, this is at zero degrees latitude and longitude (0°N 0°E), and is the location of a buoy. The name 'Null Island' serves as both a joke based around the suppositional existence of an island there, and also as a name to which coordinates erroneously set to 0,0 are assigned in placenames databases in order to more easily find and fix them. The nearest land is a small islet offshore of Ghana, between Akwidaa and Dixcove at 4°45′30″N 1°58′33″W, 307.8 nmi (354.2 mi; 570.0 km) to the north.