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🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/airline

Janet, sometimes called Janet Airlines, is the unofficial name given to a highly classified fleet of passenger aircraft operated for the United States Department of the Air Force as an employee shuttle to transport military and contractor employees. The purpose is to pick up the employees at their home airport, and take them to their place of work. Then, in the afternoon, they take the employees back to their home airports. The airline mainly serves the Nevada National Security Site (most notably Area 51 and the Tonopah Test Range), from a private terminal at Las Vegas's McCarran International Airport.

The airline's aircraft are generally unmarked, but do have a red paint strip along the windows of the aircraft, which gives some sort of hint at Janet being the operator.

Wi-Fi over Coax is a technology for extending and distributing Wi-Fi signals via coaxial cables. As an in-building wireless solution, Wi-Fi over Coax can make use of existing or new cabling with native impedance of 50 ohms shared by a Wi-Fi access point, cabling run, and antenna. Coaxial cables with characteristic impedance of 75 ohms, such as RG-6 cables used for in-building television distribution, can also be used by incorporating impedance converters. As part of a distributed antenna system, Wi-Fi over Coax can connect multiple floors of a home or office via power dividers and zoned antennas either passively or via amplifiers, potentially eliminating the need for multiple access points.

🔗 Electronic music

I am sitting in a room is a sound art piece composed in 1969 and one of composer Alvin Lucier's best known works.

The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Due to the room's particular size and geometry, certain frequencies of the recording are emphasized while others are attenuated. Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonant frequencies of the room itself.

In his book on the origins of minimalism, Edward Strickland wrote that "In its repetition and limited means, I am sitting in a room ranks with the finest achievements of Minimal tape music. Furthermore, in its ambient conversion of speech modules into drone frequencies, it unites the two principal structural components of Minimal music in general."

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 United States/Indiana

John Charles Reynolds (June 1, 1935 – April 28, 2013) was an American computer scientist.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 ArtAndFeminism

'Pataphysics (French: 'pataphysique) is a "philosophy" of science invented by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) intended to be a parody of science. Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the "science of imaginary solutions".

🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Horticulture and Gardening

A ha-ha (French: hâ-hâ or saut de loup) is a recessed landscape design element that creates a vertical barrier while preserving an uninterrupted view of the landscape beyond.

The design includes a turfed incline that slopes downward to a sharply vertical face (typically a masonry retaining wall). Ha-has are used in landscape design to prevent access to a garden, for example by grazing livestock, without obstructing views. In security design, the element is used to deter vehicular access to a site while minimizing visual obstruction.

The name "ha-ha" is thought to have stemmed from the exclamations of surprise by those coming across them, as the walls were intentionally designed so as not to be visible on the plane of the landscape.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, originating in the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s, and building on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. The final official release was in early 2015.

Under Plan 9, UNIX's everything is a file metaphor is extended via a pervasive network-centric filesystem, and graphical user interface is assumed as a basis for almost all functionality, though it retains a heavily text-centric ideology.

The name Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a reference to the Ed Wood 1959 cult science fiction Z-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space. The name of the project's mascot is "Glenda, the Plan 9 Bunny". The system continues to be used and developed by operating system researchers and hobbyists.

Flâneur (French: [flɑnœʁ]) is a French term popularized in the nineteenth-century for a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". The word has some nuanced additional meanings (including as a loanword into English). Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier.

The flâneur was first a literary type from 19th-century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. However, the flâneur's origins are to be found in journalism of the Restoration, and the politics of post-revolutionary public space. Drawing on the work of Charles Baudelaire who described the flâneur in his poetry and 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life", Walter Benjamin promoted 20th-century scholarly interest in the flâneur as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern (even modernist) experience. Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become an important symbol for scholars, artists, and writers. The classic French female counterpart is the passante, dating to the works of Marcel Proust, though a 21st-century academic coinage is flâneuse, and some English-language writers simply apply the masculine flâneur also to women. The term has acquired an additional architecture and urban planning sense, referring to passers-by who experience incidental or intentional psychological effects from the design of a structure.

🔗 Geology

Ruin marble is a kind of limestone or marble that contains light and dark patterns. It can give the impression of a ruined city scape.

It originates mostly from the city of Florence in the commune of Tuscany, in Central Italy. Its color pattern consists mainly of gray, brown and reddish, sometimes also blue and black, giving it the impression of a ruined landscape painting. The patterns (similar to Liesegang rings) develop during diagenesis due to periodic rhythmic precipitation of iron and manganese hydroxides from oxidizing aqueous fluids restricted laterally by calcite and clay filled joints.