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🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Trains 🔗 Finland 🔗 Trains/Streetcars 🔗 Food and drink/Pubs

SpåraKoff is a HM V type tram converted into a mobile bar in Helsinki, Finland. Known as the pub tram, the vehicle does circular tours of downtown Helsinki picking up passengers for a fee during summer months. It is operated jointly by Sinebrychoff, HOK-Elanto (part of the S Group), and Helsinki City Transport.

The pub tram is immediately distinguishable in the Helsinki traffic by its vivid red colour (as opposed to the normal colours, green and cream, used on the Helsinki tram network of the Helsinki City Transport), and by the destination board that reads "PUB".

It is one of the four HM V trams that remain operational in Helsinki. Two of them are museum trams, and one is used as a non-passenger carrying advertisement tram.

🔗 United States 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Rocketry

The Space Transportation System (STS), also known internally to NASA as the Integrated Program Plan (IPP), was a proposed system of reusable manned space vehicles envisioned in 1969 to support extended operations beyond the Apollo program. (NASA appropriated the name for its Space Shuttle Program, the only component of the proposal to survive Congressional funding approval). The purpose of the system was twofold: to reduce the cost of spaceflight by replacing the current method of launching capsules on expendable rockets with reusable spacecraft; and to support ambitious follow-on programs including permanent orbiting space stations around the Earth and Moon, and a human landing mission to Mars.

In February 1969, President Richard Nixon appointed a Space Task Group headed by Vice President Spiro Agnew to recommend human space projects beyond Apollo. The group responded in September with the outline of the STS, and three different program levels of effort culminating with a human Mars landing by 1983 at the earliest, and by the end of the twentieth century at the latest. The system's major components consisted of:

• A permanent space station module designed for 6 to 12 occupants, in a 270-nautical-mile (500 km) low Earth orbit, and as a permanent lunar orbit station. Modules could be combined in Earth orbit to create a 50 to 100 person permanent station.
• A chemically fueled Earth-to-station shuttle.
• A chemically fueled space tug to move crew and equipment between Earth orbits as high as geosynchronous orbit, which could be adapted as a lunar orbit-to-surface shuttle.
• A nuclear-powered ferry using the NERVA engine, to move crew, spacecraft and supplies between low Earth orbit and lunar orbit, geosynchronous orbit, or to other planets in the solar system.

The tug and ferry vehicles would be of a modular design, allowing them to be clustered and/or staged for large payloads or interplanetary missions. The system would be supported by permanent Earth and lunar orbital propellant depots. The Saturn V might still have been used as a heavy lift launch vehicle for the nuclear ferry and space station modules. A special "Mars Excursion Module" would be the only remaining vehicle necessary for a human Mars landing.

As Apollo accomplished its objective of landing the first men on the Moon, political support for further manned space activities began to wane, which was reflected in unwillingness of the Congress to provide funding for most of these extended activities. Based on this, Nixon rejected all parts of the program except the Space Shuttle, which inherited the STS name. As funded, the Shuttle was greatly scaled back from its planned degree of reusability, and deferred in time. The Shuttle first flew in 1981, and was retired in 2011.

A second part of the system, Space Station Freedom, was approved in the early 1980s and announced in 1984 by president Ronald Reagan. However, this also became politically unviable by 1993, and was replaced with the International Space Station (ISS), with substantial contribution by Russia. The ISS was completed in 2010.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/Actors and Filmmakers 🔗 Biography/Musicians

Trevor Paul Moore (April 4, 1980 – August 6, 2021) was an American comedian, actor, writer, director, producer, and musician. He was known as one of the founding members, alongside Sam Brown and Zach Cregger, of the New York City-based comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know, who had their own sketch comedy series on IFC which ran for five seasons.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Musical Instruments 🔗 Electronic music 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Science and technology

UTAU is a Japanese singing synthesizer application created by Ameya/Ayame. This program is similar to the VOCALOID software, with the difference being it is shareware instead of under a third party licensing.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Chemistry

Terfenol-D, an alloy of the formula Tb_xDy_1−xFe₂ (x ≈ 0.3), is a magnetostrictive material. It was initially developed in the 1970s by the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in United States. The technology for manufacturing the material efficiently was developed in the 1980s at Ames Laboratory under a U.S. Navy-funded program. It is named after terbium, iron (Fe), Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL), and the D comes from dysprosium.

🔗 Languages 🔗 Constructed languages

Ithkuil is an experimental constructed language created by John Quijada. It is designed to express deeper levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly with regard to human categorization. It is a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It tries to minimize the vagueness and semantic ambiguity found in natural human languages. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory, the latter being simplified in an upcoming redesign. The name "Ithkuil" is an anglicized form of Iţkuîl, which in the original form roughly means "hypothetical representation of a language". Quijada states he did not create Ithkuil to be auxiliary or used in everyday conversations. He wanted the language to be used for more elaborate and profound fields where more insightful thoughts are expected, such as philosophy, arts, science and politics.

Meaningful phrases or sentences can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer linguistic units than in natural languages. For example, the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point". Quijada deems his creation as too complex to have developed naturally, seeing it as an exercise in exploring how languages could function. No person, including Quijada himself, is known to be able to speak Ithkuil fluently. It was featured in the Language Creation Conference's 6th Conlang Relay.

Four versions of the language have been publicized: the initial version in 2004, a simplified version called Ilaksh in 2007, the current version in 2011, and as of 2017, various revisions of a new version of the language, named Ithkuil IV. In 2004—and again in 2009 with Ilaksh—Ithkuil was featured in the Russian-language popular science and IT magazine Computerra. In 2008, David Peterson awarded it the Smiley Award. In 2013, Bartłomiej Kamiński codified the language to be able to quickly parse complicated sentences. Julien Tavernier and anonymous others have followed suit. Since July 2015, Quijada has released several Ithkuil songs in a prog rock style as part of the album Kaduatán, which translates to "Wayfarers". Recently, online communities for the language have developed in English, Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese.

🔗 Economics

An Information cascade or informational cascade is a phenomenon described in behavioral economics and network theory in which a number of people make the same decision in a sequential fashion. It is similar to, but distinct from herd behavior.

An information cascade is generally accepted as a two-step process. For a cascade to begin an individual must encounter a scenario with a decision, typically a binary one. Second, outside factors can influence this decision (typically, through the observation of actions and their outcomes of other individuals in similar scenarios).

The two-step process of an informational cascade can be broken down into five basic components:

1. There is a decision to be made – for example; whether to adopt a new technology, wear a new style of clothing, eat in a new restaurant, or support a particular political position

2. A limited action space exists (e.g. an adopt/reject decision)

3. People make the decision sequentially, and each person can observe the choices made by those who acted earlier

4. Each person has some information aside from their own that helps guide their decision

5. A person can't directly observe the outside information that other people know, but he or she can make inferences about this information from what they do

Social perspectives of cascades, which suggest that agents may act irrationally (e.g., against what they think is optimal) when social pressures are great, exist as complements to the concept of information cascades. More often the problem is that the concept of an information cascade is confused with ideas that do not match the two key conditions of the process, such as social proof, information diffusion, and social influence. Indeed, the term information cascade has even been used to refer to such processes.

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Women's History 🔗 United States/U.S. presidential elections 🔗 United States/District of Columbia 🔗 Current events 🔗 Joe Biden 🔗 Women in Red

The inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States took place on January 20, 2021, before noon (EST), marking the commencement of the four-year term of Joe Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice president. The inaugural ceremony took place on the West Front of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. and was the 59th presidential inauguration. Biden took the presidential oath of office, before which Harris took the vice presidential oath of office.

The inauguration took place amidst extraordinary political, public health, economic, and national security crises, including outgoing President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, which incited a storming of the Capitol, Trump's unprecedented second impeachment, and a threat of widespread civil unrest, which stimulated a nationwide law enforcement response. Festivities were sharply curtailed by efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate the potential for violence near the Capitol. The live audience was limited to members of the 117th United States Congress and, for each, one guest of their choosing, resembling a State of the Union address. Public health measures such as mandatory face coverings, testing, temperature checks, and social distancing were used to protect participants in the ceremony.

"America United" and "Our Determined Democracy: Forging a More Perfect Union"—a reference to the Preamble to the United States Constitution—served as the inaugural themes.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Politics 🔗 Media 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia

The firehose of falsehood, or firehosing, is a propaganda technique in which a large number of messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels (such as news and social media) without regard for truth or consistency. Since 2014, when it was successfully used by Russia during its annexation of Crimea, this model has been adopted by other governments and political movements around the world.

🔗 Education

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition is a model of how learners acquire skills through formal instruction and practicing, used in the fields of education and operations research. Brothers Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus proposed the model in 1980 in an 18-page report on their research at the University of California, Berkeley, Operations Research Center for the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The model proposes that a student passes through five distinct stages and was originally determined as: novice, competence, proficiency, expertise, and mastery.