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🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Food and drink/Foodservice

An automat is a fast food restaurant where simple foods and drink are served by vending machines. The world's first automat was named Quisisana, which opened in Berlin, Germany in 1895.

🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Computing

The term bozo bit has been used in two contexts. Initially a weak copy protection system in the 1980s Apple classic Mac OS, the term "flipping the bozo bit" was later reused to describe a decision to ignore a person's input. It is a whimsical term, possibly derived from the classic children's comedy character, Bozo the Clown.

🔗 Professional sound production

The loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity, and according to many critics, listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7" singles. The maximum peak level of analog recordings such as these is limited by varying specifications of electronic equipment along the chain from source to listener, including vinyl and Compact Cassette players. The issue garnered renewed attention starting in the 1990s with the introduction of digital signal processing capable of producing further loudness increases.

With the advent of the Compact Disc (CD), music is encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. Once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, loudness can be increased still further through signal processing techniques such as dynamic range compression and equalization. Engineers can apply an increasingly high ratio of compression to a recording until it more frequently peaks at the maximum amplitude. In extreme cases, efforts to increase loudness can result in clipping and other audible distortion. Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war."

🔗 Spaceflight

Mercury-Redstone 1 (MR-1) was the first Mercury-Redstone unmanned flight test in Project Mercury and the first attempt to launch a Mercury spacecraft with the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle. Intended to be an unmanned sub-orbital spaceflight, it was launched on November 21, 1960 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The launch failed in a peculiar fashion which has been referred to as the "four-inch flight".

🔗 Video games 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Board and table games

The fog of war (German: Nebel des Krieges) is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign. Military forces try to reduce the fog of war through military intelligence and friendly force tracking systems. The term has become commonly used to define uncertainty mechanics in wargames.

🔗 Occupational Safety and Health

ISO 7010 is an International Organization for Standardization technical standard for graphical hazard symbols on hazard and safety signs, including those indicating emergency exits. It uses colours and principles set out in ISO 3864 for these symbols, and is intended to provide "safety information that relies as little as possible on the use of words to achieve understanding." It is distinct from the Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals specified by the United Nations to standardise hazardous material classification and labelling.

As of August 2019, the latest version is ISO 7010:2019. This revision incorporates all previous corrigenda, as well as incorporates water safety signs and beach safety flags previously specified in (the now-withdrawn) ISO 20712.

🔗 Trains 🔗 Trains/Monorail

The Wuppertaler Schwebebahn (Wuppertal Suspension Railway) is a suspension railway in Wuppertal, Germany.

Its full name is Anlage einer elektrischen Hochbahn (Schwebebahn), System Eugen Langen. ("Electric Elevated Railway (Suspension Railway) Installation, Eugen Langen System") It is the oldest electric elevated railway with hanging cars in the world and is a unique system.

Designed by Eugen Langen to sell to the city of Berlin, the installation with elevated stations was built in Barmen, Elberfeld and Vohwinkel between 1897 and 1903; the first track opened in 1901. The Schwebebahn is still in use today as a normal means of local public transport, moving 25 million passengers annually (2008).

The Schwebebahn runs along a route of 13.3 kilometres (8.3 mi), at a height of about 12 metres (39 ft) above the River Wupper between Oberbarmen and Sonnborner Straße (10 kilometres or 6.2 miles) and about 8 metres (26 ft) above the valley road between Sonnborner Straße and Vohwinkel (3.3 kilometres or 2.1 miles). At one point the railway crosses the A46 motorway. The entire trip takes about 30 minutes. The Schwebebahn operates within the VRR transport association and accepts tickets issued by the VRR companies.

Due to an accident in November 2018, the Schwebebahn was closed down for nearly nine months. It re-opened on 1 August 2019.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology

In social psychology, fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual's observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior. This effect has been described as "the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are".

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Books 🔗 India 🔗 Pakistan 🔗 India/Indian history workgroup

The Bakhshali manuscript is an ancient Indian mathematical text written on birch bark that was found in 1881 in the village of Bakhshali, Mardan (near Peshawar in present-day Pakistan, historical Gandhara). It is perhaps "the oldest extant manuscript in Indian mathematics". For some portions a carbon-date was proposed of AD 224–383 while for other portions a carbon-date as late as AD 885–993 in a recent study, but the dating has been criticised by specialists on methodological grounds (Plofker et al. 2017 and Houben 2018 §3). The manuscript contains the earliest known Indian use of a zero symbol. It is written in a form of literary Sanskrit influenced by contemporary dialects.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Science

Xenobots, named after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), are synthetic organisms that are automatically designed by computers to perform some desired function and built by combining together different biological tissues.

Xenobots are less than a 1 millimeter (0.039 inches) wide and composed of just two things: skin cells and heart muscle cells, both of which are derived from stem cells harvested from early (blastula stage) frog embryos. The skin cells provide rigid support and the heart cells act as small motors, contracting and expanding in volume to propel the xenobot forward. The shape of a xenobot's body, and its distribution of skin and heart cells, are automatically designed in simulation to perform a specific task, using a process of trial and error (an evolutionary algorithm). Xenobots have been designed to walk, swim, push pellets, carry payloads, and work together in a swarm to aggregate debris scattered along the surface of their dish into neat piles. They can survive for weeks without food and heal themselves after lacerations.