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🔗 Scotland 🔗 Theatre 🔗 Shakespeare

The Scottish play and the Bard's play are euphemisms for William Shakespeare's Macbeth. The first is a reference to the play's Scottish setting, the second a reference to Shakespeare’s popular nickname. According to a theatrical superstition, called the Scottish curse, speaking the name Macbeth inside a theatre, other than as called for in the script while rehearsing or performing, will cause disaster. A variation of the superstition also forbids quoting lines from the play within a theatre except as part of an actual rehearsal or performance of the play.

Because of this superstition, the lead character is often referred to as the Scottish King or Scottish Lord. Lady Macbeth is often referred to as the Scottish Lady. Sometimes Mackers or MacB is used to avoid saying the name.

🔗 Computing

PL/0 is a programming language, intended as an educational programming language, that is similar to but much simpler than Pascal, a general-purpose programming language. It serves as an example of how to construct a compiler. It was originally introduced in the book, Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, by Niklaus Wirth in 1976. It features quite limited language constructs: there are no real numbers, very few basic arithmetic operations and no control-flow constructs other than "if" and "while" blocks. While these limitations make writing real applications in this language impractical, it helps the compiler remain compact and simple.

🔗 Palaeontology 🔗 Geology 🔗 Extinction

The Permian–Triassic extinction event, also known as the P–Tr extinction, the P–T extinction, the End-Permian Extinction, and colloquially as the Great Dying, formed the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geologic periods, as well as between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, approximately 252 million years ago. It is the Earth's most severe known extinction event, with up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species becoming extinct. It was the largest known mass extinction of insects. Some 57% of all biological families and 83% of all genera became extinct.

There is evidence for one to three distinct pulses, or phases, of extinction. Potential causes for those pulses include one or more large meteor impact events, massive volcanic eruptions (such as the Siberian Traps), and climate change brought on by large releases of underwater methane or methane-producing microbes.

The speed of the recovery from the extinction is disputed. Some scientists estimate that it took 10 million years (until the Middle Triassic), due both to the severity of the extinction and because grim conditions returned periodically for another 5 million years. However, studies in Bear Lake County, near Paris, Idaho, showed a relatively quick rebound in a localized Early Triassic marine ecosystem, taking around 2 million years to recover, suggesting that the impact of the extinction may have been felt less severely in some areas than others.

🔗 United States 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Politics/Gun politics

"'No Way to Prevent This', Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" is the title of a series of articles perennially published by the American news satire organization The Onion satirizing the frequency of mass shootings in the United States and the lack of action taken in the wake of such incidents.

Each article is about 200 words long, detailing the location of the shooting and the number of victims, but otherwise remaining essentially the same. A fictitious resident—usually of a state in which the shooting did not take place—is quoted as saying that the shooting was "a terrible tragedy", but "there's nothing anyone can do to stop them." The article ends by saying that the United States is the "only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years," and that Americans view themselves and the situation as "helpless".

🔗 Apple Inc./Macintosh 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Human–Computer Interaction 🔗 Industrial design 🔗 Apple Inc./iOS

A skeuomorph () is a derivative object that retains nonfunctional ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were inherent to the original. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Neuroscience

The Weber–Fechner law refers to two related hypotheses in the field of psychophysics, known as Weber's law and Fechner's law. Both laws relate to human perception, more specifically the relation between the actual change in a physical stimulus and the perceived change. This includes stimuli to all senses: vision, hearing, taste, touch, and smell.

🔗 Video games

Tibia is a 1997 massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed and published by CipSoft. It is one of the earliest and longest-running MMORPGs, with a popularity that peaked in 2007. It is a free game to download and play, though players may pay to upgrade to a premium account, granting substantial in-game benefits. Tibia is a two-dimensional tile-based game set in a fantasy world with pixel art graphics and a top-down perspective.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

Chernoff faces, invented by Herman Chernoff in 1973, display multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The individual parts, such as eyes, ears, mouth and nose represent values of the variables by their shape, size, placement and orientation. The idea behind using faces is that humans easily recognize faces and notice small changes without difficulty. Chernoff faces handle each variable differently. Because the features of the faces vary in perceived importance, the way in which variables are mapped to the features should be carefully chosen (e.g. eye size and eyebrow-slant have been found to carry significant weight).

🔗 Ships

The Voith Schneider propeller (VSP), also known as a cycloidal drive is a specialized marine propulsion system (MPS). It is highly maneuverable, being able to change the direction of its thrust almost instantaneously. It is widely used on tugs and ferries.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Insects 🔗 Australia/Australian biota

Pantala flavescens, the globe skimmer, globe wanderer or wandering glider, is a wide-ranging dragonfly of the family Libellulidae. This species and Pantala hymenaea, the "spot-winged glider", are the only members of the genus Pantala. It was first described by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1798. It is considered to be the most widespread dragonfly on the planet with good population on every continent except Antarctica although rare in Europe. Globe skimmers make an annual multigenerational journey of some 18,000 km (about 11,200 miles); to complete the migration, individual globe skimmers fly more than 6,000 km (3,730 miles)—one of the farthest known migrations of all insect species.