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🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Radio 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Engineering

A plasma antenna is a type of radio antenna currently in development in which plasma is used instead of the metal elements of a traditional antenna. A plasma antenna can be used for both transmission and reception. Although plasma antennas have only become practical in recent years, the idea is not new; a patent for an antenna using the concept was granted to J. Hettinger in 1919.

Early practical examples of the technology used discharge tubes to contain the plasma and are referred to as ionized gas plasma antennas. Ionized gas plasma antennas can be turned on and off and are good for stealth and resistance to electronic warfare and cyber attacks. Ionized gas plasma antennas can be nested such that the higher frequency plasma antennas are placed inside lower frequency plasma antennas. Higher frequency ionized gas plasma antenna arrays can transmit and receive through lower frequency ionized gas plasma antenna arrays. This means that the ionized gas plasma antennas can be co-located and ionized gas plasma antenna arrays can be stacked. Ionized gas plasma antennas can eliminate or reduce co-site interference. Smart ionized gas plasma antennas use plasma physics to shape and steer the antenna beams without the need of phased arrays. Satellite signals can be steered or focused in the reflective or refractive modes using banks of plasma tubes making unique ionized gas satellite plasma antennas. The thermal noise of ionized gas plasma antennas is less than in the corresponding metal antennas at the higher frequencies. Solid state plasma antennas (also known as plasma silicon antennas) with steerable directional functionality that can be manufactured using standard silicon chip fabrication techniques are now also in development. Plasma silicon antennas are candidates for use in WiGig (the planned enhancement to Wi-Fi), and have other potential applications, for example in reducing the cost of vehicle-mounted radar collision avoidance systems.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Transhumanism

Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Greater Manchester

Frederick Travis Dibnah, (29 April 1938 – 6 November 2004) was an English steeplejack and television personality, with a keen interest in mechanical engineering, who described himself as a "backstreet mechanic".

When Dibnah was born, Britain relied heavily upon coal to fuel its industry. As a child, he was fascinated by the steam engines which powered the many textile mills in Bolton, but he paid particular attention to chimneys and the men who worked on them. He began his working life as a joiner, before becoming a steeplejack. From age 22, he served for two years in the Army Catering Corps of the British Army, undertaking his National Service. Once demobilised, he returned to steeplejacking but met with limited success until he was asked to repair Bolton's parish church. The resulting publicity provided a boost to his business, ensuring he was almost never out of work.

In 1978, while making repairs to Bolton Town Hall, Dibnah was filmed by a regional BBC news crew. The BBC then commissioned a documentary, which followed the rough-hewn steeplejack as he worked on chimneys, interacted with his family and talked about his favourite hobby—steam. His Lanky manner and gentle, self-taught philosophical outlook proved popular with viewers and he featured in a number of television programmes. Toward the end of his life, the decline of Britain's industry was mirrored by a decline in his steeplejacking business and Dibnah increasingly came to rely on public appearances and after-dinner speaking to support his income. In 1998, he presented a programme on Britain's industrial history and went on to present a number of series, largely concerned with the Industrial Revolution and its mechanical and architectural legacy.

He died from bladder cancer in November 2004, aged 66.

🔗 United States 🔗 China 🔗 Sociology

Satellite babies (also called Satellite Children) refer to immigrants’ children who are temporarily sent back to their home country by their parents to be reared by extended family. Typically, the satellite babies are born in the host country and sent back as infants, returning to their parents in time to start schooling or when their parents have established financial stability. Research and media articles on satellite babies have predominantly focused on the topic from a Chinese-American context. Satellite babies have become more prevalent in recent decades due to globalisation, prompting researchers and social workers to raise concerns about the psychological impacts of repeated attachment disruptions and acculturation associated with satellite babies.

🔗 Computing

Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE or PVE) is an open-source software server for virtualization management. It is a hosted hypervisor that can run operating systems including Linux and Windows on x64 hardware. It is a Debian-based Linux distribution with a modified Ubuntu LTS kernel and allows deployment and management of virtual machines and containers. Proxmox VE includes a web console and command-line tools, and provides a REST API for third-party tools. Two types of virtualization are supported: container-based with LXC (starting from version 4.0 replacing OpenVZ used in version up to 3.4, included), and full virtualization with KVM. It includes a web-based management interface.

Proxmox VE is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

🔗 Serbia 🔗 Yugoslavia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Balkan military history 🔗 Croatia 🔗 Military history/European military history

Jasenovac was a concentration and extermination camp established in Slavonia by the authorities of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. The concentration camp, one of the ten largest in Europe, was established and operated by the governing Ustaše regime, which was the only quisling regime in occupied Europe to operate extermination camps solely on their own for Jews and other ethnic groups.

It was established in August 1941 in marshland at the confluence of the Sava and Una rivers near the village of Jasenovac, and was dismantled in April 1945. It was "notorious for its barbaric practices and the large number of victims". Unlike German Nazi-run camps, Jasenovac "specialized in one-on-one violence of a particularly brutal kind" and prisoners were primarily murdered manually with the use of blunt objects such as knives, hammers and axes.

In Jasenovac the majority of victims were ethnic Serbs (as part of the Genocide of the Serbs); others were Jews (The Holocaust), Roma (The Porajmos), and some political dissidents. Jasenovac was a complex of five subcamps spread over 210 km² (81 sq mi) on both banks of the Sava and Una rivers. The largest camp was the "Brickworks" camp at Jasenovac, about 100 km (62 mi) southeast of Zagreb. The overall complex included the Stara Gradiška sub-camp, the killing grounds across the Sava river at Gradina Donja, five work farms, and the Uštica Roma camp.

During and since World War II, there has been much debate and controversy regarding the number of victims killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp complex during its more than three-and-a-half years of operation. After the war, a figure of 700,000 reflected the "conventional wisdom". Since 2002, the Museum of Victims of Genocide in Belgrade has no longer defended the figure of 700,000 to 1 million victims of the camp. In 2005, Dragan Cvetković, a researcher from the Museum, and a Croatian co-author published a book on wartime losses in the NDH which gave a figure of approximately 100,000 victims of Jasenovac. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. presently estimates that the Ustaše regime murdered between 77,000 and 99,000 people in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945.

🔗 France 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History

The Bal des Ardents (Ball of the Burning Men) or Bal des Sauvages (Ball of the Wild Men) was a masquerade ball held on 28 January 1393 in Paris at which Charles VI of France performed in a dance with five members of the French nobility. Four of the dancers were killed in a fire caused by a torch brought in by a spectator, Charles's brother Louis I, Duke of Orléans. Charles and another of the dancers survived. The ball was one of a number of events intended to entertain the young king, who the previous summer had suffered an attack of insanity. The event undermined confidence in Charles's capacity to rule; Parisians considered it proof of courtly decadence and threatened to rebel against the more powerful members of the nobility. The public's outrage forced the king and his brother Orléans, whom a contemporary chronicler accused of attempted regicide and sorcery, to offer penance for the event.

Charles's wife, Isabeau of Bavaria, held the ball to honor the remarriage of a lady-in-waiting. Scholars believe the dance performed at the ball had elements of traditional charivari, with the dancers disguised as wild men, mythical beings often associated with demonology, that were commonly represented in medieval Europe and documented in revels of Tudor England. The event was chronicled by contemporary writers such as the Monk of St Denis and Jean Froissart, and illustrated in a number of 15th-century illuminated manuscripts by painters such as the Master of Anthony of Burgundy. The incident later provided inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe's short story Hop-Frog.

🔗 Highways 🔗 Road transport 🔗 Transport in Scotland 🔗 Highways/United Kingdom Roads 🔗 UK geography

The Great Britain road numbering scheme is a numbering scheme used to classify and identify all roads in Great Britain. Each road is given a single letter, which represents the road's category, and a subsequent number, of 1 to 4 digits. Introduced to arrange funding allocations, the numbers soon became used on maps and as a method of navigation. Two sub-schemes exist: one for motorways, and another for non-motorway roads. While some major roads form part of the International E-road network, no E-routes are signposted in Great Britain, or the rest of the UK.

The scheme applies only to Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales); a similar system is used in Northern Ireland, as well as outside the UK in the Isle of Man, Jersey and British overseas territories. These other numbering schemes use similar conventions.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Worse is better, also called New Jersey style, was conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in an essay "Worse is better" to describe the dynamics of software acceptance, but it has broader application. It is the subjective idea that quality does not necessarily increase with functionality—that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability. Software that is limited, but simple to use, may be more appealing to the user and market than the reverse.

As to the oxymoronic title, Gabriel calls it a caricature, declaring the style bad in comparison with "The Right Thing". However he also states that "it has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing" development style and is superior to the "MIT Approach" with which he contrasted it in the original essay.

🔗 China 🔗 Economics

Made in China 2025 (Chinese: 中国制造2025; pinyin: Zhōngguózhìzào èrlíng'èrwǔ) (MIC25, MIC 2025, or MIC2025) is a national strategic plan and industrial policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to further develop the manufacturing sector of China, issued by CCP general secretary Xi Jinping and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's cabinet in May 2015. As part of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Five-year Plans, China aims to move away from being the "world's factory"—a producer of cheap low-tech goods facilitated by lower labour costs and supply chain advantages. The industrial policy aims to upgrade the manufacturing capabilities of Chinese industries, growing from labor-intensive workshops into a more technology-intensive powerhouse.

Made in China 2025's goals include increasing the Chinese-domestic content of core materials to 40 percent by 2020 and 70 percent by 2025. To help achieve independence from foreign suppliers, the initiative encourages increased production in high-tech products and services, with its semiconductor industry central to the industrial plan, partly because advances in chip technology may "lead to breakthroughs in other areas of technology, handing the advantage to whoever has the best chips – an advantage that currently is out of Beijing’s reach."

Since 2018, following a backlash from the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere, the phrase "MIC 2025" has been de-emphasized in government and other official communications, while the program remains in place. The Chinese government continues to invest heavily in identified technologies. In 2018, the Chinese government committed to investing roughly US$300 billion into achieving the industrial plan. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, at least an additional $1.4 trillion was also invested into MIC 2025 initiatives. Given China's current middle income country status, the practicality of its disproportionate expenditure on pioneering new technologies has been called into question.