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🔗 Video games

The Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I, later CD-i) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was mostly developed and marketed by Dutch company Philips. It was created as an extension of CDDA and CD-ROM and specified in the Green Book, co-developed by Philips and Sony, to combine audio, text and graphics. The two companies initially expected to impact the education/training, point of sale, and home entertainment industries, but CD-i eventually became best known for its video games.

CD-i media physically have the same dimensions as CD, but with up to 744 MiB of digital data storage, including up to 72 minutes of full motion video. CD-i players were usually standalone boxes that connect to a standard television; some less common setups included integrated CD-i television sets and expansion modules for personal computers. Most players were created by Philips; the format was licensed by Philips and Microware for use by other manufacturers, notably Sony who released professional CD-i players under the "Intelligent Discman" brand. Unlike CD-ROM drives, CD-i players are complete computer systems centered around dedicated Motorola 68000-based microprocessors and its own operating system called CD-RTOS, which is an acronym for "Compact Disc – Real Time Operating System".

Media released on the format included video games and "edutainment" and multimedia reference titles, such as interactive encyclopedias and museum tours – which were popular before public Internet access was widespread – as well as business software. Philips's CD-i system also implemented Internet features, including subscriptions, web browsing, downloading, e-mail, and online play. Philips's aim with its players was to introduce interactive multimedia content for the general public by combining features of a CD player and game console, but at a lower price than a personal computer with a CD-ROM drive.

Authoring kits for the format were released first in 1988, and the first player aimed for home consumers, Philips's CDI 910/205, at the end of 1991, initially priced around US$1,000 (equivalent to $1,877 in 2019), and capable of playing interactive CD-i discs, Audio CDs, CD+G (CD+Graphics), Photo CDs and Video CDs (VCDs), though the latter required an optional "Digital Video Card" to provide MPEG-1 decoding. Initially marketed to consumers as "home entertainment systems", and in later years as a "gaming platform", CD-i did not manage to find enough success in the market, and was mostly abandoned by Philips in 1996. The format continued to be supported for licensees for a few more years after.

🔗 Ships

CS Alert, or HMTS Alert, was a cable-laying ship that had a significant role in World War I. She was launched in 1871 for the Submarine Telegraph Company with the name The Lady Carmichael. In 1890 the ship was acquired by the General Post Office (GPO) as part of the nationalisation of the British telegraph network. At the outbreak of World War I, Alert was immediately dispatched to cut German telegraph cables in the English Channel, seriously damaging Germany's ability to securely communicate with the rest of the world. Alert was taken out of service as a cable ship in 1915 but her cable-handling gear was retained for fitting on her replacement. After the war, she worked as a merchant ship under various names, finally being wrecked at Redcar under the name Norham in 1932.

🔗 Holidays 🔗 Men's Issues

International Men's Day (IMD) is a global awareness day for many issues that men face, including parental alienation, abuse, homelessness, suicide, and violence, celebrated annually on November 19. The objectives of celebrating an International Men's Day are set out in 'All the Six Pillars of International Men's Day'. It is also an occasion to celebrate boys' and men's lives, achievements and contributions, in particular for their contributions to nation, union, society, community, family, marriage, and childcare.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 Technology 🔗 Private Equity 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area

Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator launched in March 2005 and has been used to launch over 2,000 companies including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, and Dropbox. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over $155 billion as of October, 2019.

🔗 United States 🔗 United States/Arizona 🔗 Invention 🔗 Ecology

Biosphere 2 is an American Earth system science research facility located in Oracle, Arizona. Its mission is to serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching, and lifelong learning about Earth, its living systems, and its place in the universe. It is a 3.14-acre (1.27-hectare) structure originally built to be an artificial, materially closed ecological system, or vivarium. It remains the largest closed ecological system ever created.

Constructed between 1987 and 1991, Biosphere 2 was originally meant to demonstrate the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space as a substitute for Earth's biosphere. It was designed to explore the web of interactions within life systems in a structure with different areas based on various biological biomes. In addition to the several biomes and living quarters for people, there was an agricultural area and work space to study the interactions between humans, farming, technology and the rest of nature as a new kind of laboratory for the study of the global ecology. Its mission was a two-year closure experiment with a crew of eight humans ("biospherians"). Long-term it was seen as a precursor to gaining knowledge about the use of closed biospheres in space colonization. As an experimental ecological facility it allowed the study and manipulation of a mini biospheric system without harming Earth's biosphere.

Its seven biome areas were a 1,900-square-meter (20,000 sq ft) rainforest, an 850-square-meter (9,100 sq ft) ocean with a coral reef, a 450-square-meter (4,800 sq ft) mangrove wetlands, a 1,300-square-metre (14,000 sq ft) savannah grassland, a 1,400-square-meter (15,000 sq ft) fog desert, and two anthropogenic biomes: a 2,500-square-meter (27,000 sq ft) agricultural system and a human habitat with living spaces, laboratories and workshops. Below ground was an extensive part of the technical infrastructure. Heating and cooling water circulated through independent piping systems and passive solar input through the glass space frame panels covering most of the facility, and electrical power was supplied into Biosphere 2 from an onsite natural gas energy center.

Biosphere 2 was only used twice for its original intended purposes as a closed-system experiment: once from 1991 to 1993, and the second time from March to September 1994. Both attempts ran into problems including low amounts of food and oxygen, die-offs of many animals and plants included in the experiment (though this was anticipated since the project used a strategy of deliberately "species-packing" anticipating losses as the biomes developed), group dynamic tensions among the resident crew, outside politics, and a power struggle over management and direction of the project. Nevertheless, the closure experiments set world records in closed ecological systems, agricultural production, health improvements with the high nutrient and low caloric diet the crew followed, and insights into the self-organization of complex biomic systems and atmospheric dynamics. The second closure experiment achieved total food sufficiency and did not require injection of oxygen.

In June 1994, during the middle of the second experiment, the managing company, Space Biosphere Ventures, was dissolved, and the facility was left in limbo. Columbia University assumed management of the facility in 1995 and used it to run experiments until 2003. It then appeared to be in danger of being demolished to make way for housing and retail stores, but was taken over for research by the University of Arizona in 2007. The University of Arizona took full ownership of the structure in 2011.

🔗 Video games

MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze, using the built-in MIDI ports of the Atari ST for networking, introduced the concept of deathmatch combat. The game found a wider audience on the Game Boy as Faceball 2000.

The original MIDI Maze team consisted of James Yee as the business manager, Michael Park as the graphic and networking programmer, and George Miller writing the AI and drone logic.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

The Caproni Ca.60 Transaereo, often referred to as the Noviplano (nine-wing) or Capronissimo, was the prototype of a large nine-wing flying boat intended to become a 100-passenger transatlantic airliner. It featured eight engines and three sets of triple wings.

Only one example of this aircraft, designed by Italian aviation pioneer Gianni Caproni, was built by the Caproni company. It was tested on Lake Maggiore in 1921: its brief maiden flight took place on February 12 or March 2. Its second flight was March 4; shortly after takeoff, the aircraft crashed on the water surface and broke up upon impact. The Ca.60 was further damaged when the wreck was towed to shore and, in spite of Caproni's intention to rebuild the aircraft, the project was soon abandoned because of its excessive cost. The few surviving parts are on display at the Gianni Caproni Museum of Aeronautics and at the Volandia aviation museum in Italy.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Energy 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language

Long-time nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the Human Interference Task Force since 1981.

A 1996 report from Sandia National Laboratories recommended that any such message should comprise four levels of increasing complexity:

• Level I: Rudimentary Information: "Something man-made is here"
• Level II: Cautionary Information: "Something man-made is here and it is dangerous"
• Level III: Basic Information: Tells what, why, when, where, who, and how
• Level IV: Complex Information: Highly detailed written records, tables, figures, graphs, maps and diagrams

🔗 United States 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Sociology 🔗 United States/Hispanic and Latino Americans

The Hispanic paradox is an epidemiological finding that Hispanic Americans tend to have health outcomes that "paradoxically" are comparable to, or in some cases better than, those of their U.S. non-Hispanic White counterparts, even though Hispanics have lower average income and education. Low socioeconomic status is almost universally associated with worse population health and higher death rates everywhere in the world. The paradox usually refers in particular to low mortality among Hispanics in the United States relative to non-Hispanic Whites. According to the Center for Disease Control's 2015 Vital Signs report, Hispanics in the United States had a 24% lower risk of mortality, as well as lower risk for nine of the fifteen leading causes of death as compared to Whites.

There are multiple hypotheses which aim to determine the reason for the existence of this paradox. Some attribute the Hispanic paradox to biases created by patterns or selection in migration. One such hypothesis is the Salmon Bias, which suggests that Hispanics tend to return home towards the end of their lives, ultimately rendering an individual "statistically immortal" and thus artificially lowering mortality for Hispanics in the United States. Another hypothesis in this group is that of the Healthy Migrant, which attributes the better health of Hispanics to the assumption that the healthiest and strongest members of a population are most likely to migrate.

Other hypotheses around the Hispanic paradox maintain that the phenomenon is real, and is caused by sociocultural factors which characterize the Hispanic population. Many of these factors can be described under the more broad categories of cultural values, interpersonal context, and community context. Some health researchers attribute the Hispanic paradox to different eating habits, especially the relatively high intake of legumes such as beans and lentils.

🔗 Military history