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🔗 Books 🔗 Urban studies and planning

The High Cost of Free Parking is an urban planning book by UCLA professor Donald Shoup dealing with the costs of free parking on society. It is structured as a criticism of the planning and regulation of parking and recommends that parking be built and allocated according to its fair market value. It incorporates elements of Shoup's Georgist philosophy.

The book was originally published in 2005 by the American Planning Association and the Planners Press. A revised edition was released in 2011 by Routledge.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Physics

Stochastic resonance (SR) is a phenomenon where a signal that is normally too weak to be detected by a sensor, can be boosted by adding white noise to the signal, which contains a wide spectrum of frequencies. The frequencies in the white noise corresponding to the original signal's frequencies will resonate with each other, amplifying the original signal while not amplifying the rest of the white noise (thereby increasing the signal-to-noise ratio which makes the original signal more prominent). Further, the added white noise can be enough to be detectable by the sensor, which can then filter it out to effectively detect the original, previously undetectable signal.

This phenomenon of boosting undetectable signals by resonating with added white noise extends to many other systems, whether electromagnetic, physical or biological, and is an area of research.

🔗 United States 🔗 Organized Labour 🔗 Record Labels 🔗 United States/American music

On August 1, 1942, the American Federation of Musicians, at the instigation of union president James C. Petrillo, began a strike against the major American record companies because of disagreements over royalty payments. Beginning at midnight, July 31, 1942, no union musician could make commercial recordings for any commercial record company. That meant that a union musician was allowed to participate on radio programs and other kinds of musical entertainment, but not in a recording session. The 1942–1944 musicians' strike remains the longest strike in entertainment history.

The strike did not affect musicians performing on live radio shows, in concerts, or, after October 27, 1943, on special recordings made by the record companies for V-Discs for distribution to the armed forces fighting World War II, because V-Discs were not available to the general public. However, the union did frequently threaten to withdraw musicians from the radio networks to punish individual network affiliates who were deemed "unfair" for violating the union's policy on recording network shows for repeat broadcasts.

The strike had a major impact on the American musical scene. At the time, union bands dominated popular music; after the strike, and partly as a result of it, the big bands began to decline and vocalists began to dominate popular music.

🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Chaos theory

In mathematics, the Menger sponge (also known as the Menger cube, Menger universal curve, Sierpinski cube, or Sierpinski sponge) is a fractal curve. It is a three-dimensional generalization of the one-dimensional Cantor set and two-dimensional Sierpinski carpet. It was first described by Karl Menger in 1926, in his studies of the concept of topological dimension.

🔗 Christianity 🔗 Mythology

The gates of hell are various places on the surface of the world that have acquired a legendary reputation for being entrances to the underworld. Often they are found in regions of unusual geological activity, particularly volcanic areas, or sometimes at lakes, caves, or mountains.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Color 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Science

Vantablack is a material developed by Surrey NanoSystems in the United Kingdom and is one of the darkest substances known, absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light (at 663 nm if the light is perpendicular to the material).

The name is a compound of the acronym VANTA (vertically aligned nanotube arrays) and the color black.

🔗 New Zealand

Taumatawhakatangi­hangakoauauotamatea­turipukakapikimaunga­horonukupokaiwhen­uakitanatahu is a hill near Porangahau, south of Waipukurau in southern Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. The height of the hill is 305 metres (1,001 ft). The hill is notable primarily for its unusually long name, which is of Māori origin; it is often shortened to Taumata for brevity. It has gained a measure of fame as it is the longest place name found in any English-speaking country, and possibly the longest place name in the world; according to World Atlas. The name of the hill (with 85 characters) has also been listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest place name. Other versions of the name, including longer ones, are also sometimes used.

🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/History 🔗 Japan/Ainu

The Hokkaido characters (北海道異体文字, hokkaidō itai moji), also known as Aino characters (アイノモジ, aino moji) or Ainu characters (アイヌ文字, ainu moji), are a set of characters discovered around 1886 on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. At the time of their discovery, they were believed to be a genuine script, but this view is not generally supported today.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 United States/Ohio 🔗 Backpacking

Emma Rowena (Caldwell) Gatewood, known as Grandma Gatewood, (October 25, 1887 – June 4, 1973), was an American ultra-light hiking pioneer. After a difficult life as a farm wife, mother of eleven children, and survivor of domestic violence, she became famous as the first solo female thru-hiker of the 2,168-mile (3,489 km) Appalachian Trail (A.T.) in 1955 at the age of 67. She subsequently became the first person (male or female) to hike the A.T. three times, after completing a second thru-hike two years later, followed by a section-hike in 1964. In the meantime, she hiked 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Oregon Trail in 1959. In her later years, she continued to travel and hike, and worked on a section of what would become the Buckeye Trail. The media coverage surrounding her feats was credited for generating interest in maintaining the A.T. and in hiking generally. Among many other honors, she was posthumously inducted into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame in 2012.

Alternative Title: Just because you have some money, that doesn't mean that you have to spend it.

In biology, the hallmarks of an aggressive cancer include limitless multiplication of ordinarily beneficial cells, even when the body signals that further multiplication is no longer needed. The Wikipedia page on the wheat and chessboard problem explains that nothing can keep growing forever. In biology, the unwanted growth usually terminates with the death of the host. Ever-increasing spending can often lead to the same undesirable result in organizations.