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🔗 Languages 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America

The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy as he could not previously read any script. He first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed into a syllabary. In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme; the 85 (originally 86) characters provide a suitable method to write Cherokee. Although some symbols resemble Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters, they are not used to represent the same sounds.

🔗 Europe/ESA

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Computing 🔗 Australia 🔗 New Zealand 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Computing/Computer Security 🔗 Computing/Networking

XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst.

In July 2013, Edward Snowden publicly revealed the program's purpose and use by the NSA in The Sydney Morning Herald and O Globo newspapers. The code name was already public knowledge because it was mentioned in earlier articles, and, like many other code names, it appears in job postings and online résumés of employees.

On July 3, 2014, German public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, a member of ARD, published excerpts of XKeyscore's source code. A team of experts analyzed the source code.

🔗 Books 🔗 Maps

An Atlas of Fantasy, compiled by Jeremiah Benjamin Post, was originally published in 1973 by Mirage Press and revised for a 1979 edition by Ballantine Books. The 1979 edition dropped twelve maps from the first edition and added fourteen new ones. It also included an introduction by Lester del Rey.

To remain of manageable size, the Atlas excludes advertising maps, cartograms, most disproportionate maps, and alternate history ("might have been") maps, focusing instead on imaginary lands derived from literary sources. It purposefully omits "one-to-one" maps such as Thomas Hardy's Wessex (which merely renames places in southwest England), but includes Barsetshire and Yoknapatawpha County, which are evidently considered to be sufficiently fictionalized. The emphasis is on science fiction and fantasy, though Post suggests there exist enough mystery fiction maps to someday create The Detectives' Handy Pocket Atlas. Other maps were omitted due to permission costs or reproduction quality.

The maps are reproduced from many sources, and an Index of Artists is included.

🔗 Arab world

The elephant clock was a medieval invention by Al-Jazari (1136–1206), an Arab engineer and inventor of various clocks. The device consisted of a weight powered water clock in the form of an Asian elephant. This horological technology was derived from earlier Indian clocks and Chinese clocks.

In China clock escapement mechanism was invented by the polymath and Buddhist monk Yi Xing as well as the hydraulic powered waterwheel and water clock in the mechanically-driven and rotated equatorial armillary sphere of the polymaths Zhang Heng and Ma Jun. The Elephant clock had some design differences compared to earlier Indian and Chinese clocks and the various elements of the clock are in the housing (howdah) on top of the elephant.

Al-Jazari upon finishing the development and construction of his Elephant clock wrote: "The elephant represents the Indian and African cultures, the two dragons represents Chinese culture, the phoenix represents Persian culture, the water work represents Greek culture, and the turban represents Islamic culture" signifying the multicultural mentality of the intellectual Al-Jazari.

In addition to its mechanical innovations, the clock itself is seen as an early example of multiculturalism represented in technology.

🔗 Color 🔗 Visual arts

Non-photo blue (or non-repro blue) is a common tool used in the graphic design and print industry.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Biography/politics and government 🔗 Anti-war 🔗 Lutheranism 🔗 Pritzker Military Library 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Germany/Munich

Sophia Magdalena Scholl (9 May 1921 – 22 February 1943) was a German student and anti-Nazi political activist, active within the White Rose non-violent resistance group in Nazi Germany.

She was convicted of high treason after having been found distributing anti-war leaflets at the University of Munich (LMU) with her brother, Hans. For her actions, she was executed by guillotine. Since the 1970s, Scholl has been extensively commemorated for her anti-Nazi resistance work.

🔗 Television 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Amateur radio

Slow-scan television (SSTV) is a picture transmission method, used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color.

A literal term for SSTV is narrowband television. Analog broadcast television requires at least 6 MHz wide channels, because it transmits 25 or 30 picture frames per second (see ITU analog broadcast standards), but SSTV usually only takes up to a maximum of 3 kHz of bandwidth. It is a much slower method of still picture transmission, usually taking from about eight seconds to a couple of minutes, depending on the mode used, to transmit one image frame.

Since SSTV systems operate on voice frequencies, amateurs use it on shortwave (also known as HF by amateur radio operators), VHF and UHF radio.

🔗 International relations 🔗 France 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 Basque 🔗 Islands 🔗 Spain

Pheasant Island (French: Île des Faisans/Île de la Conférence, Spanish: Isla de los Faisanes, Basque: Konpantzia) is an uninhabited river island in the Bidasoa river, located between France and Spain, whose administration alternates between both nations.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Geology

A fossil natural nuclear fission reactor is a uranium deposit where self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions have occurred. This can be examined by analysis of isotope ratios. The conditions under which a natural nuclear reactor could exist had been predicted in 1956 by Paul Kazuo Kuroda. The phenomenon was discovered in 1972 in Oklo, Gabon by French physicist Francis Perrin under conditions very similar to what was predicted.

Oklo is the only known location for this in the world and consists of 16 sites at which self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions are thought to have taken place approximately 1.7 billion years ago, and ran for a few hundred thousand years, averaging probably less than 100 kW of thermal power during that time.