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🔗 Companies 🔗 France 🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Business and economy 🔗 Japan/Car

The Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance, originally known as the Renault–Nissan Alliance, is a French-Japanese strategic alliance between the automobile manufacturers Renault (based in Boulogne-Billancourt, France), Nissan (based in Yokohama, Japan) and Mitsubishi Motors (based in Tokyo, Japan), which together sell more than 1 in 9 vehicles worldwide. Renault and Nissan are strategic partners since 1999 and have nearly 450,000 employees and control eight major brands: Renault, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Infiniti, Renault Korea, Dacia, Alpine, and Venucia. The car group sold 10.6 million vehicles worldwide in 2017, making it the leading light vehicle manufacturing group in the world. The Alliance adopted its current name in September 2017, one year after Nissan acquired a controlling interest in Mitsubishi and subsequently made Mitsubishi an equal partner in the Alliance.

As of December 2021, the Alliance is one of the world's leading electric vehicle manufacturing groups, with global sales of over 1 million light-duty electric vehicles since 2009. The top selling vehicles of its EV line-up are the Nissan Leaf and the Renault Zoe all-electric cars.

The strategic partnership between Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi is not a merger or an acquisition. The three companies are joined through a cross-sharing agreement. The structure was unique in the auto industry during the 1990s consolidation trend and later served as a model for General Motors and the PSA Group, and Mitsubishi, as well as the Volkswagen Group and Suzuki, though the latter combination failed. The Alliance itself has broadened its scope substantially, forming additional partnerships with automakers including Germany's Daimler and China's Dongfeng.

Following the November 2018 arrest and imprisonment of Alliance chairman and CEO Carlos Ghosn, accompanied by his dismissal from the alliance and its components, press analysts have questioned both the stability of the Alliance's shareholding agreement and its long-term existence. These analysts also note that, because the companies' recent business strategies are interdependent, attempts to restructure the Alliance could be counter-productive for all of the members.

In January 2023, Renault and Nissan moved to restructure their alliance in order to recover from Ghosn's arrest and manage through a post-Covid economy. The primary objective was to give both companies more autonomy.

🔗 Animation

"Shave and a Haircut" and the associated response "two bits" is a seven-note musical call-and-response couplet, riff or fanfare popularly used at the end of a musical performance, usually for comedic effect. It is used melodically or rhythmically, for example as a door knocker.

"Two bits" is a term in the United States and Canada for 25 cents, equivalent to a U.S. quarter. "Four bits" and "Six bits" are also occasionally used, for example in the cheer "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar." The final words may also be "get lost", "drop dead" (in Australia), or some other facetious expression. In the UK, it was often said as "five bob" (slang for five shillings), although words are now rarely used to accompany the rhythm or the tune.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Chicago 🔗 United States/Massachusetts - Cape Cod and the Islands 🔗 United States/Indiana - Indianapolis

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer. In a career spanning over 50 years, Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction, with further collections being published after his death. He is most famous for his darkly satirical, best-selling novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but dropped out in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden and survived the Allied bombing of the city by taking refuge in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He later adopted his sister's three sons, after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.

Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952. The novel was reviewed positively but was not commercially successful. In the nearly 20 years that followed, Vonnegut published several novels that were only marginally successful, such as Cat's Cradle (1963) and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1964). Vonnegut's breakthrough was his commercially and critically successful sixth novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The book's anti-war sentiment resonated with its readers amidst the ongoing Vietnam War and its reviews were generally positive. After its release, Slaughterhouse-Five went to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list, thrusting Vonnegut into fame. He was invited to give speeches, lectures and commencement addresses around the country and received many awards and honors.

Later in his career, Vonnegut published several autobiographical essays and short-story collections, including Fates Worse Than Death (1991), and A Man Without a Country (2005). After his death, he was hailed as a morbidly comical commentator on the society in which he lived and as one of the most important contemporary writers. Vonnegut's son Mark published a compilation of his father's unpublished compositions, titled Armageddon in Retrospect. In 2017, Seven Stories Press published Complete Stories, a collection of Vonnegut's short fiction including five previously unpublished stories. Complete Stories was collected and introduced by Vonnegut friends and scholars Jerome Klinkowitz and Dan Wakefield. Numerous scholarly works have examined Vonnegut's writing and humor.

🔗 Poetry

"The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, characterized by biographer Sir David Gilmour as one of several "ferocious post-war eruptions" of Kipling's souring sentiment concerning the state of Anglo-European society. It was first published in the Sunday Pictorial of London on 26 October 1919; in America, it was published as "The Gods of the Copybook Maxims" in Harper's Magazine in January 1920.

In the poem, Kipling's narrator counterposes the "Gods" of the title, who embody eternal truths, against "the Gods of the Market-Place", who represent an optimistic self-deception into which it supposes society has fallen in the early 20th century.

The "copybook headings" to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, often drawn from sermons and scripture extolling virtue and wisdom, that were printed at the top of the pages of copybooks, special notebooks used by 19th-century British schoolchildren. The students had to copy the maxims repeatedly, by hand, down the page. The exercise was thought to serve simultaneously as a form of moral education and penmanship practice.

🔗 Mathematics

Von Neumann's elephant is a problem in recreational mathematics, consisting of constructing a planar curve in the shape of an elephant from only four fixed parameters. It originated from a discussion between physicists John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi.

🔗 Robotics 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/History 🔗 Japan/Science and technology

Gakutensoku (學天則, Japanese for "learning from the laws of nature") was the first robot to be built in East Asia and was created in Osaka in the late 1920s. The robot was designed and manufactured by biologist Makoto Nishimura.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Songs 🔗 Anti-war

"99 Luftballons" (German: Neunundneunzig Luftballons, "99 balloons") is a song by the German band Nena from their 1983 self-titled album. An English-language version titled "99 Red Balloons", with lyrics by Kevin McAlea, was also released on the album 99 Luftballons in 1984 after widespread success of the original in Europe and Japan. The English version is not a direct translation of the German original and contains lyrics but with the same meaning. In the US, the English-language version did not chart, while the German-language recording became Nena's only US hit.

🔗 United States 🔗 African diaspora 🔗 Holidays 🔗 United States/Texas 🔗 United States/U.S. history 🔗 Black Lives Matter 🔗 Houston

Juneteenth is a federal holiday in the United States. It is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States. The holiday's name, first used in the 1890s, is a portmanteau of the words "June" and "nineteenth", referring to June 19, 1865, the day when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War. In the Civil War period, slavery came to an end in various areas of the United States at different times. Many enslaved Southerners escaped, demanded wages, stopped work, or took up arms against the Confederacy of slave states. In January 1865, Congress finally proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution for the national abolition of slavery. By June 1865, almost all enslaved persons had been freed by the victorious Union Army or by state abolition laws. When the national abolition amendment was ratified in December, the remaining enslaved people in Delaware and in Kentucky were freed.

Early Juneteenth celebrations date back to 1866, at first involving church-centered community gatherings in Texas. They spread across the South among newly freed African-Americans and their descendants and became more commercialized in the 1920s and 1930s, often centering on a food festival. Participants in the Great Migration brought these celebrations to the rest of the country. During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, these celebrations were eclipsed by the nonviolent determination to achieve civil rights, but grew in popularity again in the 1970s with a focus on African-American freedom and African-American arts. Beginning with Texas by proclamation in 1938, and by legislation in 1979, every U.S. state and the District of Columbia has formally recognized the holiday in some way.

Juneteenth is also celebrated by the Mascogos, descendants of Black Seminoles who escaped from slavery in 1852 and settled in Coahuila, Mexico.

The day was recognized as a federal holiday in 2021, when the 117th U.S. Congress enacted and President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law. Juneteenth became the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was adopted in 1983.

Mass amateurization refers to the capabilities that new forms of media have given to non-professionals and the ways in which those non-professionals have applied those capabilities to solve problems (e.g. create and distribute content) that compete with the solutions offered by larger, professional institutions. Mass amateurization is most often associated with Web 2.0 technologies. These technologies include the rise of blogs and citizen journalism, photo and video-sharing services such as Flickr and YouTube, user-generated wikis like Wikipedia, and distributed accommodation services such as Airbnb. While the social web is not the only technology responsible for the rise of mass amateurization, Clay Shirky claims Web 2.0 has allowed amateurs to undertake increasingly complex tasks resulting in accomplishments that would seem daunting within the traditional institutional model.

In addition to whole websites and applications, Web 2.0 has also birthed a variety of digital tools that facilitate organization and problem solving on a large scale. These tools include tags, trackbacks, and hashtags. These new forms of media became widely available during the first decade of the 21st century due in part to the fall of transactional costs of creating and distributing media. Mass amateurization is a social, cumulative and collaborative activity, wherein ideas will flow back up the pipeline from consumers and they will share them among themselves.

There is no institutional hierarchy in mass amateurization. There is only an informal group of collaborators working to solve a problem. Due to mass amateurization, amateurs are able to collaborate without the interference from the inherent obstacles associated with institutions. These obstacles include the costs that an institution incurs while educating, training, directing, coaching, advising, and organizing its members.

🔗 Central America 🔗 Panama 🔗 Colombia

The Darién Gap (UK: , US: , Spanish: Tapón del Darién [taˈpon del daˈɾjen], lit. 'Darién plug') is a geographic region in the Isthmus of Darien or Isthmus of Panama connecting the American continents within Central America, consisting of a large watershed, forest, and mountains in Panama's Darién Province and the northern portion of Colombia's Chocó Department.

The "Gap" interrupts the Pan-American Highway. Some 106 km (66 mi) of this between Yaviza, Panama, and Turbo, Colombia, has never been built. Road-building in this area is both expensive and detrimental to the environment. Political consensus in favor of road construction collapsed after an initial attempt failed in the early 1970s, with a proposal in the early 1990s halted by environmental concerns. As of 2023, there was no active plan to build a road through the Gap, although there has been discussion of reestablishing a ferry service.

The geography of the Darién Gap on the Colombian side is dominated primarily by the river delta of the Atrato River, which creates a flat marshland at least 80 km (50 mi) wide. The Serranía del Baudó range extends along Colombia's Pacific coast and into Panama. The Panamanian side, in stark contrast, is a mountainous rainforest, with terrain reaching from 60 m (197 ft) in the valley floors to 1,845 m (6,053 ft) at the tallest peak (Cerro Tacarcuna, in the Serranía del Darién).

The Darién Gap is home to the Embera-Wounaan and Guna people and was also home to the Cueva people who became extinct by 1535, following the Spanish invasion of Panama. Travel is often conducted with pirogues. On the Panamanian side, La Palma, the area's cultural center, is the capital of the province. Other population centers include Yaviza and El Real. The Darién Gap had a reported population of 8,000 in 1995 among five tribes. Maize, cassava, plantains, and bananas are staple crops on local farms.

There is no road, not even a primitive one, across the Darién. One can bypass it by boat, and for some years there was an underused ferry service. The remaining option is to hike from Colombia to Panama by trail, which is possible but very strenuous and dangerous. Heavy rain and flash floods are frequent, law enforcement and medical support are non-existent, rapes and robberies are common, and a broken leg can be fatal, as there is no way to reach assistance. However, this route was taken by hundreds of thousands of migrants since the 2010s, primarily Haitians and Venezuelans, to reach the Mexico–United States border. By 2021, the number was more than 130,000. In 2022, there were 250,000, and by 2023, 360,000 had crossed the Gap.