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🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Sweden 🔗 Solar System 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System

The Sweden Solar System is the world's largest permanent scale model of the Solar System. The Sun is represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic Sea. The system was started by Nils Brenning and Gösta Gahm and is on the scale of 1:20 million.

🔗 Business 🔗 Parliamentary Procedure

Robert's Rules of Order, often simply referred to as Robert's Rules, is a manual of parliamentary procedure by U.S. Army officer Henry Martyn Robert. "The object of Rules of Order is to assist an assembly to accomplish the work for which it was designed [...] Where there is no law [...] there is the least of real liberty". The term "Robert's Rules of Order" is also used more generically to refer to any of the more recent editions, by various editors and authors, based on any of Robert's original editions, and the term is used more generically in the United States to refer to parliamentary procedure.

Robert's manual was first published in 1876 as an adaptation of the rules and practice of the United States Congress to the needs of non-legislative societies. Robert's Rules is the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure in the United States. It governs the meetings of a diverse range of organizations—including church groups, county commissions, homeowners associations, nonprofit associations, professional societies, school boards, and trade unions—that have adopted it as their parliamentary authority. Robert published four editions of the manual before his death in 1923, the last being the thoroughly revised and expanded Fourth Edition published as Robert's Rules of Order Revised in May 1915.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 Cities 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia 🔗 Russia/human geography of Russia

A closed city or closed town is a settlement where travel or residency restrictions are applied so that specific authorization is required to visit or remain overnight. They may be sensitive military establishments or secret research installations that require much more space or freedom than is available in a conventional military base. There may also be a wider variety of permanent residents including close family members of workers or trusted traders who are not directly connected with its clandestine purposes.

Many closed cities existed in the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. After 1991, a number of them still existed in the CIS countries, especially Russia. In modern Russia, such places are officially known as "closed administrative-territorial formations" (закрытые административно-территориальные образования, zakrytye administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniya, or ЗАТО ZATO for short).

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Law Enforcement 🔗 Iraq 🔗 British crime 🔗 Explosives

The ADE 651 is a fake bomb detector produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd (ATSC). Its manufacturer claimed it could detect bombs, guns, ammunition, and more from kilometers away. However, it was a scam, and the device was little more than a dowsing rod. The device was sold for up to US$60,000 each, despite costing almost nothing to produce. It was widely used in the Middle East, and may have led to numerous deadly bombings in Iraq due to its inability to detect explosives. Its inventor, James McCormick, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2013 for fraud.

🔗 Computing

In computer programming, homoiconicity (from the Greek words homo- meaning "the same" and icon meaning "representation") is a property of some programming languages. A language is homoiconic if a program written in it can be manipulated as data using the language, and thus the program's internal representation can be inferred just by reading the program itself. For example, a Lisp program is written as a regular Lisp list, and can be manipulated by other Lisp code. In homoiconic languages, all code can be accessed and transformed as data, using the same representation. This property is often summarized by saying that the language treats "code as data".

In a homoiconic language, the primary representation of programs is also a data structure in a primitive type of the language itself. This makes metaprogramming easier than in a language without this property: reflection in the language (examining the program's entities at runtime) depends on a single, homogeneous structure, and it does not have to handle several different structures that would appear in a complex syntax.

As noted above, a commonly cited example is Lisp, which was created to allow for easy list manipulations and where the structure is given by S-expressions that take the form of nested lists. Lisp programs are written in the form of lists; the result is that the program can access its own functions and procedures while running, and programmatically alter itself on the fly. Homoiconic languages typically include full support of syntactic macros, allowing the programmer to express transformations of programs in a concise way. Examples are the programming languages Clojure (a contemporary dialect of Lisp), Rebol (also its successor Red), Refal, Prolog, and more recently Julia.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Canada 🔗 Athletics 🔗 Running 🔗 Biography/sports and games

Terrance Stanley Fox (July 28, 1958 – June 28, 1981) was a Canadian athlete, humanitarian, and cancer research activist. In 1980, with one leg having been amputated due to cancer, he embarked on an east to west cross-Canada run to raise money and awareness for cancer research. Although the spread of his cancer eventually forced him to end his quest after 143 days and 5,373 kilometres (3,339 mi), and ultimately cost him his life, his efforts resulted in a lasting, worldwide legacy. The annual Terry Fox Run, first held in 1981, has grown to involve millions of participants in over 60 countries and is now the world's largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research; over C$750 million has been raised in his name, as of January 2018.

Fox was a distance runner and basketball player for his Port Coquitlam high school, now named after him, and Simon Fraser University. His right leg was amputated in 1977 after he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, though he continued to run using an artificial leg. He also played wheelchair basketball in Vancouver, winning three national championships.

In 1980, he began the Marathon of Hope, a cross-country run to raise money for cancer research. He hoped to raise one dollar from each of Canada's 24 million people. He began with little fanfare from St John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, in April and ran the equivalent of a full marathon every day. Fox had become a national star by the time he reached Ontario; he made numerous public appearances with businessmen, athletes, and politicians in his efforts to raise money. He was forced to end his run outside Thunder Bay when the cancer spread to his lungs. His hopes of overcoming the disease and completing his marathon ended when he died nine months later.

In addition to being the youngest person ever named a Companion of the Order of Canada, Fox won the 1980 Lou Marsh Award as the nation's top sportsman and was named Canada's Newsmaker of the Year in both 1980 and 1981. Considered a national hero, he has had many buildings, statues, roads, and parks named in his honour across the country.

🔗 Graphic design

Corporate Memphis is a term used (often disparagingly) to describe a flat, geometric art style, widely used in Big Tech illustrations in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It is often criticized as seeming uninspired and dystopian.

🔗 Computing

A stack-oriented programming language is one that relies on a stack machine model for passing parameters. Several programming languages fit this description, notably Forth, RPL, PostScript, BibTeX style design language and many assembly languages (on a much lower level).

Stack-oriented languages operate on one or more stacks, each of which may serve a different purpose. Thus, programming constructs in other programming languages may need to be modified for use in a stack-oriented system. Further, some stack-oriented languages operate in postfix or Reverse Polish notation, that is, any arguments or parameters for a command are stated before that command. For example, postfix notation would be written 2, 3, multiply instead of multiply, 2, 3 (prefix or Polish notation), or 2 multiply 3 (infix notation).

🔗 Books 🔗 England 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Food and drink

The Forme of Cury (The Method of Cooking, cury from Middle French cuire: 'to cook') is an extensive 14th-century collection of medieval English recipes. Although the original manuscript is lost, the text appears in nine manuscripts, the most famous in the form of a scroll with a headnote citing it as the work of "the chief Master Cooks of King Richard II". The name The Forme of Cury is generally used for the family of recipes rather than any single manuscript text. It is among the oldest extant English cookery books, and the earliest known to mention olive oil, gourds, and spices such as mace and cloves.

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Environment 🔗 Meteorology 🔗 Urban studies and planning

An urban heat island (UHI) is an urban area or metropolitan area that is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas due to human activities. The temperature difference is usually larger at night than during the day, and is most apparent when winds are weak. UHI is most noticeable during the summer and winter. The main cause of the urban heat island effect is from the modification of land surfaces. Waste heat generated by energy usage is a secondary contributor. As a population center grows, it tends to expand its area and increase its average temperature. The term heat island is also used; the term can be used to refer to any area that is relatively hotter than the surrounding, but generally refers to human-disturbed areas.

Monthly rainfall is greater downwind of cities, partially due to the UHI. Increases in heat within urban centers increases the length of growing seasons, and decreases the occurrence of weak tornadoes. The UHI decreases air quality by increasing the production of pollutants such as ozone, and decreases water quality as warmer waters flow into area streams and put stress on their ecosystems.

Not all cities have a distinct urban heat island, and the heat island characteristics depend strongly on the background climate of the area in which the city is located. Mitigation of the urban heat island effect can be accomplished through the use of green roofs and the use of lighter-colored surfaces in urban areas, which reflect more sunlight and absorb less heat.

Concerns have been raised about possible contribution from urban heat islands to global warming. While some lines of research did not detect a significant impact, other studies have concluded that heat islands can have measurable effects on climate phenomena at the global scale.