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🔗 Film 🔗 Television 🔗 BBC 🔗 Film/British cinema

Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World is a six-part BBC documentary television series created by Adam Curtis. It was released on BBC iPlayer on 11 February 2021.

🔗 Languages 🔗 Constructed languages

Ithkuil is an experimental constructed language created by John Quijada. It is designed to express deeper levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly with regard to human categorization. It is a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It tries to minimize the vagueness and semantic ambiguity found in natural human languages. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory, the latter being simplified in an upcoming redesign. The name "Ithkuil" is an anglicized form of Iţkuîl, which in the original form roughly means "hypothetical representation of a language". Quijada states he did not create Ithkuil to be auxiliary or used in everyday conversations. He wanted the language to be used for more elaborate and profound fields where more insightful thoughts are expected, such as philosophy, arts, science and politics.

Meaningful phrases or sentences can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer linguistic units than in natural languages. For example, the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point". Quijada deems his creation as too complex to have developed naturally, seeing it as an exercise in exploring how languages could function. No person, including Quijada himself, is known to be able to speak Ithkuil fluently. It was featured in the Language Creation Conference's 6th Conlang Relay.

Four versions of the language have been publicized: the initial version in 2004, a simplified version called Ilaksh in 2007, the current version in 2011, and as of 2017, various revisions of a new version of the language, named Ithkuil IV. In 2004—and again in 2009 with Ilaksh—Ithkuil was featured in the Russian-language popular science and IT magazine Computerra. In 2008, David Peterson awarded it the Smiley Award. In 2013, Bartłomiej Kamiński codified the language to be able to quickly parse complicated sentences. Julien Tavernier and anonymous others have followed suit. Since July 2015, Quijada has released several Ithkuil songs in a prog rock style as part of the album Kaduatán, which translates to "Wayfarers". Recently, online communities for the language have developed in English, Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese.

🔗 China 🔗 Geography 🔗 Maps 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Geography and environment

Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, printed in China at the request of the Wanli Emperor during 1602 by the Italian Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci and Chinese collaborators, Mandarin Zhong Wentao and the technical translator, Li Zhizao, is the earliest known Chinese world map with the style of European maps. It has been referred to as the Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography, "because of its rarity, importance and exoticism". The map was crucial in expanding Chinese knowledge of the world. It was eventually exported to Korea then Japan and was influential there as well, though less so than Alenio's Zhifang Waiji.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 India 🔗 Rocketry 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/South Asian military history 🔗 India/Karnataka

Mysorean rockets were an Indian military weapon, the first iron-cased rockets successfully deployed for military use. The Mysorean army, under Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, used the rockets effectively against the British East India Company during the 1780s and 1790s. Their conflicts with the company exposed the British to this technology, which was then used to advance European rocketry with the development of the Congreve rocket in 1805.

🔗 Volcanoes 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Solar System 🔗 Solar System/Moon

Lunar lava tubes are lava tubes on the Moon formed during the eruption of basaltic lava flows. When the surface of a lava flow cools, it hardens and the lava can channel beneath the surface in a tube-shaped passage. Once the flow of lava diminishes, the tube may drain, forming a hollow void. Lunar lava tubes are formed on sloped surfaces that range in angle from 0.4° to 6.5°. These tubes may be as wide as 500 metres (1,600 ft) before they become unstable against gravitational collapse. However, stable tubes may still be disrupted by seismic events or meteoroid bombardment.

The existence of a lava tube is sometimes revealed by the presence of a "skylight", a place in which the roof of the tube has collapsed, leaving a circular hole that can be observed by lunar orbiters.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics

Financialization (or financialisation in British English) is a term sometimes used to describe the development of financial capitalism during the period from 1980 to present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors.

Financialization describes an economic process by which exchange is facilitated through the intermediation of financial instruments. Financialization may permit real goods, services, and risks to be readily exchangeable for currency, and thus make it easier for people to rationalize their assets and income flows.

🔗 United States 🔗 Law

Hedges v. Obama was a lawsuit filed in January 2012 against the Obama administration and members of the U.S. Congress by a group including former New York Times reporter Christopher Hedges, challenging the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). The legislation permitted the U.S. government to indefinitely detain people "who are part of or substantially support Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces engaged in hostilities against the United States". The plaintiffs contended that Section 1021(b)(2) of the law allows for detention of citizens and permanent residents taken into custody in the U.S. on "suspicion of providing substantial support" to groups engaged in hostilities against the U.S. such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban respectively that the NDAA arms the U.S. military with the ability to imprison indefinitely journalists, activists and human-rights workers based on vague allegations.

A federal court in New York issued a permanent injunction blocking the indefinite detention powers of the NDAA but the injunction was stayed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals pending appeal by the Obama Administration. On July 17, 2013, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the district court's permanent injunction blocking the indefinite detention powers of the NDAA because the plaintiffs lacked legal standing to challenge the indefinite detention powers of the NDAA. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case on April 28, 2014, leaving the Second Circuit decision intact.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Websites

VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language, pronounced vermal or by its initials, originally—before 1995—known as the Virtual Reality Markup Language) is a standard file format for representing 3-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graphics, designed particularly with the World Wide Web in mind. It has been superseded by X3D.

Meta is a company performing big data analysis of scientific literature. Company is headquartered in Redwood City, California (formerly Toronto, Ontario, Canada) and operates Meta Science, a literature discovery platform. The company was acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2017.

🔗 Books 🔗 Psychology

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct is a 1961 book by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, in which the author criticizes psychiatry and argues against the concept of mental illness. It received much publicity, and has become a classic, well known as an argument that "mentally ill" is a label which psychiatrists have used against people "disabled by living" rather than truly having a disease.