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🔗 Sociology

Xennials or xennials (also known as the Oregon Trail Generation and Generation Catalano) are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts. Researchers and popular media use birth years from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

In 2020, xennial was included in the Oxford Dictionary of English.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Criminal Biography 🔗 United States/Colorado

Marvin John Heemeyer (October 28, 1951 – June 4, 2004) was an automobile muffler repair shop owner who demolished numerous buildings with a modified bulldozer in Granby, Colorado, on June 4, 2004.

Heemeyer had feuded with Granby town officials, particularly over fines for violating city health ordinances after local officials disconnected Heemeyer's business from the city sewage system to make way for a concrete plant on an adjacent parcel. He was subsequently fined for improperly dumping sewage from his business instead of connecting to the city sewer system. Over about eighteen months Heemeyer had secretly modified a Komatsu D355A bulldozer by adding layers of steel and concrete, intended to serve as armor. On June 4, 2004, Heemeyer's feud with Granby culminated in a spree in which he used the armored bulldozer to demolish the Granby town hall, the former mayor's house, and several other buildings. Heemeyer's rampage concluded with his suicide, after his bulldozer became trapped in the basement of a hardware store he had been in the process of destroying.

🔗 Birds

The term Pfeilstorch (German for "arrow stork") is given to storks injured by an arrow while wintering in Africa, before returning to Europe with the arrow stuck in their bodies. To date, around 25 Pfeilstörche have been documented.

The first and most famous Pfeilstorch was a white stork found in 1822 near the German village of Klütz, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It was carrying a 30-inch (76 cm) spear from central Africa in its neck. The specimen was stuffed and can be seen today in the zoological collection of the University of Rostock. It is therefore referred to as the Rostocker Pfeilstorch.

This Pfeilstorch was crucial in understanding the migration of European birds. Before migration was understood, people struggled to explain the sudden annual disappearance of birds like the white stork and barn swallow. Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time. The Rostocker Pfeilstorch in particular proved that birds migrate long distances to wintering grounds.

🔗 Books 🔗 Psychology

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is the 1976 book by the Princeton psychologist, psychohistorian and consciousness theorist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997). The book addresses the problematic nature of consciousness – “the ability to introspect” – which in Jaynes’s view must be distinguished from sensory awareness and other processes of cognition. Jaynes presents his proposed solution: that consciousness is a “learned behavior” based more on language and culture than on biology; this solution, in turn, points to the origin of consciousness in ancient human history rather than in metaphysical or evolutionary processes; furthermore, archaeological and historical evidence indicates that prior to the “learning” of consciousness, human mentality was what Jaynes called "the bicameral mind" – a mentality based on verbal hallucination.

The first edition was released in January 1977 in English. Two later editions, in 1982 and in 1990, were released by Jaynes with additions but without alterations. It was Jaynes's only book, and it is still in print, in several languages. In addition to numerous reviews and commentaries, there are several summaries of the book's material, for example, in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in lectures and discussions published in Canadian Psychology, and in Art/World.

🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Radio

The Brinkley Act is the popular name given to 47 U.S.C. § 325(c) (originally section 325(b) of the Communications Act of 1934). This provision was enacted by the United States Congress to prohibit broadcasting studios in the U.S. from being connected by live telephone line or other means to a transmitter located in Mexico.

Prior to World War II, Dr. John R. Brinkley controlled a high-power radio station, XERA, located in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila (Acuna City), on the U.S.-Mexican border, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. The programs on Brinkley's stations originated from studios in the US, which were connected to his transmitters via international telephone lines. Brinkley ran a popular but controversial program offering questionable medical advice to his listeners. Since Brinkley's transmitters were licensed in Mexico, which at the time had very limited regulation of broadcast content, his broadcasting licenses could not be directly threatened by the US government.

Dr. Brinkley's activities at his studio were thought to be a local matter, outside Congress's regulatory powers. However, the communications between the studio and his transmitters clearly involved international commerce and were therefore within Congress's power to regulate under the Commerce Clause. The operative language is as follows:

No person shall be permitted to locate, use, or maintain a radio broadcast studio or other place or apparatus from which or whereby sound waves are converted into electrical energy, or mechanical or physical reproduction of sound waves produced, and caused to be transmitted or delivered to a radio station in a foreign country for the purpose of being broadcast from any radio station there having a power output of sufficient intensity and/or being so located geographically that its emissions may be received consistently in the United States, without first obtaining a permit from the Commission upon proper application therefor.

The law goes on (47 U.S.C. § 325(d)) to state that the legal process for requesting such a permit is the same as that for requesting or renewing a license for a domestic station.

Although the original purpose of the Brinkley Act was to shut down a broadcaster, such applications are today granted as a matter of course, and a number of US broadcasters are permitted to program Mexican stations from their US studios in communities such as San Diego, California and Brownsville, Texas, where as many as a third of the stations in each radio market are licensed in Mexico. In recent years the law has returned to prominence, as its provisions have been used to extend US ownership limits to Mexican stations leased by US broadcasters.

🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Cycling

The Twike (a portmanteau of the words twin and bike) is a human-electric hybrid vehicle (HEHV) designed to carry two passengers and cargo. Essentially a velomobile with an electrical hybrid engine, it can be driven in electric-only mode or electric + pedal power mode. Pedaling warms the user, making electric heating in winter unnecessary, extends the range of the vehicle but does not substantially add to the vehicle's top speed.

Constructed of lightweight materials such as aluminium (frame) and plastic (shell), the 246 kg (542 lb) (unladen, varying with battery weight) tricycle vehicle first used NiCd batteries, later Li-Mn, LiFePO₄ and LiIon. Typically ranges reach from 50 to over 500 km depending on battery size, type, status on one side and speed and altitude profile and load on the other. Energy is reclaimed while driving through regenerative braking, and load is removed from the electric system by use of the pedalling system which transfers its input directly to the drivetrain (i.e., both systems operate in parallel, not in series).

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Languages 🔗 Medicine/Neurology

The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words. The effect has been observed in American university students, Tamil speakers in India, young children, and infants, and has also been shown to occur with familiar names. It is absent in individuals who are congenitally blind and reduced in autistic individuals. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018.

🔗 Film 🔗 Lists 🔗 European Microstates 🔗 European Microstates/Vatican City

In 1995, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of cinema, the Vatican compiled a list of 45 "great films". The 45 movies are divided into three categories: religion, values, and art.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Business

A mount of piety is an institutional pawnbroker run as a charity in Europe from Renaissance times until today. Similar institutions were established in the colonies of Catholic countries; the Mexican Nacional Monte de Piedad is still in operation.

The institution originated in Italy in the fifteenth century, where it gave poor people access to loans with reasonable interest rates. It used funds from charitable donors as capital, and made loans to the poor so they could avoid going to exploitative lenders. Borrowers offered valuables as collateral, making the mount of piety more like a pawn shop than a bank.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Military history/World War II

112 Gripes About the French was a 1945 handbook issued by the United States military authorities to enlisted personnel arriving in France after the Liberation. It was meant to defuse the growing tension between the American military and the locals.

The euphoria of victory over Germany was short-lived, and within months of Liberation, tensions began to rise between the French and the U.S. military personnel stationed in the country, with the former seeing the latter as arrogant and wanting to flaunt their wealth, and the latter seeing the former as proud and resentful. Fights were breaking out more often, and fears were raised, even among high officials, that the situation might eventually lead to a breakdown of civil order.

Set out in a question-and-answer format, 112 Gripes about the French posed a series of well-rehearsed complaints about the French, and then provided a common-sense rejoinder to each of them — the aim of the authors being to bring the average American soldier to a fuller understanding of his hosts.

It has recently been republished in the United States (ISBN 1-4191-6512-7), and in France under the title "Nos amis les Français" ("Our friends the French"), ISBN 2-7491-0128-X.