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Due to national security concerns, the use of geographic information in the People's Republic of China is restricted to entities that obtain a special authorization from the administrative department for surveying and mapping under the State Council. Consequences of the restriction include fines for unauthorized surveys, lack of geotagging information on many cameras when the GPS chip detects a location within China, incorrect alignment of street maps with satellite maps in various applications, and seeming unlawfulness of crowdsourced mapping efforts such as OpenStreetMap.

The capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminum electrolytic capacitors, between 1999 and 2007, especially those from some Taiwanese manufacturers, due to faulty electrolyte composition that caused corrosion accompanied by gas generation, often rupturing the case of the capacitor from the build-up of pressure.

High failure rates occurred in many well-known brands of electronics, and were particularly evident in motherboards, video cards, and power supplies of personal computers.

A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for as long as 30 minutes. Other methods of inducing this state are also known. Ethologists refer to this state as 'tonic immobility' i.e. a natural state of semi-paralysis that some animals enter when presented with a threat, which is probably a defensive mechanism intended to feign death, albeit rather poorly.

The first known written reference for this method came in 1646, in Mirabele Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by Athanasius Kircher in Rome.

"Uncleftish Beholding" (1989) is a short text by Poul Anderson designed to illustrate what English might look like without its large number of loanwords from languages such as French, Greek, and Latin. Written in a form of "Anglish," the work explains atomic theory using Germanic words almost exclusively and coining new words when necessary; many of these new words have cognates in modern German, an important scientific language in its own right. The title phrase uncleftish beholding calques "atomic theory."

To illustrate, the text begins:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

It goes on to define firststuffs (chemical elements), such as waterstuff (hydrogen), sourstuff (oxygen), and ymirstuff (uranium), as well as bulkbits (molecules), bindings (compounds), and several other terms important to uncleftish worldken (atomic science). Wasserstoff and Sauerstoff are the modern German words for hydrogen and oxygen, and in Dutch the modern equivalents are waterstof and zuurstof. Sunstuff refers to helium, which derives from ἥλιος, the Ancient Greek word for "sun." Ymirstuff references Ymir, a giant in Norse mythology similar to Uranus in Greek mythology.

The vocabulary used in Uncleftish Beholding does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond (Modern French rond), completely displaced Old English ymbe (cognate to German um) and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.

The text gained increased exposure and popularity after being circulated around the Internet, and has served as inspiration for some inventors of Germanic English conlangs. Douglas Hofstadter, in discussing the piece in his book Le Ton beau de Marot, jocularly refers to the use of only Germanic roots for scientific pieces as "Ander-Saxon."

The year 1816 is known as the Year Without a Summer (also the Poverty Year and Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death) because of severe climate abnormalities that caused average global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7 °C (0.72–1.26 °F). This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.

Evidence suggests that the anomaly was predominantly a volcanic winter event caused by the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in April in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). This eruption was the largest eruption in at least 1,300 years (after the hypothesized eruption causing the extreme weather events of 535–536), and perhaps exacerbated by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines.

O novo guia da conversação em portuguez e inglez, commonly known by the name English as She Is Spoke, is a 19th-century book written by Pedro Carolino, with some editions crediting José da Fonseca as a co-author. It was intended as a Portuguese–English conversational guide or phrase book; however, as the "English" translations provided are usually inaccurate or incoherent, it is regarded as a classic source of unintentional humour in translation.

The humour is largely a result of Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation; this causes many idiomatic expressions to be translated ineptly. For example, Carolino translates the Portuguese phrase chover a cântaros as "raining in jars", when an analogous English idiom is available in the form of "raining buckets".

It is widely believed that Carolino could not speak English, and that a French–English dictionary was used to translate an earlier Portuguese–French phrase book, O novo guia da conversação em francês e português, written by José da Fonseca. Carolino likely added Fonseca's name to the book without his permission in an attempt to give it some credibility. The Portuguese–French phrase book is apparently a competent work, without the defects that characterize English as She Is Spoke.

The title English as She Is Spoke was given to the book in its 1883 republication; this phrase does not actually appear in the original phrasebook, nor does the word "spoke."

The Berlin key (also known as, German, Schließzwangschlüssel, or, in English, forced-locking key) is a key for a type of door lock. It was designed to force people to close and lock their doors, usually a main entrance door or gate leading into a common yard or tenement block. The key was a solution to the problem of access via communal doors of such blocks (Mietskaserne) as early as the 19th century.

Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".

The Oberon System is a modular, single-user, single-process, multitasking operating system written in the programming language of the same name. It was originally developed in the late 1980s at ETH Zürich. The Oberon System has an unconventional visual text user interface instead of a conventional CLI or GUI. This "TUI" was very innovative in its time and influenced the design of the Acme text editor for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system.

The latest version of the Oberon System, Project Oberon 2013, is still maintained by Niklaus Wirth and a number of collaborators but older ETH versions of the Oberon Systems have been orphaned. The Oberon System also evolved into the multi-process, SMP-capable Bluebottle operating system, with a zooming user interface.

The Elfstedentocht (Dutch pronunciation: [ɛlf'steːdə(n)tɔxt]; West Frisian: Alvestêdetocht [ɔlvəˈstɛːdətɔχt], English: Eleven cities tour) is a long-distance tour skating event on natural ice, almost 200 kilometres (120 mi) long, which is held both as a speed skating competition (with 300 contestants) and a leisure tour (with 16,000 skaters). It is held in the province of Friesland in the north of the Netherlands, leading past all eleven historical cities of the province. The tour is held at most once a year, only when the natural ice along the entire course is at least 15 centimetres (6 in) thick; sometimes on consecutive years, other times with gaps that may exceed 20 years. When the ice is suitable, the tour is announced and starts within 48 hours.