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🔗 Technology 🔗 Business

A format war describes competition between mutually incompatible proprietary formats that compete for the same market, typically for data storage devices and recording formats for electronic media. It is often characterized by political and financial influence on content publishers by the developers of the technologies. Developing companies may be characterized as engaging in a format war if they actively oppose or avoid interoperable open-industry technical standards in favor of their own.

A format war emergence can be explained because each vendor is trying to exploit cross-side network effects in a two-sided market. There is also a social force to stop a format war: when one of them wins as de facto standard, it solves a coordination problem for the format users.

🔗 Languages 🔗 Deaf 🔗 Nicaragua

Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN; Spanish: Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) is a sign language that was largely spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. It is of particular interest to the linguists who study it because it offers a unique opportunity to study what they believe to be the birth of a new language.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects

2024 YR₄ is an asteroid between 40 and 90 metres (130 and 300 ft) in diameter, classified as an Apollo-type (Earth-crossing) near-Earth object. It was discovered by the Chilean station of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on 27 December 2024. As of 5 February 2025, 2024 YR₄ was rated 3 on the Torino scale with a 1 in 53 (1.9%) chance of impacting Earth on 22 December 2032. NASA gives a Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale rating of −0.40 for 2024 YR₄, which corresponds to an impact hazard of 39.8% of the background hazard level. The discovery has triggered the first step in planetary defense responses, in which all available telescopes are asked to gather data about the object and United Nations-endorsed space agencies are prompted to begin planning for asteroid threat mitigation.

Preliminary analysis of spectra and photometric timeseries of this asteroid suggests it is a stony S-type or L-type asteroid with a rotation period near 19.5 minutes. The asteroid previously made a close approach of 828,800 kilometres (515,000 miles; 2.156 lunar distances) to Earth on 25 December 2024 (two days before its discovery), and is now moving away from Earth. It will make its next close approach around 17 December 2028. By early April 2025 and until June 2028, 2024 YR₄ will have moved too far away from Earth to be observed by ground-based telescopes. Space-based infrared telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope may be able to observe 2024 YR₄ when it is far from Earth.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology

The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. This effect, discovered by French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann (1861–1931), illustrates the inverse relationship that exists between the size of a group and the magnitude of group members’ individual contribution to the completion of a task. While studying the relationship between process loss (i.e., reductions in performance effectiveness or efficiency) and group productivity, Ringelmann (1913) found that having group members work together on a task (e.g., pulling a rope) actually results in significantly less effort than when individual members are acting alone. Ringelmann discovered that as more and more people are added to a group, the group often becomes increasingly inefficient, ultimately violating the notion that group effort and team participation reliably leads to increased effort on behalf of the members.

🔗 Time

The Doomsday rule is an algorithm of determination of the day of the week for a given date. It provides a perpetual calendar because the Gregorian calendar moves in cycles of 400 years. The algorithm for mental calculation was devised by John Conway in 1973, drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll's perpetual calendar algorithm. It takes advantage of each year having a certain day of the week, called the doomsday, upon which certain easy-to-remember dates fall; for example, 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, and the last day of February all occur on the same day of the week in any year. Applying the Doomsday algorithm involves three steps: Determination of the anchor day for the century, calculation of the doomsday for the year from the anchor day, and selection of the closest date out of those that always fall on the doomsday, e.g., 4/4 and 6/6, and count of the number of days (modulo 7) between that date and the date in question to arrive at the day of the week. The technique applies to both the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar, although their doomsdays are usually different days of the week.

The algorithm is simple enough that it can be computed mentally. Conway can usually give the correct answer in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practices his calendrical calculations on his computer, which is programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logs on.

🔗 Anthropology

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

In aerobatics the Cobra maneuver, also known as just the Cobra, is a dramatic and demanding maneuver in which an airplane flying at a moderate speed suddenly raises the nose momentarily to the vertical position and slightly beyond, before dropping it back to normal, effectively making the plane a full body air brake.

The maneuver relies on the ability of the plane to be able to quickly change alpha which momentarily stalls the plane without overloading the airframe and powerful engine thrust to maintain approximately constant altitude through the entire move. It is an impressive maneuver to demonstrate an aircraft's pitch control authority, high alpha stability and engine-versus-inlet compatibility, as well as the pilot's skill.

Although the maneuver is mainly performed at air shows it has use in close range air combat as a last ditch maneuver to make a pursuing plane overshoot. There is currently no widely spread or readily available evidence of the Cobra being used in real combat, although, there are records of it being used during mockup-dogfights and during border protection.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Trains 🔗 Trains/Rail transport modelling

The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing 🔗 Japan

The X68000 (Japanese: エックス ろくまんはっせん, Hepburn: Ekkusu Rokuman Hassen) is a home computer created by Sharp Corporation, first released in 1987, sold only in Japan.

The first model features a 10 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU (hence the name), 1 MB of RAM, and no hard drive; the last model was released in 1993 with a 25 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU, 4 MB of RAM, and optional 80 MB SCSI hard drive. RAM in these systems is expandable to 12 MB, though most games and applications do not require more than 2 MB.

🔗 Denmark 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Norway 🔗 Sweden

The Law of Jante (Danish: Janteloven) is a code of conduct known in Nordic countries that characterizes not conforming, doing things out of the ordinary, or being overtly personally ambitious as unworthy and inappropriate. The attitudes were first formulated in the form of the ten rules of Jante Law by the Dano-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in his satirical novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (En flyktning krysser sitt spor, 1933), but the actual attitudes themselves are older. Sandemose portrays the fictional small Danish town Jante, which he modelled upon his native town Nykøbing Mors in the 1930s, where nobody was anonymous, which is typical of all small towns and communities.

Used generally in colloquial speech in the Nordic countries as a sociological term to denote a social attitude of disapproval towards expressions of individuality and personal success, it emphasizes adherence to the collective.