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🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture 🔗 Textile Arts

Shibori (しぼり / 絞り) is a Japanese manual resist dyeing technique, which produces a number of different patterns on fabric.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Denmark 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Beer

Free Beer, originally known as Vores øl - An open source beer (Danish for: Our Beer), is the first brand of beer with an "open"/"free" brand and recipe. The recipe and trademark elements are published under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license.

The beer was created in 2004 by students at the IT University in Copenhagen together with artist collective Superflex, to illustrate how concepts of the FOSS movement might be applied outside the digital world. The "Free Beer" concept illustrates also the connection between the long tradition of freely sharing cooking recipes with the FOSS movement, which tries to establish this sharing tradition also for the "recipes" of software, the source code. The "Free beer" concept received an overall positive reception from international press and media for the political message, was presented on many exhibitions and conferences, and inspired many breweries in adopting the concept.

🔗 Musical Instruments 🔗 Electronic music

The Ondioline is an electronic keyboard instrument, invented in 1941 by the Frenchman Georges Jenny, and is a forerunner of today's synthesizers. It is sometimes called the "Jenny Ondioline."

The Ondioline is capable of creating a wide variety of sounds. Its keyboard has an unusual feature: it is suspended on special springs which makes it possible to introduce a natural vibrato if the player moves the keyboard (not the entire instrument) from side to side (laterally) with their playing hand. The result is an almost human-like vibrato that lends a wide range of expression to the Ondioline. The keyboard is also pressure-sensitive, and the instrument has a knee volume lever, as well.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics

SHRDLU was an early natural language understanding computer program, developed by Terry Winograd at MIT in 1968–1970. In it, the user carries on a conversation with the computer, moving objects, naming collections and querying the state of a simplified "blocks world", essentially a virtual box filled with different blocks.

SHRDLU was written in the Micro Planner and Lisp programming language on the DEC PDP-6 computer and a DEC graphics terminal. Later additions were made at the computer graphics labs at the University of Utah, adding a full 3D rendering of SHRDLU's "world".

The name SHRDLU was derived from ETAOIN SHRDLU, the arrangement of the letter keys on a Linotype machine, arranged in descending order of usage frequency in English.

🔗 Meteorology 🔗 Meteorology/weather data, products and instrumentation

The tempest prognosticator, also known as the leech barometer, is a 19th-century invention by George Merryweather in which leeches are used in a barometer. The twelve leeches are kept in small bottles inside the device; when they become agitated by an approaching storm they attempt to climb out of the bottles and trigger a small hammer which strikes a bell. The likelihood of a storm is indicated by the number of times the bell is struck.

🔗 Architecture

Ruin value (German: Ruinenwert) is the concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins that would last far longer without any maintenance at all. The idea was pioneered by German architect Albert Speer while planning for the 1936 Summer Olympics and published as "The Theory of Ruin Value" (Die Ruinenwerttheorie), although he was not its original inventor. The intention did not stretch only to the eventual collapse of the buildings, but rather assumed such buildings were inherently better designed and more imposing during their period of use.

The idea was supported by Adolf Hitler, who planned for such ruins to be a symbol of the greatness of the Third Reich, just as Ancient Greek and Roman ruins were symbolic of those civilisations.

🔗 Economics

Hotelling's law is an observation in economics that in many markets it is rational for producers to make their products as similar as possible. This is also referred to as the principle of minimum differentiation as well as Hotelling's linear city model. The observation was made by Harold Hotelling (1895–1973) in the article "Stability in Competition" in Economic Journal in 1929.

The opposing phenomenon is product differentiation, which is usually considered to be a business advantage if executed properly.

🔗 Biography 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/History 🔗 Japan/Biography

Otokichi (音吉 or 乙吉), also known as Yamamoto Otokichi and later known as John Matthew Ottoson (1818 – January 1867), was a Japanese castaway originally from the area of Onoura near modern-day Mihama, on the west coast of the Chita Peninsula in Aichi Prefecture.

🔗 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.

🔗 United States 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Lists 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Years 🔗 United States/U.S. history 🔗 Current events 🔗 Politics/Gun politics

This is a list of shootings in the United States that have occurred in 2022. Mass shootings are incidents involving several victims of firearm-related violence. The precise inclusion criteria are disputed, and there is no broadly accepted definition.

Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group, run by Tracy Holtan, that tracks shootings and their characteristics in the United States, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrator(s), are shot in one location at roughly the same time. The Congressional Research Service narrows that definition, limiting it to "public mass shootings", defined by four or more victims killed, excluding any victims who survive. The Washington Post and Mother Jones use similar definitions, with the latter acknowledging that their definition "is a conservative measure of the problem", as many shootings with fewer fatalities occur. The crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker project has the most expansive definition of four or more shot in any incident, including the perpetrator in the victim inclusion criteria.

A 2019 study of mass shootings published in the journal Injury Epidemiology recommended developing "a standard definition that considers both fatalities and nonfatalities to most appropriately convey the burden of mass shootings on gun violence." The authors of the study further suggested that "the definition of mass shooting should be four or more people, excluding the shooter, who are shot in a single event regardless of the motive, setting or number of deaths."