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The Electro Gyro-Cator was claimed to be the world's first automated commercially available automotive navigation system. It was co-developed by Honda, Alpine, and Stanley Electric Co..

Unlike most navigation systems of today, it did not use GPS Satellites to maintain its position and discern movement of the vehicle. Rather, it was an Inertial navigation system, because it contained a helium gas gyroscope that could detect both rotation and movement. A special servo gear was also attached to the transmission housing to feed information to the Gyro-Cator to help maintain position, map speed and distance traveled.

Transparent maps were placed inside the unit and it would scroll them past a 6 inch monochrome CRT illuminated screen as the car traveled along. The monitor would indicate by a series of circles (or cross hairs) on the screen to show the vehicle's current location or display lines for path of travel. A marking pen was also included to help make personal indicators on the map if needed. Adjustments could be made to change the display scale, position, rotation, brightness, and contrast. In its only year of production in 1981, it was announced as an option on that year's Honda Accord and Honda Vigor, but at ¥300,000 ($2,746 USD), it was almost a quarter of the value of the car. It is not clear how many units were actually sold to customers as a "dealer option". A patent for gyroscope design was introduced to the US in design patent D274332.

Documented weight for the unit was roughly 20 lb (9 kg). A display unit, with a cutaway of the Gyroscope, is currently shown at the Honda Collection Hall at Twin Ring Motegi, Japan.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind

The knowledge argument (also known as Mary's room or Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986). The experiment is intended to argue against physicalism—the view that the universe, including all that is mental, is entirely physical. The debate that emerged following its publication became the subject of an edited volume—There's Something About Mary (2004)—which includes replies from such philosophers as Daniel Dennett, David Lewis, and Paul Churchland.

🔗 United States 🔗 Africa 🔗 African diaspora 🔗 United States/Kentucky 🔗 Africa/Liberia

Kentucky in Africa was a colony in present-day Montserrado County, Liberia, founded in 1828 and settled by American free people of color, many of them former slaves. A state affiliate of the American Colonization Society, the Kentucky State Colonization Society raised money to transport people of color from Kentucky—freeborn volunteers as well as enslaved individuals set free on the condition that they leave the United States for Liberia. The Kentucky society bought a 40-square-mile (100 km²) site along the Saint Paul River (quite near the site of the present-day capital city of Monrovia) and named it Kentucky in Africa. Clay-Ashland. named after Henry Clay's Ashland Plantation, was the colony's primary settlement.

Notable residents of Kentucky in Africa include Alfred Francis Russell, the 10th President of Liberia, and William D. Coleman, the 13th President of Liberia, whose family settled in Clay-Ashland after emigrating from Fayette County, Kentucky.

Kentucky in Africa was annexed by Liberia in about 1847.

🔗 Statistics 🔗 Futures studies

The Delphi method or Delphi technique ( DEL-fy; also known as Estimate-Talk-Estimate or ETE) is a structured communication technique or method, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts. The technique can also be adapted for use in face-to-face meetings, and is then called mini-Delphi or Estimate-Talk-Estimate (ETE). Delphi has been widely used for business forecasting and has certain advantages over another structured forecasting approach, prediction markets.

Delphi is based on the principle that forecasts (or decisions) from a structured group of individuals are more accurate than those from unstructured groups. The experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator or change agent provides an anonymised summary of the experts' forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the "correct" answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a predefined stop criterion (e.g., number of rounds, achievement of consensus, stability of results), and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results.

Special attention has to be paid to the formulation of the Delphi theses and the definition and selection of the experts in order to avoid methodological weaknesses that severely threaten the validity and reliability of the results.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Computing

The STacy is a portable computer version of the Atari ST.

The computer was originally designed to operate on 12 standard C cell flashlight batteries for portability. When Atari realized how quickly the machine would use up a set of batteries (especially when rechargeable batteries of the time supplied insufficient power compared to the intended alkalines), they simply glued the lid of the battery compartment shut.

The STacy has features similar to the Macintosh Portable, a version of Apple's Macintosh computer which contained a built in keyboard and monitor.

With built-in MIDI, the STacy enjoyed success for running music-sequencer software and as a controller of musical instruments among both amateurs and well-known musicians.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare

The Boeing MQ-25 Stingray is an aerial refueling drone that resulted from the Carrier-Based Aerial-Refueling System (CBARS) program, which grew out of the earlier Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) program. The MQ-25 first flew on 19 September 2019.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Computing 🔗 Lists 🔗 Google

Google is a computer software and a web search engine company that acquired, on average, more than one company per week in 2010 and 2011. The table below is an incomplete list of acquisitions, with each acquisition listed being for the respective company in its entirety, unless otherwise specified. The acquisition date listed is the date of the agreement between Google and the acquisition subject. As Google is headquartered in the United States, acquisition is listed in US dollars. If the price of an acquisition is unlisted, then it is undisclosed. If the Google service that is derived from the acquired company is known, then it is also listed here. Google itself was re-organized into a subsidiary of a larger holding company known as Alphabet Inc. in 2015.

As of December 2016, Alphabet has acquired over 200 companies, with its largest acquisition being the purchase of Motorola Mobility, a mobile device manufacturing company, for $12.5 billion. Most of the firms acquired by Google are based in the United States, and, in turn, most of these are based in or around the San Francisco Bay Area. To date, Alphabet has divested itself of four business units: Frommers, which was sold back to Arthur Frommer in April 2012; SketchUp, which was sold to Trimble in April 2012, Boston Dynamics in early 2016 and Google Radio Automation, which was sold to WideOrbit in 2009.

Many Google products originated as services provided by companies that Google has since acquired. For example, Google's first acquisition was the Usenet company Deja News, and its services became Google Groups. Similarly, Google acquired Dodgeball, a social networking service company, and eventually replaced it with Google Latitude. Other acquisitions include web application company JotSpot, which became Google Sites; Voice over IP company GrandCentral, which became Google Voice; and video hosting service company Next New Networks, which became YouTube Next Lab and Audience Development Group. CEO Larry Page has explained that potential acquisition candidates must pass a sort of "toothbrush test": Are their products potentially useful once or twice a day, and do they improve your life?

Following the acquisition of Israel-based startup Waze in June 2013, Google submitted a 10-Q filing with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) that revealed that the corporation spent $1.3 billion on acquisitions during the first half of 2013, with $966 million of that total going to Waze.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 British Overseas Territories

The Outer Space Treaty, formally the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, is a treaty that forms the basis of international space law. The treaty was opened for signature in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union on 27 January 1967, and entered into force on 10 October 1967. As of June 2019, 109 countries are parties to the treaty, while another 23 have signed the treaty but have not completed ratification. In addition, Taiwan, which is currently recognized by 14 UN member states, ratified the treaty prior to the United Nations General Assembly's vote to transfer China's seat to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1971.

Among the Outer Space Treaty's main points are that it prohibits the placing of nuclear weapons in space, it limits the use of the Moon and all other celestial bodies to peaceful purposes only, and establishes that space shall be free for exploration and use by all nations, but that no nation may claim sovereignty of outer space or any celestial body. The Outer Space Treaty does not ban military activities within space, military space forces, or the weaponization of space, with the exception of the placement of weapons of mass destruction in space. It is mostly a non-armament treaty and offers insufficient and ambiguous regulations to newer space activities such as lunar and asteroid mining.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Anarchism

Refusal of work is behavior in which a person refuses regular employment.

As actual behavior, with or without a political or philosophical program, it has been practiced by various subcultures and individuals. Radical political positions have openly advocated refusal of work. From within Marxism it has been advocated by Paul Lafargue and the Italian workerist/autonomists (e.g. Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti), the French ultra-left (e.g. Échanges et Mouvement); and within anarchism (especially Bob Black and the post-left anarchy tendency).

🔗 Oceans 🔗 Polymers

The Indian Ocean garbage patch, discovered in 2010, is a gyre of marine litter suspended in the upper water column of the central Indian Ocean, specifically the Indian Ocean Gyre, one of the five major oceanic gyres. The patch does not appear as a continuous debris field. As with other patches in each of the five oceanic gyres, the plastics in it break down to ever smaller particles, and to constituent polymers. As with the other patches, the field constitutes an elevated level of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris; primarily particles that are invisible to the naked eye. The concentration of particle debris has been estimated to be approximately 10,000 particles per square kilometer.

A similar patch of floating plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, the Great Pacific garbage patch, was predicted in 1985, and discovered in 1997 by Charles J. Moore as he passed through the North Pacific Gyre on his return from the Transpacific Yacht Race. The North Atlantic garbage patch was discovered in 2010.