ASCII (squat)

The Amsterdam Subversive Center for Information Interchange (ASCII) was a squatted communication laboratory in the Dutch city of Amsterdam. The first incarnation was formed in 1999 and based at the Herengracht. The lab then moved to the following locations: Jodenbreestraat, Kinkerstraat, Kostverlorenkade, Wibautstraat and Javastraat (52°21′49″N 4°56′3″E / 52.36361°N 4.93417°E / 52.36361; 4.93417).

ASCII became legalised when it moved into Jodenbreestraat 24 in January 2000, alongside the radical bookshop Fort van Sjakoo, but started squatting again when faced with a 900% rent increase.

The original aim was to provide a free internet work space for activists and squatters and to promote Open Source operating systems such as Linux and free software programs such as OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. Members of the collective scavenged and rebuilt computers from trash. In 2005, ASCII was involved with a plan to set up free community wireless internet access across Amsterdam. In 2006 Javastraat was evicted and the group declared a shift towards being a hacklab rather than having a physical space.

3568 ASCII

3568 ASCII is a small main belt asteroid discovered by Marguerite Laugier on October 17, 1936.

It was named (long after its discovery) in honor of the ASCII character encoding system that was used by most computers. The name was proposed by Syuichi Nakano, who re-discovered this asteroid during his stay at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory; a stay which was partially funded by articles he wrote for the principal Japanese microcomputer magazine, ASCII.

References

External links

Bell character

A bell code (sometimes bell character) is a device control code originally sent to ring a small electromechanical bell on tickers and other teleprinters and teletypewriters to alert operators at the other end of the line, often of an incoming message. Though tickers punched the bell codes into their tapes, printers generally do not print a character when the bell code is received. Bell codes are usually represented by the label "BEL". They have been used since 1870 (initially in Baudot code).

To maintain backward compatibility, video display terminals (VDTs) that replaced teletypewriters included speakers or buzzers to perform the same function, as did the personal computers that followed. Modern terminal emulators often integrate the warnings to the desktop environment (e.g., the Mac OS X Terminal will play the system warning sound) and also often offer a silent visual bell feature that flashes the terminal window briefly.

Representations

In ASCII and Unicode the character with the value 7 is BEL. It can be referred to as control-G or ^G in caret notation. Unicode also includes a character for the visual representation of the bell code, "symbol for bell" (␇) at U+2407.

Tab key

Tab ↹ Tab key (abbreviation of tabulator key or tabular key) on a keyboard is used to advance the cursor to the next tab stop.

History

The word tab derives from the word tabulate, which means "to arrange data in a tabular, or table, form." When a person wanted to type a table (of numbers or text) on a typewriter, there was a lot of time-consuming and repetitive use of the space bar and backspace key. To simplify this, a horizontal bar was placed in the mechanism with a moveable lever stop for every position across the page, called a tab stop. Initially these were set by hand, but later tab set and tab clear keys were added. When the tab key was depressed, the carriage advanced to the next tab stop. These were set to correspond to the particular column locations of the table, hence tab, being worked on.

The tab mechanism also came into its own as a rapid and consistent way of uniformly indenting the first line of each paragraph, often a first tab stop at 5 or 6 characters was used for this, far larger than the indentation used when typesetting.

Squat

The word squat, squatter or squatting can refer to:

In body position

In computing and the Internet

In law and property

In media and entertainment

Squat (exercise)

In strength training and fitness, the squat is a compound, full body exercise that trains primarily the muscles of the thighs, hips and buttocks, quadriceps (vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, vastus intermedius and rectus femoris), hamstrings, as well as strengthening the bones, ligaments and insertion of the tendons throughout the lower body. Squats are considered a vital exercise for increasing the strength and size of the legs and buttocks, as well as developing core strength. Isometrically, the lower back, the upper back, the abdominals, the trunk muscles, the costal muscles, and the shoulders and arms are all essential to the exercise and thus are trained when squatting with the proper form.

The squat is one of the three lifts in the strength sport of powerlifting, together with deadlifts and bench press.

Muscles engaged

Gluteus maximus (glutes), quadriceps (quads)

Squat (Warhammer 40,000)

In the fictional universe of Warhammer 40,000, the Squats are a dwarf-like race descended from the humans that colonised high gravity worlds. Separated from the rest of humanity over the millennia, they evolved their own distinct morphology and culture. Squats were discontinued from the game in the 1990s by Games Workshop though their existence remains somewhat canon. Their omission from the game was explained by a Tyranid invasion of their Home Worlds wiping them out almost to a man. The survivors were then assimilated into the Imperium, however there are rumours that the squats created Tau technology which despite being younger than the Imperium, is more advanced.

Biology

Squats evolved from the human miners and explorers sent to reap the mineral wealth at the center of the galaxy. The high gravity environment, combined with the punishing mining conditions eventually changed their morphology. The subsequent generations became gradually shorter and stockier. The Squat Home Worlds were isolated from the rest of humanity during the Age of Isolation. When they were reunited with the rest of the Imperium, wars were launched against them in the belief that they were aliens. Eventually, the Squats were accepted, along with other abhumans, as being human in nature. They are now considered a separate race, though they are fundamentally human.