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🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology

Posttraumatic Embitterment Disorder (PTED) is defined as a pathological reaction to a negative life event, which those affected experienced as a grave insult, humiliation, betrayal, or injustice. Prevalent emotions of PTED are embitterment, anger, fury, and hatred, especially against the triggering stressor, often accompanied by fantasies of revenge. The disorder commences immediately and without time delay at the moment of the triggering event. If left untreated, the prognosis of PTED presents as rather unfavorable, since patients find themselves trapped in a vicious circle of strong negative emotions constantly intensifying one another and eventually leading into a self-destructive downward spiral. People affected by PTED are more likely to put fantasies of revenge into action, making them a serious threat to the stressor.

The concept of PTED as a distinct clinical disorder has been first described by the German psychiatrist and psychologist Michael Linden in 2003, who remains its most involved researcher. Even though it has been backed up by empirical research in the past years, it remains disputed as to whether embitterment should be included among psychological disorders. Therefore, PTED currently does not hold its own category in the ICD-10 but is categorized under F43.8 “Other reactions to severe stress”. It cannot be categorized as an adjustment disorder under F43.2, since “ordinary” adjustment disorders normally subside within six months, while PTED is much more likely to become chronical and last for much longer. A condition similar to PTED has already been described by Emil Kraepelin as early as 1915 by the name querulous paranoia as a form of traumatic neuroses, explicitly demarcating it from personality disorders.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 European history 🔗 Military history/Nordic military history 🔗 Finland 🔗 Military history/European military history

The Hitler and Mannerheim recording is a recording of a private conversation between Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, and Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish Defence Forces. It took place on a secret visit made to Finland by Hitler to honour Mannerheim's 75th birthday on 4 June 1942, during the Continuation War, a sub-theatre of World War II. Thor Damen, a sound engineer for the Finnish broadcaster Yleisradio (YLE) who had been assigned to record the official birthday proceedings, recorded the first eleven minutes of Hitler and Mannerheim's private conversation—without Hitler's knowledge. It is the only known recording of Hitler speaking in an unofficial tone.

🔗 Physics

The quantum Zeno effect (also known as the Turing paradox) is a feature of quantum-mechanical systems allowing a particle's time evolution to be slowed down by measuring it frequently enough with respect to some chosen measurement setting.

Sometimes this effect is interpreted as "a system cannot change while you are watching it". One can "freeze" the evolution of the system by measuring it frequently enough in its known initial state. The meaning of the term has since expanded, leading to a more technical definition, in which time evolution can be suppressed not only by measurement: the quantum Zeno effect is the suppression of unitary time evolution in quantum systems provided by a variety of sources: measurement, interactions with the environment, stochastic fields, among other factors. As an outgrowth of study of the quantum Zeno effect, it has become clear that applying a series of sufficiently strong and fast pulses with appropriate symmetry can also decouple a system from its decohering environment.

The name comes from Zeno's arrow paradox, which states that because an arrow in flight is not seen to move during any single instant, it cannot possibly be moving at all. The first rigorous and general derivation of the quantum Zeno effect was presented in 1974 by Degasperis, Fonda, and Ghirardi, although it had previously been described by Alan Turing. The comparison with Zeno's paradox is due to a 1977 article by George Sudarshan and Baidyanath Misra.

According to the reduction postulate, each measurement causes the wavefunction to collapse to an eigenstate of the measurement basis. In the context of this effect, an observation can simply be the absorption of a particle, without the need of an observer in any conventional sense. However, there is controversy over the interpretation of the effect, sometimes referred to as the "measurement problem" in traversing the interface between microscopic and macroscopic objects.

Another crucial problem related to the effect is strictly connected to the time–energy indeterminacy relation (part of the indeterminacy principle). If one wants to make the measurement process more and more frequent, one has to correspondingly decrease the time duration of the measurement itself. But the request that the measurement last only a very short time implies that the energy spread of the state in which reduction occurs becomes increasingly large. However, the deviations from the exponential decay law for small times is crucially related to the inverse of the energy spread, so that the region in which the deviations are appreciable shrinks when one makes the measurement process duration shorter and shorter. An explicit evaluation of these two competing requests shows that it is inappropriate, without taking into account this basic fact, to deal with the actual occurrence and emergence of Zeno's effect.

Closely related (and sometimes not distinguished from the quantum Zeno effect) is the watchdog effect, in which the time evolution of a system is affected by its continuous coupling to the environment.

🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Women's History 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Virginia 🔗 African diaspora 🔗 Civil Rights Movement 🔗 U.S. Supreme Court cases

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Beginning in 2013, it was cited as precedent in U.S. federal court decisions holding restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States unconstitutional, including in the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges.

The case involved Mildred Loving, a woman of color, and her white husband Richard Loving, who in 1958 were sentenced to a year in prison for marrying each other. Their marriage violated Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Lovings appealed their conviction to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which upheld it. They then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.

In June 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in the Lovings' favor and overturned their convictions. Its decision struck down Virginia's anti-miscegenation law and ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States. Virginia had argued that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender's race, and thus it "equally burdened" both whites and non-whites. The Court found that the law nonetheless violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was based solely on "distinctions drawn according to race" and outlawed conduct—namely, getting married—that was otherwise generally accepted and which citizens were free to do.

🔗 India 🔗 India/Kerala

ka·ṭa·pa·yā·di (Devanagari: कटपयादि) system (also known as Paralppēru, Malayalam: പരല്‍പ്പേര്) of numerical notation is an ancient Indian alphasyllabic numeral system to depict letters to numerals for easy remembrance of numbers as words or verses. Assigning more than one letter to one numeral and nullifying certain other letters as valueless, this system provides the flexibility in forming meaningful words out of numbers which can be easily remembered.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The 6800 ("sixty-eight hundred") is an 8-bit microprocessor designed and first manufactured by Motorola in 1974. The MC6800 microprocessor was part of the M6800 Microcomputer System that also included serial and parallel interface ICs, RAM, ROM and other support chips. A significant design feature was that the M6800 family of ICs required only a single five-volt power supply at a time when most other microprocessors required three voltages. The M6800 Microcomputer System was announced in March 1974 and was in full production by the end of that year.

The 6800 has a 16-bit address bus that can directly access 64 KB of memory and an 8-bit bi-directional data bus. It has 72 instructions with seven addressing modes for a total of 197 opcodes. The original MC6800 could have a clock frequency of up to 1 MHz. Later versions had a maximum clock frequency of 2 MHz.

In addition to the ICs, Motorola also provided a complete assembly language development system. The customer could use the software on a remote timeshare computer or on an in-house minicomputer system. The Motorola EXORciser was a desktop computer built with the M6800 ICs that could be used for prototyping and debugging new designs. An expansive documentation package included datasheets on all ICs, two assembly language programming manuals, and a 700-page application manual that showed how to design a point-of-sale terminal (a computerized cash register) around the 6800.

The 6800 was popular in computer peripherals, test equipment applications and point-of-sale terminals. It also found use in arcade games and pinball machines. The MC6802, introduced in 1977, included 128 bytes of RAM and an internal clock oscillator on chip. The MC6801 and MC6805 included RAM, ROM and I/O on a single chip and were popular in automotive applications. The Motorola 6809 was an updated compatible design.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Belarus

On 11 March 2022, Mark Izraylevich Bernstein (Russian: Марк Израйлевич Бернштейн), a Belarusian blogger and editor of the Russian-language Wikipedia based in Minsk, was detained by the Belarusian GUBOPiK security force after online accusations of violating the 2022 Russian fake news law for his editing of Wikipedia articles on the topic of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was sentenced to 15 days' administrative arrest under Article 24.3 of the Administrative Code of Belarus (for disobedience to police officers).

🔗 Literature

In literature, the competent man is a stock character who exhibits a very wide range of abilities and knowledge, making him a form of polymath. While not the first to use such a character type, the heroes and heroines of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction (with Jubal Harshaw being a prime example) generally have a wide range of abilities, and one of Heinlein's characters, Lazarus Long, gives a wide summary of requirements:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

The competent man, more often than not, is written without explaining how he achieved his wide range of skills and abilities. When such characters are young, there is often not much explanation as to how they acquired so many skills at an early age.

🔗 Death 🔗 Italy 🔗 Hungary 🔗 Austria 🔗 Netherlands 🔗 Jewish history

A Stolperstein (pronounced [ˈʃtɔlpɐˌʃtaɪn] (listen); plural Stolpersteine; literally "stumbling stone", metaphorically a "stumbling block") is a sett-size, ten-centimetre (3.9 in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution.

The Stolpersteine project, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, aims to commemorate individuals at exactly the last place of residency—or, sometimes, work—which was freely chosen by the person before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror, euthanasia, eugenics, deportation to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of December 2019, 75,000 Stolpersteine have been laid, making the Stolpersteine project the world's largest decentralized memorial.

The majority of Stolpersteine commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Others have been placed for Sinti and Romani people (then also called "gypsies"), homosexuals, the physically or mentally disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses, black people, members of the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the anti-Nazi Resistance, the Christian opposition (both Protestants and Catholics), and Freemasons, along with International Brigade soldiers in the Spanish Civil War, military deserters, conscientious objectors, escape helpers, capitulators, "habitual criminals", looters, and others charged with treason, military disobedience, or undermining the Nazi military, as well as Allied soldiers.