To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 Biography

William Angus Wallace (born 31 October 1948) is a Scottish orthopaedic surgeon. He is Professor of Orthopaedic and Accident Surgery at the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences of the University of Nottingham. He came to widespread public notice for a life-saving surgery he performed using improvised equipment on a British Airways flight in 1995, and for treating Wayne Rooney before the 2006 FIFA World Cup.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Military history/Post-Cold War

The Poseidon (Russian: Посейдон, "Poseidon", NATO reporting name Kanyon), previously known by Russian codename Status-6 (Russian: Статус-6), is an autonomous, nuclear-powered, and nuclear-armed unmanned underwater vehicle under development by Rubin Design Bureau, capable of delivering both conventional and nuclear payloads.

The Poseidon is one of the six new Russian strategic weapons announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin on 1 March 2018.

🔗 Business

Topgrading is a corporate hiring and interviewing methodology that is intended to identify preferred candidates for a particular position. In the methodology, prospective employees undergo a 12-step process that includes extensive interviews, the creation of detailed job scorecards, research into job history, coaching, and more. After being interviewed and reference-checked, job candidates are grouped into one of three categories: A Players, B Players, or C Players. A Players have the most potential for high performance in their role while B and C Players may require more work to be successful. The methodology has been used by major corporations and organizations like General Electric, Lincoln Financial, Honeywell, Barclays, and the American Heart Association.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

"I know that I know nothing" is a saying derived from Plato's account of the Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates himself was never recorded as having said this phrase, and scholars generally agree that Socrates only ever asserted that he believed that he knew nothing, having never claimed that he knew that he knew nothing. It is also sometimes called the Socratic paradox, although this name is often instead used to refer to other seemingly paradoxical claims made by Socrates in Plato's dialogues (most notably, Socratic intellectualism and the Socratic fallacy).

This saying is also connected or conflated with the answer to a question Socrates (according to Xenophon) or Chaerephon (according to Plato) is said to have posed to the Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi, in which the oracle stated something to the effect of "Socrates is the wisest person in Athens." Socrates, believing the oracle but also completely convinced that he knew nothing, was said to have concluded that nobody knew anything, and that he was only wiser than others because he was the only person who recognized his own ignorance.

🔗 Physics

Certain systems can achieve negative thermodynamic temperature; that is, their temperature can be expressed as a negative quantity on the Kelvin or Rankine scales. This should be distinguished from temperatures expressed as negative numbers on non-thermodynamic Celsius or Fahrenheit scales, which are nevertheless higher than absolute zero.

The absolute temperature (Kelvin) scale can be understood loosely as a measure of average kinetic energy. Usually, system temperatures are positive. However, in particular isolated systems, the temperature defined in terms of Boltzmann's entropy can become negative.

The possibility of negative temperatures was first predicted by Lars Onsager in 1949, in his analysis of classical point vortices confined to a finite area. Confined point vortices are a system with bounded phase space as their canonical momenta are not independent degrees of freedom from their canonical position coordinates. Bounded phase space is the essential property that allows for negative temperatures, and such temperatures can occur in both classical and quantum systems. As shown by Onsager, a system with bounded phase space necessarily has a peak in the entropy as energy is increased. For energies exceeding the value where the peak occurs, the entropy decreases as energy increases, and high-energy states necessarily have negative Boltzmann temperature.

A system with a truly negative temperature on the Kelvin scale is hotter than any system with a positive temperature. If a negative-temperature system and a positive-temperature system come in contact, heat will flow from the negative- to the positive-temperature system. A standard example of such a system is population inversion in laser physics.

Temperature is loosely interpreted as the average kinetic energy of the system's particles. The existence of negative temperature, let alone negative temperature representing "hotter" systems than positive temperature, would seem paradoxical in this interpretation. The paradox is resolved by considering the more rigorous definition of thermodynamic temperature as the tradeoff between internal energy and entropy contained in the system, with "coldness", the reciprocal of temperature, being the more fundamental quantity. Systems with a positive temperature will increase in entropy as one adds energy to the system, while systems with a negative temperature will decrease in entropy as one adds energy to the system.

Thermodynamic systems with unbounded phase space cannot achieve negative temperatures: adding heat always increases their entropy. The possibility of a decrease in entropy as energy increases requires the system to "saturate" in entropy. This is only possible if the number of high energy states is limited. For a system of ordinary (quantum or classical) particles such as atoms or dust, the number of high energy states is unlimited (particle momenta can in principle be increased indefinitely). Some systems, however (see the examples below), have a maximum amount of energy that they can hold, and as they approach that maximum energy their entropy actually begins to decrease. The limited range of states accessible to a system with negative temperature means that negative temperature is associated with emergent ordering of the system at high energies. For example in Onsager's point-vortex analysis negative temperature is associated with the emergence of large-scale clusters of vortices. This spontaneous ordering in equilibrium statistical mechanics goes against common physical intuition that increased energy leads to increased disorder.

🔗 Transport 🔗 Trains

The Cosmopolitan Railway was a proposed global railroad network advocated by William Gilpin, formerly the first territorial governor of Colorado (1861–62), in his 1890 treatise Cosmopolitan Railway: Compacting and Fusing Together All the World's Continents. Gilpin named his capital city of Denver as the "railroad centre of the West".

🔗 Cognitive science

Soar is a cognitive architecture, originally created by John Laird, Allen Newell, and Paul Rosenbloom at Carnegie Mellon University. (Rosenbloom continued to serve as co-principal investigator after moving to Stanford University, then to the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.) It is now maintained and developed by John Laird's research group at the University of Michigan.

The goal of the Soar project is to develop the fixed computational building blocks necessary for general intelligent agents – agents that can perform a wide range of tasks and encode, use, and learn all types of knowledge to realize the full range of cognitive capabilities found in humans, such as decision making, problem solving, planning, and natural language understanding. It is both a theory of what cognition is and a computational implementation of that theory. Since its beginnings in 1983 as John Laird’s thesis, it has been widely used by AI researchers to create intelligent agents and cognitive models of different aspects of human behavior. The most current and comprehensive description of Soar is the 2012 book, The Soar Cognitive Architecture.

🔗 Espionage 🔗 Internet 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia

Russian web brigades, also called Russian trolls, Russian bots, or more recently Kremlin Bots (after the Kremlin in Moscow) / Kremlins (a pejorative allusion to Gremlin) are state-sponsored anonymous Internet political commentators and trolls linked to the Government of Russia. Participants report that they are organized into teams and groups of commentators that participate in Russian and international political blogs and Internet forums using sockpuppets, social bots and large-scale orchestrated trolling and disinformation campaigns to promote pro-Putin and pro-Russian propaganda. Articles on the Russian Wikipedia concerning the MH17 crash and the 2014 Ukraine conflict were targeted by Russian internet propaganda outlets.

🔗 International relations 🔗 France 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 Basque 🔗 Islands 🔗 Spain

Pheasant Island (French: Île des Faisans/Île de la Conférence, Spanish: Isla de los Faisanes, Basque: Konpantzia) is an uninhabited river island in the Bidasoa river, located between France and Spain, whose administration alternates between both nations.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Textile Arts 🔗 Aviation/airport

The carpet at Portland International Airport (PDX) in Portland, Oregon, featured geometric shapes on a teal background, representing the intersection of the north and south runways seen by air traffic controllers from the airport's tower at night. SRG Partnership designed it in 1987, and since then, the carpet has received much media attention.

In 2013, the Port of Portland announced the carpet's replacement with a new pattern conceptualized by the Portland-based firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects. The announcement generated a social media "phenomenon" and gained attention from local and national news outlets. Removal of the original carpet began in January 2015, with the airport recycling worn portions and making remaining pieces available for sale by local retail vendors.

In 2015, Portland Trail Blazers point guard Damian Lillard released his first PDX carpet colorway on the Adidas D Lillard 1 sneaker. In 2016, Lillard released the colorway on the D Lillard 2, also inspired by the carpet.

In February of 2022, it was announced that the iconic carpet would be returning to the airport when a new terminal opens in 2024.