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🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Books

Proofs from THE BOOK is a book of mathematical proofs by Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler. The book is dedicated to the mathematician Paul Erdős, who often referred to "The Book" in which God keeps the most elegant proof of each mathematical theorem. During a lecture in 1985, Erdős said, "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book."

🔗 Sociology 🔗 Finland

Wiio's laws are humoristically formulated observations about how humans communicate.

Wiio's laws are usually summarized with "Human communications usually fail except by accident", which is the main observation made by Professor Osmo Antero Wiio in 1978.

🔗 Portugal 🔗 Japan 🔗 Glossaries

Many Japanese words of Portuguese origin entered the Japanese language when Portuguese Jesuit priests introduced Christian ideas, Western science, technology and new products to the Japanese during the Muromachi period (15th and 16th centuries).

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Japan and the first to establish direct trade between Japan and Europe, in 1543. During the 16th and 17th century, Portuguese Jesuits had undertaken a great work of Catechism, that ended only with religious persecution in the early Edo period (Tokugawa Shogunate). The Portuguese were the first to translate Japanese to a Western language, in the Nippo Jisho (日葡辞書, literally the "Japanese-Portuguese Dictionary") or Vocabulario da Lingoa de Iapam compiled by Portuguese Jesuit João Rodrigues, and published in Nagasaki in 1603, who also wrote a grammar Arte da Lingoa de Iapam (日本大文典, nihon daibunten). The dictionary of Japanese-Portuguese explained 32,000 Japanese words translated into Portuguese. Most of these words refer to the products and customs that first came to Japan via the Portuguese traders.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Cognitive science

In the field of social psychology, illusory superiority is a condition of cognitive bias wherein a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities, in relation to the same qualities and abilities of other people. Illusory superiority is one of many positive illusions, relating to the self, that are evident in the study of intelligence, the effective performance of tasks and tests, and the possession of desirable personal characteristics and personality traits. Overestimation of abilities compared to an objective measure is known as the overconfidence effect.

The term illusory superiority was first used by the researchers Van Yperen and Buunk, in 1991. The phenomenon is also known as the above-average effect, the superiority bias, the leniency error, the sense of relative superiority, the primus inter pares effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect, named after the fictional town where all the children are above average. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a form of illusory superiority shown by people on a task where their level of skill is low.

A vast majority of the literature on illusory superiority originates from studies on participants in the United States. However, research that only investigates the effects in one specific population is severely limited as this may not be a true representation of human psychology. More recent research investigating self-esteem in other countries suggests that illusory superiority depends on culture. Some studies indicate that East Asians tend to underestimate their own abilities in order to improve themselves and get along with others.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Star Trek

Alto Trek is a computer game, developed by Gene Ball and Rick Rashid for the Xerox Alto while they were graduate students at the University of Rochester during the late 1970s. It is one of the first networked multiplayer games.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Mythology

Glycon (Ancient Greek: Γλύκων Glýkōn, gen: Γλύκωνος Glýkōnos), also spelled Glykon, was an ancient snake god. He had a large and influential cult within the Roman Empire in the 2nd century, with contemporary satirist Lucian providing the primary literary reference to the deity. Lucian claimed Glycon was created in the mid-2nd century by the Greek prophet Alexander of Abonoteichos. Lucian was ill-disposed toward the cult, calling Alexander a false prophet and accusing the whole enterprise of being a hoax: Glycon himself was supposedly a hand puppet.

🔗 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.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 C/C++ 🔗 C/C++/C

Cairo (stylized as cairo) is an open-source graphics library that provides a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It provides primitives for two-dimensional drawing across a number of different back ends. Cairo uses hardware acceleration when available.