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🔗 Organizations 🔗 Engineering

The Iron Ring is a ring worn by many Canadian-trained engineers, as a symbol and reminder of the obligations and ethics associated with their profession. The ring is presented to engineering graduates in a private ceremony known as the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer. The concept of the ritual and its Iron Rings originated from H. E. T. Haultain in 1922, with assistance from Rudyard Kipling, who crafted the ritual at Haultain's request.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Australia/Western Australia 🔗 Australia/Australian biota 🔗 Spiders

Number 16 (c. 1974 – 2016), also known as #16, was a wild female trapdoor spider (Gaius villosus, family Idiopidae) that lived in North Bungulla Reserve near Tammin, Western Australia. She lived an estimated 43 years and became the longest-lived spider on record, beating a 28-year-old tarantula who previously held the title. When Number 16 finally died in 2016, it was not of old age but from a parasitic wasp sting.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Philosophy/Modern philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics 🔗 Philosophy/Analytic philosophy 🔗 Folklore

In the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The concept is one of the oldest in Western philosophy, having been discussed by the likes of Heraclitus and Plato by ca. 500-400 BC.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Military history/World War II

112 Gripes About the French was a 1945 handbook issued by the United States military authorities to enlisted personnel arriving in France after the Liberation. It was meant to defuse the growing tension between the American military and the locals.

The euphoria of victory over Germany was short-lived, and within months of Liberation, tensions began to rise between the French and the U.S. military personnel stationed in the country, with the former seeing the latter as arrogant and wanting to flaunt their wealth, and the latter seeing the former as proud and resentful. Fights were breaking out more often, and fears were raised, even among high officials, that the situation might eventually lead to a breakdown of civil order.

Set out in a question-and-answer format, 112 Gripes about the French posed a series of well-rehearsed complaints about the French, and then provided a common-sense rejoinder to each of them — the aim of the authors being to bring the average American soldier to a fuller understanding of his hosts.

It has recently been republished in the United States (ISBN 1-4191-6512-7), and in France under the title "Nos amis les Français" ("Our friends the French"), ISBN 2-7491-0128-X.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

In the context of Unix-like systems, the term rc stands for the phrase "run commands". It is used for any file that contains startup information for a command. It is believed to have originated sometime in 1965 at a runcom facility from the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).

From Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie:

There was a facility that would execute a bunch of commands stored in a file; it was called runcom for "run commands", and the file began to be called "a runcom". rc in Unix is a fossil from that usage.

Tom Van Vleck, a Multics engineer, has also reminisced about the extension rc: "The idea of having the command processing shell be an ordinary slave program came from the Multics design, and a predecessor program on CTSS by Louis Pouzin called RUNCOM, the source of the '.rc' suffix on some Unix configuration files."

This is also the origin of the name of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs shell by Tom Duff, the rc shell. It is called "rc" because the main job of a shell is to "run commands".

While not historically precise, rc may also be expanded as "run control", because an rc file controls how a program runs. For instance, the editor Vim looks for and reads the contents of the .vimrc file to determine its initial configuration. In The Art of Unix Programming, Eric S. Raymond consistently refers to rc files as "run-control" files.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Statistics

The St. Petersburg paradox or St. Petersburg lottery is a paradox related to probability and decision theory in economics. It is based on a particular (theoretical) lottery game that leads to a random variable with infinite expected value (i.e., infinite expected payoff) but nevertheless seems to be worth only a very small amount to the participants. The St. Petersburg paradox is a situation where a naive decision criterion which takes only the expected value into account predicts a course of action that presumably no actual person would be willing to take. Several resolutions are possible.

The paradox takes its name from its resolution by Daniel Bernoulli, one-time resident of the eponymous Russian city, who published his arguments in the Commentaries of the Imperial Academy of Science of Saint Petersburg (Bernoulli 1738). However, the problem was invented by Daniel's cousin, Nicolas Bernoulli, who first stated it in a letter to Pierre Raymond de Montmort on September 9, 1713 (de Montmort 1713).

🔗 United States 🔗 Telecommunications

Area code 710 is a special area code, reserved to the federal government of the United States in 1983. As of December 2006, it had only one working number, 710-NCS-GETS (710-627-4387), which requires a special access code to use.

See Government Emergency Telecommunications Service for more information on this service.

🔗 Game theory

The pirate game is a simple mathematical game. It is a multi-player version of the ultimatum game.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.