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🔗 Video games

.kkrieger (from Krieger, German for warrior) is a first-person shooter video game created by German demogroup .theprodukkt (a former subdivision of Farbrausch), which won first place in the 96k game competition at Breakpoint in April 2004. The game remains a beta version as of 2019.

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This is a list of common misconceptions. Each entry is formatted as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are meant to be concise, but more detail can be found in the main subject articles.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Festivals

Pi Day is an annual celebration of the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14 (3/14 in the month/day format) since 3, 1, and 4 are the first three significant digits of π. In 2009, the United States House of Representatives supported the designation of Pi Day. UNESCO's 40th General Conference decided Pi Day as the International Day of Mathematics in November 2019.

Pi Approximation Day is observed on July 22 (22/7 in the day/month format), since the fraction ​²²⁄₇ is a common approximation of π, which is accurate to two decimal places and dates from Archimedes.

Two Pi Day, also known as Tau Day for the mathematical constant Tau, is observed on June 28 (6/28 in the month/day format).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Economics 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Cybernetics 🔗 Chile

Project Cybersyn was a Chilean project from 1971–1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende aimed at constructing a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that were linked to one mainframe computer.

Project Cybersyn was based on viable system model theory approach to organizational design, and featured innovative technology for its time: it included a network of telex machines (Cybernet) in state-run enterprises that would transmit and receive information with the government in Santiago. Information from the field would be fed into statistical modeling software (Cyberstride) that would monitor production indicators, such as raw material supplies or high rates of worker absenteeism, in "almost" real time, alerting the workers in the first case and, in abnormal situations, if those parameters fell outside acceptable ranges by a very large degree, also the central government. The information would also be input into economic simulation software (CHECO, for CHilean ECOnomic simulator) that the government could use to forecast the possible outcome of economic decisions. Finally, a sophisticated operations room (Opsroom) would provide a space where managers could see relevant economic data, formulate feasible responses to emergencies, and transmit advice and directives to enterprises and factories in alarm situations by using the telex network.

The principal architect of the system was British operations research scientist Stafford Beer, and the system embodied his notions of organisational cybernetics in industrial management. One of its main objectives was to devolve decision-making power within industrial enterprises to their workforce in order to develop self-regulation of factories.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

Benford's law, also called the Newcomb–Benford law, the law of anomalous numbers, or the first-digit law, is an observation about the frequency distribution of leading digits in many real-life sets of numerical data. The law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading significant digit is likely to be small. For example, in sets that obey the law, the number 1 appears as the leading significant digit about 30% of the time, while 9 appears as the leading significant digit less than 5% of the time. If the digits were distributed uniformly, they would each occur about 11.1% of the time. Benford's law also makes predictions about the distribution of second digits, third digits, digit combinations, and so on.

The graph to the right shows Benford's law for base 10. There is a generalization of the law to numbers expressed in other bases (for example, base 16), and also a generalization from leading 1 digit to leading n digits.

It has been shown that this result applies to a wide variety of data sets, including electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, house prices, population numbers, death rates, lengths of rivers, physical and mathematical constants. Like other general principles about natural data—for example the fact that many data sets are well approximated by a normal distribution—there are illustrative examples and explanations that cover many of the cases where Benford's law applies, though there are many other cases where Benford's law applies that resist a simple explanation. It tends to be most accurate when values are distributed across multiple orders of magnitude, especially if the process generating the numbers is described by a power law (which are common in nature).

It is named after physicist Frank Benford, who stated it in 1938 in a paper titled "The Law of Anomalous Numbers", although it had been previously stated by Simon Newcomb in 1881.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Poetry

"Black Perl" is a code poem written using the Perl programming language. It was posted anonymously to Usenet on April 1, 1990, and is popular among Perl programmers as a piece of Perl poetry. Written in Perl 3, the poem is able to be executed as a program.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages

White Coke (Russian: Бесцветная кока-кола, tr. Bestsvetnaya koka-kola, lit. "colorless Coca-Cola") is a nickname for a clear variant of Coca-Cola produced in the 1940s at the request of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov. Like other clear colas, it was of the same original flavor, virtually unchanged by the absence of caramel coloring.

🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment

The Onion Futures Act is a United States law banning the trading of futures contracts on onions as well as "motion picture box office receipts".

In 1955, two onion traders, Sam Siegel and Vincent Kosuga, cornered the onion futures market on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The resulting regulatory actions led to the passing of the act on August 28, 1958. As of January 2020, it remains in effect.

🔗 Death 🔗 Statistics

A micromort (from micro- and mortality) is a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death. Micromorts can be used to measure riskiness of various day-to-day activities. A microprobability is a one-in-a million chance of some event; thus a micromort is the microprobability of death. The micromort concept was introduced by Ronald A. Howard who pioneered the modern practice of decision analysis.

Micromorts for future activities can only be rough assessments as specific circumstances will always have an impact. However past historical rates of events can be used to provide a ball park, average figure.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Organizations 🔗 Game theory

Braess' paradox is the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it. The paradox was postulated in 1968 by German mathematician Dietrich Braess, who noticed that adding a road to a particular congested road traffic network would increase overall journey time.

The paradox may have analogies in electrical power grids and biological systems. It has been suggested that in theory, the improvement of a malfunctioning network could be accomplished by removing certain parts of it. The paradox has been used to explain instances of improved traffic flow when existing major roads are closed.