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🔗 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.

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/French military history 🔗 Military history/Napoleonic era 🔗 Military history/European military history

Tarrare (c. 1772 – 1798), sometimes spelled Tarare, was a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual eating habits. Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry; his parents could not provide for him, and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He travelled France in the company of a band of thieves and prostitutes, before becoming the warm-up act to a travelling charlatan; he would swallow corks, stones, live animals and a whole basketful of apples. He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer.

At the start of the War of the First Coalition, Tarrare joined the French Revolutionary Army. With military rations, though quadrupled, unable to satisfy his large appetite, he would eat any available food from gutters and refuse heaps but his condition still deteriorated through hunger. He was hospitalised due to exhaustion and became the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his eating capacity, in which, among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing. Despite his unusual diet, he was of normal size and appearance, and showed no signs of mental illness other than what was described as an apathetic temperament.

General Alexandre de Beauharnais decided to put Tarrare's abilities to military use, and he was employed as a courier by the French army, with the intention that he would swallow documents, pass through enemy lines, and recover them from his stool once safely at his destination. Tarrare could not speak German, and on his first mission was captured by Prussian forces, severely beaten and underwent a mock execution before being returned to French lines.

Chastened by this experience, he agreed to submit to any procedure that would cure his appetite, and was treated with laudanum, tobacco pills, wine vinegar and soft-boiled eggs. The procedures failed, and doctors could not keep him on a controlled diet; he would sneak out of the hospital to scavenge for offal in gutters, rubbish heaps and outside butchers' shops, and attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital and to eat the corpses in the hospital morgue. After being suspected of eating a toddler he was ejected from the hospital. He reappeared four years later in Versailles with a case of severe tuberculosis, and died shortly afterwards, following a lengthy bout of exudative diarrhoea.

A galactic algorithm is one that runs faster than any other algorithm for problems that are sufficiently large, but where "sufficiently large" is so big that the algorithm is never used in practice. Galactic algorithms were so named by Richard Lipton and Ken Regan, as they will never be used on any of the merely terrestrial data sets we find here on Earth.

An example of a galactic algorithm is the fastest known way to multiply two numbers, which is based on a 1729-dimensional Fourier transform. This means it will not reach its stated efficiency until the numbers have at least 2¹⁷²⁹¹² bits (at least 10¹⁰³⁸ digits), which is vastly larger than the number of atoms in the known universe. So this algorithm is never used in practice.

Despite the fact that they will never be used, galactic algorithms may still contribute to computer science:

• An algorithm, even if impractical, may show new techniques that may eventually be used to create practical algorithms.
• Computer sizes may catch up to the crossover point, so that a previously impractical algorithm becomes practical.
• An impractical algorithm can still demonstrate that conjectured bounds can be achieved, or alternatively show that conjectured bounds are wrong. As Lipton says "This alone could be important and often is a great reason for finding such algorithms. For example, if tomorrow there were a discovery that showed there is a factoring algorithm with a huge but provably polynomial time bound, that would change our beliefs about factoring. The algorithm might never be used, but would certainly shape the future research into factoring." Similarly, a ${\displaystyle O\left(n^{2^{100}}\right)}$ algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem, although unusable in practice, would settle the P versus NP problem, the most important open problem in computer science and one of the Millennium Prize Problems.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Languages 🔗 Medicine/Neurology

The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words. The effect has been observed in American university students, Tamil speakers in India, young children, and infants, and has also been shown to occur with familiar names. It is absent in individuals who are congenitally blind and reduced in autistic individuals. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018.

🔗 Chemistry

Dry water , an unusual form of "powdered liquid", is a water–air emulsion in which tiny water droplets, each the size of a grain of sand, are surrounded by a sandy silica coating. Dry water actually consists of 95% liquid water, but the silica coating prevents the water droplets from combining and turning back into a bulk liquid. The result is a white powder that looks very similar to table salt. It is also more commonly known among researchers as empty water.

🔗 Books

IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation is a book by investigative journalist Edwin Black which details the business dealings of the American-based multinational corporation International Business Machines (IBM) and its German and other European subsidiaries with the government of Adolf Hitler during the 1930s and the years of World War II. In the book, published in 2001, Black outlined the way in which IBM's technology helped facilitate Nazi genocide through generation and tabulation of punch cards based upon national census data.

🔗 Education

TRIZ (; Russian: теория решения изобретательских задач, teoriya resheniya izobretatelskikh zadatch, literally: "theory of the resolution of invention-related tasks") is "a problem-solving, analysis and forecasting tool derived from the study of patterns of invention in the global patent literature". It was developed by the Soviet inventor and science-fiction author Genrich Altshuller (1926-1998) and his colleagues, beginning in 1946. In English the name is typically rendered as "the theory of inventive problem solving", and occasionally goes by the English acronym TIPS.

Following Altshuller's insight, the theory developed on a foundation of extensive research covering hundreds of thousands of inventions across many different fields to produce a theory which defines generalisable patterns in the nature of inventive solutions and the distinguishing characteristics of the problems that these inventions have overcome.

An important part of the theory has been devoted to revealing patterns of evolution and one of the objectives which has been pursued by leading practitioners of TRIZ has been the development of an algorithmic approach to the invention of new systems, and to the refinement of existing ones.

TRIZ includes a practical methodology, tool sets, a knowledge base, and model-based technology for generating innovative solutions for problem solving. It is useful for problem formulation, system analysis, failure analysis, and patterns of system evolution. There is a general similarity of purposes and methods with the field of pattern language, a cross discipline practice for explicitly describing and sharing holistic patterns of design.

The research has produced three primary findings:

1. problems and solutions are repeated across industries and sciences
2. patterns of technical evolution are also repeated across industries and sciences
3. the innovations used scientific effects outside the field in which they were developed

TRIZ practitioners apply all these findings in order to create and to improve products, services, and systems.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Literature 🔗 Russia/performing arts in Russia 🔗 Russia/language and literature of Russia

Chekhov's gun (Russian: Чеховское ружьё) is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. Elements should not appear to make "false promises" by never coming into play. The statement is recorded in letters by Anton Chekhov several times, with some variation:

• "Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."
• "One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep." Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev (pseudonym of A. S. Gruzinsky), 1 November 1889. Here the "gun" is a monologue that Chekhov deemed superfluous and unrelated to the rest of the play.
• "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." From Gurlyand's Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No. 28, 11 July, p. 521.

Ernest Hemingway mocked the interpretation given by English instructors to the principle. He gives in his essay "The Art of the Short Story" an example of two characters that are introduced and then never again mentioned in his short story "Fifty Grand". Hemingway valued inconsequential details, but conceded that readers will inevitably seek symbolism and significance in these inconsequential details.

🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 Computing 🔗 Chess 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Robotics 🔗 Stanford University

John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized time-sharing, invented garbage collection, and was very influential in the early development of AI.

McCarthy spent most of his career at Stanford University. He received many accolades and honors, such as the 1971 Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize.