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🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

The paradox of hedonism, also called the pleasure paradox, refers to the practical difficulties encountered in the pursuit of pleasure. For the hedonist, constant pleasure-seeking may not yield the most actual pleasure or happiness in the long run—or even in the short run, when consciously pursuing pleasure interferes with experiencing it.

The utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick was first to note in The Methods of Ethics that the paradox of hedonism is that pleasure cannot be acquired directly. Variations on this theme appear in the realms of ethics, philosophy, psychology, and economics.

🔗 Judaism

Sabbath mode, also known as Shabbos mode (Ashkenazi pronunciation) or Shabbat mode, is a feature in many modern home appliances, including ovens and refrigerators, which is intended to allow the appliances to be used (subject to various constraints) by Shabbat-observant Jews on the Shabbat and Jewish holidays. The mode usually overrides the usual, everyday operation of the electrical appliance and makes the operation of the appliance comply with the rules of Halakha (Jewish law).

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar".

Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150. Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

Dunbar theorised that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size [...] the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained". On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint himself or herself if they met again.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Lists 🔗 Computing/Networking

This is a list of interface bit rates, is a measure of information transfer rates, or digital bandwidth capacity, at which digital interfaces in a computer or network can communicate over various kinds of buses and channels. The distinction can be arbitrary between a computer bus, often closer in space, and larger telecommunications networks. Many device interfaces or protocols (e.g., SATA, USB, SAS, PCIe) are used both inside many-device boxes, such as a PC, and one-device-boxes, such as a hard drive enclosure. Accordingly, this page lists both the internal ribbon and external communications cable standards together in one sortable table.

🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Assyria 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Project-independent assessment 🔗 Intertranswiki/OKA

The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld (or, in its Akkadian version, Descent of Ishtar into the Underworld) or Angalta ("From the Great Sky") is a Sumerian myth that narrates the descent of the goddess Inanna (Ishtar in Akkadian) into the Underworld to overthrow its ruler, her sister Ereshkigal, the "Queen of the Dead." But following the removal of her adornments, she perishes and her corpse is suspended on a nail. The god Enki intervenes indirectly, restoring Inanna to life. However, on her return journey, Inanna is required to deliver another living human in exchange for her freedom. She selects Dumuzi, her spouse, who is abruptly transported to the Underworld. In response to the pleas of Dumuzi's sister, Geshtinanna, his circumstances are somewhat ameliorated: he is permitted to remain in the Underworld for only a portion of the year, with his sister assuming his role for the remaining duration.

The myth exists in two main versions: one in Sumerian and the other in Akkadian. The Akkadian version was first discovered and translated in the 1860s. The existence of the longer and older Sumerian version was first established in the early 20th century, but it required approximately fifty years for epigraphists to fully reconstruct and translate it.

The story of Descent of Inanna into the Underworld offers insights into Mesopotamian culture through its numerous characters and developed plot. The influence of this culture on subsequent civilizations is evident in the traces of Mesopotamian elements found in Greece, Phoenicia, and the Old Testament. In the 20th century, the story was used by some psychoanalysis theorists to illustrate psychic mechanisms.

🔗 Spaceflight

StarTram is a proposed space launch system propelled by maglev. The initial Generation 1 facility would launch cargo only, launching from a mountain peak at an altitude of 3 to 7 kilometres (1.9 to 4.3 mi) with an evacuated tube staying at local surface level; it has been claimed that about 150,000 tons could be lifted to orbit annually. More advanced technology would be required for the Generation 2 system for passengers, with a longer track instead gradually curving up at its end to the thinner air at 22 kilometres (14 mi) altitude, supported by magnetic levitation, reducing g-forces when each capsule transitions from the vacuum tube to the atmosphere. A SPESIF 2010 presentation stated that Generation 1 could be completed by the year 2020 or later if funding began in 2010, and Generation 2 by 2030 or later.

🔗 Ships

The Voith Schneider propeller (VSP), also known as a cycloidal drive is a specialized marine propulsion system (MPS). It is highly maneuverable, being able to change the direction of its thrust almost instantaneously. It is widely used on tugs and ferries.

🔗 Constructed languages 🔗 Graphic design

Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) is a method of showing social, technological, biological, and historical connections in pictorial form. It consists of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik), due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Social and Economic Museum of Vienna) between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. Gerd Arntz was the artist responsible for realising the graphics. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Networking

The fallacies of distributed computing are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.