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🔗 Technology 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Firearms

A synchronization gear, or a gun synchronizer, sometimes rather less accurately called an interrupter, is attached to the armament of a single-engine tractor-configuration aircraft so it can fire through the arc of its spinning propeller without bullets striking the blades. The idea presupposes a fixed armament directed by aiming the aircraft in which it is fitted at the target, rather than aiming the gun independently.

There are many practical problems, mostly arising from the inherently imprecise nature of an automatic gun's firing, the great (and varying) velocity of the blades of a spinning propeller, and the very high speed at which any gear synchronizing the two has to operate.

Design and experimentation with gun synchronization had been underway in France and Germany in 1913–1914, following the ideas of August Euler, who seems to have been the first to suggest mounting a fixed armament firing in the direction of flight (in 1910). However, the first practical—if far from reliable—gear to enter operational service was that fitted to the Eindecker monoplane fighters, which entered squadron service with the German Air Service in mid-1915. The success of the Eindecker led to numerous gun synchronization devices, culminating in the reasonably reliable hydraulic British Constantinesco gear of 1917. By the end of the war German engineers were well on the way to perfecting a gear using an electrical rather than a mechanical or hydraulic link between the engine and the gun, with the gun being triggered by a solenoid rather than by a mechanical "trigger motor".

From 1918 to the mid-1930s the standard armament for a fighter aircraft remained two synchronized rifle-calibre machine guns, firing forward through the arc of the propeller. During the late 1930s, however, the main role of the fighter was increasingly seen as the destruction of large, all-metal bombers, for which the "traditional" light armament was inadequate.

Since it was impractical to try to fit more than one or two extra guns in the limited space available in the front of a single-engine aircraft's fuselage, this led to an increasing proportion of the armament being mounted in the wings, firing outside the arc of the propeller. There were in fact some advantages in dispensing with centrally mounted guns altogether. Nevertheless, the conclusive redundancy of synchronization gears did not finally come until the introduction of jet propulsion and the absence of a propeller for guns to be synchronized with.

🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Chaos theory

The Burning Ship fractal, first described and created by Michael Michelitsch and Otto E. Rössler in 1992, is generated by iterating the function:

${\displaystyle z_{n+1}=(|\operatorname {Re} \left(z_{n}\right)|+i|\operatorname {Im} \left(z_{n}\right)|)^{2}+c,\quad z_{0}=0}$

in the complex plane ${\displaystyle \mathbb {C} }$ which will either escape or remain bounded. The difference between this calculation and that for the Mandelbrot set is that the real and imaginary components are set to their respective absolute values before squaring at each iteration. The mapping is non-analytic because its real and imaginary parts do not obey the Cauchy–Riemann equations.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Sociology

The Third Wave was an experimental social movement created by California high school history teacher Ron Jones in 1967 to explain how the German population could accept the actions of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. While he taught his students about Nazi Germany during his "Contemporary World History" class, Jones found it difficult to explain how the German people could accept the actions of the Nazis, and decided to create a social movement as a demonstration of the appeal of fascism. Over the course of five days, Jones – a member of the SDS, Cubberley United Student Movement sponsor and Black Panthers supporter – conducted a series of exercises in his classroom emphasizing discipline and community, intended to model certain characteristics of the Nazi movement. As the movement grew outside his class and began to number in the hundreds, Jones began to feel that the movement had spiraled out of control. He convinced the students to attend a rally where he claimed that the classroom project was part of a nationwide movement, and that the announcement of a Third Wave presidential candidate would be televised. Upon their arrival, the students were presented with a blank channel. Jones told his students of the true nature of the movement as an experiment in fascism, and presented to them a short film discussing the actions of Nazi Germany.

🔗 Video games

SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation is a management simulation video game, developed by Thinking Tools and published by Maxis with assistance from the Markle Foundation for MS-DOS in 1994. It is a simulation of the U.S. Healthcare system. The game was released during Congressional debates on the Clinton health care plan.

Due to the complexity of the game, SimHealth was seen as being very difficult. Armed with none of the tongue-in-cheek humor that Maxis's prior games were known for, the only real link to the franchise was the SimCity 2000-inspired user interface. The game was seen as more serious than other Maxis games. Noel Fritzinger, who with Lyman Orton first conceptualized CommunityViz, says that his inspiration came from seeing SimHealth and wondering if the same concepts could be applied to real-world land-use planning.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

"On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" (Russian: «О культе личности и его последствиях», romanized: “O kul'te lichnosti i yego posledstviyakh”) was a report by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, made to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 25 February 1956. Popularly known as the Secret Speech (Russian: секретный доклад Хрущёва, romanized: sekretnïy doklad Khrushcheva), this is something of a misnomer, as copies of the speech were read out at thousands of meetings of Communist Party and Komsomol organisations across the country. Khrushchev's speech was sharply critical of the rule of the deceased General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin, particularly with respect to the purges which had especially marked the last years of the 1930s. Khrushchev charged Stalin with having fostered a leadership cult of personality despite ostensibly maintaining support for the ideals of communism.

The speech was shocking in its day. There are reports that some of those present suffered heart attacks and that the speech even inspired suicides, due to the shock of all of Khrushchev's criticisms and condemnations of the government and the figure of Stalin. The ensuing confusion among many Soviet citizens, raised on panegyrics and permanent praise of the "genius" of Stalin, was especially apparent in Georgia, Stalin's homeland, where days of protests and rioting ended with a Soviet army crackdown on 9 March 1956. The speech was leaked to the West by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, which received it from the Polish-Jewish journalist Wiktor Grajewski. It politically devastated organised communists in the West; the Communist Party USA alone lost more than 30,000 members within weeks of its publication.

The speech helped give rise to the period of liberalisation known as the Khrushchev Thaw, and the process of de-Stalinization. It was cited as a major cause of the Sino-Soviet split by China (under Chairman Mao Zedong) and Albania (under First Secretary Enver Hoxha), who condemned Khrushchev as a revisionist. In response, they formed the anti-revisionist movement, criticizing the post-Stalin leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for allegedly deviating from the path of Lenin and Stalin. In North Korea, factions of the Workers' Party of Korea attempted to remove Chairman Kim Il Sung, criticizing him for not "correcting" his leadership methods, developing a personality cult, distorting the "Leninist principle of collective leadership" and "distortions of socialist legality" (i.e. using arbitrary arrest and executions) and using other Khrushchev-era criticisms of Stalinism against Kim Il Sung's leadership.

🔗 Glass 🔗 Photography

The Nikon F-mount is a type of interchangeable lens mount developed by Nikon for its 35mm format single-lens reflex cameras. The F-mount was first introduced on the Nikon F camera in 1959, and features a three-lug bayonet mount with a 44 mm throat and a flange to focal plane distance of 46.5 mm. The company continues, with the 2020 D6 model, to use variations of the same lens mount specification for its film and digital SLR cameras.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Worse is better, also called New Jersey style, was conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in an essay "Worse is better" to describe the dynamics of software acceptance, but it has broader application. It is the subjective idea that quality does not necessarily increase with functionality—that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability. Software that is limited, but simple to use, may be more appealing to the user and market than the reverse.

As to the oxymoronic title, Gabriel calls it a caricature, declaring the style bad in comparison with "The Right Thing". However he also states that "it has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing" development style and is superior to the "MIT Approach" with which he contrasted it in the original essay.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Bible 🔗 England

Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands, sometimes referred to as a slave bible, is an abbreviated version of the Bible specifically made for teaching a pro-slavery version of Christianity to enslaved people in the British West Indies.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Time

Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used specifically to refer to the French Republican calendar time system used in France from 1794 to 1800, during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds (100000 decimal seconds per day), as opposed to the more familiar standard time, which divides the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds (86400 SI seconds per day).

The main advantage of a decimal time system is that, since the base used to divide the time is the same as the one used to represent it, the representation of hours, minutes and seconds can be handled as a unified value. Therefore, it becomes simpler to interpret a timestamp and to perform conversions. For instance, 1^h23^m45^s is 1 decimal hour, 23 decimal minutes, and 45 decimal seconds, or 1.2345 decimal hours, or 123.45 decimal minutes or 12345 decimal seconds; 3 hours is 300 minutes or 30,000 seconds. This property also makes it straightforward to represent a timestamp as a fractional day, so that 2024-01-15.54321 can be interpreted as five decimal hours and 43 decimal minutes and 21 decimal seconds after the start of that day, or a fraction of 0.54321 (54.321%) through that day (which is shortly after traditional 13:00). It also adjusts well to digital time representation using epochs, in that the internal time representation can be used directly both for computation and for user-facing display.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Google

Google Sidewiki was a web annotation tool from Google, launched in September 2009 and discontinued in December 2011. Sidewiki was a browser extension that allowed anyone logged into a Google Account to make and view comments about a given website in a sidebar. Despite the name, the tool was not a collaborative wiki, though the comments were editable by the author.