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🔗 Biography 🔗 Medicine 🔗 New York City 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Pennsylvania 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Psychiatry 🔗 Pittsburgh 🔗 Newspapers

Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (born Elizabeth Jane Cochran; May 5, 1864 – January 27, 1922), better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and for an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within. She pioneered her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.

🔗 Internet culture

TSLAQ is a loose, international collective of largely anonymous short-sellers, skeptics, and researchers who openly criticize Tesla, Inc. and its CEO, Elon Musk. The group primarily organizes on Twitter, often using the $TSLAQ cashtag, and Reddit to coordinate efforts and share news, opinions, and analysis about the company and its stock. Edward Niedermeyer, in his book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors (2019), establishes the doxxing of Lawrence Fossi, a Seeking Alpha writer and Tesla short seller who uses the pseudonym Montana Skeptic, in July 2018 as the catalyst for the formation of TSLAQ. The group was the subject of a Real Vision video which included interviews with prominent members @TESLACharts and @Paul91701736.

TSLAQ highlights what they claim to be a variety of dangerous, deceptive, unlawful and fraudulent business practices by Tesla. Regular criticisms include knowingly selling Model S cars with a design flaw that could cause fires, reselling defective "lemon" cars, performing stealth recalls and requiring customers to sign non-disclosure agreements for "goodwill" repairs, issuing over-the-air updates to cover-up a fire risk in their batteries, publishing misleading safety statistics, delivering cars with lower-performance hardware than promised, taking months to issue customers refunds, and selling a Full Self-Driving package with the promise 1 million "robotaxis" by the end of 2020 despite the technology not yet being available. TSLAQ has also criticized Tesla and Musk for their attempts to intimidate and silence whistleblowers who have spoken out against the company. In addition, the group has highlighted Tesla's history of environmental violations, disregard for workers' safety, and Musk's excessive compensation package. As financial media producer Demetri Kofinas put it, TSLAQ believes Musk "to be a carnival barker running the biggest fraud in corporate America."

On occasion, TSLAQ has exchanged online verbal hostilities with Tesla fans and Elon Musk, who once tweeted with a prominent member and also tweeted personal information of another. While explicitly an online group, off-line activities performed by subgroups include aerial reconnaissance and on-the-ground observations of parking lots used by Tesla for storage.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Maps

Yahoo! Pipes was a web application from Yahoo! that provided a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. The application worked by enabling users to "pipe" information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified (for example, filtering). Other than the pipe editing page, the website had a documentation page and a discussion page. The documentation page contained information about pipes including guides for the pipe editor and troubleshooting. The discussion page enabled users to discuss the pipes with other users.

🔗 Computing

In computer storage, Bélády's anomaly is the phenomenon in which increasing the number of page frames results in an increase in the number of page faults for certain memory access patterns. This phenomenon is commonly experienced when using the first-in first-out (FIFO) page replacement algorithm. In FIFO, the page fault may or may not increase as the page frames increase, but in Optimal and stack-based algorithms like LRU, as the page frames increase the page fault decreases. László Bélády demonstrated this in 1969.

In common computer memory management, information is loaded in specific-sized chunks. Each chunk is referred to as a page. Main memory can hold only a limited number of pages at a time. It requires a frame for each page it can load. A page fault occurs when a page is not found, and might need to be loaded from disk into memory.

When a page fault occurs and all frames are in use, one must be cleared to make room for the new page. A simple algorithm is FIFO: whichever page has been in the frames the longest is the one that is cleared. Until Bélády's anomaly was demonstrated, it was believed that an increase in the number of page frames would always result in the same number of or fewer page faults.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Equine 🔗 Military history/Medieval warfare

The Great Stirrup Controversy is the academic debate about the Stirrup Thesis, the theory that feudalism in Europe developed largely as a result of the introduction of the stirrup to cavalry in the 8th century CE. It relates to the hypothesis suggested by Lynn Townsend White Jr. in his 1962 book, Medieval Technology and Social Change. White believed that the stirrup enabled heavy cavalry and shock combat, which in turn prompted the Carolingian dynasty of the 8th and 9th centuries to organize its territory into a vassalage system, rewarding mounted warriors with land grants for their service. White's book has proved very influential, but others have accused him of speculation, oversimplification, and ignoring contradictory evidence on the subject. Scholars have debated whether the stirrup actually provided the impetus for this social change, or whether the rise of heavy cavalry resulted from political changes in Medieval Europe.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Fortifications 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Military history/Balkan military history 🔗 Albania 🔗 Military history/European military history

Concrete military bunkers are a ubiquitous sight in Albania, with an average of 5.7 bunkers for every square kilometer (14.7 per square mile). The bunkers (Albanian: bunkerët) were built during the Hoxhaist government led by the Leader Enver Hoxha from the 1960s to the 1980s, as the government fortified Albania by building more than 750,000 bunkers.

Hoxha's program of "bunkerization" (bunkerizimi) resulted in the construction of bunkers in every corner of the then-People's Socialist Republic of Albania, ranging from mountain passes to city streets. They were never used for their intended purpose during the years that Hoxha governed. The cost of constructing them was a drain on Albania's resources, diverting them away from dealing with the country's housing shortage and poor roads.

The bunkers were abandoned following the dissolution of the communist government in 1992. A few were used in the Insurrection of 1997 and the Kosovo War of 1999. Most are now derelict, though some have been reused for a variety of purposes, including residential accommodation, cafés, storehouses, and shelters for animals or the homeless.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Military history/Classical warfare

Polybolos, meaning "multi thrower" in Greek, was an ancient Greek repeating ballista reputedly invented by Dionysius of Alexandria, a 3rd-century BC Greek engineer at the Rhodes arsenal, and used in antiquity.

Philo of Byzantium encountered and described a weapon similar to the polybolos, a catapult that like a modern machine gun could fire again and again without a need to reload. Philo left a detailed description of the gears that powered its chain drive, the oldest known application of such a mechanism, and that placed bolt after bolt into its firing slot.

🔗 Genetics 🔗 Evolutionary biology

Spiegelman's Monster is the name given to an RNA chain of only 218 nucleotides that is able to be reproduced by the RNA replication enzyme RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, also called RNA replicase. It is named after its creator, Sol Spiegelman, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who first described it in 1965.

🔗 Literature 🔗 Education 🔗 Reference works

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces are used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts. Each one is unique to its creator's particular interests but they almost always include passages found in other texts, sometimes accompanied by the compiler's responses. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.

"Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means "a general or common topic", such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton's example. Scholars now understand them to include manuscripts in which an individual collects material which have a common theme, such as ethics, or exploring several themes in one volume. Commonplace books are private collections of information, but they are not diaries or travelogues.

In 1685 the English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote a treatise in French on commonplace books, translated into English in 1706 as A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books, "in which techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches were formulated. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion. Commonplace books, it must be stressed, are not journals, which are chronological and introspective."

By the early eighteenth century they had become an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations and definitions. They were used in private households to collate ethical or informative texts, sometimes alongside recipes or medical formulae. For women, who were excluded from formal higher education, the commonplace book could be a repository of intellectual references. The gentlewoman Elizabeth Lyttelton kept one from the 1670s to 1713 and a typical example was published by Mrs Anna Jameson in 1855, including headings such as Ethical Fragments; Theological; Literature and Art. Commonplace books were used by scientists and other thinkers in the same way that a database might now be used: Carl Linnaeus, for instance, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae (which is the basis for the system used by scientists today). The commonplace book was often a lifelong habit: for example the English-Australian artist Georgina McCrae kept a commonplace book from 1828-1865.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Maps

The coastline paradox is the counterintuitive observation that the coastline of a landmass does not have a well-defined length. This results from the fractal curve-like properties of coastlines, i.e., the fact that a coastline typically has a fractal dimension (which in fact makes the notion of length inapplicable). The first recorded observation of this phenomenon was by Lewis Fry Richardson and it was expanded upon by Benoit Mandelbrot.

The measured length of the coastline depends on the method used to measure it and the degree of cartographic generalization. Since a landmass has features at all scales, from hundreds of kilometers in size to tiny fractions of a millimeter and below, there is no obvious size of the smallest feature that should be taken into consideration when measuring, and hence no single well-defined perimeter to the landmass. Various approximations exist when specific assumptions are made about minimum feature size.

The problem is fundamentally different from the measurement of other, simpler edges. It is possible, for example, to accurately measure the length of a straight, idealized metal bar by using a measurement device to determine that the length is less than a certain amount and greater than another amount—that is, to measure it within a certain degree of uncertainty. The more accurate the measurement device, the closer results will be to the true length of the edge. When measuring a coastline, however, the closer measurement does not result in an increase in accuracy—the measurement only increases in length; unlike with the metal bar, there is no way to obtain a maximum value for the length of the coastline.

In three-dimensional space, the coastline paradox is readily extended to the concept of fractal surfaces whereby the area of a surface varies, depending on the measurement resolution.