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🔗 Computing

Koomey's law describes a trend in the history of computing hardware: for about a half-century, the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated doubled about every 1.57 years. Professor Jonathan Koomey described the trend in a 2010 paper in which he wrote that "at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half."

This trend had been remarkably stable since the 1950s (R² of over 98%). But in 2011, Koomey re-examined this data and found that after 2000, the doubling slowed to about once every 2.6 years. This is related to the slowing of Moore's Law, the ability to build smaller transistors; and the end around 2005 of Dennard scaling, the ability to build smaller transistors with constant power density.

"The difference between these two growth rates is substantial. A doubling every year and a half results in a 100-fold increase in efficiency every decade. A doubling every two and a half years yields just a 16-fold increase", Koomey wrote.

🔗 Books 🔗 Writing systems

An abecedarium (also known as an abecedary or ABCs or simply an ABC) is an inscription consisting of the letters of an alphabet, almost always listed in order. Typically, abecedaria (or abecedaries) are practice exercises.

🔗 Sexology and sexuality 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/History 🔗 Japan/Culture 🔗 Japan/Law and government 🔗 Gender Studies 🔗 Sexology and sexuality/Sex work

Prostitution in modern Japan, as defined under Japanese law, is the illegal practice of sexual intercourse with an 'unspecified' (unacquainted) person in exchange for monetary compensation, which was criminalised in 1956 by the introduction of article 3 of the Anti-Prostitution Law (売春防止法, Baishun bōshi hō). However, the definition of prostitution made illegal under this law is strictly limited to sexual intercourse with an 'unspecified person', and does not criminalise the sale of numerous other acts performed by sex workers in exchange for compensation, such as oral sex, anal sex, mammary intercourse, and other non-coital sex acts; the Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Law of 1948 (風俗営業取締法, Fūzoku eigyō torishimari hō), also known as the "Law to Regulate Adult Entertainment Businesses", amended in 1985, 1999 and 2005, regulates these businesses, making only one definition of prostitution in Japan illegal.

Following the criminalisation of payment for sexual intercourse, the sex industry in Japan has developed into a number of varied businesses and offering services not prohibited under Japanese law. These fall into a number of categories known by various euphemistic names, such as soaplands, fashion health shops, and pink salons, with the term "health" commonly being a euphemism for sexual services. These businesses typically operate out of physical premises, either with their own employees or freelancers such as call girls, who may operate via Internet dating sites known as deai sites (Internet dating sites) or via delivery health services.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Sociology

In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and "wicked" denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil. Another definition is "a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point". Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.

The phrase was originally used in social planning. Its modern sense was introduced in 1967 by C. West Churchman in a guest editorial Churchman wrote in the journal Management Science, responding to a previous use of the term by Horst Rittel. Churchman discussed the moral responsibility of operations research "to inform the manager in what respect our 'solutions' have failed to tame his wicked problems". Rittel and Melvin M. Webber formally described the concept of wicked problems in a 1973 treatise, contrasting "wicked" problems with relatively "tame", soluble problems in mathematics, chess, or puzzle solving.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Belgium 🔗 Military history/European military history

The Wire of Death (Dutch: Dodendraad, German: Todesdraht) was a lethal electric fence created by the German military to control the Dutch–Belgian frontier during the occupation of Belgium during the First World War.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Japan

Gate Tower Building (ゲートタワービル, gēto tawā biru) is a 16 floor office building in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, Japan. It is notable for the highway offramp at Umeda Exit that passes through the building.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Business 🔗 Computing/Software

The bus factor is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from the phrase "in case they get hit by a bus." It is also known as the bread truck scenario, lottery factor, truck factor, bus/truck number, or lorry factor.

The concept is similar to the much older idea of key person risk, but considers the consequences of losing key technical experts, versus financial or managerial executives (who are theoretically replaceable at an insurable cost). Personnel must be both key and irreplaceable to contribute to the bus factor; losing a replaceable or non-key person would not result in a bus-factor effect.

The term was first applied to software development, where a team member might create critical components by crafting code that performs well, but which also is unavailable to other team members, such as work that was undocumented, never shared, encrypted, obfuscated, unpublished, or otherwise incomprehensible to others. Thus a key component would be effectively lost as a direct consequence of the absence of that team member, making the member key. If this component was key to the project's advancement, the project would stall.

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

The Siege of Caffa was a 14th-century military encounter when Jani Beg of the Golden Horde sieged the city of Caffa, (today Feodosia) between two periods in the 1340s. The city of Caffa, a Genoese colony, was a vital trading hub located in Crimea. The city was then part of Gazaria, a group of seven ports located in Crimea and belonging to the maritime empire of the Republic of Genoa. The event is historically significant primarily because it is believed to be one of the earliest instances of biological warfare.

The siege of Caffa was characterized by intense military tactics from both sides. After several years of siege, the armies of the Horde were forced to withdraw. The siege is famous for a story recounted by Italian notary Gabriel de Mussis, which attributed the subsequent spread of the Black Death to plague-infested corpses having been launched over the walls at the end of the siege.

🔗 Spaceflight

Quindar tones, most often referred to as the "beeps" that were heard during the American Apollo space missions, were a means by which remote transmitters on Earth were turned on and off so that the capsule communicator (CapCom) could communicate with the crews of the spacecraft. It was a means of in-band signaling to simulate the action of the push-to-talk and release-to-listen (often referred to as PTT) button commonly found on two-way radio systems and walkie-talkies.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Cats

Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology, which in the 1960s intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. In an hour-long procedure a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat's ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull and a thin wire into its fur.

This would allow the cat to innocuously record and transmit sound from its surroundings. Due to problems with distraction, the cat's sense of hunger had to be addressed in another operation. Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, said Project Acoustic Kitty cost about $20 million.

The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately. However, this was disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former Director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, who said that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and "the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards". Subsequent tests also failed. Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss. However, other accounts report more success for the project.

The project was cancelled in 1967. A closing memorandum said that the CIA researchers believed that they could train cats to move short distances, but that "the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that for our (intelligence) purposes, it would not be practical." The project was disclosed in 2001, when some CIA documents were declassified.