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🔗 Geography 🔗 Maps

The Peirce quincuncial projection is a conformal map projection developed by Charles Sanders Peirce in 1879. The projection has the distinctive property that it can be tiled ad infinitum on the plane, with edge-crossings being completely smooth except for four singular points per tile. The projection has seen use in digital photography for portraying 360° views. The description quincuncial refers to the arrangement of four quadrants of the globe around the center hemisphere in an overall square pattern. Typically the projection is oriented such that the north pole lies at the center.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Systems 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Systems/Software engineering

From its beginnings in the 1960s, writing software has evolved into a profession concerned with how best to maximize the quality of software and of how to create it. Quality can refer to how maintainable software is, to its stability, speed, usability, testability, readability, size, cost, security, and number of flaws or "bugs", as well as to less measurable qualities like elegance, conciseness, and customer satisfaction, among many other attributes. How best to create high quality software is a separate and controversial problem covering software design principles, so-called "best practices" for writing code, as well as broader management issues such as optimal team size, process, how best to deliver software on time and as quickly as possible, work-place "culture", hiring practices, and so forth. All this falls under the broad rubric of software engineering.

🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Singapore

"Disneyland with the Death Penalty" is a 4,500-word article about Singapore written by William Gibson. His first major piece of non-fiction, it was first published as the cover story for Wired magazine's September/October 1993 issue (1.4).

The article follows Gibson's observations of the architecture, phenomenology and culture of Singapore, and the clean, bland and conformist impression the city-state conveys during his stay. Its title and central metaphor—Singapore as Disneyland with the death penalty—is a reference to the authoritarian artifice the author perceives the city-state to be. Singapore, Gibson details, is lacking any sense of creativity or authenticity, absent of any indication of its history or underground culture. He finds the government to be pervasive, corporatist and technocratic, and the judicial system rigid and draconian. Singaporeans are characterized as consumerists of insipid taste. The article is accentuated by local news reports of criminal trials by which the author illustrates his observations, and bracketed by contrasting descriptions of the Southeast Asian airports he arrives and leaves by.

Though Gibson's first major piece of non-fiction, the article had an immediate and lasting impact. The Singaporean government banned Wired upon the publication of the issue. The phrase "Disneyland with the death penalty" came to stand internationally for an authoritarian and austere reputation that the city-state found difficult to shake off.

🔗 Chess

Los Alamos chess (or anti-clerical chess) is a chess variant played on a 6×6 board without bishops. This was the first chess-like game played by a computer program. This program was written at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory by Paul Stein and Mark Wells for the MANIAC I computer in 1956. The reduction of the board size and the number of pieces from standard chess was due to the very limited capacity of computers at the time.

The program was very simple, containing only about 600 instructions. It was mostly a minimax tree search and could look four plies ahead. For scoring the board at the end of the four-ply lookahead, it estimates a score for material and a score for mobility, then adds them up. Pseudocode for the chess program is described in Figure 11.4 of Newell, 2019. In 1958, a revised version was written for MANIAC II for full 8×8 chess, though its pseudocode was never published. There is a record of a single game by it, circa November 1958 (Table 11.2 of Newell, 2019).

The sulfur lamp (also sulphur lamp) is a highly efficient full-spectrum electrodeless lighting system whose light is generated by sulfur plasma that has been excited by microwave radiation. They are a particular type of plasma lamp, and one of the most modern. The technology was developed in the early 1990s, but, although it appeared initially to be very promising, sulfur lighting was a commercial failure by the late 1990s. Since 2005, lamps are again being manufactured for commercial use.

🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Trade 🔗 Micronesia 🔗 Micronesia/Federated States of Micronesia

The Micronesian island of Yap is known for its stone money, known as Rai (Yapese: raay), or Fei: large doughnut-shaped, carved disks of (usually) calcite, up to 4 m (13 ft) in diameter (most are much smaller). The smallest can be as little as 3.5 centimetres (1.4 in) in diameter. There are around 6,000 of the large, circular stone disks carved out of limestone formed from aragonite and calcite crystals. Rai stones were quarried on several of the Micronesian islands, mainly Palau, but briefly on Guam as well, and transported to Yap for use as money. They have been used in trade by the Yapese as a form of currency.

The monetary system of Yap relies on an oral history of ownership. In the case of stones that are too large to move, buying an item with one simply involves agreeing that the ownership has changed. As long as the transaction is recorded in the oral history, it will now be owned by the person to whom it is passed and no physical movement of the stone is required.

🔗 Economics

The Alchian–Allen effect was described in 1964 by Armen Alchian and William R Allen in the book University Economics (now called Exchange and Production). It states that when the prices of two substitute goods, such as high and low grades of the same product, are both increased by a fixed per-unit amount such as a transportation cost or a lump-sum tax, consumption will shift toward the higher-grade product. This is because the added per-unit amount decreases the relative price of the higher-grade product.

Suppose, for example, that high-grade coffee beans are $3/pound and low-grade beans $1.50/pound; in this example, high-grade beans cost twice as much as low-grade beans. Now add a per-pound international shipping cost of $1. The effective prices are now $4 and $2.50; high-grade beans now cost only 1.6 times as much as low-grade beans. This reduced ratio of difference will induce distant coffee-buyers to now choose a higher ratio of high-to-low grade beans than local coffee-buyers.

The effect has been studied as it applies to illegal drugs and it has been shown that the potency of marijuana increased in response to higher enforcement budgets, and there was a similar effect for alcohol in the U.S. during Prohibition. This effect is called iron law of prohibition.

Another example is that Australians drink higher-quality Californian wine than Californians, and vice versa, because it is only worth the transportation costs for the most expensive wine.

Colloquially, the Alchian–Allen theorem is also known as the “shipping the good apples out” theorem (Thomas Borcherding), or as the “third law of demand.”

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology 🔗 Philosophy/Modern philosophy 🔗 Libertarianism

Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne ( mon-TAYN; French: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), known as Michel de Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. Montaigne had a direct influence on numerous Western writers; his massive volume Essais contains some of the most influential essays ever written.

During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that "I am myself the matter of my book" was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt that began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, ''Que sçay-je?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; now rendered as "Que sais-je?" in modern French).

🔗 United States 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Aviation/aircraft engine 🔗 Ships

A toroidal propeller is a type of propeller that is ring-shaped with each blade forming a closed loop. The propellers are significantly quieter at audible frequency ranges, between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, while generating comparable thrust to traditional propellers. In practice, toroidal propellers reduce noise pollution in both aviation and maritime transport.

This is a list of phrases and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, with real examples taken from Wikipedia articles and drafts. Note that not all text featuring the following indicators is AI-generated; large language models, which power AI-chatbots, have been trained on human writing, and humans might happen to have a writing style similar to that of an AI. Be cautious when relying on automated artificial intelligence detection software such as GPTZero. While these services perform better than random chance, they should not replace human judgment.

Beyond simply being indicators, the following phrasings and conventions often violate Wikipedia's Manual of Style or introduce a promotional or non-neutral tone; therefore appropriate use of AI chatbots on Wikipedia should not exhibit any of these indicators.