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🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology

In the Abilene paradox, a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and, therefore, does not raise objections. A common phrase relating to the Abilene paradox is a desire not to "rock the boat". This differs from groupthink in that the Abilene paradox is characterized by an inability to manage agreement.

🔗 Lists

The car crash song emerged as a popular pop and rock music teenage tragedy song during the 1950s and 1960s at a time when the number of people being killed in vehicle collisions was rising rapidly in many countries. In the United Kingdom, the number of fatalities on UK roads rose to a peace-time peak of 7,985 in 1966 before then falling to a new low of 2,222 in 2009. The theme also appears in country and other music styles.

🔗 Canada 🔗 Canada/History of Canada 🔗 Canada/Geography of Canada 🔗 Canada/Canadian Territories

The High Arctic relocation (French: La délocalisation du Haut-Arctique, Inuktitut syllabics: ᖁᑦᑎᒃᑐᒥᐅᑦᑕ ᓅᑕᐅᓂᖏᑦ Inuktitut: Quttiktumut nuutauningit) took place during the Cold War in the 1950s, when 92 Inuit were moved by the Government of Canada to the High Arctic.

The relocation has been a source of controversy: on one hand being described as a humanitarian gesture to save the lives of starving indigenous people and enable them to continue a subsistence lifestyle; and on the other hand, said to be a forced migration instigated by the federal government to assert its sovereignty in the Far North by the use of "human flagpoles", in light of both the Cold War and the disputed territorial claims to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Both sides acknowledge that the relocated Inuit were not given sufficient support to prevent extreme privation during their first years after the move. The story was the subject of a book called The Long Exile, published by Melanie McGrath in 2006.

🔗 Comedy

Meta-joke refers to several somewhat different, but related categories: joke templates, self-referential jokes, and jokes about jokes (also known as meta-humor).

🔗 Russia 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death

The 2022 Russian businessmen mystery deaths are a series of unusual deaths of Russian-connected businessmen in 2022. Most of the deaths were officially declared to be suicides, but a number of commentators have suggested that the circumstances of the suicides appear to be suspicious and may have been staged.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 London 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 England 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Robotics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 LGBT studies/LGBT Person 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Athletics 🔗 Greater Manchester 🔗 Cheshire 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Molecular and Cell Biology 🔗 Surrey 🔗 Running 🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology

Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments, he was not fully recognised in his home country during his lifetime, due to his homosexuality, and because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Due to the problems of counterfactual history, it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives.

After the war Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine. The Automatic Computing Engine was one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory, at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.

Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts; the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 had mandated that "gross indecency" was a criminal offence in the UK. He accepted chemical castration treatment, with DES, as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.

In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon in 2013. The Alan Turing law is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.

🔗 Geography 🔗 Romania 🔗 Ecology 🔗 Caves

Movile Cave (Romanian: Peștera Movile) is a cave near Mangalia, Constanța County, Romania discovered in 1986 by Cristian Lascu a few kilometers from the Black Sea coast. It is notable for its unique groundwater ecosystem abundant in hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide, but low in oxygen. Life in the cave has been separated from the outside for the past 5.5 million years and it is based completely on chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

"Everything is a file" is an idea that Unix, and its derivatives, handle input/output to and from resources such as documents, hard-drives, modems, keyboards, printers and even some inter-process and network communications as simple streams of bytes exposed through the filesystem name space. Exceptions include semaphores, processes and threads.

The advantage of this approach is that the same set of tools, utilities and APIs can be used on a wide range of resources and a number of file types. When a file is opened, a file descriptor is created, using the file path as an addressing system. The file descriptor is then a byte stream I/O interface on which file operations are performed. File descriptors are also created for objects such as anonymous pipes and network sockets - and therefore a more accurate description of this feature is Everything is a file descriptor.

Additionally, a range of pseudo and virtual filesystems exists which exposes internal kernel data, such as information about processes, to user space in a hierarchical file-like structure. These are mounted into the single file hierarchy.

An example of this purely virtual filesystem is under /proc that exposes many system properties as files. All of these files, in the broader sense of the word, have standard Unix file attributes such as an owner and access permissions, and can be queried by the same classic Unix tools and filters. However, this is not universally considered a fast or portable approach. Some operating systems do not mount /proc by default due to security or speed concerns, relying on system calls instead. It is, though, used heavily by Linux shell utilities, such as procps ps implementation and the widely installed on embedded systems BusyBox. Android Toolbox program depend on it as well.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

In logic, a many-valued logic (also multi- or multiple-valued logic) is a propositional calculus in which there are more than two truth values. Traditionally, in Aristotle's logical calculus, there were only two possible values (i.e., "true" and "false") for any proposition. Classical two-valued logic may be extended to n-valued logic for n greater than 2. Those most popular in the literature are three-valued (e.g., Łukasiewicz's and Kleene's, which accept the values "true", "false", and "unknown"), the finite-valued (finitely-many valued) with more than three values, and the infinite-valued (infinitely-many-valued), such as fuzzy logic and probability logic.

🔗 Color

RAL is a colour management system used in Europe that is created and administered by the German RAL gGmbH (RAL non-profit LLC), which is a subsidiary of the German RAL Institute. In colloquial speech, RAL refers to the RAL Classic system, mainly used for varnish and powder coating, but now plastics as well. Approved RAL products are provided with a hologram to make unauthorised versions difficult to produce. Imitations may show different hue and colour when observed under various light sources.