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🔗 Poetry

"Fragments of Olympian Gossip" is a poem that Nikola Tesla composed in the late 1920s for his friend the German poet and mystic George Sylvester Viereck. It made fun of the scientific establishment of the day.

While listening on my cosmic phone
I caught words from the Olympus blown.
A newcomer was shown around;
That much I could guess, aided by sound.

"There's Archimedes with his lever
Still busy on problems as ever.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable."

"Below, on Earth, they work at full blast
And news are coming in thick and fast.
The latest tells of a cosmic gun.
To be pelted is very poor fun.
We are wary with so much at stake,
Those beggars are a pest—no mistake."

"Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown
And turned your great science upside down.
Now a long haired crank, Einstein by name,
Puts on your high teaching all the blame.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable."

"I am much too ignorant, my son,
For grasping schemes so finely spun.
My followers are of stronger mind
And I am content to stay behind,
Perhaps I failed, but I did my best,
These masters of mine may do the rest.
Come, Kelvin, I have finished my cup.
When is your friend Tesla coming up."

"Oh, quoth Kelvin, he is always late,
It would be useless to remonstrate."

Then silence—shuffle of soft slippered feet—
I knock and—the bedlam of the street.

Nikola Tesla, Novice

🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Transport 🔗 Trains 🔗 Engineering

A Hyperloop is a proposed mode of passenger and freight transportation, first used to describe an open-source vactrain design released by a joint team from Tesla and SpaceX. Hyperloop is a sealed tube or system of tubes through which a pod may travel free of air resistance or friction conveying people or objects at high speed while being very efficient, thereby drastically reducing travel times over medium-range distances.

Elon Musk's version of the concept, first publicly mentioned in 2012, incorporates reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on air bearings driven by linear induction motors and axial compressors.

The Hyperloop Alpha concept was first published in August 2013, proposing and examining a route running from the Los Angeles region to the San Francisco Bay Area, roughly following the Interstate 5 corridor. The Hyperloop Genesis paper conceived of a hyperloop system that would propel passengers along the 350-mile (560 km) route at a speed of 760 mph (1,200 km/h), allowing for a travel time of 35 minutes, which is considerably faster than current rail or air travel times. Preliminary cost estimates for this LA–SF suggested route were included in the white paper—US$6 billion for a passenger-only version, and US$7.5 billion for a somewhat larger-diameter version transporting passengers and vehicles—although transportation analysts had doubts that the system could be constructed on that budget; some analysts claimed that the Hyperloop would be several billion dollars overbudget, taking into consideration construction, development, and operation costs.

The Hyperloop concept has been explicitly "open-sourced" by Musk and SpaceX, and others have been encouraged to take the ideas and further develop them. To that end, a few companies have been formed, and several interdisciplinary student-led teams are working to advance the technology. SpaceX built an approximately 1-mile-long (1.6 km) subscale track for its pod design competition at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

In probability theory, the birthday problem or birthday paradox concerns the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are only 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people, and 50% probability with 23 people. These conclusions are based on the assumption that each day of the year (excluding February 29) is equally probable for a birthday.

Actual birth records show that different numbers of people are born on different days. In this case, it can be shown that the number of people required to reach the 50% threshold is 23 or fewer. For example, if half the people were born on one day and the other half on another day, then any two people would have a 50% chance of sharing a birthday.

It may well seem surprising that a group of just 23 individuals is required to reach a probability of 50% that at least two individuals in the group have the same birthday: this result is perhaps made more plausible by considering that the comparisons of birthday will actually be made between every possible pair of individuals = 23 × 22/2 = 253 comparisons, which is well over half the number of days in a year (183 at most), as opposed to fixing on one individual and comparing his or her birthday to everyone else's. The birthday problem is not a "paradox" in the literal logical sense of being self-contradictory, but is merely unintuitive at first glance.

Real-world applications for the birthday problem include a cryptographic attack called the birthday attack, which uses this probabilistic model to reduce the complexity of finding a collision for a hash function, as well as calculating the approximate risk of a hash collision existing within the hashes of a given size of population.

The history of the problem is obscure. W. W. Rouse Ball indicated (without citation) that it was first discussed by Harold Davenport. However, Richard von Mises proposed an earlier version of what is considered today to be the birthday problem.

Wikiracing is a game using the online encyclopedia Wikipedia which focuses on traversing links from one page to another. It has many different variations and names, including The Wikipedia Game, Wikipedia Maze, Wikispeedia, Wikiwars, Wikipedia Ball, and Litner Ball. External websites have been created to facilitate the game.

The Seattle Times has recommended it as a good educational pastime for children and the Larchmont Gazette has said, "While I don't know any teenagers who would curl up with an encyclopedia for a good read, I hear that a lot are reading it in the process of playing the Wikipedia Game".

The Amazing Wiki Race has been an event at the TechOlympics and the Yale Freshman Olympics.

The average number of links separating any Wikipedia page from the United Kingdom page is 3.67. Other common houserules such as not using the United States page increase the difficulty of the game.

As of July 2019, a website and game known as The Wiki Game has been created, allowing players to Wikirace against each other in a server, for more points and recognition on the server. The game reached more recognition as Internet stars such as Game Grumps played it on their channels. There is a version on the App Store as well, in which players can do a variety of Wikirace styles from their phone.

🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Ohio

The Ohio nuclear bribery scandal is a 2020 political scandal in Ohio involving allegations that FirstEnergy paid roughly $60 million to Generation Now, a 501(c)(4) organization purportedly controlled by Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Larry Householder, in exchange for passing a $1.3 billion bailout for the struggling nuclear power operator. It was described as "likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio" by U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers, who charged Householder and four others with racketeering on July 21. According to prosecutors, FirstEnergy poured millions into the campaigns of 21 candidates during the 2018 Ohio House of Representatives election, which ultimately helped Householder replace Ryan Smith as Republican House speaker.

According to DeVillers in late July 2020, the investigation is far from over. "There are a lot of federal agents knocking on a lot of doors."

🔗 Color

International orange is a color used in the aerospace industry to set objects apart from their surroundings, similar to safety orange, but deeper and with a more reddish tone.

🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Computing 🔗 Microsoft Windows 🔗 Microsoft Windows/Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 Microsoft/Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Works is a discontinued productivity software suite developed by Microsoft and sold from 1987 to 2009. Its core functionality included a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database management system. Later versions had a calendar application and a dictionary while older releases included a terminal emulator. Works was available as a standalone program, and as part of a namesake home productivity suite. Because of its low cost ($40 retail, or as low as $2 OEM), companies frequently pre-installed Works on their low-cost machines. Works was smaller, less expensive, and had fewer features than Microsoft Office and other major office suites available at the time.

Mainstream support for the final standalone and suite release ended on October 9, 2012 and January 8, 2013, respectively.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing

"ABAQ" redirects here. ABAQ is also the callsign for TV station ABQ in Alpha, Queensland.

The Atari Transputer Workstation (also known as ATW-800, or simply ATW) is a workstation class computer released by Atari Corporation in the late 1980s, based on the INMOS transputer. It was introduced in 1987 as the Abaq, but the name was changed before sales began. Sales were almost non-existent, and the product was canceled after only a few hundred units had been produced.

🔗 Computing

A stack-oriented programming language is one that relies on a stack machine model for passing parameters. Several programming languages fit this description, notably Forth, RPL, PostScript, BibTeX style design language and many assembly languages (on a much lower level).

Stack-oriented languages operate on one or more stacks, each of which may serve a different purpose. Thus, programming constructs in other programming languages may need to be modified for use in a stack-oriented system. Further, some stack-oriented languages operate in postfix or Reverse Polish notation, that is, any arguments or parameters for a command are stated before that command. For example, postfix notation would be written 2, 3, multiply instead of multiply, 2, 3 (prefix or Polish notation), or 2 multiply 3 (infix notation).

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Viruses 🔗 Death

The 2009 flu pandemic in the United States was a novel strain of the Influenza A/H1N1 virus, commonly referred to as "swine flu", that began in the spring of 2009. The virus had spread to the US from an outbreak in Mexico.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, there were 60.8 million cases, 274,000 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths (0.02% infection fatality rate/Mortality rate) in the United States due to the virus.