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🔗 Internet culture

Community Memory (CM) was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud link to a teleprinter at a record store in Berkeley to let users enter and retrieve messages. Individuals could place messages in the computer and then look through the memory for a specific notice.

While initially conceived as an information and resource sharing network linking a variety of counter-cultural economic, educational, and social organizations with each other and the public, Community Memory was soon generalized to be an information flea market, by providing unmediated, two-way access to message databases through public computer terminals. Once the system became available, the users demonstrated that it was a general communications medium that could be used for art, literature, journalism, commerce, and social chatter.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Psychology

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking bullshit: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

🔗 Aviation 🔗 History 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Spaceflight/Timeline of spaceflight working group 🔗 Physics 🔗 Lists 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Rocketry 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

Spaceflight as a practical endeavor began during World War II with the development of operational liquid-fueled rockets. Beginning life as a weapon, the V-2 was pressed into peaceful service after the war at the United States' White Sands Missile Range as well as the Soviet Union's Kapustin Yar. This led to a flourishing of missile designs setting the stage for the exploration of space. The small American WAC Corporal rocket was evolved into the Aerobee, a much more powerful sounding rocket. Exploration of space began in earnest in 1947 with the flight of the first Aerobee, 46 of which had flown by the end of 1950. These and other rockets, both Soviet and American, returned the first direct data on air density, temperature, charged particles and magnetic fields in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

By 1948, the United States Navy had evolved the V-2 design into the Viking capable of more than 100 miles (160 km) in altitude. The first Viking to accomplish this feat, number four, did so 10 May 1950. The Soviet Union developed a virtual copy of the V-2 called the R-1, which first flew in 1948. Its longer-ranged successor, the R-2, entered military service in 1950. This event marked the entry of both superpowers into the post-V-2 rocketry era.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Germany/Hamburg 🔗 Germany/German transportation

Old Elbe Tunnel or St. Pauli Elbe Tunnel (German: Alter Elbtunnel colloquially or St. Pauli Elbtunnel officially) which opened in 1911, is a pedestrian and vehicle tunnel in Hamburg. The 426 m (1,398 ft) long tunnel was a technical sensation; 24 m (80 ft) beneath the surface, two 6 m (20 ft) diameter tubes connect central Hamburg with the docks and shipyards on the south side of the river Elbe. This was a big improvement for tens of thousands of workers in one of the busiest harbors in the world.

Six large lifts on either side of the tunnel carry pedestrians and vehicles to the bottom. The two tunnels are both still in operation, though due to their limited capacity by today's standards, other bridges and tunnels have been built and taken over most of the traffic.

In 2008 approximately 300,000 cars, 63,000 bicycles, and 700,000 pedestrians used the tunnel. The tunnel is opened 24 hours for pedestrians and bicycles. For motorized vehicles, opening times are currently Monday to Friday from 5:20 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and on Saturdays from 5:20 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Telecommunications

Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, as part of its warrantless surveillance program as authorized by the Patriot Act. The facility commenced operations in 2003 and its purpose was publicly revealed in 2006.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Japan 🔗 Photography 🔗 Japan/History 🔗 Japan/Science and technology 🔗 Photography/History of photography 🔗 Japan/Biography

Ichiki Shirō (市来 四郎, January 29, 1828 – February 12, 1903) was a pioneering Japanese photographer.

Ichiki was born in Satsuma Province (now Kagoshima Prefecture) in Kyūshū on 24 December 1828. He excelled in the study of topics related to gunpowder production in the Takashima-ryū school of gunnery. This talent was recognized by Shimazu Nariakira, the daimyō of Satsuma, who selected Ichiki to be one of his personal retainers. In 1848, Shimazu obtained the first daguerreotype camera ever imported into Japan. Ever fascinated by Western technology, he ordered his retainers (including Ichiki) to study it and produce working photographs. Due to the limitations of the lens used and the lack of formal training, it took many years for a quality photograph to be created, but on 17 September 1857, Ichiki created a portrait of Shimazu in formal attire. All this was recorded in detail in Ichiki's memoirs, which were compiled in 1884.

This photograph became an object of worship in Terukuni jinja after Shimazu's death, but it later went missing. Lost for a century, the daguerreotype was discovered in a warehouse in 1975 and was later determined to be the oldest daguerreotype in existence that was created by a Japanese photographer. For this reason, it was designated an Important Cultural Property by the government of Japan in 1999, the first photograph so designated.

🔗 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.

🔗 Typography

A fleuron (;), also known as printers' flower, is a typographic element, or glyph, used either as a punctuation mark or as an ornament for typographic compositions. Fleurons are stylized forms of flowers or leaves; the term derives from the Old French: floron ("flower"). Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style calls the forms "horticultural dingbats". A commonly-encountered fleuron is the ❦, the floral heart or hedera (ivy leaf). It is also known as an aldus leaf (after Italian Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius).

🔗 Biography 🔗 Poetry 🔗 United Kingdom

The person from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797. Coleridge claimed to have perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interrupted by this visitor from Porlock while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "person from Porlock", "man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" are literary allusions to unwanted intruders who disrupt inspired creativity.

🔗 Physics

In physics, the fourth, fifth and sixth derivatives of position are defined as derivatives of the position vector with respect to time – with the first, second, and third derivatives being velocity, acceleration, and jerk, respectively. Unlike the first three derivatives, the higher-order derivatives are less common, thus their names are not as standardized, though the concept of a minimum snap trajectory has been used in robotics and is implemented in MATLAB.

The fourth derivative is often referred to as snap or jounce. The name "snap" for the fourth derivative led to crackle and pop for the fifth and sixth derivatives respectively, inspired by the Rice Krispies mascots Snap, Crackle, and Pop. These terms are occasionally used, though "sometimes somewhat facetiously".