Simpson's paradox has been used as an exemplar to illustrate to the non-specialist or public audience the kind of misleading results mis-applied statistics can generate. Martin Gardner wrote a popular account of Simpson's paradox in his March 1976 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

Edward H. Simpson first described this phenomenon in a technical paper in 1951, but the statisticians Karl Pearson et al., in 1899, and Udny Yule, in 1903, had mentioned similar effects earlier. The name Simpson's paradox was introduced by Colin R. Blyth in 1972.

It is also referred to as or Simpson's reversal, Yule–Simpson effect, amalgamation paradox, or reversal paradox.

Although the term is used less precisely in games such as chess, it is used specifically in combinatorial game theory to denote a move that directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss. Putting the opponent in zugzwang is a common way to help the superior side win a game, and in some cases it is necessary in order to make the win possible.

The term zugzwang was used in German chess literature in 1858 or earlier, and the first known use of the term in English was by World Champion Emanuel Lasker in 1905. The concept of zugzwang was known to chess players many centuries before the term was coined, appearing in an endgame study published in 1604 by Alessandro Salvio, one of the first writers on the game, and in shatranj studies dating back to the early 9th century, over 1000 years before the first known use of the term.

Positions with zugzwang occur fairly often in chess endgames, especially in king and pawn endgames. According to John Nunn, positions of reciprocal zugzwang are surprisingly important in the analysis of endgames.

Researchers have used the illusion to demonstrate that burning pain sensation is in fact a mixture of both cold and heat pain and that it is only the inhibition of the cold pain "channel" that reveals the heat component.

The illusion is demonstrated by positioning the middle finger in cold water and the ring and index fingers in warm water. Due to shortcomings in the body map - multisensory representation of the body - and this particular sensory input configuration, the brain is tricked into thinking the middle finger is in the warm water and the index and ring fingers in cold water.

In an fMRI experiment of the illusion, researchers recently observed an activation of the thalamus not seen for control stimuli. Also, activity in a portion of the right mid/anterior insula correlated with the perceived unpleasantness of the illusion.

SHRDLU was written in the Micro Planner and Lisp programming language on the DEC PDP-6 computer and a DEC graphics terminal. Later additions were made at the computer graphics labs at the University of Utah, adding a full 3D rendering of SHRDLU's "world".

The name SHRDLU was derived from ETAOIN SHRDLU, the arrangement of the letter keys on a Linotype machine, arranged in descending order of usage frequency in English.

The Tour de Cordouan, the 'Patriarch of Lighthouses' is by far the oldest lighthouse in France, with construction starting in 1584 and finishing in 1611. Designed by leading Paris architect Louis de Foix, the lighthouse is something of a Renaissance masterpiece, drawing inspiration from Roman mausoleums, and the palaces, cathedrals, and forts of the Renaissance. Three stories were added in the 18th century.

Because of its outstanding Renaissance architecture and its testimony to the development of lighthouses, the Cordouan Lighthouse was listed as a historic monument in 1862, and recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2021.

The blaster beam was designed by John Lazelle in the early 1970s, and was first widely used by Francisco Lupica who built several out of iron. American child-actor-turned-musician Craig Huxley created his own refined version of the beam out of aluminum which was brought to fame in the soundtrack for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) in which composer Jerry Goldsmith used the instrument to create the signature V'ger sound. Earlier that year, Huxley performed his custom-built blaster beam on Robert Prince's score for the season three Wonder Woman episode "Spaced Out". The instrument was also used by composer James Horner for several of his early soundtracks, including Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Michael Stearns for his score to the IMAX film Chronos, and in David Shire's soundtrack to 2010 (1984), which score was co-written by Huxley. Huxley also played the instrument on the Quincy Jones song, "Ai No Corrida”.

Huxley successfully patented his design of the beam in 1984.

The instrument has since been used to create dark unnatural sounds in other movie soundtracks in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the films The Black Hole, Forbidden World, Dreamscape, and Meteor, in the last of which it was used during shots of the giant looming meteorite as it approached Earth. It has also been used by new age artists including Kitaro, Stearns and Huxley. The blaster beam was also used for the seismic charge sound used by Jango Fett, in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.

Some more unexpected attention came in the early nineties when several women attending a music concert in New York's Central Park claimed to have been stimulated by the sound created by a blaster beam being used in the performance. This prompted Australian radio station 2SER-FM to conduct an experiment in which they played a continuous loop of a blaster beam performance and asked their female listeners to report any stimulation they experienced. (FM's frequency response typically starts at around 50 Hz which is similar to the theoretical lowest frequencies of the blaster beam, but these frequencies might have been more prominent at the live concert.) On this occasion none of the show's listeners reported any arousal whatsoever.

In 2016, composer Bear McCreary featured the Blaster Beam in his score to 10 Cloverfield Lane, performed by Craig Huxley.

The Church Rock uranium mill spill occurred in the U.S. state of New Mexico on July 16, 1979, when United Nuclear Corporation's tailings disposal pond at its uranium mill in Church Rock breached its dam. The spill remains the largest release of radioactive material in U.S. history, having released more radioactivity than the Three Mile Island accident four months earlier.

The mill, which operated from June 1977 to May 1982, was located on privately owned land about 17 miles (27 km) northeast of Gallup, New Mexico, and was bordered to the north and southwest by Navajo Nation Tribal Trust lands. The milling of uranium ore produced an acidic slurry of ground waste rock and fluid (tailings) that was pumped to the tailings disposal area. The breach released more than 1,100 short tons (1,000 t) of solid radioactive mill waste and 94 million US gallons (360,000 m³) of acidic, radioactive tailings solution into the Puerco River through Pipeline Arroyo. An estimated 1.36 short tons (1.23 t) of uranium and 46 curies of alpha contaminants traveled 80 miles (130 km) downstream to Navajo County, Arizona, and onto the Navajo Nation. In addition to being radioactive and acidic, the spill contained toxic metals and sulfates. The spill contaminated groundwater and rendered the Puerco unusable to local residents, mostly Navajo peoples who used the river's water for drinking, irrigation, and livestock. They were not warned for days of the toxic dangers from the spill.

The governor of New Mexico, Bruce King, refused the Navajo Nation's request that the site be declared a federal disaster area, limiting aid to affected residents. The nuclear contamination event received less media coverage than that of Three Mile Island, possibly because it occurred in a very rural area not served by major media. The spill also happened in Native American country, among a community who reportedly did not have their concerns addressed by medical authorities.

In 2003, the Church Rock Chapter of the Navajo Nation began the Church Rock Uranium Monitoring Project to assess environmental impacts of abandoned uranium mines; it found significant radiation from both natural and mining sources in the area. As of 2016, the EPA National Priorities List included the Church Rock tailings storage site, where "groundwater migration is not under control".

The Canard Digérateur, or Digesting Duck, was an automaton in the form of a duck, created by Jacques de Vaucanson and unveiled on 30 May 1764 in France. The mechanical duck appeared to have the ability to eat kernels of grain, and to metabolize and defecate them. While the duck did not actually have the ability to do this—the food was collected in one inner container, and the pre-stored feces were "produced" from a second, so that no actual digestion took place—Vaucanson hoped that a truly digesting automaton could one day be designed.

Voltaire wrote in 1769 that "Without the voice of le Maure and Vaucanson's duck, you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France."

The duck is thought to have been destroyed in a fire at a private museum in 1879.

When exploring AI techniques and systems, the community consensus is to prefer human decisions over machine-generated outcomes until the implications are better understood.

"Clanker" is a derogatory term for robots and artificial intelligence (AI) software. The term has been used in Star Wars media, first appearing in the franchise's 2005 video game Star Wars: Republic Commando. By 2025, the term had become widely used to express hatred or distaste for machines ranging from delivery robots to large language models. This trend has been attributed to anxiety around the negative societal effects of AI.

The Cahokia Mounds (also simply known as Cahokia) (11 MS 2) is the site of a Native American city (which existed c. 1050–1350 CE) directly across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis. The state archaeology park lies in south-western Illinois between East St. Louis and Collinsville. The park covers 2,200 acres (890 ha), or about 3.5 square miles (9 km²), and contains about 80 manmade mounds, but the ancient city was much larger. At its apex around 1100 CE, the city covered about 6 square miles (16 km²), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.

Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement of the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the Central and the Southeastern United States, beginning around 1000 CE. Today, the Cahokia Mounds are considered to be the largest and most complex archaeological site north of the great pre-Columbian cities in Mexico.

The city's original name is unknown. The mounds were later named after the Cahokia tribe, a historic Illiniwek people living in the area when the first French explorers arrived in the 17th century. As this was centuries after Cahokia was abandoned by its original inhabitants, the Cahokia tribe was not necessarily descended from the earlier Mississippian-era people. Most likely, multiple indigenous ethnic groups settled in the Cahokia Mounds area during the time of the city's apex.

Cahokia Mounds is a National Historic Landmark and a designated site for state protection. It is also one of the 26 UNESCO World Heritage Sites within the United States. The largest pre-Columbian earthen construction in the Americas north of Mexico, the site is open to the public and administered by the Illinois Historic Preservation Division and supported by the Cahokia Mounds Museum Society. In celebration of the 2018 Illinois state bicentennial, the Cahokia Mounds were selected as one of the Illinois 200 Great Places by the American Institute of Architects Illinois component (AIA Illinois). It was recognized by USA Today Travel magazine, as one of the selections for 'Illinois 25 Must See Places'.

There are eight known cases of Wikipedia editors being imprisoned for contributing to Wikipedia. In the case of Bassel Khartabil, he was subsequently executed.

At the time of the incidents, news media dismissed the plot, with a New York Times editorial characterizing it as a "gigantic hoax". While historians have not accepted the notion of a plot, they agree that Butler described one.

Simon Oxley (1969 – April 2026) was a British freelance graphic designer and illustrator who was most famous for designing the original bird logo for Twitter, the Octocat logo for GitHub, the puffer fish for Bitly, and Sammy the Shark for DigitalOcean. Operating predominantly under the studio pseudonym Idokungfoo, Oxley became a pioneer in the microstock economy and played a seminal role in establishing the friendly, mascot-driven aesthetic of the Web 2.0 era.