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🔗 Biography 🔗 Sweden

Thomas Harry Salme (born 18 February 1969, in Stockholm) was convicted of flying passenger jets without a commercial pilot's license. After working as a First Officer and Captain from 1997 to 2010 for several international airline companies, Salme was arrested at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in March 2010.

A Van Halen test refers to any question that is asked to assess whether the full set of instructions given to another party has been thoroughly and correctly read. It has also been used to describe asking necessary questions.

The name of the test refers to the contractual clause Van Halen would give to venues at which they were to perform. There was a clause requesting that a bowl of M&Ms be supplied, with all the brown candies removed. If this bowl with the correct contents was not provided by the venue, they knew their contract was not thoroughly reviewed, and that there may be safety issues. The worry was that with complex safety requirements involving pyrotechnics, large voltages, and stage construction, any lapse in following instructions could be a danger. Rumors about this clause date back to 1980.

🔗 Computing

In 2002, the United States Department of Justice, under the Sherman Antitrust Act, began a probe into the activities of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) manufacturers in response to claims by US computer makers, including Dell and Gateway, that inflated DRAM pricing was causing lost profits and hindering their effectiveness in the marketplace.

To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Canada 🔗 Law Enforcement

Mr. Big (sometimes known as the Canadian technique) is a covert investigation procedure used by undercover police to elicit confessions from suspects in cold cases (usually murder). Police officers create a fictitious grey area or criminal organization and then seduce the suspect into joining it. They build a relationship with the suspect, gain their confidence, and then enlist their help in a succession of criminal acts (e.g., delivering goods, credit card scams, selling guns) for which they are paid. Once the suspect has become enmeshed in the criminal gang, they are persuaded to divulge information about their criminal history, usually as a prerequisite for being accepted as a member of the organization.

The Mr. Big technique was developed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in British Columbia, with the first documented case taking place in March of 1965 during the investigation of David Louis Harrison, a former Vancouver police constable who was tried and convicted for taking part in the robbery of $1.2 million of cancelled currency from the Canadian Pacific Merchandise Services warehouse in Vancouver. Harrison was convicted using evidence gained by Cpl. Allan Richards, posing as crime syndicate hoodlum John Clarke, and his sting partner, police operative Al Brooks. Harrison testified that he believed John Clarke was a violent syndicate hoodlum. Harrison further testified that Clarke was often packing a gun, that Clarke carried a vial of nitroglycerine around his neck that he would throw at a police car if it got too close to him, and that he was afraid he would be harmed if he didn’t play along.

The Mr. Big tactic has been used in more than 350 cases across Canada as of 2008. The RCMP claims that the person of interest was either cleared or charged in 75% of cases (the rest remaining unresolved and requiring further investigation). Of the cases prosecuted, an estimated 95% result in a conviction.

The use of this technique is essentially prohibited in some countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States. In Germany, which has high standards for what constitutes a voluntary confession, it may be more difficult to use confessions obtained by this technique. The procedure has been used by police in Australia and New Zealand, and its use has been upheld by courts in both countries.

🔗 Cetaceans

The 52-hertz whale is an individual whale of unidentified species which calls at the very unusual frequency of 52 Hz. This pitch is a much higher frequency than that of the other whale species with migration patterns most closely resembling this whale's – the blue whale (10–39 Hz) or fin whale (20 Hz). It has been detected regularly in many locations since the late 1980s and appears to be the only individual emitting a whale call at this frequency. It has been described as the "world's loneliest whale".

🔗 Australia 🔗 New Zealand 🔗 Cricket 🔗 Australia/Australian sports 🔗 Cricket/EAP cricket

The underarm bowling incident of 1981 is a sporting controversy that took place on 1 February 1981, when Australia played New Zealand in a One Day International cricket match, the third in the best-of-five final of the 1980–81 World Series Cup, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

With one ball of the final over remaining in the match, New Zealand required a six to tie the match. To ensure that New Zealand were unable to achieve this, the Australian captain Greg Chappell instructed his bowler (and younger brother) Trevor Chappell to deliver the last ball to batsman Brian McKechnie underarm along the ground. Trevor did so, forcing McKechnie to play the ball defensively, meaning Australia won. This action, although legal at the time, was nevertheless widely perceived as being wholly against the traditional spirit of cricketing fair play.

The outrage caused by the incident eventually led to an official amendment to the international laws of cricket to prevent it from occurring again.

---

Hi everyone,

I'm baaaaack!

I co-founded Wikipedia long ago. While I was gone for a long time, I did keep abreast what's been going on and how the system works, as a student and critic of Wikipedia and of the internet generally.

But as of fall 2025, I have returned, with the aim of helping Wikipedia in various ways to reform.

Most recently, I have been working on WikiProject Intellectual Diversity. This is not yet an approved WikiProject, but I am confident we will get enough supporters to make our application successful. If you too want Wikipedia to be reformed in ways that will make the project more open and welcoming to those of a more intellectually diverse body of contributors, please join!

For most of 2025, I developed Nine Theses on Wikipedia, which is partly an extended criticism and partly a reform proposal. Unlike much of my previous writing and speaking about Wikipedia over the past 20 years or so, this is not merely negative. It is a realistic plan to make Wikipedia better. I hope you will take it seriously.

All the best,

Larry Sanger (talk) 17:24, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

P.S. Here's what I posted when I left in 2002. Still good advice:

All the best to Wikipedia and Wikipedians. May you continue

• to be open and warmly welcoming, not insular,
• to be focused singlemindedly on writing an encyclopedia, not on Usenet-style debate,
• to recognize and praise the best work, work that is detailed, factual, well-informed, and well-referenced,
• to work to understand what neutrality requires and why it is so essential to and good for this project,

• to treat your fellow productive, well-meaning members of Wikipedia with respect and good will,
• to attract and honor good people who know a lot and can write about it well, and
• to show the door to trolls, vandals, and wiki-anarchists, who if permitted would waste your time and create a poisonous atmosphere here.

Archive - Archive 2 - Policy talk pages

🔗 Physics

The Armstrong effect is the physical process by which static electricity is produced by the friction of a fluid. It was first discovered in 1840 when an electrical spark resulted from water droplets being swept out by escaping steam from a boiler. The effect is named after William Armstrong, who later became 1st Baron Armstrong, who was one of several people involved in discovering the effect and investigating the processes involved. Using this principle, Armstrong went on to invent what he called the Armstrong hydroelectric machine, which, despite its name, generated static electricity and not hydroelectric power.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Japan 🔗 Longevity 🔗 Japan/Biography

Sogen Kato (加藤 宗現, Katō Sōgen; 22 July 1899 – c. November 1978) was a Japanese man thought to have been Tokyo's oldest man until July 2010, when his mummified corpse was found in his bedroom. It was concluded he had likely died in November 1978, aged 79, and his family had never reported his death. Relatives had rebuffed attempts by ward officials to see Kato in preparations for Respect for the Aged Day later that year, citing many reasons from him being a "human vegetable" to becoming a sokushinbutsu (Buddhist mummy). An autopsy could not determine the cause of Kato's death.

The discovery of Kato's remains sparked a search for other missing centenarians lost due to poor recordkeeping by officials. A study following the discovery of Kato's remains found that police did not know if 234,354 people over the age of 100 were still alive. Poor recordkeeping was to blame for many of the cases, officials admitted. One of Kato's relatives was found guilty of fraud; his relatives claimed ¥9,500,000 (US$117,939; £72,030) of the pension meant for Kato.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Etymology

Zenzizenzizenzic is an obsolete form of mathematical notation representing the eighth power of a number (that is, the zenzizenzizenzic of x is x⁸), dating from a time when powers were written out in words rather than as superscript numbers. This term was suggested by Robert Recorde, a 16th-century Welsh writer of popular mathematics textbooks, in his 1557 work The Whetstone of Witte (although his spelling was zenzizenzizenzike); he wrote that it "doeth represent the square of squares squaredly".

At the time Recorde proposed this notation, there was no easy way of denoting the powers of numbers other than squares and cubes. The root word for Recorde's notation is zenzic, which is a German spelling of the medieval Italian word censo, meaning "squared". Since the square of a square of a number is its fourth power, Recorde used the word zenzizenzic (spelled by him as zenzizenzike) to express it. Some of the terms had prior use in Latin "zenzicubicus", "zensizensicus" and "zensizenzum". Similarly, as the sixth power of a number is equal to the square of its cube, Recorde used the word zenzicubike to express it; a more modern spelling, zenzicube, is found in Samuel Jeake's Logisticelogia. Finally, the word zenzizenzizenzic denotes the square of the square of a number's square, which is its eighth power: in modern notation,

${\displaystyle x^{8}=\left(\left(x^{2}\right)^{2}\right)^{2}.}$

Recorde proposed three mathematical terms by which any power (that is, index or exponent) greater than 1 could be expressed: zenzic, i.e. squared; cubic; and sursolid, i.e. raised to a prime number greater than three, the smallest of which is five. Sursolids were as follows: 5 was the first; 7, the second; 11, the third; 13, the fourth; etc.

Therefore, a number raised to the power of six would be zenzicubic, a number raised to the power of seven would be the second sursolid, hence bissursolid (not a multiple of two and three), a number raised to the twelfth power would be the "zenzizenzicubic" and a number raised to the power of ten would be the square of the (first) sursolid. The fourteenth power was the square of the second sursolid, and the twenty-second was the square of the third sursolid.

Curiously, Jeake's text appears to designate a written exponent of 0 as being equal to an "absolute number, as if it had no Mark", thus using the notation x⁰ to refer to x alone, while a written exponent of 1, in his text, denotes "the Root of any number", thus using the notation x¹ to refer to what is now known to be x^0.5.

The word, as well as the system, is obsolete except as a curiosity; the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has only one citation for it. As well as being a mathematical oddity, it survives as a linguistic oddity: zenzizenzizenzic has more Zs than any other word in the OED.

Samuel Jeake the Younger gives zenzizenzizenzizenzike (the square of the square of the square of the square, or 16th power) in a table in A Compleat Body of Arithmetick: