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🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Food and drink/Foodservice 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Globalization

The Big Mac Index is a price index published by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity (PPP) between two currencies and provides a test of the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries. It "seeks to make exchange-rate theory a bit more digestible."

The index, created in 1986, takes its name from the Big Mac, a hamburger sold at McDonald's restaurants.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Software

In computing, a Parallel Sysplex is a cluster of IBM mainframes acting together as a single system image with z/OS. Used for disaster recovery, Parallel Sysplex combines data sharing and parallel computing to allow a cluster of up to 32 systems to share a workload for high performance and high availability.

🔗 Scotland 🔗 Theatre 🔗 Shakespeare

The Scottish play and the Bard's play are euphemisms for William Shakespeare's Macbeth. The first is a reference to the play's Scottish setting, the second a reference to Shakespeare’s popular nickname. According to a theatrical superstition, called the Scottish curse, speaking the name Macbeth inside a theatre, other than as called for in the script while rehearsing or performing, will cause disaster. A variation of the superstition also forbids quoting lines from the play within a theatre except as part of an actual rehearsal or performance of the play.

Because of this superstition, the lead character is often referred to as the Scottish King or Scottish Lord. Lady Macbeth is often referred to as the Scottish Lady. Sometimes Mackers or MacB is used to avoid saying the name.

🔗 Systems 🔗 Robotics 🔗 Systems/Cybernetics

The Johns Hopkins Beast was a mobile automaton, an early pre-robot, built in the 1960s at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The machine had a rudimentary intelligence and the ability to survive on its own. As it wandered through the white halls of the laboratory, it would seek black wall outlets. When it found one it would plug in and recharge.

The robot was cybernetic. It did not use a computer. Its control circuitry consisted of dozens of transistors controlling analog voltages. It used photocell optics and sonar to navigate. The 2N404 transistors were used to create NOR logic gates that implemented the Boolean logic to tell it what to do when a specific sensor was activated. The 2N404 transistors were also used to create timing gates to tell it how long to do something. 2N1040 Power transistors were used to control the power to the motion treads, the boom, and the charging mechanism.

The original sensors in Mod I were physical touch only. The wall socket was detected by physical switches on the arm that followed the wall. Once detected, two electrical prongs were extended until they entered the wall socket and made the electrical connection to charge the vehicle. The stairway, doors, and pipes on the hall wall were also detected by physical switches and recognized by appropriate logic.

The sonar guidance system was developed for Mod I and improved for Mod II. It used two ultrasonic transducers to determine distance, location within the halls, and obstructions in its path. This provided "The Beast" with bat-like guidance. At this point, it could detect obstructions in the hallway, such as people in the hallway. Once an obstruction was detected, the Beast would slow down and then decide whether to stop or divert around the obstruction. It could also ultrasonically recognize the stairway and doorways to take appropriate action.

An optical guidance system was added to Mod II. This provided, among other capabilities, the ability to optically identify the black wall sockets that contrasted with the white wall.

The Hopkins Beast Autonomous Robot Mod II link below was written by Dr. Ronald McConnell, at that time a co-op student and one of the designers for Mod II.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Companies 🔗 Crime 🔗 Health and fitness

The Sackler family is an American family who founded and own the pharmaceutical companies Purdue Pharma and Mundipharma. Purdue Pharma, and some members of the family, have faced lawsuits regarding overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical drugs, including OxyContin. Purdue Pharma has been criticized for its role in the opioid epidemic in the United States. They have been described as the "most evil family in America", "drug dealers" and "the worst drug dealers in history".

The Sackler family has been profiled in various media, including the documentary Crime of the Century on HBO, the book Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, and the 2021 Hulu mini-series Dopesick.

🔗 Economics

The men's underwear index (MUI) is an economic index that can supposedly detect the beginnings of a recovery during an economic slump. The premise is that men's underwear are a necessity in normal economic times and sales remain stable. During a severe downturn, demand for these goods changes as new purchases are deferred. Hence, men's purchasing habits for underwear (and that of their spouses on their behalf) is thought to be a good indicator of discretionary spending for consumption at large especially during turnaround periods.

This indicator is noted for being followed by former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan.

The cryotron is a switch that operates using superconductivity. The cryotron works on the principle that magnetic fields destroy superconductivity. This simple device consists of two superconducting wires (e.g. tantalum and niobium) with different critical temperature (Tc). The cryotron was invented by Dudley Allen Buck of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory.

As described by Buck, a straight wire of tantalum (having lower Tc) is wrapped around with a wire of niobium in a single layer coil. Both wires are electrically isolated from each other. When this device is immersed in a liquid helium bath both wires become superconducting and hence offer no resistance to the passage of electric current. Tantalum in superconducting state can carry large amount of current as compared to its normal state. Now when current is passed through the niobium coil (wrapped around tantalum) it produces a magnetic field, which in turn reduces (kills) the superconductivity of the tantalum wire and hence reduces the amount of the current that can flow through the tantalum wire. Hence one can control the amount of the current that can flow in the straight wire with the help of small current in the coiled wire. We can think of the tantalum straight wire as a "gate" and the coiled niobium as a "control".

The article by Buck includes descriptions of several logic circuits implemented using cryotrons, including: one stage of a binary adder, carry network, binary accumulator stage, and two stages of a cryotron stepping register.

A planar cryotron using thin films of lead and tin was developed in 1957 by John Bremer at General Electric's General Engineering Lab in Schenectady, New York. This was one of the first integrated circuits, although using superconductors rather than semiconductors. In the next few years, a demonstration computer was made and arrays with 2000 devices operated. A short history of this work is in the November 2007 newsletter of the IEEE History Center.

Juri Matisoo developed a version of the cryotron incorporating a Josephson junction switched by the magnetic field from a control wire. He also explained the shortcomings of traditional cryotrons in which the superconductive material must transition between superconducting and normal states to switch the device, and thus switch relatively slowly. Matisoo's cryotron switched between a conducting state in which 'pair tunneling' of electrons through the gate took place and a 'resistive' state where only single electrons were able to tunnel. The circuit was (like the traditional cryotron) capable of some amplification (i.e gain greater than unity) had a switching rate of less than 800 picoseconds. Although the requirement for cryogenic cooling limited its practicality, it wasn't until the late 2010s that commercial transistors came close to matching this performance.

There have been periods of renewed interest in various types of cryotron, IBM experimented with using them for limited applications in supercomputers during the 1980s and (as of 2020) there has been some investigation of their potential applications both to I/O and logic in prototype quantum computers.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Poland 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Scotland 🔗 Zoo

Wojtek (1942 – 2 December 1963; Polish pronunciation: [ˈvɔjtɛk]; in English, sometimes spelled Voytek and pronounced as such) was a Syrian brown bear (Ursus arctos syriacus) bought, as a young cub, at a railway station in Hamadan, Iran, by Polish II Corps soldiers who had been evacuated from the Soviet Union. In order to provide for his rations and transportation, he was eventually enlisted officially as a soldier with the rank of private, and was subsequently promoted to corporal.

He accompanied the bulk of the II Corps to Italy, serving with the 22nd Artillery Supply Company. During the Battle of Monte Cassino, in Italy in 1944, Wojtek helped move crates of ammunition and became a celebrity with visiting Allied generals and statesmen. After the war, mustered out of the Polish Army, he was billeted and lived out the rest of his life at the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland.

🔗 Television 🔗 Science Fiction

V (or V: The Original Miniseries) is a two-part American science-fiction television miniseries, written and directed by Kenneth Johnson. First shown in 1983, it initiated the science-fiction franchise concerning aliens known as the "Visitors" trying to gain control of Earth and of the ways the populace reacts.