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🔗 Cognitive science

Soar is a cognitive architecture, originally created by John Laird, Allen Newell, and Paul Rosenbloom at Carnegie Mellon University. (Rosenbloom continued to serve as co-principal investigator after moving to Stanford University, then to the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.) It is now maintained and developed by John Laird's research group at the University of Michigan.

The goal of the Soar project is to develop the fixed computational building blocks necessary for general intelligent agents – agents that can perform a wide range of tasks and encode, use, and learn all types of knowledge to realize the full range of cognitive capabilities found in humans, such as decision making, problem solving, planning, and natural language understanding. It is both a theory of what cognition is and a computational implementation of that theory. Since its beginnings in 1983 as John Laird’s thesis, it has been widely used by AI researchers to create intelligent agents and cognitive models of different aspects of human behavior. The most current and comprehensive description of Soar is the 2012 book, The Soar Cognitive Architecture.

🔗 Espionage 🔗 Internet 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia

Russian web brigades, also called Russian trolls, Russian bots, or more recently Kremlin Bots (after the Kremlin in Moscow) / Kremlins (a pejorative allusion to Gremlin) are state-sponsored anonymous Internet political commentators and trolls linked to the Government of Russia. Participants report that they are organized into teams and groups of commentators that participate in Russian and international political blogs and Internet forums using sockpuppets, social bots and large-scale orchestrated trolling and disinformation campaigns to promote pro-Putin and pro-Russian propaganda. Articles on the Russian Wikipedia concerning the MH17 crash and the 2014 Ukraine conflict were targeted by Russian internet propaganda outlets.

🔗 International relations 🔗 France 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 Basque 🔗 Islands 🔗 Spain

Pheasant Island (French: Île des Faisans/Île de la Conférence, Spanish: Isla de los Faisanes, Basque: Konpantzia) is an uninhabited river island in the Bidasoa river, located between France and Spain, whose administration alternates between both nations.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Textile Arts 🔗 Aviation/airport

The carpet at Portland International Airport (PDX) in Portland, Oregon, featured geometric shapes on a teal background, representing the intersection of the north and south runways seen by air traffic controllers from the airport's tower at night. SRG Partnership designed it in 1987, and since then, the carpet has received much media attention.

In 2013, the Port of Portland announced the carpet's replacement with a new pattern conceptualized by the Portland-based firm Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects. The announcement generated a social media "phenomenon" and gained attention from local and national news outlets. Removal of the original carpet began in January 2015, with the airport recycling worn portions and making remaining pieces available for sale by local retail vendors.

In 2015, Portland Trail Blazers point guard Damian Lillard released his first PDX carpet colorway on the Adidas D Lillard 1 sneaker. In 2016, Lillard released the colorway on the D Lillard 2, also inspired by the carpet.

In February of 2022, it was announced that the iconic carpet would be returning to the airport when a new terminal opens in 2024.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Psychology

Kettle logic (la logique du chaudron in the original French) is a rhetorical device wherein one uses multiple arguments to defend a point, but the arguments are inconsistent with each other.

Jacques Derrida uses this expression in reference to the humorous "kettle-story", that Sigmund Freud relates in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905).

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

Erotetics or erotetic logic is a part of logic, devoted to logical analysis of questions. It is sometimes called the logic of questions and answers.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Western Asia 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Western Asia/Kuwait

The Highway of Death (Arabic: طريق الموت ṭarīq al-mawt) is a six-lane highway between Kuwait and Iraq, officially known as Highway 80. It runs from Kuwait City to the border town of Safwan in Iraq and then on to the Iraqi city of Basra. The road was used by Iraqi armored divisions for the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It was repaired after the Gulf War and used by U.S. and British forces in the initial stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

During the American-led coalition offensive in the Persian Gulf War, American, Canadian, British and French aircraft and ground forces attacked retreating Iraqi military personnel attempting to leave Kuwait on the night of February 26–27, 1991, resulting in the destruction of hundreds of vehicles and the deaths of many of their occupants. Between 1,400 and 2,000 vehicles were hit or abandoned on the main Highway 80 north of Al Jahra.

The scenes of devastation on the road are some of the most recognizable images of the war, and it has been suggested that they were a factor in President George H. W. Bush's decision to declare a cessation of hostilities the next day. Many Iraqi forces successfully escaped across the Euphrates river, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that upwards of 70,000 to 80,000 troops from defeated divisions in Kuwait might have fled into Basra, evading capture.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Cold War

World War III or the Third World War, often abbreviated as WWIII or WW3, are names given to a hypothetical third worldwide large-scale military conflict after World War I and World War II. The term has been in use since at least as early as 1941. Some apply it loosely to limited or more minor conflicts such as the Cold War or the war on terror. In contrast, others assume that such a conflict would surpass prior world wars in both scope and destructive impact.

Due to the development and use of nuclear weapons near the end of World War II and their subsequent acquisition and deployment by many countries, the potential risk of a nuclear apocalypse causing widespread destruction of Earth's civilization and life is a common theme in speculations about a Third World War. Another primary concern is that biological warfare could cause many casualties. It could happen intentionally or inadvertently, by an accidental release of a biological agent, the unexpected mutation of an agent, or its adaptation to other species after use. Large-scale apocalyptic events like these, caused by advanced technology used for destruction, could render Earth's surface uninhabitable.

Before the beginning of World War II in 1939, World War I (1914–1918) was believed to have been "the war to end [all] wars." It was popularly believed that never again could there possibly be a global conflict of such magnitude. During the interwar period, World War I was typically referred to simply as "The Great War". The outbreak of World War II disproved the hope that humanity might have already "outgrown" the need for such widespread global wars.

With the advent of the Cold War in 1945 and with the spread of nuclear weapons technology to the Soviet Union, the possibility of a third global conflict became more plausible. During the Cold War years, the possibility of a Third World War was anticipated and planned for by military and civil authorities in many countries. Scenarios ranged from conventional warfare to limited or total nuclear warfare. At the height of the Cold War, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which determined an all-out nuclear confrontation would destroy all of the states involved in the conflict, had been developed. The absolute potential destruction of the human race may have contributed to the ability of both American and Soviet leaders to avoid such a scenario.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Military history 🔗 Europe 🔗 Politics 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 European history 🔗 Military history/Military culture, traditions, and heraldry

"Z" is one of several symbols painted on military vehicles of the Russian Armed Forces involved in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The symbol has been used in Russian popular culture as a sign of support for the invasion. Displaying any of the symbols on vehicles in public is illegal in Kazakhstan.