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🔗 Military history/Early Muslim military history 🔗 Games

The two envelopes problem, also known as the exchange paradox, is a brain teaser, puzzle, or paradox in logic, probability, and recreational mathematics. It is of special interest in decision theory, and for the Bayesian interpretation of probability theory. Historically, it arose as a variant of the necktie paradox. The problem typically is introduced by formulating a hypothetical challenge of the following type:

It seems obvious that there is no point in switching envelopes as the situation is symmetric. However, because you stand to gain twice as much money if you switch while risking only a loss of half of what you currently have, it is possible to argue that it is more beneficial to switch. The problem is to show what is wrong with this argument.

🔗 United States 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Lists 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Years 🔗 United States/U.S. history 🔗 Current events 🔗 Politics/Gun politics

This is a list of shootings in the United States that have occurred in 2022. Mass shootings are incidents involving several victims of firearm-related violence. The precise inclusion criteria are disputed, and there is no broadly accepted definition.

Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group, run by Tracy Holtan, that tracks shootings and their characteristics in the United States, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrator(s), are shot in one location at roughly the same time. The Congressional Research Service narrows that definition, limiting it to "public mass shootings", defined by four or more victims killed, excluding any victims who survive. The Washington Post and Mother Jones use similar definitions, with the latter acknowledging that their definition "is a conservative measure of the problem", as many shootings with fewer fatalities occur. The crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker project has the most expansive definition of four or more shot in any incident, including the perpetrator in the victim inclusion criteria.

A 2019 study of mass shootings published in the journal Injury Epidemiology recommended developing "a standard definition that considers both fatalities and nonfatalities to most appropriately convey the burden of mass shootings on gun violence." The authors of the study further suggested that "the definition of mass shooting should be four or more people, excluding the shooter, who are shot in a single event regardless of the motive, setting or number of deaths."

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Pennsylvania 🔗 Pittsburgh

A Pittsburgh toilet, or Pittsburgh potty, is a common fixture in pre-World War II houses built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States and surrounding region. It consists of an ordinary flush toilet installed in the basement, with no surrounding walls. Most of these toilets are paired with a crude basement shower apparatus and large sink, which often doubles as a laundry basin. Also, because western Pennsylvania is a steep topographical zone, many basements have their own entryway, allowing homeowners to enter from their yard or garage, cleanse themselves in their basement, and then ascend their basement stairs refreshed. Its primary function was to serve as a cleanup station for steel mill workers to clean themselves after returning from work. The toilet fixtures would also limit the harm of sewage backups in hilly Pittsburgh, providing a lower, flushable outlet than the main part of the house.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Armenia

The Radio Yerevan jokes, also known as the Armenian Radio jokes, have been popular in the Soviet Union and other countries of the former Communist Eastern bloc since the second half of the 20th century. These jokes of the Q&A type pretended to come from the Question & Answer series of the Armenian Radio. A typical format of a joke was: "Radio Yerevan was asked," and "Radio Yerevan answered."

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Film/Documentary films

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is a short documentary film directed by Les Blank in 1980 which depicts director Werner Herzog living up to his promise that he would eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever completed the film Gates of Heaven. The film includes clips from both Gates of Heaven and Herzog's 1970 feature Even Dwarfs Started Small. Comic song "Old Whisky Shoes", played by the Walt Solek Band, is the signature tune over the opening and closing credits.

Filmed in April 1979, the film features Herzog cooking his shoes (the ones he claims to have been wearing when he made the bet) at the Berkeley, California restaurant Chez Panisse, with the help of chef Alice Waters. (The shoes were boiled with garlic, herbs, and stock for 5 hours.) He is later shown eating one of the shoes before an audience at the premiere of Gates of Heaven at the nearby UC Theater. He did not eat the sole of the shoe, however, explaining that one does not eat the bones of the chicken.

Morris is not shown in the film, and Herzog, Morris, and others have told different stories of the nature of the bet, disagreeing as to whether it was serious, flippant, or an after-the-fact publicity stunt.

Blank went on to direct Burden of Dreams (1982), a feature-length documentary about Herzog and the making of Fitzcarraldo. Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is included as an extra on The Criterion Collection edition of the Burden of Dreams DVD. It is also included as an extra in the Criterion Collection edition of the Gates of Heaven Blu-ray disc.

When Chez Panisse celebrated its 40th anniversary, a replica of the shoe was created, boiled, and eaten as part of the public anniversary celebration.

The Academy Film Archive preserved Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe in 1999.

🔗 Lists

The following article lists the indebted companies in the world by total corporate debt according estimates by the British-Australian investment firm Janus Henderson. In 2019, the total debt of the 900 most indebted companies was $8,325 billion. The most indebted companies were in the oil and gas, utilities, telecommunication and automotive industries. The word's most indebted company in 2019 was Volkswagen AG.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

GNU Guix System or Guix System (previously GuixSD) is a rolling release, free and open source Linux distribution built around the GNU Guix package manager. It enables a declarative operating system configuration and allows reliable system upgrades that can easily be rolled back. It uses the GNU Shepherd init system and the Linux-libre kernel, with support for the GNU Hurd kernel under development. On February 3, 2015, the distribution was added to the Free Software Foundation's list of free Linux distributions. The Guix package manager and the Guix System drew inspiration from the Nix package manager and NixOS respectively.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Sweden 🔗 Travel and Tourism 🔗 Travel and Tourism/Hotels

The Jumbo Stay (formerly named the Jumbo Hostel) is a hostel located inside a decommissioned Boeing 747-200 jetliner at Stockholm Arlanda Airport. It opened in 2009.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Urban studies and planning 🔗 Hospitals

The Kirkbride Plan was a system of mental asylum design advocated by American psychiatrist Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809–1883) in the mid-19th century. The asylums built in the Kirkbride design, often referred to as Kirkbride Buildings (or simply Kirkbrides), were constructed during the mid-to-late-19th century in the United States. The structural features of the hospitals as designated by Kirkbride were contingent on his theories regarding the healing of the mentally ill, in which environment and exposure to natural light and air circulation were crucial. The hospitals built according to the Kirkbride Plan would adopt various architectural styles, but had in common the "bat wing" style floor plan, housing numerous wings that sprawl outward from the center.

The first hospital designed under the Kirkbride Plan was the Trenton State Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, constructed in 1848. Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, numerous psychiatric hospitals were designed under the Kirkbride Plan across the United States. By the twentieth century, popularity of the design had waned, largely due to the economic pressures of maintaining the immense facilities, as well as contestation of Kirkbride's theories amongst the medical community.

Numerous Kirkbride structures still exist, though many have been demolished or partially-demolished and repurposed. At least 30 of the original Kirkbride buildings have been registered with the National Register of Historic Places in the United States, either directly or through their location on hospital campuses or in historic districts.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Photography

Group f/64 or f.64 was a group founded by seven 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.