To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Lists

This is a list of some of the major unsolved problems, puzzles, or questions in economics. Some of these are theoretical in origin and some of them concern the inability of orthodox economic theory to explain an empirical observation.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Lists 🔗 Countries

This is a list of purchases of territory by a sovereign nation from another sovereign nation.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/Filmmaking

Soundies are three-minute American musical films, produced between 1940 and 1947, each displaying a song, dance, and/or band or orchestral number. Produced professionally on 35 mm black-and-white film, like theatrical motion pictures, they were printed on the more portable and economical 16 mm film.

The films were shown in a coin-operated "movie jukebox" named the Panoram, manufactured by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago. Each Panoram housed a 16 mm RCA film projector, with eight Soundies films threaded in an endless-loop arrangement. A system of mirrors flashed the image from the lower half of the cabinet onto a front-facing screen in the top half. Each film cost 10 cents to play, with no choice of song; the patron saw whatever film was next in the queue. Panorams could be found in public amusement centers, nightclubs, taverns, restaurants, and factory lounges, and the films were changed weekly. The completed Soundies were generally made available within a few weeks of their filming, by the Soundies Distributing Corporation of America.

Several production companies filmed the Soundies shorts in New York City, Hollywood, and Chicago: James Roosevelt's Globe Productions (1940–41), Cinemasters (1940–41), Minoco Productions (owned by Mills Novelty, 1941–43), RCM Productions (1941–46), LOL Productions (1943), Glamourettes (1943), Filmcraft Productions (1943–46), and Alexander Productions (1946) led by William D. Alexander). The performers recorded the music in advance, and mimed to the soundtrack during filming.

The movie-jukebox idea developed several imitations and variations of the technical design; the most successful of these imitators were the Techniprocess company (managed by Rudy Vallee) and the Featurettes company, which used original novelty songs and usually unknown talent (17-year-old Gwen Verdon appears in a couple of the Featurettes as "Gwen Verdun"). As Soundies quickly gained most of the market for jukebox films, the other companies disbanded, and some sold their films to the Soundies concern.

🔗 Mathematics

In geometry, a ball is a region in a space comprising all points within a fixed distance, called the radius, from a given point; that is, it is the region enclosed by a sphere or hypersphere. An n-ball is a ball in an n-dimensional Euclidean space. The volume of a n-ball is the Lebesgue measure of this ball, which generalizes to any dimension the usual volume of a ball in 3-dimensional space. The volume of a n-ball of radius R is ${\displaystyle R^{n}V_{n},}$ where ${\displaystyle V_{n}}$ is the volume of the unit n-ball, the n-ball of radius 1.

The real number ${\displaystyle V_{n}}$ can be expressed by a expression involving the gamma function. It can be computed with several recurrence relations. It can be expressed in terms of ${\displaystyle A_{n},}$ the area of the unit n-sphere.

🔗 Computing

Project Denver is the codename of a microarchitecture designed by Nvidia that implements the ARMv8-A 64/32-bit instruction sets using a combination of simple hardware decoder and software-based binary translation (dynamic recompilation) where "Denver's binary translation layer runs in software, at a lower level than the operating system, and stores commonly accessed, already optimized code sequences in a 128 MB cache stored in main memory". Denver is a very wide in-order superscalar pipeline. Its design makes it suitable for integration with other SIPs cores (e.g. GPU, display controller, DSP, image processor, etc.) into one die constituting a system on a chip (SoC).

Project Denver is targeted at mobile computers, personal computers, servers, as well as supercomputers. Respective cores have found integration in the Tegra SoC series from Nvidia. Initially Denver cores was designed for the 28nm process node (Tegra model T132 aka "Tegra K1"). Denver 2 was an improved design that built for the smaller, more efficient 16nm node. (Tegra model T186 aka "Tegra X2").

In 2018, Nvidia released an improved design (codename: "Carmel", based on ARMv8 (64-bit; variant: ARM-v8.2 with 10-way superscalar, functional safety, dual execution, parity & ECC) got integrated into the Tegra Xavier SoC offering a total of 8 cores (or 4 dual-core pairs). The Carmel CPU core supports full Advanced SIMD (ARM NEON), VFP (Vector Floating Point), and ARMv8.2-FP16. First published testings of Carmel cores integrated in the Jetson AGX development kit by third party experts took place in September 2018 and indicated a noticeably increased performance as should expected for this real world physical manifestation compared to predecessors systems, despite all doubts the used quickness of such a test setup in general an in particular implies. The Carmel design can be found in the Tegra model T194 ("Tegra Xavier") that is designed with a 12 nm structure size.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Libraries

The memex (originally coined "at random", though sometimes said to be a portmanteau of "memory" and "index") is the name of the hypothetical proto-hypertext system that Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think". Bush envisioned the memex as a device in which individuals would compress and store all of their books, records, and communications, "mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility". The memex would provide an "enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory". The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext systems (eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web) and personal knowledge base software. The hypothetical implementation depicted by Bush for the purpose of concrete illustration was based upon a document bookmark list of static microfilm pages and lacked a true hypertext system, where parts of pages would have internal structure beyond the common textual format. Early electronic hypertext systems were thus inspired by memex rather than modeled directly upon it.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Canada 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Aviation/gliding 🔗 Canada/History of Canada 🔗 Canada/Manitoba

Air Canada Flight 143 was a Canadian scheduled domestic passenger flight between Montreal and Edmonton that ran out of fuel on July 23, 1983, at an altitude of 41,000 feet (12,000 m), midway through the flight. The crew was able to glide the Boeing 767 aircraft safely to an emergency landing at a former Royal Canadian Air Force base in Gimli, Manitoba, that had been turned into a motor racing track. This unusual aviation incident earned the aircraft the nickname "Gimli Glider".

The subsequent investigation revealed that a combination of company failures, human errors and confusion over unit measures had led to the aircraft being refuelled with insufficient fuel for the planned flight.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Geology

A fossil natural nuclear fission reactor is a uranium deposit where self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions have occurred. This can be examined by analysis of isotope ratios. The conditions under which a natural nuclear reactor could exist had been predicted in 1956 by Paul Kazuo Kuroda. The phenomenon was discovered in 1972 in Oklo, Gabon by French physicist Francis Perrin under conditions very similar to what was predicted.

Oklo is the only known location for this in the world and consists of 16 sites at which self-sustaining nuclear fission reactions are thought to have taken place approximately 1.7 billion years ago, and ran for a few hundred thousand years, averaging probably less than 100 kW of thermal power during that time.

🔗 Culture 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture

Mono no aware (物の哀れ), literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese idiom for the awareness of impermanence (無常, mujō), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.

🔗 Computing

SQRL (pronounced "squirrel") or Secure, Quick, Reliable Login (formerly Secure QR Login) is a draft open standard for secure website login and authentication. The software typically uses a link of the scheme sqrl:// or optionally a QR code, where a user identifies via a pseudonymous zero-knowledge proof rather than providing a user ID and password. This method is thought to be impervious to a brute force password attack or data breach. It shifts the burden of security away from the party requesting the authentication and closer to the operating system implementation of what is possible on the hardware, as well as to the user. SQRL was proposed by Steve Gibson of Gibson Research Corporation in October 2013 as a way to simplify the process of authentication without the risk of revelation of information about the transaction to a third party.