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🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

A ram air turbine (RAT) is a small wind turbine that is connected to a hydraulic pump, or electrical generator, installed in an aircraft and used as a power source. The RAT generates power from the airstream by ram pressure due to the speed of the aircraft.

🔗 Linguistics

🔗 Computing 🔗 Systems 🔗 Business 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Systems/Systems engineering

Hofstadter's law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity:

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

The law is often cited by programmers in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as The Mythical Man-Month or extreme programming.

🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Board and table games

Senet (or senat) is a board game from ancient Egypt, whose original rules are the subject of conjecture. The oldest hieroglyph resembling a senet game dates to around 3100 BC. The full name of the game in Egyptian is thought to have been zn.t n.t ḥˁb, meaning the "game of passing".

🔗 Sharks

Magnetic shark repellents utilize permanent magnets, which exploit the sensitivity of the Ampullae of Lorenzini in sharks and rays (electrosense). This organ is not found on bony fish (teleosts), therefore, this type of shark repellent is selective to sharks and rays. Permanent magnets do not require power input, making them ideal for use in fisheries and as bycatch reduction devices. Sharkbanz, released in 2014, is a wearable commercially available device intended for recreational users.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Judaism

Atbash (Hebrew: אתבש‎; also transliterated Atbaš) is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher originally used to encrypt the Hebrew alphabet. It can be modified for use with any known writing system with a standard collating order.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Physics

The flyby anomaly is a discrepancy between current scientific models and the actual increase in speed (i.e. increase in kinetic energy) observed during a planetary flyby (usually of Earth) by a spacecraft. In multiple cases, spacecraft have been observed to gain greater speed than scientists had predicted, but thus far no convincing explanation has been found. This anomaly has been observed as shifts in the S-band and X-band Doppler and ranging telemetry. The largest discrepancy noticed during a flyby has been 13 mm/s.

🔗 Computing

Plankalkül (German pronunciation: [ˈplaːnkalkyːl]) is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. It was the first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer.

Kalkül is the German term for a formal system—as in Hilbert-Kalkül, the original name for the Hilbert-style deduction system—so Plankalkül refers to a formal system for planning.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Denmark

Peter Naur (25 October 1928 – 3 January 2016) was a Danish computer science pioneer and Turing award winner. His last name is the "N" in the BNF notation (Backus–Naur form), used in the description of the syntax for most programming languages. He contributed to the creation of the ALGOL 60 programming language.