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🔗 Companies 🔗 Environment 🔗 Automobiles

Criticism of Tesla, Inc., especially under CEO Elon Musk, ranges from potential safety issues to questionable business practices which include alleged fraud, a history of environmental violations, disregard for workers' safety, and Musk's excessive compensation package. Tesla and Musk have also been criticized for their attempts to intimidate and silence whistleblowers, journalists, and other critics who have spoken out against the company.

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Europe 🔗 Energy

The European super grid is a possible future super grid that would ultimately interconnect the various European countries and the regions around Europe's borders – including North Africa, Kazakhstan, and Turkey – with a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) power grid.

It is envisaged that a European super grid would:

• lower the cost of power in all participating countries by allowing the entire region to share the most efficient power plants;
• pool load variability and power station unreliability, reducing the margin of inefficient spinning reserve and standby that have to be supplied;
• allow for wider use of renewable energy, particularly wind energy, from the concept that "it is always windy somewhere" – in particular it tends to be windy in the summer in North Africa, and windy in the winter in Europe;
• allow wide sharing of the total European hydro power resource, which is about 6 weeks of full load European output;
• decrease Europe's dependence on imported fuels.

🔗 Computer science

TLA⁺ is a formal specification language developed by Leslie Lamport. It is used to design, model, document, and verify programs, especially concurrent systems and distributed systems. TLA⁺ has been described as exhaustively-testable pseudocode, and its use likened to drawing blueprints for software systems; TLA is an acronym for Temporal Logic of Actions.

For design and documentation, TLA⁺ fulfills the same purpose as informal technical specifications. However, TLA⁺ specifications are written in a formal language of logic and mathematics, and the precision of specifications written in this language is intended to uncover design flaws before system implementation is underway.

Since TLA⁺ specifications are written in a formal language, they are amenable to finite model checking. The model checker finds all possible system behaviours up to some number of execution steps, and examines them for violations of desired invariance properties such as safety and liveness. TLA⁺ specifications use basic set theory to define safety (bad things won't happen) and temporal logic to define liveness (good things eventually happen).

TLA⁺ is also used to write machine-checked proofs of correctness both for algorithms and mathematical theorems. The proofs are written in a declarative, hierarchical style independent of any single theorem prover backend. Both formal and informal structured mathematical proofs can be written in TLA⁺; the language is similar to LaTeX, and tools exist to translate TLA⁺ specifications to LaTeX documents.

TLA⁺ was introduced in 1999, following several decades of research into a verification method for concurrent systems. A toolchain has since developed, including an IDE and distributed model checker. The pseudocode-like language PlusCal was created in 2009; it transpiles to TLA⁺ and is useful for specifying sequential algorithms. TLA⁺² was announced in 2014, expanding language support for proof constructs. The current TLA⁺ reference is The TLA⁺ Hyperbook by Leslie Lamport.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Religion 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Military history/Military culture, traditions, and heraldry

The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, people under arms" or "detachment, war party") refers to the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for a number of years before their full integration to the host society, in the context of a rite of passage into manhood.

Subsequent Indo-European traditions and myths feature parallel linkages between property-less adolescent males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated into the community of the married men; their service in a "police-army" sent away for a part of the year in the wild (where they hunted animals and raided foreign communities) and defending the host society during the remaining part of the year; their mystical self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, promiscuity, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between invulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Lists

This is a list of video games that multiple video game journalists and critics have considered to be among the best of all time. The games listed here are included on at least six separate "best/greatest of all time" lists from different publications, as chosen by their editorial staffs.

🔗 Brands 🔗 Toys

Spirograph is a geometric drawing device that produces mathematical roulette curves of the variety technically known as hypotrochoids and epitrochoids. The well known toy version was developed by British engineer Denys Fisher and first sold in 1965.

The name has been a registered trademark of Hasbro Inc. since 1998 following purchase of the company that had acquired the Denys Fisher company. The Spirograph brand was relaunched worldwide in 2013, with its original product configurations, by Kahootz Toys.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Water 🔗 Rivers 🔗 Africa/Libya

The Great Man-Made River (GMMR, النهر الصناعي العظيم) is a network of pipes that supplies fresh water obtained from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System fossil aquifer across Libya. It is the world's largest irrigation project. The project utilizes a pipeline system that pumps water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System from down south in Libya to cities in the populous Libyan northern Mediterranean coast including Tripoli and Benghazi. The water covers a distance of up to 1,600 kilometers and provides 70% of all freshwater used in Libya.

According to its website, it is the largest underground network of pipes (2,820 kilometres (1,750 mi)) and aqueducts in the world. It consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m³ of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and elsewhere. The late Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi described it as the "Eighth Wonder of the World".

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages

ISO 3103 is a standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (commonly referred to as ISO), specifying a standardized method for brewing tea, possibly sampled by the standardized methods described in ISO 1839. It was originally laid down in 1980 as BS 6008:1980 by the British Standards Institution, and a revision was published in December, 2019 as ISO/NP 3103. It was produced by ISO Technical Committee 34 (Food products), Sub-Committee 8 (Tea).

The abstract states the following:

The method consists in extracting of soluble substances in dried tea leaf, contained in a porcelain or earthenware pot, by means of freshly boiling water, pouring of the liquor into a white porcelain or earthenware bowl, examination of the organoleptic properties of the infused leaf, and of the liquor with or without milk, or both.

This standard is not meant to define the proper method for brewing tea intended for general consumption, but rather to document a tea brewing procedure where meaningful sensory comparisons can be made. An example of such a test would be a taste-test to establish which blend of teas to choose for a particular brand or basic label in order to maintain a consistent tasting brewed drink from harvest to harvest.

The work was the winner of the parodic Ig Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.

🔗 Statistics 🔗 Futures studies

The Delphi method or Delphi technique ( DEL-fy; also known as Estimate-Talk-Estimate or ETE) is a structured communication technique or method, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts. The technique can also be adapted for use in face-to-face meetings, and is then called mini-Delphi or Estimate-Talk-Estimate (ETE). Delphi has been widely used for business forecasting and has certain advantages over another structured forecasting approach, prediction markets.

Delphi is based on the principle that forecasts (or decisions) from a structured group of individuals are more accurate than those from unstructured groups. The experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator or change agent provides an anonymised summary of the experts' forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the "correct" answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a predefined stop criterion (e.g., number of rounds, achievement of consensus, stability of results), and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results.

Special attention has to be paid to the formulation of the Delphi theses and the definition and selection of the experts in order to avoid methodological weaknesses that severely threaten the validity and reliability of the results.

🔗 History 🔗 Europe 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Romania 🔗 Moldova

In the archaeology of Neolithic Europe, the burned house horizon is the geographical extent of the phenomenon of presumably intentionally burned settlements.

This was a widespread and long-lasting tradition in what is now Southeastern and Eastern Europe, lasting from as early as 6500 BCE (the beginning of the Neolithic) to as late as 2000 BCE (the end of the Chalcolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age). A notable representative of this tradition is the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, which was centered on the burned-house horizon both geographically and temporally.

There is still a discussion in the study of Neolithic and Eneolithic Europe whether the majority of burned houses were intentionally set alight or not.

Although there is still debate about the why house burning was practiced, the evidence seems to indicate that it was highly unlikely to have been accidental. There is also debate about why this would have been done deliberately and regularly, since these burnings could destroy the entire settlement. However, in recent years, the consensus has begun to gel around the "domicide" theory supported by Tringham, Stevanovic and others.

Cucuteni-Trypillian settlements were completely burned every 75–80 years, leaving behind successive layers consisting mostly of large amounts of rubble from the collapsed wattle-and-daub walls. This rubble was mostly ceramic material that had been created as the raw clay used in the daub of the walls became vitrified from the intense heat that would have turned it a bright orange color during the conflagration that destroyed the buildings, much the same way that raw clay objects are turned into ceramic products during the firing process in a kiln. Moreover, the sheer amount of fired-clay rubble found within every house of a settlement indicates that a fire of enormous intensity would have raged through the entire community to have created the volume of material found.