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🔗 History 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Viruses 🔗 Death 🔗 Globalization

The Spanish flu (also known as the 1918 flu pandemic) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic. Lasting from January 1918 to December 1920, it infected 500 million people—about a quarter of the world's population at the time. The death toll is estimated to have been anywhere from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.

To maintain morale, World War I censors minimized early reports of illness and mortality in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Papers were free to report the epidemic's effects in neutral Spain, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit. This gave rise to the pandemic's nickname, "Spanish flu". Historical and epidemiological data are inadequate to identify with certainty the pandemic's geographic origin, with varying views as to the origin.

Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill the very young and the very old, with a higher survival rate for those in between, but the Spanish flu pandemic resulted in a higher than expected mortality rate for young adults. Scientists offer several possible explanations for the high mortality rate of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Some analyses have shown the virus to be particularly deadly because it triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults. In contrast, a 2007 analysis of medical journals from the period of the pandemic found that the viral infection was no more aggressive than previous influenza strains. Instead, malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, and poor hygiene promoted bacterial superinfection. This superinfection killed most of the victims, typically after a somewhat prolonged death bed.

The Spanish flu was the first of two pandemics caused by the H1N1 influenza virus; the second was the swine flu in 2009.

🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Star Trek

The Vulcan salutation is a hand gesture popularized by the 1960s television series Star Trek. It consists of a raised hand with the palm forward and the thumb extended, while the fingers are parted between the middle and ring finger.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines. They contain orders on what action to take in the event that an enemy nuclear strike has destroyed the British government and has killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and the "second person" (normally a high-ranking member of the Cabinet) whom the prime minister has designated to make a decision on how to act in the event of the prime minister's death. In the event that the orders are carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of Government of the United Kingdom.

The letters are stored inside two nested safes in the control room of each submarine. The letters are destroyed unopened after a prime minister leaves office, so their content remains known only to the prime minister who issued them.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Politics 🔗 Media 🔗 Journalism

Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. It is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda. When criticisms were leveled at the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the Soviet response would often be "What about..." followed by an event in the Western world. As Garry Kasparov noted, it is a word that was coined to describe the frequent use of a rhetorical diversion by Soviet apologists and dictators, who would counter charges of their oppression, "massacres, gulags, and forced deportations" by invoking American slavery, racism, lynchings, etc. It has been adopted by other politicians and countries.

🔗 Mathematics

John von Neumann's universal constructor is a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer. The fundamental details of the machine were published in von Neumann's book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, completed in 1966 by Arthur W. Burks after von Neumann's death.

Von Neumann's goal was to specify an abstract machine which, when run, would replicate itself. In his design, the machine consists of three parts: a 'blueprint' for itself, a mechanism that can read any blueprint and construct the machine (sans blueprint) specified by that blueprint, and a 'copy machine' that can make copies of any blueprint. After the mechanism has been used to construct the machine specified by the blueprint, the copy machine is used to create a copy of that blueprint, and this copy is placed into the new machine, resulting in a working replication of the original machine. Some machines will do this backwards, copying the blueprint and then building a machine.

To define his machine in more detail, von Neumann invented the concept of a cellular automaton. The one he used consists of a two-dimensional grid of cells, each of which can be in one of 29 states at any point in time. At each timestep, each cell updates its state depending on the states of the surrounding cells at the prior timestep. The rules governing these updates are identical for all cells.

The universal constructor is a certain pattern of cell states in this cellular automaton. It contains one line of cells that serve as a 'tape', encoding a sequence of instructions that serve as a 'blueprint' for the machine. The machine reads these instructions one by one and performs the corresponding actions. The instructions direct the machine to use its 'construction arm' to build a copy of the machine, without tape, at some other location in the cell grid. The tape can't contain instructions to build an equally long tape, just as a container can't contain a container of the same size. Therefore, the machine contains a separate 'copy machine' which reads the tape and places a copy into the newly constructed machine. The resulting new machine and tape is identical to the old one, and it proceeds to replicate again.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Computing/Networking

In mathematics, the Cheeger constant (also Cheeger number or isoperimetric number) of a graph is a numerical measure of whether or not a graph has a "bottleneck". The Cheeger constant as a measure of "bottleneckedness" is of great interest in many areas: for example, constructing well-connected networks of computers, card shuffling. The graph theoretical notion originated after the Cheeger isoperimetric constant of a compact Riemannian manifold.

The Cheeger constant is named after the mathematician Jeff Cheeger.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Evolutionary biology 🔗 Tree of Life

The three-domain system is a biological classification introduced by Carl Woese et al. in 1990 that divides cellular life forms into archaea, bacteria, and eukaryote domains. In particular, it emphasizes the separation of prokaryotes into two groups, originally called Eubacteria (now Bacteria) and Archaebacteria (now Archaea). Woese argued that, on the basis of differences in 16S rRNA genes, these two groups and the eukaryotes each arose separately from an ancestor with poorly developed genetic machinery, often called a progenote. To reflect these primary lines of descent, he treated each as a domain, divided into several different kingdoms. Woese initially used the term "kingdom" to refer to the three primary phylogenic groupings, and this nomenclature was widely used until the term "domain" was adopted in 1990.

Parts of the three-domain theory have been fiercly challenged by scientists such as Radhey S. Gupta, who argues that the primary division within prokaryotes should be between those surrounded by a single membrane, and those with two membranes.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Education 🔗 Homeschooling 🔗 Alternative education

Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) or self-education (also self-learning and self-teaching) is education without the guidance of masters (such as teachers and professors) or institutions (such as schools). Generally, an autodidact is an individual who chooses the subject they will study, their studying material, and the studying rhythm and time. An autodidact may or may not have formal education, and their study may be either a complement or an alternative to formal education. Many notable contributions have been made by autodidacts.

🔗 Novels

The 480 is a political fiction novel by Eugene Burdick (1964).

The plot evolves around the political turmoil after John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963. In the novel, a fictitious charismatic character, John Thatch, an engineer, is seeking nomination for the Republican Party candidate at 1964 presidential elections. He is described as being contaminated with the "political virus". A handful of political professionals are promoting his nomination, in confrontation with the Party establishment. There exist apparent parallels between Thatch and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a write-in hero at New Hampshire primary.

The novel criticizes the socio-political effects on society at large from the use of computers to run massive simulations, which predict the public reaction to certain (proposed) political moves before implementing them. Such simulations make it easy to manipulate the public consciousness.

The "480" in the title denotes the number of groups (by party affiliation, socioeconomic status, location, origin, etc.) that the computer simulation uses to classify the American electorate. The full list of these is reproduced in the Appendix, claimed by the author to be the true list used by the Simulmatics Corporation (real name) in Senator John F. Kennedy's Presidential campaign in 1960. The cover features an IBM 5081 punched card.

The Simulmatics Corporation was created by MIT Professor Ithiel de Sola Pool, who provided a non-fiction backup to "The 480" in "Candidates, Issues, and Strategies: A Computer Simulation of the 1960 Presidential Election," MIT Press, 1964 (with co-authors Robert P. Abelson and Samuel L. Popkin). They built their model from 130,000 archived interviews in Gallup and Roper polls over a ten-year period. Based on its output, they advised Kennedy that he would benefit from a strong civil rights stand and that he had nothing to lose, and much to gain, by attacking religious bigotry and dealing frankly with his Catholicism.

The 480 has been cited as prefiguring the effect of modern social media and data gathering on politics.

🔗 United States 🔗 History 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Sociology 🔗 United States History 🔗 United States/U.S. history

The Strauss–Howe generational theory, also known as the Fourth Turning theory or simply the Fourth Turning, which was created by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, describes a theorized recurring generation cycle in American history. According to the theory, historical events are associated with recurring generational personas (archetypes). Each generational persona unleashes a new era (called a turning) lasting around 20–22 years, in which a new social, political, and economic climate exists. They are part of a larger cyclical "saeculum" (a long human life, which usually spans between 80 and 90 years, although some saecula have lasted longer). The theory states that after every saeculum, a crisis recurs in American history, which is followed by a recovery (high). During this recovery, institutions and communitarian values are strong. Ultimately, succeeding generational archetypes attack and weaken institutions in the name of autonomy and individualism, which ultimately creates a tumultuous political environment that ripens conditions for another crisis.

Strauss and Howe laid the groundwork for their theory in their 1991 book Generations, which discusses the history of the United States as a series of generational biographies going back to 1584. In their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, the authors expanded the theory to focus on a fourfold cycle of generational types and recurring mood eras to describe the history of the United States, including the Thirteen Colonies and their British antecedents. However, the authors have also examined generational trends elsewhere in the world and described similar cycles in several developed countries.

Academic response to the theory has been mixed—some applauding Strauss and Howe for their "bold and imaginative thesis" and others criticizing the theory as being overly-deterministic, non-falsifiable, and unsupported by rigorous evidence, "about as scientific as astrology or a Nostradamus text." Strauss–Howe generational theory has also been described by some historians and journalists as a "pseudoscience" "kooky", and "an elaborate historical horoscope that will never withstand scholarly scrutiny."

Academic criticism has focused on the lack of rigorous empirical evidence for their claims, and the authors' view that generational groupings are far more powerful than other social groupings such as economic class, race, sex, religion and political parties.