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🔗 Biography 🔗 Oregon 🔗 LGBT studies

Alan L. Hart (born Alberta Lucille Hart, October 4, 1890 – July 1, 1962) was an American physician, radiologist, tuberculosis researcher, writer and novelist. He was in 1917–18 one of the first trans men to undergo hysterectomy in the United States, and lived the rest of his life as a man. He pioneered the use of x-ray photography in tuberculosis detection, and helped implement TB screening programs that saved thousands of lives.

🔗 Computing

The Owner-Free File System (OFF System, or OFF for short) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system in which all shared files are represented by randomized multi-used data blocks. Instead of anonymizing the network, the data blocks are anonymized and therefore, only data garbage is ever exchanged and stored and no forwarding via intermediate nodes is required. OFF claims to have been created with the expressed intention "to cut off some gangrene-infested bits of the copyright industry."

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Southeast Asian military history 🔗 Vietnam

Operation Popeye (Project Controlled Weather Popeye / Motorpool / Intermediary-Compatriot) was a highly classified weather modification program in Southeast Asia during 1967–1972. The cloud seeding operation during the Vietnam War ran from March 20, 1967 until July 5, 1972 in an attempt to extend the monsoon season, specifically over areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The operation was used to induce rain and extend the East Asian Monsoon season in support of U.S. government efforts related to the War in Southeast Asia.

The former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, was aware that there might be objections raised by the international scientific community but said in a memo to the president that such objections had not in the past been a basis for prevention of military activities considered to be in the interests of U.S. national security.

The chemical weather modification program was conducted from Thailand over Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam and allegedly sponsored by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA without the authorization of then Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird who had categorically denied to Congress that a program for modification of the weather for use as a tactical weapon even existed.

🔗 Mathematics

In mathematics, 0.999... (also written as 0.9, among other ways) denotes the repeating decimal consisting of infinitely many 9s after the decimal point (and one 0 before it). This repeating decimal represents the smallest number no less than every decimal number in the sequence (0.9, 0.99, 0.999, ...). This number is equal to 1. In other words, "0.999..." and "1" represent the same number. There are many ways of showing this equality, from intuitive arguments to mathematically rigorous proofs. The technique used depends on the target audience, background assumptions, historical context, and preferred development of the real numbers, the system within which 0.999... is commonly defined. (In other systems, 0.999... can have the same meaning, a different definition, or be undefined.)

More generally, every nonzero terminating decimal has two equal representations (for example, 8.32 and 8.31999...), which is a property of all base representations. The utilitarian preference for the terminating decimal representation contributes to the misconception that it is the only representation. For this and other reasons—such as rigorous proofs relying on non-elementary techniques, properties, or disciplines—some people can find the equality sufficiently counterintuitive that they question or reject it. This has been the subject of several studies in mathematics education.

🔗 Physics

The Foucault pendulum or Foucault's pendulum is a simple device named after French physicist Léon Foucault and conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the Earth's rotation. The pendulum was introduced in 1851 and was the first experiment to give simple, direct evidence of the earth's rotation. Foucault pendulums today are popular displays in science museums and universities.

🔗 Computing

Wi-Fi over Coax is a technology for extending and distributing Wi-Fi signals via coaxial cables. As an in-building wireless solution, Wi-Fi over Coax can make use of existing or new cabling with native impedance of 50 ohms shared by a Wi-Fi access point, cabling run, and antenna. Coaxial cables with characteristic impedance of 75 ohms, such as RG-6 cables used for in-building television distribution, can also be used by incorporating impedance converters. As part of a distributed antenna system, Wi-Fi over Coax can connect multiple floors of a home or office via power dividers and zoned antennas either passively or via amplifiers, potentially eliminating the need for multiple access points.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Genetics 🔗 Physiology 🔗 Physiology/neuro 🔗 Evolutionary biology 🔗 Conservatism

A number of studies have found that biology can be linked with political orientation. This means that biology is a possible factor in political orientation but may also mean that the ideology a person identifies with changes a person's ability to perform certain tasks. Many of the studies linking biology to politics remain controversial and unreplicated, although the overall body of evidence is growing.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 Plan 9

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, originating in the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s, and building on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. The final official release was in early 2015.

Under Plan 9, UNIX's everything is a file metaphor is extended via a pervasive network-centric filesystem, and graphical user interface is assumed as a basis for almost all functionality, though it retains a heavily text-centric ideology.

The name Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a reference to the Ed Wood 1959 cult science fiction Z-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space. The name of the project's mascot is "Glenda, the Plan 9 Bunny". The system continues to be used and developed by operating system researchers and hobbyists.

🔗 Physics

Magnetocapacitance is a property of some dielectric, insulating materials, and metal–insulator–metal heterostructures that exhibit a change in the value of their capacitance when an external magnetic field is applied to them. Magnetocapacitance can be an intrinsic property of some dielectric materials, such as multiferroic compounds like BiMnO₃, or can be a manifest of properties extrinsic to the dielectric but present in capacitance structures like Pd, Al₂O₃, and Al.

🔗 Astronomy

The Great Debate, also called the Shapley–Curtis Debate, was held on 26 April 1920 at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis. It concerned the nature of so-called spiral nebulae and the size of the universe; Shapley believed that distant nebulae were relatively small and lay within the outskirts of Earth's home galaxy, while Curtis held that they were in fact independent galaxies, implying that they were exceedingly large and distant.

The two scientists first presented independent technical papers about "The Scale of the Universe" during the day and then took part in a joint discussion that evening. Much of the lore of the Great Debate grew out of two papers published by Shapley and by Curtis in the May 1921 issue of the Bulletin of the National Research Council. The published papers each included counter arguments to the position advocated by the other scientist at the 1920 meeting.

In the aftermath of the public debate, scientists have been able to verify individual pieces of evidence from both astronomers, but on the main point of the existence of other galaxies, Curtis has been proven correct.