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

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Conservatism

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine is a 1961 LP featuring the actor Ronald Reagan. In this more than ten-minute recording, Reagan "criticized Social Security for supplanting private savings and warned that subsidized medicine would curtail Americans' freedom" and that "pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him." Roger Lowenstein called the LP part of a "stealth program" conducted by the American Medical Association (see Operation Coffee Cup).

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics

Soundex is a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English. The goal is for homophones to be encoded to the same representation so that they can be matched despite minor differences in spelling. The algorithm mainly encodes consonants; a vowel will not be encoded unless it is the first letter. Soundex is the most widely known of all phonetic algorithms (in part because it is a standard feature of popular database software such as DB2, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Ingres, MS SQL Server and Oracle.) Improvements to Soundex are the basis for many modern phonetic algorithms.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

In computer programming, COMEFROM (or COME FROM) is an obscure control flow structure used in some programming languages, originally as a joke. COMEFROM is roughly the opposite of GOTO in that it can take the execution state from any arbitrary point in code to a COMEFROM statement.

The point in code where the state transfer happens is usually given as a parameter to COMEFROM. Whether the transfer happens before or after the instruction at the specified transfer point depends on the language used. Depending on the language used, multiple COMEFROMs referencing the same departure point may be invalid, be non-deterministic, be executed in some sort of defined priority, or even induce parallel or otherwise concurrent execution as seen in Threaded Intercal.

A simple example of a "COMEFROM x" statement is a label x (which does not need to be physically located anywhere near its corresponding COMEFROM) that acts as a "trap door". When code execution reaches the label, control gets passed to the statement following the COMEFROM. This may also be conditional, passing control only if a condition is satisfied, analogous to a GOTO within an IF statement. The primary difference from GOTO is that GOTO only depends on the local structure of the code, while COMEFROM depends on the global structure – a GOTO transfers control when it reaches a line with a GOTO statement, while COMEFROM requires scanning the entire program or scope to see if any COMEFROM statements are in scope for the line, and then verifying if a condition is hit. The effect of this is primarily to make debugging (and understanding the control flow of the program) extremely difficult, since there is no indication near the line or label in question that control will mysteriously jump to another point of the program – one must study the entire program to see if any COMEFROM statements reference that line or label.

Debugger hooks can be used to implement a COMEFROM statement, as in the humorous Python goto module; see below. This also can be implemented with the gcc feature "asm goto" as used by the Linux kernel configuration option CONFIG_JUMP_LABEL. A no-op has its location stored, to be replaced by a jump to an executable fragment that at its end returns to the instruction after the no-op.

🔗 Psychology

Terror management theory (TMT) is both a social and evolutionary psychology theory originally proposed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski and codified in their book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015). It proposes that a basic psychological conflict results from having a self-preservation instinct while realizing that death is inevitable and to some extent unpredictable. This conflict produces terror, and the terror is then managed by embracing cultural beliefs, or symbolic systems that act to counter biological reality with more durable forms of meaning and value.

The most obvious examples of cultural values that assuage death anxiety are those that purport to offer literal immortality (e.g. belief in afterlife, religion). However, TMT also argues that other cultural values – including those that are seemingly unrelated to death – offer symbolic immortality. For example, values of national identity, posterity, cultural perspectives on sex, and human superiority over animals have been linked to death concerns. In many cases these values are thought to offer symbolic immortality either a) by providing the sense that one is part of something greater that will ultimately outlive the individual (e.g. country, lineage, species), or b) by making one's symbolic identity superior to biological nature (i.e. you are a personality, which makes you more than a glob of cells).

Because cultural values determine that which is meaningful, they are also the foundation for self-esteem. TMT describes self-esteem as being the personal, subjective measure of how well an individual is living up to their cultural values.

TMT is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death. The terror of absolute annihilation creates such a profound – albeit subconscious – anxiety in people that they spend their lives attempting to make sense of it. On large scales, societies build symbols: laws, religious meaning systems, cultures, and belief systems to explain the significance of life, define what makes certain characteristics, skills, and talents extraordinary, reward others whom they find exemplify certain attributes, and punish or kill others who do not adhere to their cultural worldview. On an individual level, self-esteem provides a buffer against death-related anxiety.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction

We (Russian: Мы, romanized: My) is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920–1921. The novel was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state. George Orwell claimed that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied it.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

This article compares variety of different X window managers. For an introduction to the topic, see X Window System.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Dogs 🔗 Animal rights

During the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet space program used dogs for sub-orbital and orbital space flights to determine whether human spaceflight was feasible. In this period, the Soviet Union launched missions with passenger slots for at least 57 dogs. The number of dogs in space is smaller, as some dogs flew more than once. Most survived; the few that died were lost mostly through technical failures, according to the parameters of the test.

A notable exception is Laika, the first dog to be sent into orbit, whose death during the 3 November, 1957 Sputnik 2 mission was expected from its outset.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Photography 🔗 Photography/History of photography

The rapatronic camera (a portmanteau of rapid action electronic) is a high-speed camera capable of recording a still image with an exposure time as brief as 10 nanoseconds.

The camera was developed by Harold Edgerton in the 1940s and was first used to photograph the rapidly changing matter in nuclear explosions within milliseconds of detonation, using exposures of several microseconds. To overcome the speed limitation of a conventional camera's mechanical shutter, the rapatronic camera uses two polarizing filters and a Faraday cell (or in some variants a Kerr cell). The two filters are mounted with their polarization angles at 90° to each other, to block all incoming light. The Faraday cell sits between the filters and changes the polarization plane of light passing through it depending on the level of magnetic field applied, acting as a shutter when it is energized at the right time for a very short amount of time, allowing the film to be properly exposed.

In magneto-optical shutters, the active material of the Faraday cell (e.g. dense flint glass, which reacts well to a strong magnetic field) is located inside an electromagnet coil, formed by a few loops of thick wire. The coil is powered from a pulse forming network by discharging a high-voltage capacitor (e.g. 2 microfarads at 1000 volts), into the coil via a trigatron or a thyratron switch. In electro-optical shutters, the active material is a liquid, typically nitrobenzene, located in a cell between two electrodes. A brief impulse of high voltage is applied to rotate the polarization of the passing light.

For a film-like sequence of high-speed photographs, as used in the photography of nuclear and thermonuclear tests, arrays of up to 12 cameras were deployed, with each camera carefully timed to record sequentially. Each camera was capable of recording only one exposure on a single sheet of film. Therefore, in order to create time-lapse sequences, banks of four to ten cameras were set up to take photos in rapid succession. The average exposure time used was three microseconds.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Children's literature 🔗 Novels/Short story

Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) is the first volume of stories about Winnie-the-Pooh, written by A. A. Milne and illustrated by E. H. Shepard. The book focuses on the adventures of a teddy bear called Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends Piglet, a small toy pig; Eeyore, a toy donkey; Owl, a live owl; and Rabbit, a live rabbit. The characters of Kanga, a toy kangaroo, and her son Roo are introduced later in the book, in the chapter entitled "In Which Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest and Piglet has a Bath". The bouncy toy-tiger character of Tigger is not introduced until the sequel, The House at Pooh Corner.

In 2003, Winnie the Pooh was listed at number 7 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Disability 🔗 United States/Utah

Laurence Kim Peek (November 11, 1951 – December 19, 2009) was an American savant. Known as a "megasavant", he had an exceptional memory, but he also experienced social difficulties, possibly resulting from a developmental disability related to congenital brain abnormalities. He was the inspiration for the autistic savant character Raymond Babbitt in the movie Rain Man. Although Peek was previously diagnosed with autism, it is now thought that he instead had FG syndrome.