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🔗 California 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Geography 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Geology

Sailing stones (also known as sliding rocks, walking rocks, rolling stones, and moving rocks), are a geological phenomenon where rocks move and inscribe long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention. The movement of the rocks occurs when large ice sheets a few millimeters thick and floating in an ephemeral winter pond start to break up during sunny days. Frozen during cold winter nights, these thin floating ice panels are driven by wind and shove rocks at speeds up to 5 meters per minute.

Trails of sliding rocks have been observed and studied in various locations, including Little Bonnie Claire Playa in Nevada, and most famously at Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park, California, where the number and length of tracks are notable.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Plants 🔗 Africa/Niger

The Ténéré Tree (French: L'Arbre du Ténéré) was a solitary acacia, of either Acacia raddiana or Acacia tortilis, that was once considered the most isolated tree on Earth—the only one for over 400 kilometres (250 mi). It was a landmark on caravan routes through the Ténéré region of the Sahara Desert in northeast Niger, so well known that it and the Arbre Perdu (Lost Tree) to the north are the only trees to be shown on a map at a scale of 1:4,000,000. The Tree of Ténéré was located near a 40-metre (130 ft) deep well. It was knocked down in 1973, by a truck driver.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Amphibians and Reptiles

The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.

While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms.

🔗 Computer science

In computer science, a skip list is a data structure that allows ${\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}(\log n)}$ search complexity as well as ${\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}(\log n)}$ insertion complexity within an ordered sequence of ${\displaystyle n}$ elements. Thus it can get the best features of an array (for searching) while maintaining a linked list-like structure that allows insertion, which is not possible in an array. Fast search is made possible by maintaining a linked hierarchy of subsequences, with each successive subsequence skipping over fewer elements than the previous one (see the picture below on the right). Searching starts in the sparsest subsequence until two consecutive elements have been found, one smaller and one larger than or equal to the element searched for. Via the linked hierarchy, these two elements link to elements of the next sparsest subsequence, where searching is continued until finally we are searching in the full sequence. The elements that are skipped over may be chosen probabilistically or deterministically, with the former being more common.

🔗 History 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Urban studies and planning

New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighborhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually influenced many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies. New urbanism attempts to address the ills associated with urban sprawl and post-Second World War suburban development.

New Urbanism is strongly influenced by urban design practices that were prominent until the rise of the automobile prior to World War II; it encompasses ten basic principles such as traditional neighborhood design (TND) and transit-oriented development (TOD). These ideas can all be circled back to two concepts: building a sense of community and the development of ecological practices.

The organizing body for New Urbanism is the Congress for the New Urbanism, founded in 1993. Its foundational text is the Charter of the New Urbanism, which begins:

We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.

New Urbanists support regional planning for open space; context-appropriate architecture and planning; adequate provision of infrastructure such as sporting facilities, libraries and community centres; and the balanced development of jobs and housing. They believe their strategies can reduce traffic congestion by encouraging the population to ride bikes, walk, or take the train. They also hope that this set up will increase the supply of affordable housing and rein in suburban sprawl. The Charter of the New Urbanism also covers issues such as historic preservation, safe streets, green building, and the re-development of brownfield land. The ten Principles of Intelligent Urbanism also phrase guidelines for new urbanist approaches.

Architecturally, new urbanist developments are often accompanied by New Classical, postmodern, or vernacular styles, although that is not always the case.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Comedy

An esoteric programming language (sometimes shortened to esolang) is a programming language designed to test the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, as software art, as a hacking interface to another language (particularly functional programming or procedural programming languages), or as a joke. The use of esoteric distinguishes these languages from programming languages that working developers use to write software. Usually, an esolang's creators do not intend the language to be used for mainstream programming, although some esoteric features, such as visuospatial syntax, have inspired practical applications in the arts. Such languages are often popular among hackers and hobbyists.

Usability is rarely a goal for esoteric programming language designers—often the design leads to quite the opposite. Their usual aim is to remove or replace conventional language features while still maintaining a language that is Turing-complete, or even one for which the computational class is unknown.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Economics

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small Is Beautiful" came from a principle espoused by Schumacher's teacher Leopold Kohr (1937-1994) The concept is often used to champion small, appropriate technologies or polities that are believed to empower people more, in contrast with phrases such as "bigger is better".

First published in 1973, Small Is Beautiful brought Schumacher's critiques of Western economics to a wider audience during the 1973 energy crisis and the popularisation of the concept of globalization. In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked Small Is Beautiful among the 100 most influential books published since World War II. A further edition with commentaries was published in 1999.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Psychology

In positive psychology, a flow state, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time.

Named by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1975, the concept has been widely referred to across a variety of fields (and is particularly well recognized in occupational therapy), though the concept has been claimed to have existed for thousands of years under other names, notably in some Eastern thought systems, for example, Daoism and Buddhism.

The flow state shares many characteristics with hyperfocus. However, hyperfocus is not always described in a positive light. Some examples include spending "too much" time playing video games or watching television and getting side-tracked and pleasurably absorbed by one aspect of an assignment or task to the detriment of the overall assignment. In some cases, hyperfocus can "capture" a person, perhaps causing them to appear unfocused or to start several projects, but complete few. Other related concepts are trance, hypnosis, hypomania and mindfulness.

🔗 Games

The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever is a logic puzzle so called by American philosopher and logician George Boolos and published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy in 1996. Boolos' article includes multiple ways of solving the problem. A translation in Italian was published earlier in the newspaper La Repubblica, under the title L'indovinello più difficile del mondo.

It is stated as follows:

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in no particular order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are da and ja, in some order. You do not know which word means which.

Boolos provides the following clarifications: a single god may be asked more than one question, questions are permitted to depend on the answers to earlier questions, and the nature of Random's response should be thought of as depending on the flip of a fair coin hidden in his brain: if the coin comes down heads, he speaks truly; if tails, falsely.

🔗 Education 🔗 Engineering

Regulation and licensure in engineering is established by various jurisdictions of the world to encourage public welfare, safety, well-being and other interests of the general public and to define the licensure process through which an engineer becomes authorized to practice engineering and/or provide engineering professional services to the public.

As with many other professions, the professional status and the actual practice of professional engineering is legally defined and protected by law in some jurisdictions. Additionally, some jurisdictions permit only licensed engineers (sometimes called registered engineers) to "practice engineering," which requires careful definition in order to resolve potential overlap or ambiguity with respect to certain other professions which may or may not be themselves regulated (e.g. "scientists," or "architects"). Relatedly, jurisdictions that license according to particular engineering discipline need to define those boundaries carefully as well so that practitioners understand what they are permitted to do.

In many cases, only a state or provincial licensed/registered engineer has the authority to take legal responsibility for engineering work or projects (typically via a seal or stamp on the relevant design documentation). Regulations may require that only a licensed or registered engineer can sign, seal or stamp technical documentation such as reports, plans, engineering drawings and calculations for study estimate or valuation or carry out design analysis, repair, servicing, maintenance or supervision of engineering work, process or project. In cases where public safety, property or welfare is concerned, it may be required that an engineer be licensed or registered – though some jurisdictions have an "industrial exemption" that permits engineers to work internally for an organization without licensure so long as they are not making final decisions to release product to the public or offering engineering services directly to the public (e.g. consultant).

Expert witness or opinion in courts or before government committees or commissions can be provided by experts in the respective field, which is sometimes given by a registered or licensed engineer in some jurisdictions.