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🔗 Books 🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Organizations

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. The concept was elucidated in the book The Peter Principle (William Morrow and Company, 1969) by Dr Peter and Raymond Hull.

Peter and Hull intended the book to be satire, but it became popular as it was seen to make a serious point about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within hierarchical organizations. Hull wrote the text, based on Peter's research. The Peter principle has been the subject of much subsequent commentary and research.

🔗 History 🔗 Politics 🔗 Sports 🔗 Current events 🔗 History/Contemporary History 🔗 Weather 🔗 Weather/Weather 🔗 Portals

🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Astronomy

The Fermi paradox is the apparent inconsistency between the lack of conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the apparently high likelihood of their existence.

In simple terms, the Fermi paradox asks why, given the vast number of stars and potentially habitable planets in our observable universe, there is no clear evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations.

The paradox is named after physicist Enrico Fermi who blurted out the question—remembered by Emil Konopinski as "But where is everybody?"—during lunchtime after the conversation had already moved on to other topics. This happened at Los Alamos in 1950 with colleagues Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York. The paradox first appeared in print in a 1963 paper by Carl Sagan, and the paradox has since been fully described by scientists. Early formulations of the paradox have also been identified in writings by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1686) and Jules Verne (1865), and by Soviet rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1933).

There have been many attempts to resolve the Fermi paradox, such as suggesting that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are extremely rare, that the lifetime of such civilizations is short, or that they exist but (for various reasons) humans see no evidence.

🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Energy

TV pickup is a phenomenon that occurs in the United Kingdom involving sudden surges in demand on the national electrical grid, occurring when a large number of people simultaneously watch the same television programme. TV pickup occurs when viewers take advantage of commercial breaks in programming to operate electrical appliances at the same time, causing large synchronised surges in national electricity consumption. Such sudden huge surges in demand tied to the TV schedule are unique to the United Kingdom.

Electricity networks devote considerable resources to predicting and providing supply for these events, which typically impose an extra demand of around 200–400 megawatts (MW) on the British National Grid. Short-term supply is often obtained from pumped storage reservoirs, which can be quickly brought online, and are backed up by the slower fossil fuel and nuclear power stations. The largest ever pickup occurred on 4 July 1990, when a 2800 megawatt demand was imposed by the ending of the penalty shootout in the England v West Germany FIFA World Cup semi-final. In addition to pickups, the Grid also prepares for synchronised switch-offs during remembrance and energy-awareness events.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Battle of the Beams was a period early in the Second World War when bombers of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) used a number of increasingly accurate systems of radio navigation for night bombing in the United Kingdom. British scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry fought back with a variety of their own increasingly effective means, involving jamming and distortion of the radio waves. The period ended when the Wehrmacht moved their forces to the East in May 1941, in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union.

🔗 Cetaceans

A salmon hat is a cultural fad displayed by orcas, in which they wear dead salmon upon their heads. It was first observed in 1987 with southern resident orcas and was a relatively short-lived phenomenon. In 2024, the behaviour was observed again with orcas in Puget Sound. The motivations for salmon hats are unclear, but other orcas will mimic the behaviour once it begins. One hypothesis is that orcas wear salmon hats to display high food availability, or that the same individuals that originally started the trend revitalized it. It may also indicate playfulness.

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Death 🔗 Kansas City 🔗 Missouri

On July 17, 1981, two walkways collapsed at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, one directly above the other. They crashed onto a tea dance being held in the hotel's lobby, killing 114 and injuring 216. As a product of a corporate culture of profound neglect, the disaster contributed many lessons to the study of engineering ethics and errors, and to emergency management. The event remains the deadliest non‑deliberate structural failure in American history, and it was the deadliest structural collapse in the U.S. until the collapse of the World Trade Center towers 20 years later.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Paranormal

John Titor (May 5, 6 or 7, 1998) is a name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war, none of which came true. Subsequent closer examination of Titor's assertions provoked widespread skepticism. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator's findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax. A 2009 investigation concluded that Titor was likely the creation of Larry Haber, a Florida entertainment lawyer, along with his brother Morey, a computer scientist.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Business 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Languages

ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled natural language that is designed to simplify and clarify technical documentation. It was originally developed in the 1980s by the European Association of Aerospace Industries (AECMA) at the request of the European airline industry, which wanted a standardized form of English for aircraft maintenance documentation that could be easily understood by non-native English-speakers.

It has since been adopted in many other fields outside the aerospace, defense, and maintenance domains for its clear, consistent, and comprehensive nature. The current edition of the STE standard, which was published in January 2025, consists of 53 writing rules and a dictionary of approximately 900 approved words.