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🔗 Elements

Alternative periodic tables are tabulations of chemical elements differing in their organization from the traditional depiction of the periodic system.

Over a thousand have been devised, often for didactic reasons, as not all correlations between the chemical elements are effectively captured by the standard periodic table.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Cooperatives 🔗 Catholicism

Distributism is an economic theory asserting that the world's productive assets should be widely owned rather than concentrated.

Developed in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, distributism was based upon the principles of Catholic social teaching, especially the teachings of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno (1931). It views both capitalism and socialism as equally flawed and exploitative, and it favors economic mechanisms such as cooperatives and member-owned mutual organizations as well as small businesses, and large-scale antitrust regulations.

Some Christian democratic political parties have advocated distributism in their economic policies.

🔗 Computing

A Gödel machine is a hypothetical self-improving computer program that solves problems in an optimal way. It uses a recursive self-improvement protocol in which it rewrites its own code when it can prove the new code provides a better strategy. The machine was invented by Jürgen Schmidhuber (first proposed in 2003), but is named after Kurt Gödel who inspired the mathematical theories.

The Gödel machine is often discussed when dealing with issues of meta-learning, also known as "learning to learn." Applications include automating human design decisions and transfer of knowledge between multiple related tasks, and may lead to design of more robust and general learning architectures. Though theoretically possible, no full implementation has been created.

The Gödel machine is often compared with Marcus Hutter's AIXItl, another formal specification for an artificial general intelligence. Schmidhuber points out that the Gödel machine could start out by implementing AIXItl as its initial sub-program, and self-modify after it finds proof that another algorithm for its search code will be better.

🔗 Video games

MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze, using the built-in MIDI ports of the Atari ST for networking, introduced the concept of deathmatch combat. The game found a wider audience on the Game Boy as Faceball 2000.

The original MIDI Maze team consisted of James Yee as the business manager, Michael Park as the graphic and networking programmer, and George Miller writing the AI and drone logic.

🔗 Korea

Nunchi, sometimes noonchi, is a Korean concept signifying the subtle art and ability to listen and gauge others' moods. It first appears in the 17th century as nunch'ŭi (眼勢 in Chinese characters), meaning "eye force/power". In Western culture, nunchi could be described as the concept of emotional intelligence. It is of central importance to the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Nunchi is literally translated as "eye-measure". It is closely related to the broader concept of paralanguage, however nunchi also relies on an understanding of one's status relative to the person with whom they're interacting. It can be seen as the embodiment of skills necessary to communicate effectively in high context culture.

The concept of nunchi, and one's abundance or lack thereof, forms the basis of many common expressions and idioms. For example, a socially clumsy person can be described as nunchi eoptta (눈치 없다), meaning "absence of nunchi."

눈치 Nunchi is briefly defined as the high social sensitivity of Koreans which basically means they are able to ascertain others moods by being around them and talking to them. They are sensitive to what others say indirectly, because they want to maintain harmony. They do this by the use of the skill named "nunchi" which literally means eye measure in Korean, they sense someone's "kibun", Kibun is a Korean word which relates to mood, current feelings, and the state of mind. Facilitating nunchi, encouraging the use of this skill, is expected to result in rich understanding. It is of central importance to the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. With nunchi, Koreans are using non-verbal cues to convey emotion and meaning through various means, including voice pitch and volume as well as intonation. Nunchi also relies heavily on an understanding of one's status relative to the person with whom one is interacting. Because Korea, as with other high-context cultures caters toward in-groups that have similar experiences and expectations and from which inferences are drawn, many things are left unsaid here. The culture does the explaining, in effect. Both Kibun and Nunchi are very difficult concepts for non-Koreans to get the hang of and they will generally be forgiven for their ignorance of these concepts and consequent rude behavior, especially if they are high on the status ladder. However, one gains more than one loses by trying to understand and, as much as possible, behaving according to these rules of behavior. In Korea, personal relations frequently take precedence over business. In order to be successful, it is vital to establish good, personal relationships based on mutual trust and benefit Koreans judge this by Nunchi to get a base understanding of the individual they just met. Korean business culture is firmly grounded in respectful rapport and in order to establish this, it is essential to have the right introduction to approach the company. Koreans will use Nunchi to make sure the right approach is being used, often through a mutual friend or acquaintance at the appropriate level. Koreans spend a significant amount of time developing and fostering personal contacts. Therefore, time should be allocated for this process, particularly during the first meeting, which is frequently used to simply establish rapport and build trust.

The phrase 눈치 있다 (nunchi itda) refers to someone who's quick witted, can understand the situation quickly, or has common sense. Another way to say this is 눈치 빠르다 (nunchi ppareuda) – to have quick nunchi.

In Korean, the phrase 눈치 없다 (nunchi eoptta) refers to someone that is clueless, someone that doesn't know what's going on, or simply doesn't have any common sense basically it is the exact opposite of nunchi or when someones nunchi is lacking.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Florida

Marvin Pipkin (November 18, 1889 – January 7, 1977) was an American chemist. During his time in the United States Army he worked on gas masks. In his civilian life he invented a process for frosting the inside of incandescent light bulbs to cut down on the sharp glare and diffuse the light. He went on to make many other inventions and innovative improvements to the light bulb.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

In x86 computing, unreal mode, also big real mode, huge real mode, flat real mode, or voodoo mode is a variant of real mode, in which one or more segment descriptors has been loaded with non-standard values, like 32-bit limits allowing access to the entire memory. Contrary to its name, it is not a separate addressing mode that the x86 processors can operate in. It is used in the 80286 and later x86 processors.