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🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Philosophy/Analytic philosophy

The Chinese room argument holds that a digital computer executing a program cannot be shown to have a "mind", "understanding" or "consciousness", regardless of how intelligently or human-like the program may make the computer behave. The argument was first presented by philosopher John Searle in his paper, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 1980. It has been widely discussed in the years since. The centerpiece of the argument is a thought experiment known as the Chinese room.

The argument is directed against the philosophical positions of functionalism and computationalism, which hold that the mind may be viewed as an information-processing system operating on formal symbols. Specifically, the argument is intended to refute a position Searle calls strong AI: "The appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds."

Although it was originally presented in reaction to the statements of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, it is not an argument against the behavioural goals of AI research, because it does not limit the amount of intelligence a machine can display. The argument applies only to digital computers running programs and does not apply to machines in general.

🔗 North America 🔗 Energy

The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and the Canadian province of Ontario on August 14–28, 2003, beginning just after 4:10 p.m. EDT.

Some power was restored by 11 p.m. Most did not get their power back until two days later. In other areas, it took nearly a week or two for power to be restored. At the time, it was the world's second most widespread blackout in history, after the 1999 Southern Brazil blackout. The outage, which was much more widespread than the Northeast blackout of 1965, affected an estimated 10 million people in southern and central Ontario, and 45 million people in eight U.S. states.

The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Physics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Physics/Biographies 🔗 United States/Washington - Seattle 🔗 Buddhism 🔗 Invention

Chester Floyd Carlson (February 8, 1906 – September 19, 1968) was an American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney born in Seattle, Washington.

He is best known for inventing electrophotography, the process performed today by millions of photocopiers worldwide. Carlson's process produced a dry copy, as contrasted with the wet copies then produced by the mimeograph process. Carlson's process was renamed xerography, a term that means "dry writing."

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 China 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Central Asia 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Mongols 🔗 Military history/Medieval warfare

Subutai (Classical Mongolian: Sübügätäi or Sübü'ätäi; Tuvan: Сүбэдэй, [sybɛˈdɛj]; Modern Mongolian: Сүбээдэй, Sübeedei. [sʊbeːˈdɛ]; Chinese: 速不台 1175–1248) was an Uriankhai general, and the primary military strategist of Genghis Khan and Ögedei Khan. He directed more than 20 campaigns in which he conquered 32 nations and won 65 pitched battles, during which he conquered or overran more territory than any other commander in history. He gained victory by means of imaginative and sophisticated strategies and routinely coordinated movements of armies that were hundreds of kilometers away from each other. He is also remembered for devising the campaign that destroyed the armies of Hungary and Poland within two days of each other, by forces over 500 kilometers apart.

🔗 Sociology

Computational sociology is a branch of sociology that uses computationally intensive methods to analyze and model social phenomena. Using computer simulations, artificial intelligence, complex statistical methods, and analytic approaches like social network analysis, computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modeling of social interactions.

It involves the understanding of social agents, the interaction among these agents, and the effect of these interactions on the social aggregate. Although the subject matter and methodologies in social science differ from those in natural science or computer science, several of the approaches used in contemporary social simulation originated from fields such as physics and artificial intelligence. Some of the approaches that originated in this field have been imported into the natural sciences, such as measures of network centrality from the fields of social network analysis and network science.

In relevant literature, computational sociology is often related to the study of social complexity. Social complexity concepts such as complex systems, non-linear interconnection among macro and micro process, and emergence, have entered the vocabulary of computational sociology. A practical and well-known example is the construction of a computational model in the form of an "artificial society", by which researchers can analyze the structure of a social system.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Fluid Dynamics

A Feynman sprinkler, also referred to as a Feynman inverse sprinkler or as a reverse sprinkler, is a sprinkler-like device which is submerged in a tank and made to suck in the surrounding fluid. The question of how such a device would turn was the subject of an intense and remarkably long-lived debate.

A regular sprinkler has nozzles arranged at angles on a freely rotating wheel such that when water is pumped out of them, the resulting jets cause the wheel to rotate; both a Catherine wheel and the aeolipile ("Hero's engine") work on the same principle. A "reverse" or "inverse" sprinkler would operate by aspirating the surrounding fluid instead. The problem is now commonly associated with theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, who mentions it in his bestselling memoirs Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! The problem did not originate with Feynman, nor did he publish a solution to it.

🔗 Department of Fun

Of the over six million articles in the English Wikipedia there are some articles that Wikipedians have identified as being somewhat unusual. These articles are verifiable, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something one would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. We should take special care to meet the highest standards of an encyclopedia with these articles lest they make Wikipedia appear idiosyncratic. If you wish to add an article to this list, the article in question should preferably meet one or more of these criteria:

• The article is something a reasonable person would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.
• The subject is a highly unusual combination of concepts, such as cosmic latte, death from laughter, etc.
• The subject is a clear anomaly—something that defies common sense, common expectations or common knowledge, such as Bir Tawil, Märket, Phineas Gage, Snow in Florida, etc.
• The subject is well-documented for unexpected notoriety or an unplanned cult following at extreme levels, such as Ampelmännchen or All your base are belong to us.
• The subject is a notorious hoax, such as the Sokal affair or Mary Toft.
• The subject might be found amusing, though serious.
• The subject is distinct amongst other similar ones.
• The article is a list or collection of articles or subjects meeting the criteria above.

This definition is not precise or absolute; some articles could still be considered unusual even if they do not fit these guidelines.

To keep the list of interest to readers, each entry on this list should be an article on its own (not merely a section in a less unusual article) and of decent quality, and in large meeting Wikipedia's manual of style. For unusual contributions that are of greater levity, see Wikipedia:Silly Things. A star () indicates a featured article. A plus () indicates a good article.

🔗 United States 🔗 Telecommunications

Area code 710 is a special area code, reserved to the federal government of the United States in 1983. As of December 2006, it had only one working number, 710-NCS-GETS (710-627-4387), which requires a special access code to use.

See Government Emergency Telecommunications Service for more information on this service.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Education 🔗 Museums

The Exploratorium is a museum of science, technology, and arts in San Francisco. Its mission is to create inquiry-based experiences that transform learning worldwide. It has been described by the New York Times as the most important science museum to have opened since the mid-20th century, an achievement attributed to "the nature of its exhibits, its wide-ranging influence and its sophisticated teacher training program". Characterized as "a mad scientist's penny arcade, a scientific funhouse, and an experimental laboratory all rolled into one", the participatory nature of its exhibits and its self-identification as a center for informal learning has led to it being cited as the prototype for participatory museums around the world.

The Exploratorium was founded by physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer and opened in 1969 at the Palace of Fine Arts, its home until January 2, 2013. On April 17, 2013, the Exploratorium reopened at Piers 15 and 17 on San Francisco's Embarcadero. The historic interior and exterior of Pier 15 was renovated extensively prior to the move, and is divided into several galleries mainly separated by content, including the physics of seeing and listening (Light and Sound), Human Behavior, Living Systems, Tinkering (including electricity and magnetism), the Outdoor Gallery, and the Bay Observatory Gallery, which focuses on local environment, weather, and landscape.

Since the museum's founding, over 1,000 participatory exhibits have been created, approximately 600 of which are on the floor at any given time. The exhibit-building workshop space is contained within the museum and is open to view. In addition to the public exhibition space, the Exploratorium has been engaged in the professional development of teachers, science education reform, and the promotion of museums as informal education centers since its founding. Since Oppenheimer's death in 1985, the Exploratorium has expanded into other domains, including its 50,000-page website and two iPad apps on sound and color. It has also inspired an international network of participatory museums working to engage the public with general science education. The new Exploratorium building is also working to showcase environmental sustainability efforts as part of its goal to become the largest net-zero museum in the country.

The Exploratorium offers visitors a variety of ways—including exhibits, webcasts, websites and events—for visitors to explore and understand the world around them. In 2011, the Exploratorium received the National Science Board 2011 Public Service Science Award for its contributions to public understanding of science and engineering.

🔗 Toys

A pantograph (Greek roots παντ- "all, every" and γραφ- "to write", from their original use for copying writing) is a mechanical linkage connected in a manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a second pen. If a line drawing is traced by the first point, an identical, enlarged, or miniaturized copy will be drawn by a pen fixed to the other. Using the same principle, different kinds of pantographs are used for other forms of duplication in areas such as sculpture, minting, engraving, and milling.

Because of the shape of the original device, a pantograph also refers to a kind of structure that can compress or extend like an accordion, forming a characteristic rhomboidal pattern. This can be found in extension arms for wall-mounted mirrors, temporary fences, scissor lifts, and other scissor mechanisms such as the pantograph used on electric locomotives and trams.