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🔗 Computing

Koomey's law describes a trend in the history of computing hardware: for about a half-century, the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated doubled about every 1.57 years. Professor Jonathan Koomey described the trend in a 2010 paper in which he wrote that "at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half."

This trend had been remarkably stable since the 1950s (R² of over 98%). But in 2011, Koomey re-examined this data and found that after 2000, the doubling slowed to about once every 2.6 years. This is related to the slowing of Moore's Law, the ability to build smaller transistors; and the end around 2005 of Dennard scaling, the ability to build smaller transistors with constant power density.

"The difference between these two growth rates is substantial. A doubling every year and a half results in a 100-fold increase in efficiency every decade. A doubling every two and a half years yields just a 16-fold increase", Koomey wrote.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Computing 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War II

The Norden Mk. XV, known as the Norden M series in U.S. Army service, is a bombsight that was used by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the United States Navy during World War II, and the United States Air Force in the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. It was an early tachometric design that directly measured the aircraft's ground speed and direction, which older bombsights could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.

Together, these features promised unprecedented accuracy for daytime bombing from high altitudes. During prewar testing the Norden demonstrated a circular error probable (CEP) of 75 feet (23 m), an astonishing performance for that period. This accuracy would enable direct attacks on ships, factories, and other point targets. Both the Navy and the USAAF saw it as a means to conduct successful high-altitude bombing. For example, an invasion fleet could be destroyed long before it could reach U.S. shores. To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale as the Manhattan Project. Carl L. Norden, Inc. ranked 46th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.

Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected accuracy, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m), similar to other Allied and German results. Both the Navy and Air Forces had to give up using pinpoint attacks. The Navy turned to dive bombing and skip bombing to attack ships, while the Air Forces developed the lead bomber procedure to improve accuracy, and adopted area bombing techniques for ever larger groups of aircraft. Nevertheless, the Norden's reputation as a pin-point device endured, due in no small part to Norden's own advertising of the device after secrecy was reduced late in the war.

The Norden's secrecy had already been compromised by espionage before the United States entered the war. As early as January 1941, the Germans introduced a lightened derivative of the Norden called the Carl Zeiss Lotfernrohr 7 as the primary bombsight for most Luftwaffe level bombers and the first of its bombsights to have gyroscopic stabilization.

The Norden saw reduced use in the post-World War II period after radar-based targeting was introduced, but the need for accurate daytime attacks kept it in service, especially during the Korean War. The last combat use of the Norden was in the U.S. Navy's VO-67 squadron, which used them to drop sensors onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail as late as 1967. The Norden remains one of the best-known bombsights ever invented.

🔗 Computer science

The Rule 110 cellular automaton (often simply Rule 110) is an elementary cellular automaton with interesting behavior on the boundary between stability and chaos. In this respect, it is similar to Conway's Game of Life. Like Life, Rule 110 is known to be Turing complete. This implies that, in principle, any calculation or computer program can be simulated using this automaton.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History

Ala al-Dīn Ali ibn Muhammed (1403 – 16 December 1474), known as Ali Qushji (Ottoman Turkish/Persian language: علی قوشچی, kuşçu – falconer in Turkish; Latin: Ali Kushgii) was an astronomer, mathematician and physicist originally from Samarkand, who settled in the Ottoman Empire some time before 1472. As a disciple of Ulugh Beg, he is best known for the development of astronomical physics independent from natural philosophy, and for providing empirical evidence for the Earth's rotation in his treatise, Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy. In addition to his contributions to Ulugh Beg's famous work Zij-i-Sultani and to the founding of Sahn-ı Seman Medrese, one of the first centers for the study of various traditional Islamic sciences in the Ottoman caliphate, Ali Kuşçu was also the author of several scientific works and textbooks on astronomy.

🔗 Graphic design

A visiting card, also known as a calling card, is a small card used for social purposes. Before the 18th century, visitors making social calls left handwritten notes at the home of friends who were not at home. By the 1760s, the upper classes in France and Italy were leaving printed visiting cards decorated with images on one side and a blank space for hand-writing a note on the other. The style quickly spread across Europe and to the United States. As printing technology improved, elaborate color designs became increasingly popular. However, by the late 1800s, simpler styles became more common.

By the 19th century, men and women needed personalized calling or visiting cards to maintain their social status or to move up in society. These small cards, about the size of a modern-day business card, usually featured the name of the owner, and sometimes an address. Calling cards were left at homes, sent to individuals, or exchanged in person for various social purposes. Knowing and following calling card “rules” signaled one’s status and intentions.

🔗 New Zealand 🔗 India 🔗 India/Tamil Nadu 🔗 Dravidian civilizations 🔗 New Zealand/Māori 🔗 Tamil civilization

The Tamil Bell is a broken bronze bell discovered in approximately 1836 by missionary William Colenso. It was being used as a pot to boil potatoes by Māori women near Whangarei in the Northland Region of New Zealand.

The bell is 13 cm long and 9 cm deep, and has an inscription. The inscription running around the rim of the bell has been identified as old Tamil. Translated, it says "Mohoyiden Buks ship’s bell". Some of the characters in the inscription are of an archaic form no longer seen in modern Tamil script, thus suggesting that the bell could be about 500 years old, possibly from the Later Pandya period. It is thus what is sometimes called an out-of-place artefact.

Indologist V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar states in his The Origin and Spread of the Tamils that ancient Tamil sea-farers might have had a knowledge of Australia and Polynesia. The discovery of the bell has led to speculation about a possible Tamil presence in New Zealand, but the bell is not in itself proof of early Tamil contact with New Zealand'. Seafarers from Trincomalee may have reached New Zealand during the period of increased trade between the Vanni country and South East Asia. The bell might have been dropped off the shore by a Portuguese ship, whose sailors had been in touch with the Indians. Also, a number of Indian vessels had been captured by the Europeans during the period; thus, another possibility is that the bell might have belonged to such a wrecked vessel, cast away on the New Zealand shores.

The bell was bequeathed by William Colenso to the Dominion Museum – now the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Lists 🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia

The dangers to journalists in Russia have been well known since the early 1990s but concern over the number of unsolved killings soared after Anna Politkovskaya's murder in Moscow on 7 October 2006. While international monitors mentioned a dozen deaths, some sources within Russia talked of over two hundred fatalities. The evidence has since been examined and documented in two reports, published in Russian and English, by international organizations. These revealed a basic confusion in terminology that explained the seemingly enormous numerical discrepancy: statistics of premature death among journalists (from work accidents, crossfire incidents, and purely criminal or domestic cases of manslaughter) were repeatedly equated with the much smaller number of targeted (contract) killings or work-related murders. The Remembrance Day of Journalists Killed in the Line of Duty in Russia is observed on 15 December every year.

🔗 United States 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Physics 🔗 Women's History 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Tennessee 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Physics/History 🔗 Science

The Calutron Girls were a group of young women, mostly high school graduates who joined the World War II efforts in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1945.

Although they were not allowed to know at the time, they were monitoring dials and watching meters for a calutron, a mass spectrometer that separates uranium isotopes. The enriched uranium was used to make the first atomic bomb.

Calutron Girls were trained and employed at the Y-12 National Security Complex. Wartime labor shortages forced the Tennessee Eastman Corporation to hire women to work at the Y-12 plant.

According to Gladys Owens, one of the few Calutron Girls, a manager at the facility once told them: "We can train you how to do what is needed, but cannot tell you what you are doing. I can only tell you that if our enemies beat us to it, God have mercy on us!"

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

The Pick operating system (often called just "the Pick system" or simply "Pick") is a demand-paged, multiuser, virtual memory, time-sharing computer operating system based around a unique MultiValue database. Pick is used primarily for business data processing. It is named after one of its developers, Dick Pick.

The term "Pick system" has also come to be used as the general name of all operating environments which employ this multivalued database and have some implementation of Pick/BASIC and ENGLISH/Access queries. Although Pick started on a variety of minicomputers, the system and its various implementations eventually spread to a large assortment of microcomputers, personal computers and mainframe computers.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Aviation/Defunct Airlines

The British Imperial Airship Scheme was a 1920s project to improve communication between Britain and the distant countries of the British Empire by establishing air routes using airships. This led to the construction of two large and technically advanced airships, the R100 and the R101. The scheme was terminated in 1931 following the crash of R101 in October 1930 while attempting its first flight to India.