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🔗 Companies 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Business 🔗 Nevada

Braeburn Capital Inc. is an asset management company based in Reno, Nevada and a subsidiary of Apple Inc. Its offices are located at 6900 S. McCarran Boulevard in Reno.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry

An incendiary balloon (or balloon bomb) is a balloon inflated with a lighter than air gas such as hot air, hydrogen, or helium, that has a bomb, incendiary device, or Molotov cocktail attached. The balloon is carried by the prevailing winds to the target area, where it falls or releases its payload.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Solar System

The Vega program (Cyrillic: ВеГа) was a series of Venus missions that also took advantage of the appearance of comet 1P/Halley in 1986. Vega 1 and Vega 2 were uncrewed spacecraft launched in a cooperative effort among the Soviet Union (who also provided the spacecraft and launch vehicle) and Austria, Bulgaria, France, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Federal Republic of Germany in December 1984. They had a two-part mission to investigate Venus and also flyby Halley's Comet.

The flyby of Halley's Comet had been a late mission change in the Venera program following on from the cancellation of the American Halley mission in 1981. A later Venera mission was canceled and the Venus part of the Vega 1 mission was reduced. Because of this, the craft was designated VeGa, a contraction of Venera and Gallei (Венера and Галлея respectively, the Russian words for "Venus" and "Halley"). The spacecraft design was based on the previous Venera 9 and Venera 10 missions.

The two spacecraft were launched on 15 and 21 December 1984, respectively. With their redesignated dual missions, the Vega probes became part of the Halley Armada, a group of space probes that studied Halley's Comet during its 1985/1986 perihelion.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Futures studies

Pessimism porn is a neologism coined in 2009 during the 2007–2012 global financial crisis to describe the alleged eschatological and survivalist thrill some people derive from predicting, reading and fantasizing about the collapse of civil society through the destruction of the world's economic system.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion

"Turtles all the way down" is an expression of the problem of infinite regress. The saying alludes to the mythological idea of a World Turtle that supports the earth on its back. It suggests that this turtle rests on the back of an even larger turtle, which itself is part of a column of increasingly large world turtles that continues indefinitely (i.e., "turtles all the way down").

The exact origin of the phrase is uncertain. In the form "rocks all the way down", the saying appears as early as 1838. References to the saying's mythological antecedents, the World Turtle and its counterpart the World Elephant, were made by a number of authors in the 17th and 18th centuries. This mythology is frequently assumed to have originated in ancient India and other Hinduist beliefs.

The expression has been used to illustrate problems such as the regress argument in epistemology.

Interactive EasyFlow was one of the first diagramming and flow charting software packages available for personal computers. This product was the flagship software produced by HavenTree Software Limited, of Kingston, Ontario Canada. HavenTree software, formed in 1981, offered predecessor non-interactive products "EasyFlow" (1983) and "EasyFlow-Plus" (1984). Interactive EasyFlow - so named to distinguish it from the preceding products - was offered from 1985 until the early 1990s, when the company dropped the "Interactive" adjective in favour of simply "HavenTree EasyFlow". It offered the software for sale until it filed for protection under Canada's Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act in April 1996. The assets of the company were purchased by SPSS Inc. in 1998.

🔗 Biography 🔗 China 🔗 Business 🔗 Women

Zhou Qunfei (Chinese: 周群飞; born 1970) is a Chinese entrepreneur who founded the major touchscreen maker Lens Technology. After the public listing of her company on the Shenzhen ChiNext market in March 2015, her net worth reached US$10 billion, making her the richest woman in China. In 2018, she was named the world's richest self-made woman, with a net worth of $9.8 billion.

In theoretical computer science, the PACELC theorem is an extension to the CAP theorem. It states that in case of network partitioning (P) in a distributed computer system, one has to choose between availability (A) and consistency (C) (as per the CAP theorem), but else (E), even when the system is running normally in the absence of partitions, one has to choose between latency (L) and consistency (C).

🔗 Lists 🔗 Languages 🔗 Endangered languages

This is a list of extinct languages sorted by their time of extinction. A language is determined to be an extinct when its last native or fluent speaker dies. When the exact time of death of the last remaining speaker is not known, either an approximate time or the date when the language was last being recorded is given.

🔗 Games

Nim is a mathematical game of strategy in which two players take turns removing (or "nimming") objects from distinct heaps or piles. On each turn, a player must remove at least one object, and may remove any number of objects provided they all come from the same heap or pile. Depending on the version being played, the goal of the game is either to avoid taking the last object, or to take the last object.

Variants of Nim have been played since ancient times. The game is said to have originated in China—it closely resembles the Chinese game of 捡石子 jiǎn-shízi, or "picking stones"—but the origin is uncertain; the earliest European references to Nim are from the beginning of the 16th century. Its current name was coined by Charles L. Bouton of Harvard University, who also developed the complete theory of the game in 1901, but the origins of the name were never fully explained.

Nim is typically played as a misère game, in which the player to take the last object loses. Nim can also be played as a normal play game, where the player taking the last object wins. This is called normal play because the last move is a winning move in most games, even though it is not the normal way that Nim is played. In either normal play or a misère game, when the number of heaps with at least two objects is exactly equal to one, the next player who takes next can easily win. If this removes either all or all but one objects from the heap that has two or more, then no heaps will have more than one object, so the players are forced to alternate removing exactly one object until the game ends. If the player leaves an even number of non-zero heaps (as the player would do in normal play), the player takes last; if the player leaves an odd number of heaps (as the player would do in misère play), then the other player takes last.

Normal play Nim (or more precisely the system of nimbers) is fundamental to the Sprague–Grundy theorem, which essentially says that in normal play every impartial game is equivalent to a Nim heap that yields the same outcome when played in parallel with other normal play impartial games (see disjunctive sum).

While all normal play impartial games can be assigned a Nim value, that is not the case under the misère convention. Only tame games can be played using the same strategy as misère Nim.

Nim is a special case of a poset game where the poset consists of disjoint chains (the heaps).

The evolution graph of the game of Nim with three heaps is the same as three branches of the evolution graph of the Ulam-Warburton automaton.

At the 1940 New York World's Fair Westinghouse displayed a machine, the Nimatron, that played Nim. From May 11, 1940 to October 27, 1940 only a few people were able to beat the machine in that six week period; if they did they were presented with a coin that said Nim Champ. It was also one of the first ever electronic computerized games. Ferranti built a Nim playing computer which was displayed at the Festival of Britain in 1951. In 1952 Herbert Koppel, Eugene Grant and Howard Bailer, engineers from the W. L. Maxon Corporation, developed a machine weighing 23 kilograms (50 lb) which played Nim against a human opponent and regularly won. A Nim Playing Machine has been described made from TinkerToy.

The game of Nim was the subject of Martin Gardner's February 1958 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. A version of Nim is played—and has symbolic importance—in the French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad (1961).