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🔗 Biography 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Norway 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

Arne Dekke Eide Næss ( AR-nə NESS; Norwegian: [ˈnɛsː]; 27 January 1912 – 12 January 2009) was a Norwegian philosopher who coined the term "deep ecology" and was an important intellectual and inspirational figure within the environmental movement of the late twentieth century. Næss cited Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring as being a key influence in his vision of deep ecology. Næss combined his ecological vision with Gandhian nonviolence and on several occasions participated in direct action.

Næss averred that while western environmental groups of the early post-war period had raised public awareness of the environmental issues of the time, they had largely failed to have insight into and address what he argued were the underlying cultural and philosophical background to these problems. Naess believed that the environmental crisis of the twentieth century had arisen due to certain unspoken philosophical presuppositions and attitudes within modern western developed societies which remained unacknowledged.

He thereby distinguished between what he called deep and shallow ecological thinking. In contrast to the prevailing utilitarian pragmatism of western businesses and governments, he advocated that a true understanding of nature would give rise to a point of view that appreciates the value of biological diversity, understanding that each living thing is dependent on the existence of other creatures in the complex web of interrelationships that is the natural world.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Brands

Cell is a multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose PowerPC core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.

It was developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI". The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a budget reported by Sony as approaching US$400 million. Cell is shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, commonly abbreviated CBEA in full or Cell BE in part.

The first major commercial application of Cell was in Sony's PlayStation 3 game console, released in 2006. In May 2008, the Cell-based IBM Roadrunner supercomputer became the first TOP500 LINPACK sustained 1.0 petaflops system. Mercury Computer Systems also developed designs based on the Cell.

The Cell architecture includes a memory coherence architecture that emphasizes power efficiency, prioritizes bandwidth over low latency, and favors peak computational throughput over simplicity of program code. For these reasons, Cell is widely regarded as a challenging environment for software development. IBM provides a Linux-based development platform to help developers program for Cell chips.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Arachne is a discontinued Internet suite containing a graphical web browser, email client, and dialer. Originally, Arachne was developed by Michal Polák under his xChaos label, a name he later changed into Arachne Labs. It was written in C and compiled using Borland C++ 3.1. Arachne has since been released under the GPL as Arachne GPL.

Arachne primarily runs on DOS-based operating systems, but includes builds for Linux as well. The Linux version relies on SVGALib and therefore does not require a display server.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Whitespace is an esoteric programming language developed by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris at the University of Durham (also developers of the Kaya and Idris programming languages). It was released on 1 April 2003 (April Fool's Day). Its name is a reference to whitespace characters. Unlike most programming languages, which ignore or assign little meaning to most whitespace characters, the Whitespace interpreter ignores any non-whitespace characters. Only spaces, tabs and linefeeds have meaning. A consequence of this property is that a Whitespace program can easily be contained within the whitespace characters of a program written in another language, except possibly in languages which depend on spaces for syntax validity such as Python, making the text a polyglot.

The language itself is an imperative stack-based language. The virtual machine on which the programs run has a stack and a heap. The programmer is free to push arbitrary-width integers onto the stack (currently there is no implementation of floating point numbers) and can also access the heap as a permanent store for variables and data structures.

🔗 Computing

The Olivetti Programma 101, also known as Perottina or P101, is one of the first "all in one" commercial programmable desktop calculators, although not the first. Produced by Italian manufacturer Olivetti, based in Ivrea, Piedmont, and invented by the Italian engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto, the P101 has the main features of large computers of that period. It was launched at the 1964 New York World's Fair; volume production started in 1965. A futuristic design for its time, the Programma 101 was priced at $3,200 (equivalent to $26,000 in 2019). About 44,000 units were sold, primarily in the US.

It is usually called a printing programmable calculator or desktop calculator because its arithmetic instructions correspond to calculator operations.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Military land vehicles 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Canal Defence Light (CDL) was a British "secret weapon" of the Second World War.

It was based upon the use of a powerful carbon-arc searchlight mounted on a tank. It was intended to be used during night-time attacks, when the light would allow enemy positions to be targeted. A secondary use of the light would be to dazzle and disorient enemy troops, making it harder for them to return fire accurately. The name Canal Defence Light was used to conceal the device's true purpose. For the same reason, in US service they were designated T10 Shop Tractor.

🔗 Mathematics

A self-tiling tile set, or setiset, of order n is a set of n shapes or pieces, usually planar, each of which can be tiled with smaller replicas of the complete set of n shapes. That is, the n shapes can be assembled in n different ways so as to create larger copies of themselves, where the increase in scale is the same in each case. Figure 1 shows an example for n = 4 using distinctly shaped decominoes. The concept can be extended to include pieces of higher dimension. The name setisets was coined by Lee Sallows in 2012, but the problem of finding such sets for n = 4 was asked decades previously by C. Dudley Langford, and examples for polyaboloes (discovered by Martin Gardner, Wade E. Philpott and others) and polyominoes (discovered by Maurice J. Povah) were previously published by Gardner.

🔗 History 🔗 Psychology

The method of loci (loci being Latin for "places") is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique. This method is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria). Many memory contest champions report using this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words.

The term is most often found in specialised works on psychology, neurobiology, and memory, though it was used in the same general way at least as early as the first half of the nineteenth century in works on rhetoric, logic, and philosophy. John O'Keefe and Lynn Nadel refer to:

'the method of loci', an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and described by Yates (1966) in her book The Art of Memory as well as by Luria (1969). In this technique the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject 'walks' through these loci in their imagination and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by 'walking' through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items. The efficacy of this technique has been well established (Ross and Lawrence 1968, Crovitz 1969, 1971, Briggs, Hawkins and Crovitz 1970, Lea 1975), as is the minimal interference seen with its use.

The items to be remembered in this mnemonic system are mentally associated with specific physical locations. The method relies on memorized spatial relationships to establish order and recollect memorial content. It is also known as the "Journey Method", used for storing lists of related items, or the "Roman Room" technique, which is most effective for storing unrelated information.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Media 🔗 Philadelphia 🔗 Pennsylvania

N. W. Ayer & Son was a Philadelphia advertising agency founded in 1869. It called itself the oldest advertising agency in the United States. Named after Francis Ayer's father N. W. Ayer, it ventured into advertising in 1884. It created a number of memorable slogans for firms such as De Beers, AT&T and the U.S. Army. The company started to decline in the 1960s and, after a series of mergers, was closed in 2002 with its assets sold to the Publicis Groupe.

🔗 United States 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Occupational Safety and Health 🔗 United States/Massachusetts - Boston

The Great Molasses Flood, also known as the Boston Molasses Disaster or the Great Boston Molasses Flood, and sometimes referred to locally as the Boston Molassacre, occurred on January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. A large storage tank filled with 2.3 million US gal (8,700 m³) weighing approximately 13,000 short tons (12,000 t) of molasses burst, and the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph (56 km/h), killing 21 and injuring 150. The event entered local folklore and residents claimed for decades afterwards that the area still smelled of molasses on hot summer days.