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🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Croatia

The Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis (Latin for "Linen Book of Zagreb", also rarely known as Liber Agramensis, "Book of Agram") is the longest Etruscan text and the only extant linen book, dated to the 3rd century BCE. It remains mostly untranslated because of the lack of knowledge about the Etruscan language, though the few words which can be understood indicate that the text is most likely a ritual calendar.

The fabric of the book was preserved when it was used for mummy wrappings in Ptolemaic Egypt. The mummy was bought in Alexandria in 1848 and since 1867 both the mummy and the manuscript have been kept in Zagreb, Croatia, now in a refrigerated room at the Archaeological Museum.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Russia/visual arts in Russia

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire, also known as Cossacks of Saporog Are Drafting a Manifesto (Russian: Запорожцы пишут письмо турецкому султану), is a painting by Russian artist Ilya Repin. The 2.03 m (6 foot 7 inch) by 3.58 m (11 foot 9 inch) canvas was started in 1880 and finished in 1891. Repin recorded the years of work along the lower edge of the canvas. Alexander III bought the painting for 35,000 rubles, at the time the greatest sum ever paid for a Russian painting. Since then, the canvas has been exhibited in the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg.

🔗 Germany

Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz listen  (RkReÜAÜG) (literally, Cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law) was a law of the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern of 1999, repealed in 2013. It dealt with the supervision of the labeling of beef.

The name is an example of the virtually unlimited compounding of nouns that is possible in many Germanic languages. German orthography uses "closed" compounds, concatenating nouns to form one long word. This is unlike most English compounds, which are separated using spaces or hyphens.

Strictly speaking, it is made up of two words, because a hyphen at the end of a word is used to show that the word will end in the same way as the following. Consequently, the two words would be Rinderkennzeichnungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz and Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.

This is the official short title of the law; its full name is Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung, corresponding to Law on delegation of duties for supervision of cattle marking and beef labeling. Most German laws have a short title consisting of a composite noun.

Words as long as this are not at all common in German. When the law was proposed in the state parliament, the members reacted with laughter and the responsible minister Till Backhaus apologized for the "possibly excessive length". In 1999, the German Language Society nominated Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz for its Word of the Year award, but it lost to das Millennium, a Latin word that gained in usage at that time, complementing the German word for millennium, Jahrtausend.

In 2003, a decree was established that modified some real estate-related regulations; its name was longer than the above law: Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung (long title: Verordnung zur Übertragung der Zuständigkeiten des Oberfinanzpräsidenten der Oberfinanzdirektion Berlin nach § 8 Satz 2 der Grundstücksverkehrsordnung auf das Bundesamt zur Regelung offener Vermögensfragen, GrundVZÜV), roughly Regulation on the delegation of authority concerning land conveyance permissions. At 67 letters, it surpassed the RkReÜAÜG, but was repealed in 2007.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Rodents

Rat Park was a series of studies into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s and published between 1978 and 1981 by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to them is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.

To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, a large housing colony, 200 times the floor area of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating. The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis.

The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response. Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.

🔗 Biography 🔗 AIDS

Robert Rayford (February 3, 1953 – May 15 or 16, 1969), sometimes identified as Robert R. due to his age, was a teenager from Missouri who has been suggested to represent the earliest case of HIV/AIDS in North America based on evidence published in 1988 in which the authors claimed indicated he was "infected with a virus closely related or identical to human immunodeficiency virus type 1." Rayford died of pneumonia, but his other symptoms baffled the doctors who treated him. A study published in 1988 reported the detection of antibodies against HIV. Results of testing for HIV genetic material were reported once at a scientific conference in Australia in 1999; however, the data have never been published in a peer-reviewed medical or scientific journal.

The Weissman score is an efficiency metric for lossless compression applications, which was developed for fictional use. It compares both required time and compression ratio of measured applications, with those of a de facto standard according to the data type. It was developed by Tsachy Weissman, a professor at Stanford University, and Vinith Mishra, a graduate student, at the request of producers for HBO's television series Silicon Valley, about a fictional tech start-up.

The formula is the following; where r is the compression ratio, T is the time required to compress, the overlined ones are the same metrics for a standard compressor, and alpha is a scaling constant.

Weissman score was used in Dropbox Tech Blog to explain real-world work on lossless compression.

🔗 United States 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Rocketry

The Lockheed Martin X-33 was an uncrewed, sub-scale technology demonstrator suborbital spaceplane developed in the 1990s under the U.S. government–funded Space Launch Initiative program. The X-33 was a technology demonstrator for the VentureStar orbital spaceplane, which was planned to be a next-generation, commercially operated reusable launch vehicle. The X-33 would flight-test a range of technologies that NASA believed it needed for single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicles (SSTO RLVs), such as metallic thermal protection systems, composite cryogenic fuel tanks for liquid hydrogen, the aerospike engine, autonomous (uncrewed) flight control, rapid flight turn-around times through streamlined operations, and its lifting body aerodynamics.

Failures of its 21-meter wingspan and multi-lobed, composite-material fuel tank during pressure testing ultimately led to the withdrawal of federal support for the program in early 2001. Lockheed Martin has conducted unrelated testing, and has had a single success after a string of failures as recently as 2009 using a 2-meter scale model.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Theoretical Linguistics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of language 🔗 Chicago 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language 🔗 Philosophy/Analytic philosophy 🔗 Atheism 🔗 Biography/Peerage and Baronetage

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, essayist, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. At various points in his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, although he also confessed that his sceptical nature had led him to feel that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense." Russell was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom.

In the early 20th century, Russell led the British "revolt against idealism". He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. With A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics, the quintessential work of classical logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science (see type theory and type system) and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.

Russell was a prominent anti-war activist and he championed anti-imperialism. Occasionally, he advocated preventive nuclear war, before the opportunity provided by the atomic monopoly had passed and he decided he would "welcome with enthusiasm" world government. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. Later, Russell concluded that war against Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany was a necessary "lesser of two evils" and criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament. In 1950, Russell was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".

🔗 Law 🔗 English Language

"The exception that proves the rule" (sometimes "the exception proves the rule") is a saying whose meaning is contested. Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used, and each use makes some sort of reference to the role that a particular case or event takes in relation to a more general rule.

Two original meanings of the phrase are usually cited. The first, preferred by Fowler, is that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. A more explicit phrasing might be "the exception that proves the existence of the rule." Most contemporary uses of the phrase emerge from this origin, although often in a way which is closer to the idea that all rules have their exceptions. The alternative origin given is that the word "prove" is used in the archaic sense of "test". In this sense, the phrase does not mean that an exception demonstrates a rule to be true or to exist, but that it tests the rule, thereby proving its value. There is little evidence of the phrase being used in this second way.

🔗 California 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Trains 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Trains/Rapid transit 🔗 Buses 🔗 Trains/Streetcars

The notion of a General Motors streetcar conspiracy emerged after General Motors (GM) and other companies were convicted of monopolizing the sale of buses and supplies to National City Lines (NCL) and its subsidiaries. In the same case, the defendants were accused of conspiring to own or control transit systems, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust act. The suit created lingering suspicions that the defendants had in fact plotted to dismantle streetcar systems in many cities in the United States as an attempt to monopolize surface transportation.

Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities. Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland. NCL often converted streetcars to bus operations in that period, although electric traction was preserved or expanded in some locations. Other systems, such as San Diego's, were converted by outgrowths of the City Lines. Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry.

The story as an urban legend has been written about by Martha Bianco, Scott Bottles, Sy Adler, Jonathan Richmond, and Robert Post. It has been explored several times in print, film, and other media, notably in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Taken for a Ride, Internal Combustion, and The End of Suburbia.

Only a handful of U.S. cities, including San Francisco, New Orleans, Newark, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Boston, have surviving legacy rail urban transport systems based on streetcars, although their systems are significantly smaller than they once were. Other cities are re-introducing streetcars. In some cases, the streetcars do not actually ride on the street. Boston had all of its downtown lines elevated or buried by the mid-1920s, and most of the surviving lines at grade operate on their own right of way. However, San Francisco's and Philadelphia's lines do have large portions of the route that ride on the street as well as using tunnels.