To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Linguistics

A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, commonly used to quell cognitive dissonance. Depending on context in which a phrase (or cliché) is used, it may actually be valid and not qualify as thought-terminating; it does qualify as such when its application intends to dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic. Its only function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, in other words "end the debate with a cliche... not a point." The term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, who called the use of the cliché, along with "loading the language", as "The language of Non-thought".

🔗 Poetry 🔗 Shakespeare

Sonnet 5 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence. Sonnet 5 is linked to Sonnet 6, which continues the theme of distillation.

🔗 Mathematics

In mathematics, the Kolakoski sequence, sometimes also known as the Oldenburger–Kolakoski sequence, is an infinite sequence of symbols {1,2} that is the sequence of run lengths in its own run-length encoding. It is named after the recreational mathematician William Kolakoski (1944–97) who described it in 1965, but it was previously discussed by Rufus Oldenburger in 1939.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Transhumanism

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is a 1994 novel by Roger Williams, a programmer living in New Orleans. It deals with the ramifications of a powerful, superintelligent supercomputer that discovers god-like powers to alter reality while studying a quirk of quantum physics discovered during the prototyping of its own specialised processors, ultimately heralding a technological singularity. After remaining unpublished for years, the novel was published online in 2002, hosted by Kuro5hin; Williams later published a print edition via print-on-demand publisher Lulu. One reviewer called the novel "a well-written and very creative, if flawed, piece of work" and ranked it as one of the more important works of fiction to deal with the idea of a technological singularity.

🔗 Comics

An ashcan comic is a form of the American comic book created solely to establish trademarks on potential titles and not intended for sale. The practice was common in the 1930s and 1940s when the comic book industry was in its infancy, but was phased out after updates to US trademark law. The term was revived in the 1980s by Bob Burden, who applied it to prototypes of his self-published comic book. Since the 1990s, the term has been used to describe promotional materials produced in large print runs and made available for mass consumption. In the film and television industries, the term "ashcan copy" has been adopted for low-grade material created to preserve a claim to licensed property rights.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 C/C++ 🔗 Java

ArcaOS is a proprietary operating system based on OS/2, developed and marketed by Arca Noae, LLC under license from IBM. It was first released in 2017 and builds on OS/2 Warp 4.52 by adding support for new hardware, fixing defects and limitations in the operating system, and by including new applications and tools, and includes some Linux/Unix tool compatibility. It is targeted at professional users who need to run their OS/2 applications on new hardware, as well as personal users of OS/2.

Like OS/2 Warp, ArcaOS is a 32-bit single user, multiprocessing, preemptive multitasking operating system for the x86 architecture. It is supported on both physical hardware and virtual machine hypervisors.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Neurology

Gourmand syndrome is a very rare and benign eating disorder that usually occurs six to twelve months after an injury to the frontal lobe. Those with the disorder usually have a right hemisphere frontal or temporal brain lesion typically affecting the cortical areas, basal ganglia or limbic structures. These people develop a new, post-injury passion for gourmet food.

There are two main aspects of gourmand syndrome: first, the fine dining habits and changes to taste, and second, an obsessive component which may result in craving and preservation. Gourmand syndrome can be related to, and shares biological features with, addictive and obsessive disorders. The syndrome was first characterized in 1997.

🔗 History 🔗 Lists 🔗 Business

This is a list of obsolete occupations. To be included in this list an occupation must be completely, or to a great extent, obsolete. For example, there are still a few lamplighters retained for ceremonial or tourist purposes, but in the main the occupation is now obsolete. Similarly, there are still some manual switchboard operators and elevator operators which are required for historic equipment or security reasons, but these are now considered to be obsolete occupations. Occupations which appear to be obsolete in industrialized countries may still be carried out commercially in other parts of the world, for example charcoal burner.

To be included in this list an obsolete occupation should in the past have employed significant numbers of workers (hundreds or thousands as evidenced by, for example, census data). Some rare occupations are included in this list, but only if they have notable practitioners, for example alchemist or phrenologist.

Terms which describe groups of people carrying out a variety of roles, but which are not specific occupations, are excluded from this list even if they are obsolete, for example conquistador or retinue. Terms describing positions which have a modern equivalent, and are thus not obsolete occupations, are excluded from this list, for example a dragoman would now be termed a diplomat; similarly a cunning woman would now be termed a practitioner of folk medicine. Terms describing a state of being rather than an occupation are excluded, for example castrato. Specialist terms for an occupation, even if they are obsolete, are excluded, for example the numerous historic terms for cavalry and courtesan. Foreign language terms for existing occupations are excluded, for example korobeinik or Laukkuryssä which are types of peddler. All types of forced labour, such as slavery and penal labour are excluded from this list as they are not paid occupations.

Only occupations which are notable, well-defined, and adequately documented in secondary sources are included in this list.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Internet culture

A Usenet personality was a particular kind of internet personality who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on the Usenet discussion forum. Since its inception, Usenet newsgroups have attracted a wide variety of users. Some posters achieved a certain amount of fame and celebrity within Usenet circles because of their unusual or humorous writings.