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🔗 Biography 🔗 London 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Engineering

Thomas Harold Flowers MBE (22 December 1905 - 28 October 1998) was an English engineer with the British General Post Office. During World War II, Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher encrypted German messages.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 ArtAndFeminism

'Pataphysics (French: 'pataphysique) is a "philosophy" of science invented by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) intended to be a parody of science. Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the "science of imaginary solutions".

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Home Living

The Hoover free flights promotion was a marketing promotion run by the British division of the Hoover Company in late 1992. The promotion, aiming to boost sales during the global recession of the early 1990s, offered two complimentary round-trip plane tickets to the United States, worth about £600, to any customer purchasing at least £100 in Hoover products. Hoover had been experiencing dwindling sales as a result of the economic downturn and a sharp increase in competing brands. Hoover was counting on most customers spending more than £100, as well as being deterred from completing the difficult application process, and not meeting its exact terms.

Consumer response was much higher than the company anticipated, with many customers buying the minimum £100 of Hoover products to qualify. It was perceived as two US flights for just £100 with a free vacuum cleaner included. The resulting demand was disastrous for the 84-year-old company. Hoover cancelled the ticket promotion after consumers had already bought the products and filled in forms applying for millions of pounds' worth of tickets. Reneging on the offer resulted in protests and legal action from customers who failed to receive the tickets they had been promised. The campaign was a financial disaster for the company and led to the loss of Hoover's Royal Warrant after the airing of a 2004 BBC documentary. The European branch of the company was eventually sold to one of its competitors, Candy, having never recovered from the losses, the promotion and the subsequent scandal.

🔗 Computing

The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM 7030 Stretch, by a factor of three. With performance of up to three megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969, when it relinquished that status to its successor, the CDC 7600.

The first CDC 6600s were delivered in 1965 to Livermore and Los Alamos. They quickly became a must-have system in high-end scientific and mathematical computing, with systems being delivered to Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, CERN, the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and many others. At least 100 were delivered in total.

A CDC 6600 is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The only running CDC 6000 series machine has been restored by Living Computers: Museum + Labs.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/History 🔗 Physics/Fluid Dynamics

The pitch drop experiment is a long-term experiment which measures the flow of a piece of pitch over many years. 'Pitch' is the name for any of a number of highly viscous liquids which appear solid; most commonly bitumen. At room temperature, tar pitch flows at a very low rate, taking several years to form a single drop.

🔗 Estonia 🔗 Festivals 🔗 Regional and national music

The Estonian Song Festival (in Estonian: laulupidu, Estonian pronunciation: [ˈlɑu.luˈpi.du]) is one of the largest choral events in the world, a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. It is held every five years in July on the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds (Lauluväljak) simultaneously with the Estonian Dance Festival. The joint choir has comprised more than 30,000 singers performing to an audience of 80,000.

Almost every Festival features famous Estonian songs "Ta lendab mesipuu poole", the unofficial national anthem "Mu isamaa on minu arm" and the national anthem "Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm".

🔗 Physics 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Dynamical systems

In mathematics and physics, the Poincaré recurrence theorem states that certain dynamical systems will, after a sufficiently long but finite time, return to a state arbitrarily close to (for continuous state systems), or exactly the same as (for discrete state systems), their initial state.

The Poincaré recurrence time is the length of time elapsed until the recurrence. This time may vary greatly depending on the exact initial state and required degree of closeness. The result applies to isolated mechanical systems subject to some constraints, e.g., all particles must be bound to a finite volume. The theorem is commonly discussed in the context of ergodic theory, dynamical systems and statistical mechanics. Systems to which the Poincaré recurrence theorem applies are called conservative systems.

The theorem is named after Henri Poincaré, who discussed it in 1890 and proved by Constantin Carathéodory using measure theory in 1919.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Architecture 🔗 England 🔗 Military history/Fortifications 🔗 Military history/Napoleonic era 🔗 Ireland 🔗 Kent 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history 🔗 Irish Maritime

Martello towers, sometimes known simply as Martellos, are small defensive forts that were built across the British Empire during the 19th century, from the time of the French Revolutionary Wars onwards. Most were coastal forts.

They stand up to 40 feet (12 m) high (with two floors) and typically had a garrison of one officer and 15–25 men. Their round structure and thick walls of solid masonry made them resistant to cannon fire, while their height made them an ideal platform for a single heavy artillery piece, mounted on the flat roof and able to traverse, and hence fire, over a complete 360° circle. A few towers had moats or other batteries and works attached for extra defence.

The Martello towers were used during the first half of the 19th century, but became obsolete with the introduction of powerful rifled artillery. Many have survived to the present day, often preserved as historic monuments.