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🔗 Internet culture

In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio), which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.

Similar rules are known in information science, such as the 80/20 rule known as the Pareto principle, that 20 percent of a group will produce 80 percent of the activity, however the activity may be defined.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Television 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Lenin was a mushroom (Russian: Ленин — гриб) was a highly influential televised hoax by Soviet musician Sergey Kuryokhin and reporter Sergey Sholokhov. It was first broadcast on 17 May 1991 on Leningrad Television.

The hoax took the form of an interview on the television program Pyatoe Koleso (The Fifth Wheel). In the interview, Kuryokhin, impersonating a historian, narrated his findings that Vladimir Lenin consumed large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms and eventually became a mushroom himself. Kuryokhin arrived at his conclusion through a long series of logical fallacies and appeals to the authority of various "sources" (such as Carlos Castaneda, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky), creating the illusion of a reasoned and plausible logical chain.

The timing of the hoax played a large role in its success, coming as it did during the Glasnost period when the ebbing of censorship in the Soviet Union led to many revelations about the country's history, often presented in sensational form. Furthermore, Soviet television had, up to that point, been regarded by its audience as conservative in style and content. As a result, a large number of Soviet citizens (one estimate puts the number at 11,250,000 audience members) took the deadpan "interview" at face value, in spite of the absurd claims presented.

Sholokhov has said that perhaps the most notable result of the show was an appeal by a group of party members to the Leningrad Regional Committee of the CPSU to clarify the veracity of Kuryokhin's claim. According to Sholokhov, in response to the request one of the top regional functionaries stated that "Lenin could not have been a mushroom" because "a mammal cannot be a plant." Modern taxonomy classifies mushrooms as fungi, a separate kingdom from plants.

The incident has served as a watershed moment in Soviet (and Russian) culture and has often been used as proof of the gullibility of the masses.

🔗 Civil engineering 🔗 Water

A qanat or kariz is a gently sloping underground channel to transport water from an aquifer or water well to surface for irrigation and drinking, acting as an underground aqueduct. This is an old system of water supply from a deep well with a series of vertical access shafts. The qanats still create a reliable supply of water for human settlements and irrigation in hot, arid, and semi-arid climates, but the value of this system is directly related to the quality, volume, and regularity of the water flow. Traditionally qanats are built by a group of skilled laborers, muqannīs, with hand labor. The profession historically paid well and was typically handed down from father to son. According to most sources, the qanat technology was developed in ancient Iran by the Persian people sometime in the early 1st millennium BCE, and spread from there slowly westward and eastward. However, some other sources suggest a Southeast Arabian origin.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Brands 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages

OpenCola is a brand of open-source cola, where the instructions for making it are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe. It was launched in 2001 by free software P2P company Opencola, to promote their open-source software concept.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Radio Stations

UVB-76, also known as "The Buzzer", is a nickname given by radio listeners to a shortwave radio station that broadcasts on the frequencies 4625 and 4810 kHz. It broadcasts a short, monotonous buzz tone , repeating at a rate of approximately 25 tones per minute, 24 hours per day. Sometimes, the buzzer signal is interrupted and a voice transmission in Russian takes place. The first reports were made of a station on this frequency in 1973.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Disability 🔗 Neuroscience

Aphantasia is a condition where one does not possess a functioning mind's eye and cannot voluntarily visualize imagery. The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880 but has since remained largely unstudied. Interest in the phenomenon renewed after the publication of a study in 2015 conducted by a team led by Professor Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter, which also coined the term aphantasia. Research on the condition is still scarce.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

A one-instruction set computer (OISC), sometimes called an ultimate reduced instruction set computer (URISC), is an abstract machine that uses only one instruction – obviating the need for a machine language opcode. With a judicious choice for the single instruction and given infinite resources, an OISC is capable of being a universal computer in the same manner as traditional computers that have multiple instructions. OISCs have been recommended as aids in teaching computer architecture and have been used as computational models in structural computing research.

🔗 England 🔗 Linguistics

The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels was changed. Some consonant sounds changed as well, particularly those that became silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is sometimes used to include these consonant changes.

English spelling began to become standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often considerably deviate from how they represent pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.

🔗 History 🔗 Physics 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Physics/History 🔗 Paranormal

The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal received on August 15, 1977, by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope in the United States, then used to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and bore the expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin.

Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman discovered the anomaly a few days later while reviewing the recorded data. He was so impressed by the result that he circled the reading on the computer printout, "6EQUJ5", and wrote the comment "Wow!" on its side, leading to the event's widely used name.

The entire signal sequence lasted for the full 72-second window during which Big Ear was able to observe it, but has not been detected since, despite several subsequent attempts by Ehman and others. Many hypotheses have been advanced on the origin of the emission, including natural and human-made sources, but none of them adequately explains the signal.

Although the Wow! signal had no detectable modulation—a technique used to transmit information over radio waves—it remains the strongest candidate for an alien radio transmission ever detected.

🔗 Business 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Science and technology 🔗 Japan/Business and economy

Poka-yoke (ポカヨケ, [poka yoke]) is a Japanese term that means "mistake-proofing" or "inadvertent error prevention". A poka-yoke is any mechanism in any process that helps an equipment operator avoid (yokeru) mistakes (poka). Its purpose is to eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors as they occur. The concept was formalised, and the term adopted, by Shigeo Shingo as part of the Toyota Production System. It was originally described as baka-yoke, but as this means "fool-proofing" (or "idiot-proofing") the name was changed to the milder poka-yoke.