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🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Paranormal

John Titor (May 5, 6 or 7, 1998) is a name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war, none of which came true. Subsequent closer examination of Titor's assertions provoked widespread skepticism. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator's findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax. A 2009 investigation concluded that Titor was likely the creation of Larry Haber, a Florida entertainment lawyer, along with his brother Morey, a computer scientist.

🔗 Meteorology 🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Soil 🔗 Weather 🔗 Weather/Weather

Petrichor () is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil. The word is constructed from Greek petra (πέτρα), meaning "stone", and īchōr (ἰχώρ), the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology.

🔗 Professional sound production

A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower.

🔗 Computer science

The inner-platform effect is the tendency of software architects to create a system so customizable as to become a replica, and often a poor replica, of the software development platform they are using. This is generally inefficient and such systems are often considered to be examples of an anti-pattern.

I have edited thousands of articles so that they do not contain the phrase "comprised of". Edit summaries for those edits usually refer to this page.

This page explains the purpose of these edits and the project in general.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Maps

Yahoo! Pipes was a web application from Yahoo! that provided a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps. The application worked by enabling users to "pipe" information from different sources and then set up rules for how that content should be modified (for example, filtering). Other than the pipe editing page, the website had a documentation page and a discussion page. The documentation page contained information about pipes including guides for the pipe editor and troubleshooting. The discussion page enabled users to discuss the pipes with other users.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 United States/U.S. history

Gödel's Loophole is a "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-German-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gödel claimed to have discovered in 1947. The flaw would have allowed the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. Gödel told his friend Oskar Morgenstern about the existence of the flaw and Morgenstern told Albert Einstein about it at the time, but Morgenstern, in his recollection of the incident in 1971, never mentioned the exact problem as Gödel saw it. This has led to speculation about the precise nature of what has come to be called "Gödel's Loophole". It has been called "one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law."

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

The secretary problem is a problem that demonstrates a scenario involving optimal stopping theory. The problem has been studied extensively in the fields of applied probability, statistics, and decision theory. It is also known as the marriage problem, the sultan's dowry problem, the fussy suitor problem, the googol game, and the best choice problem.

The basic form of the problem is the following: imagine an administrator who wants to hire the best secretary out of ${\displaystyle n}$ rankable applicants for a position. The applicants are interviewed one by one in random order. A decision about each particular applicant is to be made immediately after the interview. Once rejected, an applicant cannot be recalled. During the interview, the administrator gains information sufficient to rank the applicant among all applicants interviewed so far, but is unaware of the quality of yet unseen applicants. The question is about the optimal strategy (stopping rule) to maximize the probability of selecting the best applicant. If the decision can be deferred to the end, this can be solved by the simple maximum selection algorithm of tracking the running maximum (and who achieved it), and selecting the overall maximum at the end. The difficulty is that the decision must be made immediately.

The shortest rigorous proof known so far is provided by the odds algorithm (Bruss 2000). It implies that the optimal win probability is always at least ${\displaystyle 1/e}$ (where e is the base of the natural logarithm), and that the latter holds even in a much greater generality (2003). The optimal stopping rule prescribes always rejecting the first ${\displaystyle \sim n/e}$ applicants that are interviewed and then stopping at the first applicant who is better than every applicant interviewed so far (or continuing to the last applicant if this never occurs). Sometimes this strategy is called the ${\displaystyle 1/e}$ stopping rule, because the probability of stopping at the best applicant with this strategy is about ${\displaystyle 1/e}$ already for moderate values of ${\displaystyle n}$. One reason why the secretary problem has received so much attention is that the optimal policy for the problem (the stopping rule) is simple and selects the single best candidate about 37% of the time, irrespective of whether there are 100 or 100 million applicants.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Law Enforcement 🔗 Typography

The FE-Schrift or Fälschungserschwerende Schrift (forgery-impeding typeface) is a sans serif typeface introduced for use on licence plates. Its monospaced letters and numbers are slightly disproportionate to prevent easy modification and to improve machine readability. It has been developed in Germany where it has been mandatory since November 2000.

The abbreviation "FE" is derived from the compound German adjective "fälschungserschwerend" combining the noun "Fälschung" (falsification) and the verb "erschweren" (to hinder). "Schrift" means font in German. Other countries have later introduced the same or a derived typeface for license plates taking advantage of the proven design for the FE-Schrift.