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🔗 Chess

Zugzwang (German for "compulsion to move", pronounced [ˈtsuːktsvaŋ]) is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because they must make a move when they would prefer to pass and not move. The fact that the player is compelled to move means that their position will become significantly weaker. A player is said to be "in zugzwang" when any possible move will worsen their position.

Although the term is used less precisely in games such as chess, it is used specifically in combinatorial game theory to denote a move that directly changes the outcome of the game from a win to a loss. Putting the opponent in zugzwang is a common way to help the superior side win a game, and in some cases it is necessary in order to make the win possible.

The term zugzwang was used in German chess literature in 1858 or earlier, and the first known use of the term in English was by World Champion Emanuel Lasker in 1905. The concept of zugzwang was known to chess players many centuries before the term was coined, appearing in an endgame study published in 1604 by Alessandro Salvio, one of the first writers on the game, and in shatranj studies dating back to the early 9th century, over 1000 years before the first known use of the term.

Positions with zugzwang occur fairly often in chess endgames, especially in king and pawn endgames. According to John Nunn, positions of reciprocal zugzwang are surprisingly important in the analysis of endgames.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Star Wars

In programming jargon, Yoda conditions (also called Yoda notation) is a programming style where the two parts of an expression are reversed from the typical order in a conditional statement. A Yoda condition places the constant portion of the expression on the left side of the conditional statement. The name for this programming style is derived from the Star Wars character named Yoda, who speaks English with a non-standard syntax.

Yoda conditions are part of the Symfony, and the WordPress coding standards.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Internet

The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies such as Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign at some point in their studies.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/theology 🔗 Military history/European military history

Gödel's ontological proof is a formal argument by the mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) for the existence of God. The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm's ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: "God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist." A more elaborate version was given by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716); this is the version that Gödel studied and attempted to clarify with his ontological argument.

Gödel left a fourteen-point outline of his philosophical beliefs in his papers. Points relevant to the ontological proof include

4. There are other worlds and rational beings of a different and higher kind.

5. The world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall live or have lived.

13. There is a scientific (exact) philosophy and theology, which deals with concepts of the highest abstractness; and this is also most highly fruitful for science.

14. Religions are, for the most part, bad—but religion is not.

🔗 Sociology

Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.

Turchin said that this situation explained social disturbances during the late Roman empire and the French Wars of Religion, and predicted in 2010 that this situation would cause social unrest in the United States of America during the 2020s. According to Turchin and Jack Goldstone, periods of political instability have throughout human history been due to the purely self-interested behavior of the elite. When the economy faced a surge in the workforce, which exerted a downward pressure on wages, the elite generally kept much of the wealth generated to themselves, resisting taxation and income redistribution. In the face of intensifying competition, they also sought to restrict the window of opportunity, to preserve their power and status for their descendants. These actions exacerbated inequality, a key driver of sociopolitical turbulence due to the proneness of the relatively well-off to radicalism. Widespread progressive political beliefs among university graduates, for instance, can be due to widespread underemployment rather than from exposure to progressive ideas or experiences during their studies.

In the case of the United States, by the 2010s, it became clear that the cost of higher education has ballooned over the previous three to four decades—faster than inflation, in fact—thanks to growing demand. For this prediction, Turchin used current data and the structural-demographic theory, a mathematical model of how population changes affect the behavior of the state, the elite, and the commons, created by Jack Goldstone. Goldstone himself predicted using his model that in the twenty-first century, the United States would elect a national populist leader. Elite overproduction has been cited as a root cause of political tension in the U.S., as so many well-educated Millennials are either unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise not achieving the high status they expect. Even then, the nation continued to produce excess PhD holders before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, especially in the humanities and social sciences, for which employment prospects were dim. Moreover, according to projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, the share of people in their 20s continued to grow till the end of the 2010s, meaning the youth bulge would likely not fade away before the 2020s. As such the gap between the supply and demand in the labor market would likely not fall before then, and falling or stagnant wages generate sociopolitical stress.

In the United Kingdom, there was simply not enough working-class Britons disenchanted with the status quo to support the Brexit movement, which was also buoyed by many highly educated voters.

However, Turchin's model cannot foretell precisely how a crisis will unfold; it can only yield probabilities. Turchin likened this to the accumulation of deadwood in a forest over many years, paving the way for a cataclysmic forest fire later on. It is possible to predict a massive conflagration, but not what causes it.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Crime

On April 16, 2013, a sophisticated assault was carried out on Pacific Gas and Electric Company's Metcalf Transmission Substation in Coyote, California, near the border of San Jose. The attack, in which gunmen fired on 17 electrical transformers, resulted in more than $15 million worth of equipment damage, but it had little impact on the station's electrical power supply.

🔗 Ships

The Voith Schneider propeller (VSP), also known as a cycloidal drive is a specialized marine propulsion system (MPS). It is highly maneuverable, being able to change the direction of its thrust almost instantaneously. It is widely used on tugs and ferries.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Internet 🔗 History 🔗 Computing 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Economics 🔗 Law 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Capitalism 🔗 Globalization 🔗 Google

Surveillance capitalism has a number of meanings around the commodification of personal information. Since 2014, social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff has used and popularized the term.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Shopping Centers

In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer (also known as the Gruen effect) is the moment when consumers enter a shopping mall or store and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, lose track of their original intentions, making consumers more susceptible to make impulse buys. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen, who disavowed such manipulative techniques.

🔗 Companies 🔗 China 🔗 Organized Labour

The 996 working hour system (Chinese: 996工作制) is a work schedule commonly practiced by some companies in the People's Republic of China. It derives its name from its requirement that employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week; i.e. 72 hours per week. A number of Chinese internet companies have adopted this system as their official work schedule. Critics argue that the 996 working hour system is a flagrant violation of Chinese law.

In March 2019 an "anti-996" protest was launched via GitHub.