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🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Acoustics

Sonoluminescence is the emission of short bursts of light from imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound.

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

OK Soda was a soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1993 that courted the American Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including neo-noir design, chain letters and deliberately negative publicity. After the soda did not sell well in select test markets, it was officially declared out of production in 1995 before reaching nationwide distribution. The drink's slogan was "Things are going to be OK."

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Military history/World War II

112 Gripes About the French was a 1945 handbook issued by the United States military authorities to enlisted personnel arriving in France after the Liberation. It was meant to defuse the growing tension between the American military and the locals.

The euphoria of victory over Germany was short-lived, and within months of Liberation, tensions began to rise between the French and the U.S. military personnel stationed in the country, with the former seeing the latter as arrogant and wanting to flaunt their wealth, and the latter seeing the former as proud and resentful. Fights were breaking out more often, and fears were raised, even among high officials, that the situation might eventually lead to a breakdown of civil order.

Set out in a question-and-answer format, 112 Gripes about the French posed a series of well-rehearsed complaints about the French, and then provided a common-sense rejoinder to each of them — the aim of the authors being to bring the average American soldier to a fuller understanding of his hosts.

It has recently been republished in the United States (ISBN 1-4191-6512-7), and in France under the title "Nos amis les Français" ("Our friends the French"), ISBN 2-7491-0128-X.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

In the context of Unix-like systems, the term rc stands for the phrase "run commands". It is used for any file that contains startup information for a command. It is believed to have originated sometime in 1965 at a runcom facility from the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).

From Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie:

There was a facility that would execute a bunch of commands stored in a file; it was called runcom for "run commands", and the file began to be called "a runcom". rc in Unix is a fossil from that usage.

Tom Van Vleck, a Multics engineer, has also reminisced about the extension rc: "The idea of having the command processing shell be an ordinary slave program came from the Multics design, and a predecessor program on CTSS by Louis Pouzin called RUNCOM, the source of the '.rc' suffix on some Unix configuration files."

This is also the origin of the name of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs shell by Tom Duff, the rc shell. It is called "rc" because the main job of a shell is to "run commands".

While not historically precise, rc may also be expanded as "run control", because an rc file controls how a program runs. For instance, the editor Vim looks for and reads the contents of the .vimrc file to determine its initial configuration. In The Art of Unix Programming, Eric S. Raymond consistently refers to rc files as "run-control" files.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Statistics

The St. Petersburg paradox or St. Petersburg lottery is a paradox related to probability and decision theory in economics. It is based on a particular (theoretical) lottery game that leads to a random variable with infinite expected value (i.e., infinite expected payoff) but nevertheless seems to be worth only a very small amount to the participants. The St. Petersburg paradox is a situation where a naive decision criterion which takes only the expected value into account predicts a course of action that presumably no actual person would be willing to take. Several resolutions are possible.

The paradox takes its name from its resolution by Daniel Bernoulli, one-time resident of the eponymous Russian city, who published his arguments in the Commentaries of the Imperial Academy of Science of Saint Petersburg (Bernoulli 1738). However, the problem was invented by Daniel's cousin, Nicolas Bernoulli, who first stated it in a letter to Pierre Raymond de Montmort on September 9, 1713 (de Montmort 1713).

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Television 🔗 The Simpsons

Flanderization is the process through which a fictional character's essential traits are exaggerated over the course of a serial work. The term flanderization was coined by TV Tropes in reference to Ned Flanders of The Simpsons, who was caricatured over the show's run from a good neighbor who was religious among other characteristics into an evangelical "bible-thumper". Flanderization has been analyzed as an aspect of serial works, especially television comedies, that shows a work's decline.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Archaeology

Onfim (Old Novgorodian: онѳиме, Onfime; also, Anthemius of Novgorod) was a boy who lived in Novgorod in the 13th century. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark (beresta) which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod. Onfim, who was six or seven at the time, wrote in Old Novgorodian; besides letters and syllables, he drew "battle scenes and drawings of himself and his teacher".

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

In political discourse, if-by-whiskey is a relativist fallacy in which the speaker's position is contingent on the listener's opinion. An if-by-whiskey argument implemented through doublespeak appears to affirm both sides of an issue, and agrees with whichever side the listener supports, in effect taking a position without taking a position. The statement typically uses words with strongly positive or negative connotations (e.g., terrorist as negative and freedom fighter as positive).

🔗 Greece 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/Eastern Orthodoxy

Epiousios (ἐπιούσιος) is a Greek adjective used in the Lord's Prayer verse "Τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον" 'Give us today our epiousion bread'. Because the word is used nowhere else, its meaning is unclear. It is traditionally translated as "daily", but most modern scholars reject that interpretation.

Since it is a Koine Greek dis legomenon found only in the New Testament passages Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3, its interpretation relies upon morphological analysis and context. The traditional and most common English translation is daily, although most scholars today reject this in part because all other New Testament passages with the translation "daily" include the word hemera (ἡμέρᾱ, 'day').

The difficulty in understanding epiousios goes at least as far back as AD 382. At that time, St. Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus I to renew and consolidate the various collections of biblical texts in the Vetus Latina ("Old Latin") then in use by the Church. Jerome accomplished this by going back to the original Greek of the New Testament and translating it into Latin; his translation came to be known as the Vulgate. In the identical contexts of Matthew and Luke—that is, reporting the Lord's Prayer—Jerome translated epiousios in two different ways: by morphological analysis as 'supersubstantial' (supersubstantialem) in Matthew 6:11, but retaining 'daily' (quotidianum) in Luke 11:3.

The modern Catholic Catechism holds that there are several ways of understanding epiousios, including the traditional 'daily', but most literally as 'supersubstantial' or 'superessential', based on its morphological components. Alternative theories are that—aside from the etymology of ousia, meaning 'substance'—it may be derived from either of the verbs einai (εἶναι), meaning "to be", or ienai (ἰέναι), meaning both "to come" and "to go".^:172