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🔗 Biography 🔗 Bangladesh 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Skyscrapers 🔗 Civil engineering 🔗 Chicago 🔗 Illinois

Fazlur Rahman Khan (Bengali: ফজলুর রহমান খান, Fozlur Rôhman Khan) (3 April 1929 – 27 March 1982) was a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer and architect, who initiated important structural systems for skyscrapers. Considered the "father of tubular designs" for high-rises, Khan was also a pioneer in computer-aided design (CAD). He was the structural engineer of the Sears Tower working with Architect Bruce Graham, since renamed Willis Tower, the tallest building in the world from 1973 until 1998, and the 100-story John Hancock Center.

Khan, more than any other individual, ushered in a renaissance in skyscraper construction during the second half of the 20th century. He has been called the "Einstein of structural engineering" and the "Greatest Structural Engineer of the 20th Century" for his innovative use of structural systems that remain fundamental to modern skyscraper design and construction. In his honor, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat established the Fazlur Khan Lifetime Achievement Medal, as one of their CTBUH Skyscraper Awards.

Although best known for skyscrapers, Khan was also an active designer of other kinds of structures, including the Hajj airport terminal, the McMath–Pierce solar telescope, and several stadium structures.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Neuroscience

Pain in babies, and whether babies feel pain, has been a large subject of debate within the medical profession for centuries. Prior to the late nineteenth century it was generally considered that babies hurt more easily than adults. It was only in the last quarter of the 20th century that scientific techniques finally established babies definitely do experience pain – probably more than adults – and developed reliable means of assessing and of treating it. As recently as 1999, it was commonly stated that babies could not feel pain until they were a year old, but today it is believed newborns and likely even fetuses beyond a certain age can experience pain.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

A propfan, also called an open rotor engine, or unducted fan, is a type of aircraft engine related in concept to both the turboprop and turbofan, but distinct from both. The design is intended to offer the speed and performance of a turbofan, with the fuel economy of a turboprop. A propfan is typically designed with a large number of short, highly twisted blades, similar to a turbofan's bypass compressor (the fan itself). For this reason, the propfan has been variously described as an "unducted fan" or an "ultra-high-bypass (UHB) turbofan."

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Energy 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language

Long-term nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the American Human Interference Task Force in 1981.

A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories recommended that such messages be constructed at several levels of complexity. They suggested that the sites should include foreboding physical features which would immediately convey to future visitors that the site was both man-made and dangerous, as well as providing pictographic information attempting to convey some details of the danger, and written explanations for those able to read it.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Organized Labour

The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization or PATCO was a United States trade union that operated from 1968 until its decertification in 1981 following an illegal strike that was broken by the Reagan Administration. According to labor historian Joseph A. McCartin, the 1981 strike and defeat of PATCO was "one of the most important events in late twentieth century U.S. labor history".

🔗 Books 🔗 Sociology

The Power Elite is a 1956 book by sociologist C. Wright Mills, in which Mills calls attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society and suggests that the ordinary citizen in modern times is a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those three entities.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Korea 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Kim Ung-Yong (Hangul: 김웅용; born March 8, 1962) is a South Korean professor and former child prodigy, who once held the Guinness World Record for highest IQ, at a score of 230+.

🔗 Systems

Chartjunk consists of all visual elements in charts and graphs that are not necessary to comprehend the information represented on the graph, or that distract the viewer from this information.

Markings and visual elements can be called chartjunk if they are not part of the minimum set of visuals necessary to communicate the information understandably. Examples of unnecessary elements that might be called chartjunk include heavy or dark grid lines, unnecessary text, inappropriately complex or gimmicky font faces, ornamented chart axes, and display frames, pictures, backgrounds or icons within data graphs, ornamental shading and unnecessary dimensions.

Another kind of chartjunk skews the depiction and makes it difficult to understand the real data being displayed. Examples of this type include items depicted out of scale to one another, noisy backgrounds making comparison between elements difficult in a chart or graph, and 3-D simulations in line and bar charts.

The term chartjunk was coined by Edward Tufte in his 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Tufte wrote:

The interior decoration of graphics generates a lot of ink that does not tell the viewer anything new. The purpose of decoration varies—to make the graphic appear more scientific and precise, to enliven the display, to give the designer an opportunity to exercise artistic skills. Regardless of its cause, it is all non-data-ink or redundant data-ink, and it is often chartjunk.

The term is relatively recent and is often associated with Tufte in other references.

The concept is analogous to Adolf Loos's idea that ornament is a crime.

🔗 Physics

A Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter (also called the fifth state of matter) which is typically formed when a gas of bosons at low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (-273.15 °C). Under such conditions, a large fraction of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state, at which point microscopic quantum phenomena, particularly wavefunction interference, become apparent macroscopically. A BEC is formed by cooling a gas of extremely low density, about one-hundred-thousandth (1/100,000) the density of normal air, to ultra-low temperatures.

This state was first predicted, generally, in 1924–1925 by Albert Einstein following a paper written by Satyendra Nath Bose, although Bose came up with the pioneering paper on the new statistics.

🔗 United States 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Canada 🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Canada/British Columbia 🔗 United States/Washington 🔗 Canada/Geography of Canada 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history 🔗 Agriculture/Livestock

The Pig War was a confrontation in 1859 between the United States and United Kingdom over the British–U.S. border in the San Juan Islands, between Vancouver Island (present-day Canada) and the State of Washington. The Pig War, so called because it was triggered by the shooting of a pig, is also called the Pig Episode, the Pig and Potato War, the San Juan Boundary Dispute and the Northwestern Boundary Dispute. Aside from the death of one pig, this dispute was a bloodless conflict.