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🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Energy 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Science Policy

The Kyshtym disaster, sometimes referred to as the Mayak disaster or Ozyorsk disaster in newer sources, was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozyorsk) in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union.

The disaster was the second worst nuclear incident (by radioactivity released) after the Chernobyl disaster. It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), making it the third highest on the INES (which ranks by population impact), behind Chernobyl (evacuated 335,000 people) and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (evacuated 154,000 people) which are both Level 7 on the INES. At least twenty-two villages were exposed to radiation from the Kyshtym disaster, with a total population of around 10,000 people evacuated. Some were evacuated after a week, but it took almost two years for evacuations to occur at other sites.

The disaster spread hot particles over more than 52,000 square kilometres (20,000 sq mi), where at least 270,000 people lived. Since Chelyabinsk-40 (later renamed Chelyabinsk-65 until 1994) was not marked on maps, the disaster was named after Kyshtym, the nearest known town.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia 🔗 Geology 🔗 Russia/physical geography of Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Paranormal

The Tunguska event was a massive ~12 megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, on the morning of June 30, 1908. The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km² (830 sq mi) of forest, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least three people may have died in the event. The explosion is generally attributed to the air burst of a stony meteoroid about 50–60 metres (160–200 feet) in size.^{: p. 178} The meteoroid approached from the east-southeast, and likely with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s. It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than to have hit the surface of the Earth.

The Tunguska event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, though much larger impacts have occurred in prehistoric times. An explosion of this magnitude would be capable of destroying a large metropolitan area. It has been mentioned numerous times in popular culture, and has also inspired real-world discussion of asteroid impact avoidance.

🔗 United States 🔗 Computing 🔗 Television 🔗 United States/American television

Halt and Catch Fire is an American period drama television series created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers. It aired on the cable network AMC in the United States from June 1, 2014, to October 14, 2017, spanning four seasons and 40 episodes. Taking place over a period of more than ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. The show's title refers to computer machine code instruction Halt and Catch Fire (HCF), the execution of which would cause the computer's central processing unit to stop working (catch fire being a humorous exaggeration).

In season one, the company Cardiff Electric makes its first foray into personal computing, with entrepreneur Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) running a project to build an IBM PC clone with the help of computer engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and prodigy programmer Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis). Seasons two and three shift focus to a startup company, the online community Mutiny, that is headed by Cameron and Gordon's wife Donna (Kerry Bishé), while Joe ventures out on his own. The fourth and final season focuses on competing web search engines involving all the principal characters.

Halt and Catch Fire marked Cantwell's and Rogers's first jobs in television. They wrote the pilot hoping to use it to secure jobs as writers in the industry but instead landed a series of their own from AMC. The story was inspired by Cantwell's childhood in the Silicon Prairie of Dallas–Fort Worth, where his father worked as a software salesman, and the creators' subsequent research into Texas's role in personal computing innovations of the 1980s. Filmed in the Atlanta, Georgia, area and produced by the network, the series is set in the Silicon Prairie for its first two seasons and Silicon Valley for its latter two.

Halt and Catch Fire debuted to generally favorable reviews, though many reviewers initially found it derivative of other series such as Mad Men. In each subsequent season, the series grew in acclaim, and by the time it concluded, critics considered it among the best shows of the 2010s. Despite its critical reception, the series experienced low viewership ratings throughout its run, with only the first episode surpassing one million viewers for its initial broadcast.

🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Home Living 🔗 United States/Nebraska - Omaha

Nebraska Furniture Mart is the largest home furnishing store in North America selling furniture, flooring, appliances and electronics. NFM was founded in 1937 by Belarus-born Rose Blumkin, universally known as Mrs. B., in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. Under the motto "sell cheap and tell the truth," she worked in the business until age 103. In 1983, Mrs. B. sold a majority interest to Berkshire Hathaway in a handshake deal with Warren Buffett.

🔗 Mathematics

The ant on a rubber rope is a mathematical puzzle with a solution that appears counterintuitive or paradoxical. It is sometimes given as a worm, or inchworm, on a rubber or elastic band, but the principles of the puzzle remain the same.

The details of the puzzle can vary, but a typical form is as follows:

An ant starts to crawl along a taut rubber rope 1 km long at a speed of 1 cm per second (relative to the rubber it is crawling on). At the same time, the rope starts to stretch uniformly at a constant rate of 1 km per second, so that after 1 second it is 2 km long, after 2 seconds it is 3 km long, etc. Will the ant ever reach the end of the rope?

At first consideration it seems that the ant will never reach the end of the rope, but in fact it does. (In the form stated above, it would take 8.9×10⁴³⁴²¹ years.) Whatever the length of the rope and the relative speeds of the ant and the stretching, provided that the ant's speed and the stretching remain steady, the ant will always be able to reach the end given sufficient time. Once the ant has begun moving, the rubber rope is stretching both in front of and behind the ant, conserving the proportion of the rope already walked by the ant and enabling the ant to make continual progress.

Chesterton's fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from G. K. Chesterton's 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled "The Drift from Domesticity":

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

Chesterton's admonition should first be understood within his own historical context, as a response to certain socialists and reformers of his time (e.g. George Bernard Shaw).

🔗 LGBTQ+ studies

“Ur-Fascism” or “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt” (in Italian: Il fascismo eterno, or Ur-Fascismo) is a renowned essay authored by the Italian philosopher, novelist, and semiotician Umberto Eco. First published in 1995, this influential essay provides an analysis of fascism, a definition of fascism, and discusses the fundamental characteristics and traits of fascism. Drawing on Eco's personal experiences growing up in Mussolini's Italy and his extensive research on fascist movements, the essay offers his insights into the nature of fascism and its manifestations.

🔗 Statistics

Berkson's paradox also known as Berkson's bias or Berkson's fallacy is a result in conditional probability and statistics which is often found to be counterintuitive, and hence a veridical paradox. It is a complicating factor arising in statistical tests of proportions. Specifically, it arises when there is an ascertainment bias inherent in a study design. The effect is related to the explaining away phenomenon in Bayesian networks, and conditioning on a collider in graphical models.

It is often described in the fields of medical statistics or biostatistics, as in the original description of the problem by Joseph Berkson.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science

Entity realism (also selective realism), sometimes equated with referential realism, is a philosophical position within the debate about scientific realism. It is a variation of realism (independently proposed by Stanford School philosophers Nancy Cartwright and Ian Hacking in 1983) that restricts warranted belief to only certain entities.

🔗 Poetry 🔗 Shakespeare

Sonnet 5 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence. Sonnet 5 is linked to Sonnet 6, which continues the theme of distillation.