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🔗 United States 🔗 Law

Lemon laws are United States state laws that provide a remedy for purchasers of cars and other consumer goods in order to compensate for products that repeatedly fail to meet standards of quality and performance. Although many types of products can be defective, the term "lemon" is mostly used to describe defective motor vehicles, such as cars, trucks, and motorcycles.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics

The Omega Point is a theorized future event in which the entirety of the universe spirals toward a final point of unification. The term was invented by the French Jesuit Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is "God from God", "Light from Light", "True God from True God", and "through him all things were made". In the Book of Revelation, Christ describes himself thrice as "the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end". Several decades after Teilhard's death, the idea of the Omega Point was expanded upon in the writings of John David Garcia (1971), Paolo Soleri (1981), Frank Tipler (1994), and David Deutsch (1997).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Collections Care

M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc. and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Environment 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Sociology

The dihydrogen monoxide parody involves calling water by an unfamiliar chemical name, most often "dihydrogen monoxide" (DHMO), and listing some of water's well-known effects in a particularly alarming manner, such as accelerating corrosion and causing suffocation. The parody often calls for dihydrogen monoxide to be banned, regulated, or labeled as dangerous. It demonstrates how a lack of scientific literacy and an exaggerated analysis can lead to misplaced fears.

The parody has been used with other chemical names, including "dihydrogen oxide", "hydroxyl acid", and "hydroxylic acid".

🔗 Internet

Demand Progress is an internet activist-related entity encompassing a 501(c)4 arm sponsored by the 1630 Fund and a 501(c)3 arm sponsored by the New Venture Fund. It specializes in online-intensive and other grassroots activism to support Internet freedom, civil liberties, transparency, and human rights, and in opposition to censorship and corporate control of government. The organization was founded through a petition in opposition to the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, sparking the movement that eventually defeated COICA's successor bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act, two highly controversial pieces of United States legislation.

The organization has continued to fight for such causes in the wake of the successful shelving of these two acts. Demand Progress has also played key roles in forwarding the passage of net neutrality rules, blocking expansion of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, under which co-founder Aaron Swartz was indicted, and other key legislative efforts. Estimated membership numbers in early 2015 weigh in at over two million. As of late 2013, the organization encompasses the Demand Progress, Rootstrikers and Watchdog.net wings/brands.

🔗 Economics

"The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a well-known 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought.

Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a "lemon". Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (p_avg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since p_lemon < p_avg) and they will leave the market when they hold "peaches" (since p_peach > p_avg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop.

Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse.

Akerlof's paper shows how prices can determine the quality of goods traded on the market. Low prices drive away sellers of high-quality goods, leaving only lemons behind. In 2001, Akerlof, along with Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz, jointly received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for their research on issues related to asymmetric information.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

The Gompertz curve or Gompertz function is a type of mathematical model for a time series, named after Benjamin Gompertz (1779–1865). It is a sigmoid function which describes growth as being slowest at the start and end of a given time period. The right-side or future value asymptote of the function is approached much more gradually by the curve than the left-side or lower valued asymptote. This is in contrast to the simple logistic function in which both asymptotes are approached by the curve symmetrically. It is a special case of the generalised logistic function. The function was originally designed to describe human mortality, but since has been modified to be applied in biology, with regard to detailing populations.

🔗 Electronics

The two capacitor paradox or capacitor paradox is a paradox, or counterintuitive thought experiment, in electric circuit theory. The thought experiment is usually described as follows: Two identical capacitors are connected in parallel with an open switch between them. One of the capacitors is charged with a voltage of ${\displaystyle V_{i}}$, the other is uncharged. When the switch is closed, some of the charge ${\displaystyle Q=CV_{i}}$ on the first capacitor flows into the second, reducing the voltage on the first and increasing the voltage on the second. When a steady state is reached and the current goes to zero, the voltage on the two capacitors must be equal since they are connected together. Since they both have the same capacitance ${\displaystyle C}$ the charge will be divided equally between the capacitors so each capacitor will have a charge of ${\displaystyle {Q \over 2}}$ and a voltage of ${\displaystyle V_{f}={Q \over 2C}={V_{i} \over 2}}$. At the beginning of the experiment the total initial energy ${\displaystyle W_{i}}$ in the circuit is the energy stored in the charged capacitor:

${\displaystyle W_{i}={1 \over 2}CV_{i}^{2}}$.

At the end of the experiment the final energy ${\displaystyle W_{f}}$ is equal to the sum of the energy in the two capacitors

${\displaystyle W_{f}={1 \over 2}CV_{f}^{2}+{1 \over 2}CV_{f}^{2}=CV_{f}^{2}=C({V_{i} \over 2})^{2}={1 \over 4}CV_{i}^{2}={1 \over 2}W_{i}}$

Thus the final energy ${\displaystyle W_{f}}$ is equal to half of the initial energy ${\displaystyle W_{i}}$. Where did the other half of the initial energy go?

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Fluid Dynamics

In aviation, a phugoid or fugoid ( ) is an aircraft motion in which the vehicle pitches up and climbs, and then pitches down and descends, accompanied by speeding up and slowing down as it goes "downhill" and "uphill". This is one of the basic flight dynamics modes of an aircraft (others include short period, roll subsidence, dutch roll, and spiral divergence).

🔗 Iran 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Assyria 🔗 Bible 🔗 Syria 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Endangered languages 🔗 Christianity/Jesus 🔗 Lebanon 🔗 Christianity/Oriental Orthodoxy 🔗 Christianity/Syriac Christianity

The Aramaic original New Testament theory is the belief that the Christian New Testament was originally written in Aramaic.

There are several versions of the New Testament in Aramaic languages:

1. the Vetus Syra (Old Syriac), a translation from Greek into early Classical Syriac, containing most—but not all—of the text of the 4 Gospels, and represented in the Curetonian Gospels and the Sinaitic Palimpsest
2. the Christian Palestinian Aramaic Lectionary fragments represented in such manuscripts as Codex Climaci Rescriptus, Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus, and later lectionary codices (Vatican sir. 19 [A]; St Catherine’s Monastery B, C, D)
3. the Classical Syriac Peshitta, a rendering in Aramaic of the Hebrew (and some Aramaic, e.g. in Daniel and Ezra) Old Testament, plus the New Testament purportedly in its original Aramaic, and still the standard in most Syriac churches
4. the Harklean, a strictly literal translation by Thomas of Harqel into Classical Syriac from Greek
5. the Assyrian Modern Version, a new translation into Assyrian Neo-Aramaic from the Greek published in 1997 and mainly in use among Protestants
6. and a number of other scattered versions in various dialects

The traditional New Testament of the Peshitta has 22 books, lacking the Second Epistle of John, the Third Epistle of John, the Second Epistle of Peter, the Epistle of Jude and the Book of Revelation, which are books of the Antilegomena. Closure of the Church of the East's New Testament Canon occurred before the 'Western Five' books could be incorporated. Its Gospels text also lacks the verses known as Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) and Luke 22:17–18, but does have the 'long ending of Mark.'