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🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism

The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions which share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey"). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).

🔗 Film 🔗 Africa 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Animal rights

Roar is a 1981 American adventure comedy film written, produced, and directed by Noel Marshall. Roar's story follows Hank, a naturalist who lives on a nature preserve in Africa with lions, tigers, and other big cats. When his family visits him, they are instead confronted by the group of animals. The film stars Marshall as Hank and Tippi Hedren as his wife Madeleine, with Melanie Griffith, and Marshall's sons John and Jerry Marshall in supporting roles.

In 1969, while Hedren was filming Satan's Harvest in Mozambique, she and Marshall had occasion to observe a pride of lions move into a recently vacated house, driven by increased poaching. They decided to make a film centered around that theme, bringing rescued big cats into their homes in California and living with them. Filming began in 1976; it was finished after five years. The film was fully completed after 11 years in production.

Roar was not initially released in North America; in 1981, Noel and John Marshall privately released it internationally. It was also acquired by Filmways Pictures and Alpha Films. Despite performing well in Germany and Japan, Roar was a box office failure, grossing $2 million worldwide against a $17 million budget. In 2015, 34 years after the film's original release, it was released in theaters in the United States by Drafthouse Films. Roar's message of protection for African wildlife as well as its animal interactions were praised by critics, but its plot, story, inconsistent tone, dialogue, and editing were criticized.

The cast and crew members of Roar faced dangerous situations during filming; seventy people, including the film's stars, were injured as a result of multiple animal attacks. Flooding from a dam destroyed much of the set and equipment during its production, and the film's budget increased drastically. In 1983, Hedren founded the Roar Foundation and established the Shambala Preserve sanctuary, to house the animals appearing in the film. She also wrote a book, The Cats of Shambala (1985), about many of the film's events. The film has been described as "the most dangerous film ever made" and "the most expensive home movie ever made", and has gained a cult following.

🔗 Arthropods

Carcinisation (or carcinization) is an example of convergent evolution in which a crustacean evolves into a crab-like form from a non-crab-like form. The term was introduced into evolutionary biology by L. A. Borradaile, who described it as "one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab".

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Networking

The fallacies of distributed computing are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Computing 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Engineering

Electrochemical Random-Access Memory (ECRAM) is a type of non-volatile memory (NVM) with multiple levels per cell (MLC) designed for deep learning analog acceleration. An ECRAM cell is a three-terminal device composed of a conductive channel, an insulating electrolyte, an ionic reservoir, and metal contacts. The resistance of the channel is modulated by ionic exchange at the interface between the channel and the electrolyte upon application of an electric field. The charge-transfer process allows both for state retention in the absence of applied power, and for programming of multiple distinct levels, both differentiating ECRAM operation from that of a field-effect transistor (FET). The write operation is deterministic and can result in symmetrical potentiation and depression, making ECRAM arrays attractive for acting as artificial synaptic weights in physical implementations of artificial neural networks (ANN). The technological challenges include open circuit potential (OCP) and semiconductor foundry compatibility associated with energy materials. Universities, government laboratories, and corporate research teams have contributed to the development of ECRAM for analog computing. Notably, Sandia National Laboratories designed a lithium-based cell inspired by solid-state battery materials, Stanford University built an organic proton-based cell, and International Business Machines (IBM) demonstrated in-memory selector-free parallel programming for a logistic regression task in an array of metal-oxide ECRAM designed for insertion in the back end of line (BEOL). In 2022, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology built an inorganic, CMOS-compatible protonic technology that achieved near-ideal modulation characteristics using nanosecond fast pulses

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects

Hoag's Object is a non-typical galaxy of the type known as a ring galaxy. The galaxy is named after Arthur Hoag who discovered it in 1950 and identified it as either a planetary nebula or a peculiar galaxy with eight billion stars, spanning roughly 100,000 light years.

🔗 Economics

The Penn effect is the economic finding that real income ratios between high and low income countries are systematically exaggerated by gross domestic product (GDP) conversion at market exchange rates. It is associated with what became the Penn World Table, and it has been a consistent econometric result since at least the 1950s.

The "Balassa–Samuelson effect" is a model cited as the principal cause of the Penn effect by neo-classical economics, as well as being a synonym of "Penn effect".

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 African diaspora 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Abram Petrovich Gannibal, also Hannibal or Ganibal, or Abram Hannibal or Abram Petrov (Russian: Абра́м Петро́вич Ганниба́л; c. 1696 – 14 May 1781), was a Russian military engineer, major-general, and nobleman of African origin. Kidnapped as a child, Gannibal was taken to Russia and presented as a gift to Peter the Great, where he was freed, adopted and raised in the Emperor's court household as his godson.

Gannibal eventually rose to become a prominent member of the imperial court in the reign of Peter's daughter Elizabeth. He had 11 children, most of whom became members of the Russian nobility; he was a great-grandfather of the author and poet Alexander Pushkin.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Environment 🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Environment/Green vehicle

A compressed-air car is a compressed-air vehicle powered by pressure vessels filled with compressed air. It is propelled by the release and expansion of the air within a motor adapted to compressed air. The car might be powered solely by air, or combined (as in a hybrid electric vehicle) with other fuels such as gasoline, diesel, or an electric plant with regenerative braking.

Compressed-air cars use a thermodynamic process. Air cools when expanding and heats when compressed. Thermal energy losses in the compressor and tankage reduce the capacity factor of compressed air systems.

This technology might develop into an inexpensive, clean transportation technology. The energy, vehicles and compressors might be produced easily by decentralized methods, even circular industry. Using plastic might permit open source fabrication using numerical control, including additive manufacturing. The compressed air for such vehicles might be produced easily by common types of renewable energy. For example, multistage air compressors and intercoolers or hydraulic pumps might be attached directly to trompes, hydropower, VAWT wind turbines or stirling engines using a solar concentrator. Direct mechanical compression avoids the Carnot inefficiencies of heat engines. Insulated storage of compressed air avoids energy conversion and battery storage. Heat-based systems might use tankage of solar-heated molten salts driving a heat exchanger rather than an onboard heat recovery system. Electric energy, electric grids and their issues might be avoided.