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🔗 Computing 🔗 Microsoft Windows 🔗 Microsoft Windows/Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 JavaScript 🔗 Microsoft/.NET

JScript is Microsoft's dialect of the ECMAScript standard that is used in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

JScript is implemented as an Active Scripting engine. This means that it can be "plugged in" to OLE Automation applications that support Active Scripting, such as Internet Explorer, Active Server Pages, and Windows Script Host. It also means such applications can use multiple Active Scripting languages, e.g., JScript, VBScript or PerlScript.

JScript was first supported in the Internet Explorer 3.0 browser released in August 1996. Its most recent version is JScript 9.0, included in Internet Explorer 9.

JScript 10.0 is a separate dialect, also known as JScript .NET, which adds several new features from the abandoned fourth edition of the ECMAScript standard. It must be compiled for .NET Framework version 2 or version 4, but static type annotations are optional.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Germany 🔗 Visual arts

The Master of the Playing Cards (German: Meister der Spielkarten) was the first major master in the history of printmaking. He was a German (or conceivably Swiss) engraver, and probably also a painter, active in southwestern Germany – probably in Alsace, from the 1430s to the 1450s, who has been called "the first personality in the history of engraving."

Various attempts to identify him have not been generally accepted, so he remains known only through his 106 engravings, which include the set of playing cards in five suits from which he takes his name. The majority of the set survives in unique impressions, most of which are in the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. A further 88 engravings are regarded as sufficiently close to his style to be by his pupils.

🔗 Economics

Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth. This pattern seemingly goes against the theory in classical economics in which real wage growth is closely tied to labor productivity changes. The phenomenon was described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s.

The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains is from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Pennsylvania 🔗 Pittsburgh

A Pittsburgh toilet, or Pittsburgh potty, is a common fixture in pre-World War II houses built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States and surrounding region. It consists of an ordinary flush toilet installed in the basement, with no surrounding walls. Most of these toilets are paired with a crude basement shower apparatus and large sink, which often doubles as a laundry basin. Also, because western Pennsylvania is a steep topographical zone, many basements have their own entryway, allowing homeowners to enter from their yard or garage, cleanse themselves in their basement, and then ascend their basement stairs refreshed. Its primary function was to serve as a cleanup station for steel mill workers to clean themselves after returning from work. The toilet fixtures would also limit the harm of sewage backups in hilly Pittsburgh, providing a lower, flushable outlet than the main part of the house.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Dogs 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Laika (Russian: Лайка; c. 1954 – 3 November 1957) was a Soviet space dog who was one of the first animals in space and the first to orbit the Earth. A stray mongrel from the streets of Moscow, she flew aboard the Sputnik 2 spacecraft, launched into low orbit on 3 November 1957. As the technology to de-orbit had not yet been developed, Laika's survival was never expected. She died of overheating hours into the flight, on the craft's fourth orbit.

Little was known about the impact of spaceflight on living creatures at the time of Laika's mission, and animal flights were viewed by engineers as a necessary precursor to human missions. The experiment, which monitored Laika's vital signs, aimed to prove that a living organism could survive being launched into orbit and continue to function under conditions of weakened gravity and increased radiation, providing scientists with some of the first data on the biological effects of spaceflight.

Laika died within hours from overheating, possibly caused by a failure of the central R‑7 sustainer to separate from the payload. The true cause and time of her death were not made public until 2002; instead, it was widely reported that she died when her oxygen ran out on day six or, as the Soviet government initially claimed, she was euthanised prior to oxygen depletion. In 2008, a small monument to Laika depicting her standing atop a rocket was unveiled near the military research facility in Moscow that prepared her flight. She also appears on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space in Moscow.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors

"The Unreality of Time" is the best-known philosophical work of the Cambridge idealist J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925). In the argument, first published as a journal article in Mind in 1908, McTaggart argues that time is unreal because our descriptions of time are either contradictory, circular, or insufficient. A slightly different version of the argument appeared in 1927 as one of the chapters in the second volume of McTaggart's greatest work, The Nature of Existence.

The argument for the unreality of time is popularly treated as a stand-alone argument that does not depend on any significant metaphysical principles (e.g. as argued by C. D. Broad 1933 and L. O. Mink 1960). R. D. Ingthorsson disputes this, and argues that the argument can only be understood as an attempt to draw out certain consequences of the metaphysical system that McTaggart presents in the first volume of The Nature of Existence (Ingthorsson 1998 & 2016).

It is helpful to consider the argument as consisting of three parts. In the first part, McTaggart offers a phenomenological analysis of the appearance of time, in terms of the now famous A- and B-series (see below for detail). In the second part, he argues that a conception of time as only forming a B-series but not an A-series is an inadequate conception of time because the B-series does not contain any notion of change. The A-series, on the other hand, appears to contain change and is thus more likely to be an adequate conception of time. In the third and final part, he argues that the conception of time forming an A-series is contradictory and thus nothing can be like an A-series. Since the A- and the B- series exhaust possible conceptions of how reality can be temporal, and neither is adequate, the conclusion McTaggart reaches is that reality is not temporal at all.

🔗 North America 🔗 Energy

The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and the Canadian province of Ontario on August 14–28, 2003, beginning just after 4:10 p.m. EDT.

Some power was restored by 11 p.m. Most did not get their power back until two days later. In other areas, it took nearly a week or two for power to be restored. At the time, it was the world's second most widespread blackout in history, after the 1999 Southern Brazil blackout. The outage, which was much more widespread than the Northeast blackout of 1965, affected an estimated 10 million people in southern and central Ontario, and 45 million people in eight U.S. states.

The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region.

🔗 Fishes 🔗 Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs 🔗 Altered States of Consciousness

Several species of fish are claimed to produce hallucinogenic effects when consumed. For example, Sarpa salpa, a species of sea bream, is commonly claimed to be hallucinogenic. These widely distributed coastal fish are normally found in the Mediterranean and around Spain, and along the west and south coasts of Africa. Occasionally they are found in British waters. They may induce hallucinogenic effects that are purportedly LSD-like if eaten. In 2006, two men who apparently ate the fish experienced hallucinations lasting for several days. The likelihood of hallucinations depends on the season. Sarpa salpa is known as "the fish that makes dreams" in Arabic.

Other species claimed to be capable of producing hallucinations include several species of sea chub from the genus Kyphosus. It is unclear whether the toxins are produced by the fish themselves or by marine algae in their diet. Other hallucinogenic fish are Siganus spinus, called "the fish that inebriates" in Reunion Island, and Mulloidichthys flavolineatus (formerly Mulloidichthys samoensis), called "the chief of ghosts" in Hawaii.

🔗 Mathematics

In mathematics, a combinatorial explosion is the rapid growth of the complexity of a problem due to how the combinatorics of the problem is affected by the input, constraints, and bounds of the problem. Combinatorial explosion is sometimes used to justify the intractability of certain problems. Examples of such problems include certain mathematical functions, the analysis of some puzzles and games, and some pathological examples which can be modelled as the Ackermann function.