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🔗 United States 🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and June 30, 1945, as part of the Allied Alsos Mission, mainly as part of its Operation Big sweep through southwestern Germany.

They were interned at Farm Hall, a bugged house in Godmanchester, near Cambridge, England, from July 3, 1945, to January 3, 1946. The primary goal of the program was to determine how close Nazi Germany had been to constructing an atomic bomb by listening to their conversations.

🔗 Spaceflight

AMC-14 is a communications satellite. Initially owned by SES Americom, AMC-14 was designed to be placed in geostationary orbit, following launch on a Proton rocket. Built by Lockheed Martin and based on the A2100 satellite bus, AMC-14 was to have been located at 61.5° west longitude for DISH Network service.

It was launched atop a Proton-M/Briz-M rocket at 23:18:55 GMT on 14 March 2008, from LC-200/39 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The satellite was placed in an unusable orbit, following a malfunction of the Briz-M upper stage. Over a six-month period, it was maneuvered into a geosynchronous orbit, and is now near 35° East and in an inclined orbit.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics

Zipf's law (, not as in German) is an empirical law formulated using mathematical statistics that refers to the fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions. Zipf distribution is related to the zeta distribution, but is not identical.

Zipf's law was originally formulated in terms of quantitative linguistics, stating that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.: the rank-frequency distribution is an inverse relation. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word the is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word of accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by and (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.

The law is named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950), who popularized it and sought to explain it (Zipf 1935, 1949), though he did not claim to have originated it. The French stenographer Jean-Baptiste Estoup (1868–1950) appears to have noticed the regularity before Zipf. It was also noted in 1913 by German physicist Felix Auerbach (1856–1933).

🔗 Physics

The green flash and green ray are meteorological optical phenomena that sometimes occur transiently around the moment of sunset or sunrise. When the conditions are right, a distinct green spot is briefly visible above the upper rim of the Sun's disk; the green appearance usually lasts for no more than two seconds. Rarely, the green flash can resemble a green ray shooting up from the sunset or sunrise point.

Green flashes occur because the earth's atmosphere can cause the light from the Sun to separate out into different colors. Green flashes are a group of similar phenomena that stem from slightly different causes, and therefore, some types of green flashes are more common than others.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Crime 🔗 Lists 🔗 Novels 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Novels/Crime

A helicopter prison escape is made when an inmate escapes from a prison by means of a helicopter. This list includes prisoner escapes where a helicopter was used in an attempt to free prisoners from a place of internment, a prison or correctional facility.

One of the earliest instances of using a helicopter to escape a prison was the escape of Joel David Kaplan, nicknamed "Man Fan", on August 19, 1971 from the Santa Martha Acatitla in Mexico. Kaplan was a New York businessman who not only escaped the prison but eventually got out of Mexico and went on to write a book about his experience, The 10-Second Jailbreak.

France has had more recorded helicopter escape attempts than any other country, with at least 11. One of the most notable French jail breaks occurred in 1986, when the wife of bank robber Michel Vaujour studied for months to learn how to fly a helicopter. Using her newly acquired skills, she rented a white helicopter and flew low over Paris to pluck her husband off the roof of his fortress prison. Vaujour was later seriously wounded in a shootout with police, and his pilot wife was arrested.

The record for most helicopter escapes goes to convicted murderer Pascal Payet, who has used helicopters to escape from prisons in 2001, 2003, and most recently 2007.

Another multiple helicopter escapee is Vasilis Paleokostas who on February 22, 2009 escaped for the second time from the same prison. Because of this, many prisons have taken applicable precautions, such as nets or cables strung over open prison courtyards.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Science 🔗 Academic Journals

The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is, as of 2020, an ongoing methodological crisis in which it has been found that many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce. The replication crisis affects the social sciences and medicine most severely. The crisis has long-standing roots; the phrase was coined in the early 2010s as part of a growing awareness of the problem. The replication crisis represents an important body of research in the field of metascience.

Because the reproducibility of experimental results is an essential part of the scientific method, the inability to replicate the studies of others has potentially grave consequences for many fields of science in which significant theories are grounded on unreproducible experimental work. The replication crisis has been particularly widely discussed in the field of psychology and in medicine, where a number of efforts have been made to re-investigate classic results, to determine both the reliability of the results, and, if found to be unreliable, the reasons for the failure of replication.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Telecommunications

Super Dimension Fortress (SDF, also known as freeshell.org) is a non-profit public access UNIX shell provider on the Internet. It has been in continual operation since 1987 as a non-profit social club. The name is derived from the Japanese anime series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross; the original SDF server was a BBS for anime fans. From its BBS roots, which have been well documented as part of the BBS: The Documentary project, SDF has grown into a feature-rich provider serving members around the world.

🔗 Economics 🔗 New York City

The National Debt Clock is a billboard-sized running total display which constantly updates to show the current United States gross national debt and each American family's share of the debt. It is currently installed on the western side of One Bryant Park, west of Sixth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets in Manhattan, New York City. It was the first debt clock installed anywhere.

The idea for the clock came from New York real estate developer Seymour Durst, who wanted to highlight the rising national debt. In 1989, he sponsored the installation of the first clock, which was originally placed on Sixth Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets, one block away from Times Square. In 2004, the original clock was dismantled and replaced by a newer clock near 44th Street and Sixth Avenue. In 2008, as the U.S. national debt exceeded $10 trillion for the first time, it was reported that the value of the debt may have exceeded the number of digits in the clock. The lit dollar-sign in the clock's leftmost digit position was later changed to the "1" digit to represent the ten-trillionth place. In 2017, the clock was moved again to One Bryant Park, near its original location.

🔗 Metalworking 🔗 Measurement

A thousandth of an inch is a derived unit of length in a system of units using inches. Equal to 1⁄1000 of an inch, a thousandth is commonly called a thou (used for both singular and plural) or particularly in North America a mil (plural mils).

The words are shortened forms of the English and Latin words for "thousand" (mille in Latin). In international engineering contexts, confusion can arise because mil is a formal unit name in North America but mil or mill is also a common colloquial clipped form of millimetre. The units are considerably different: a millimetre is approximately 39 mils.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Medicine

The Corsi–Rosenthal Box, also called a Corsi–Rosenthal Cube or a Comparetto Cube, is a design for a do-it-yourself air purifier that can be built comparatively inexpensively. It was designed during the COVID-19 pandemic with the goal of reducing the levels of airborne viral particles in indoor settings.