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🔗 Military history 🔗 Religion 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Military history/Military culture, traditions, and heraldry

The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, people under arms" or "detachment, war party") refers to the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for a number of years before their full integration to the host society, in the context of a rite of passage into manhood.

Subsequent Indo-European traditions and myths feature parallel linkages between property-less adolescent males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated into the community of the married men; their service in a "police-army" sent away for a part of the year in the wild (where they hunted animals and raided foreign communities) and defending the host society during the remaining part of the year; their mystical self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, promiscuity, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between invulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Insects 🔗 Ecology

A hyperparasite, also known as a metaparasite is a parasite whose host, often an insect, is also a parasite, often specifically a parasitoid. Hyperparasites are found mainly among the wasp-waisted Apocrita within the Hymenoptera, and in two other insect orders, the Diptera (true flies) and Coleoptera (beetles). Seventeen families in Hymenoptera and a few species of Diptera and Coleoptera are hyperparasitic. Hyperparasitism developed from primary parasitism, which evolved in the Jurassic period in the Hymenoptera. Hyperparasitism intrigues entomologists because of its multidisciplinary relationship to evolution, ecology, behavior, biological control, taxonomy, and mathematical models.

🔗 Economics

An Information cascade or informational cascade is a phenomenon described in behavioral economics and network theory in which a number of people make the same decision in a sequential fashion. It is similar to, but distinct from herd behavior.

An information cascade is generally accepted as a two-step process. For a cascade to begin an individual must encounter a scenario with a decision, typically a binary one. Second, outside factors can influence this decision (typically, through the observation of actions and their outcomes of other individuals in similar scenarios).

The two-step process of an informational cascade can be broken down into five basic components:

1. There is a decision to be made – for example; whether to adopt a new technology, wear a new style of clothing, eat in a new restaurant, or support a particular political position

2. A limited action space exists (e.g. an adopt/reject decision)

3. People make the decision sequentially, and each person can observe the choices made by those who acted earlier

4. Each person has some information aside from their own that helps guide their decision

5. A person can't directly observe the outside information that other people know, but he or she can make inferences about this information from what they do

Social perspectives of cascades, which suggest that agents may act irrationally (e.g., against what they think is optimal) when social pressures are great, exist as complements to the concept of information cascades. More often the problem is that the concept of an information cascade is confused with ideas that do not match the two key conditions of the process, such as social proof, information diffusion, and social influence. Indeed, the term information cascade has even been used to refer to such processes.

🔗 New York City 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Skyscrapers 🔗 Telecommunications

33 Thomas Street (formerly the AT&T Long Lines Building) is a 550-foot-tall (170 m) skyscraper in Civic Center, Lower Manhattan, New York City. It stands on the east side of Church Street, between Thomas Street and Worth Street. The building is an example of the Brutalist architectural style. It is a telephone exchange or wire center building which contained three major 4ESS switches used for interexchange (long distance) telephony, as well as a number of other switches used for competitive local exchange carrier services. However, it is not used for incumbent local exchange carrier services, and is not a central office. The CLLI code for this facility is NYCMNYBW. The building has also been described as the likely location of a National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance hub codenamed TITANPOINTE.

🔗 United States 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Law 🔗 History of Science 🔗 United States/Indiana

The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, rather than to establish a certain value for the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by the crank Edward J. Goodwin, does imply various incorrect values of π, such as 3.2. The bill never became law, due to the intervention of Professor C. A. Waldo of Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.

The impossibility of squaring the circle using only compass and straightedge constructions, suspected since ancient times, was rigorously proven in 1882 by Ferdinand von Lindemann. Better approximations of π than those implied by the bill have been known since ancient times.

🔗 Telecommunications

The Wheatstone system was an automated telegraph system that replaced a human operator with machines capable of sending and recording Morse code at a consistent fast rate. The system included a perforator, which prepared punched paper tape called a Wheatstone slip, a transmitter that read the tape and converted the symbols into dots and dashes encoded as mark and space electric currents on the telegraph line, and a receiver at the other end of the telegraph line that printed the Morse symbols. The system was invented by Charles Wheatstone. Enhancements could be made so that it was a duplex system, able to send and receive on the same line simultaneously.

The Wheatstone slip was a paper tape that contained holes in a pattern to control the mark and space signals on the telegraph line. The paper tape was from 0.46 to 0.48 inches in width, (but the standard width is from 0.472 to 0.475 inches) and a standard thickness of 0.004 to 0.0045 inches. Olive oil coating lubricated the punch process. There were three rows of holes. The middle row forms a rack so that a star wheel can move the paper forward. Every used position on the tape has a middle hole punched. The top hole indicates when to turn on the mark signal on the line, and the bottom hole says to turn off the mark signal. Each vertical column represents a time interval in the Morse code, including the spacing between the holes. The holes are spaced 0.1 inches apart. A column of three holes turns on the mark at the beginning of the interval, and turns it off at the end making a dot. If there is a top hole without a bottom, and then the next column has a bottom without a top hole, mark is on for three intervals, and a dash is represented. If there is only a centre hole, then nothing changes, and this would normally be used to put in space between letters and words.

The Wheatstone perforator was a manually operated hole punch machine to produce Wheatstone slips. It had three buttons (or keys) labelled "A", "A1" and "A2". "A" punched the pattern for dot, "A1" punched the pattern for space, and "A2" punched the dash pattern in two columns. The keys were so difficult to press that fist-held rubber-tipped mallets were used to depress them and operate the punches. Using this, invalid combinations of holes could not be produced. The blank paper tape was fed in from the right over a roller and came out the left side. It was oriented in a vertical plane. The paper punches were labelled with numbers: 1 for the top hole of the dot, 2 for the sprocket hole for dot, and 3 for the bottom hole for dot. When a dash was punched, extra hole punches to the right punched a centre hole with number 4 and a bottom hole with number 5. The perforator was introduced in 1867. It enabled transmission speeds on a telegraph line to increase to 70 words per minute. The very first message ever punched onto a tape was "SOS EIOS". The manual perforator was subsequently replaced by keyboard perforators like the Gell keyboard perforator or Kleinschmidt keyboard perforator.

Each of the keys had a spring to restore its position after pressing. Each key moved a corresponding lever underneath the instrument. The other end of the levers protruded up into the back of the mechanism. Each punch rod also had a spring to put it back in place after punching a hole. For space and dot keying (A or A1) the star wheel was only allowed to turn one position by a pawl, and the paper tape only moved forward one position. However, when key A2 was hit, the corresponding lever B2 raised a bar (h) which allowed another lever attached to the pawl to move further back when the star wheel rotated, and the wheel could turn two positions, for a dash. The distance the paper tape moved for each position was determined by how far lever k moved, and its range of movement had to be set by adjusting screws i and t. A flat spring g stored energy from the punch to move the paper. The force of the spring was determined by adjusting screws n and n'. A guide roller (r) with a groove was pressed by an adjustable spring to press the pawl against the star wheel. The star wheel was on a frame with a piece sticking out the left hand side as a lever. When the operator wanted to insert paper tape, this lever was pulled, and the star wheel retracted from the paper.

The Wheatstone transmitter read a paper tape (Wheatstone slip) and converted the dot pattern into mark and space symbols on the telegraph line. It worked by two rods alternately rising up to sample the holes in the tape. First of all the top hole was probed, and if the rod could go through, it moved a compound lever that connected the mark signal to the line. With no hole the lever remained unmoved. Next the top hole rod dropped and the bottom hole rod checked whether there was a bottom hole in the tape. If there was, the compound lever was moved back to connect the space signal on the line. If there was no hole, the compound lever was left alone as it was. An extra switch enabled the transmitter to be bypassed so that a Morse key could be used instead.

The Wheatstone receiver converted the signal on the telegraph line to an inked pattern on a paper strip. An electromagnet electrically connected to the telegraph line moved an inking wheel to press against the paper. A clockwork mechanism advanced the paper tape, and turned the inking wheel, and an ink supply wheel. The paper advance speed could be adjusted between 7 and 60 feet per minute. Power to the clockwork had three sources: it could be a coiled spring, a weight, or an electric motor. Paper spools were stored in drawers beneath the reader to allow quick change when one was exhausted. The ink supply wheel turned in an inkwell. The machine was started and stopped by use of a lever. In electrical characteristics, the electromagnet had two windings, each of 100 ohms resistance. These could be connected in parallel or series to achieve a 50 or 200 ohm resistance, to better match the telegraph line. Other maintenance that might have been required was cleaning of the marker and supply wheels, adjusting the armature-coil spacing to avoid a marking or spacing bias, and cleaning the sounding tongue and contact points.

The Wheatstone telegram consisted of strips of paper tape with the Morse code printed on it, pasted on a form. The telegram would later be retyped to make a final presentable message for the recipient.

🔗 Death 🔗 Iran 🔗 Archaeology

The Hasanlu Lovers are a pair of human remains found at the Teppe Hasanlu archaeological site, located in the Naqadeh in the West Azerbaijan Province of Iran. Around 800 BCE, the city of Hasanlu, located in north-western Iran, was destroyed by an unknown invader. Inhabitants were slain and left where they fell. In 1973, the lovers were discovered by a team of archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania led by Robert H. Dyson.

The two human skeletons were found together in a bin during excavations, seemingly embracing at the time of death, with no other objects except a stone slab under the head of one skeleton. They died together around 800 BCE, during the last destruction of the Hasanlu. Approximately 246 skeletons were found at the site altogether. How the lovers died and ended up in the bin is still under speculation but both skeletons lack evidence of injury near the time of death and possibly died of asphyxiation. They were exhibited at the Penn Museum from 1974 until the mid-1980s.

The right skeleton, referred to as HAS 73-5-799 (SK 335), is lying on its back and the left skeleton, referred to as HAS 73-5-800 (SK 336), is lying on its left side facing SK 335. When excavated, the skeletons were tested to determine various characteristics. Dental evidence suggest SK 335 was a young adult, possibly 19–22 years of age. Researchers identified the skeleton as male largely based on the pelvis. The skeleton had no apparent evidence of disease or healed lifetime injuries. Skeleton SK 336 appeared to have been healthy in life; the skeleton had no apparent evidence of healed lifetimes injuries, and was estimated to have been aged to about 30–35 years. Sex determination of the left skeleton was less definitive. Evidence suggests SK 336 was also male after being originally identified as female. The skeletons have been a subject of debate since they were first excavated.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Aesthetics 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture

Japanese aesthetics comprise a set of ancient ideals that include wabi (transient and stark beauty), sabi (the beauty of natural patina and aging), and yūgen (profound grace and subtlety). These ideals, and others, underpin much of Japanese cultural and aesthetic norms on what is considered tasteful or beautiful. Thus, while seen as a philosophy in Western societies, the concept of aesthetics in Japan is seen as an integral part of daily life. Japanese aesthetics now encompass a variety of ideals; some of these are traditional while others are modern and sometimes influenced by other cultures.

🔗 United States 🔗 Military history 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Military history/Military biography

The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

The fallacy refers to McNamara's belief as to what led the United States to defeat in the Vietnam War—specifically, his quantification of success in the war (e.g., in terms of enemy body count), ignoring other variables.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry

The demon core was a spherical 6.2-kilogram (14 lb) subcritical mass of plutonium 89 millimetres (3.5 in) in diameter, that was involved in two criticality accidents, on August 21, 1945 and May 21, 1946. The core was intended for use in a third nuclear weapon, but remained in use for testing after Japan's surrender. It was designed with a small safety margin to ensure a successful explosion of the bomb. The device briefly went supercritical when it was accidentally placed in supercritical configurations during two separate experiments intended to guarantee the core was indeed close to the critical point. The incidents happened at the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1945 and 1946, both resulting in the acute radiation poisoning and subsequent deaths of scientists: Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. After these incidents the spherical plutonium core was referred to as the "demon core".