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🔗 Technology 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Industrial design

Muntzing is the practice and technique of reducing the components inside an electronic appliance to the minimum required for it to sufficiently function in most operating conditions, reducing design margins above minimum requirements toward zero. The term is named after the man who invented it, Earl "Madman" Muntz, a car and electronics salesman, who was not formally educated or trained in any science or engineering discipline.

In the 1940s and 1950s, television receivers were relatively new to the consumer market, and were more complex pieces of equipment than the radios which were then in popular use. TVs often contained upwards of 30 vacuum tubes, as well as transformers, rheostats, and other electronics. The consequence of high cost was high sales pricing, limiting potential for high-volume sales. Muntz expressed suspicion of complexity in circuit designs, and determined through simple trial and error that he could remove a significant number of electronic components from a circuit design and still end up with a monochrome TV that worked sufficiently well in urban areas, close to transmission towers where the broadcast signal was strong. He carried a pair of wire clippers, and when he felt that one of his builders was overengineering a circuit, he would begin snipping out some of the electronics components. When the TV stopped functioning, he would have the technician reinsert the last removed part. He would repeat the snipping in other portions of the circuit until he was satisfied in his simplification efforts, and then leave the TV as it was without further testing in more adverse conditions for signal reception.

As a result, he reduced his costs and increased his profits at the expense of poorer performance at locations more distant from urban centers. He reasoned that population density was higher in and near the urban centers where the TVs would work, and lower further out where the TVs would not work, so the Muntz TVs were adequate for a very large fraction of his customers. And for those further out, where the Muntz TVs did not work, those could be returned at the customer's additional effort and expense, and not Muntz's. He focused less resources in the product, intentionally accepting bare minimum performance quality, and focused more resources on advertising and sales promotions.

🔗 Birds

Crop milk is a secretion from the lining of the crop of parent birds in some species that is regurgitated to young birds. It is found among all pigeons and doves where it is also referred to as pigeon milk. Crop milk is also secreted from the crop of flamingos and the male emperor penguin, suggesting independent evolution of this trait. Unlike in mammals where only females produce milk, crop milk is produced by both males and females in pigeons and flamingos; and in penguins, only by the male. Lactation in birds is controlled by prolactin, which is the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals. Crop milk is a holocrine secretion, unlike in mammals where milk is an exocrine secretion. Crop milk contains both fat and protein, as with mammalian milk, but unlike mammalian milk, it contains no carbohydrates.

🔗 Linguistics

A synecdoche ( sin-NEK-tə-kee, from Greek συνεκδοχή, synekdochē, 'simultaneous understanding') is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something or vice versa. A synecdoche is a class of metonymy, often by means of either mentioning a part for the whole or conversely the whole for one of its parts. Examples from common English expressions include "suits" (for "businessmen"), "boots" (for "soldiers") (pars pro toto), and "America" (for "the United States of America", totum pro parte).

The use of government buildings to refer to their occupants is metonymy and sometimes also synecdoche. "The Pentagon" for the United States Department of Defense can be considered synecdoche, as the building can be considered part of the department. Likewise, using "Number 10" to mean "the Office of the Prime Minister" (of the United Kingdom) is a synecdoche.

🔗 Apple Inc./Macintosh 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Human–Computer Interaction 🔗 Industrial design 🔗 Apple Inc./iOS

A skeuomorph () is a derivative object that retains nonfunctional ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were inherent to the original. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Millipede memory is a form of non-volatile computer memory. It promised a data density of more than 1 terabit per square inch (1 gigabit per square millimeter), which is about the limit of the perpendicular recording hard drives. Millipede storage technology was pursued as a potential replacement for magnetic recording in hard drives and a means of reducing the physical size of the technology to that of flash media.

IBM demonstrated a prototype millipede storage device at CeBIT 2005, and was trying to make the technology commercially available by the end of 2007. However, because of concurrent advances in competing storage technologies, no commercial product has been made available since then.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history

In March 2022, a series of war crimes were committed by Russian occupation forces in the Ukrainian city of Bucha during the Battle of Bucha, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities said that more than 300 inhabitants of the town had been killed.

🔗 Computing

Reservoir computing is a framework for computation that may be viewed as an extension of neural networks. Typically an input signal is fed into a fixed (random) dynamical system called a reservoir and the dynamics of the reservoir map the input to a higher dimension. Then a simple readout mechanism is trained to read the state of the reservoir and map it to the desired output. The main benefit is that training is performed only at the readout stage and the reservoir is fixed. Liquid-state machines and echo state networks are two major types of reservoir computing. One important feature of this system is that it can use the computational power of naturally available systems which is different from the neural networks and it reduces the computational cost.

🔗 Politics

A kakistocracy [kækɪ'stɑkrəsi] is a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens. The word was coined as early as the seventeenth century, but gained significant use in the first decades of the 20th century to criticize populist governments emerging in different democracies around the world.

🔗 Biography

Anthony Peter "Tony" Buzan (; 2 June 1942 – 13 April 2019) was an English author and educational consultant.

Buzan popularised the idea of mental literacy, radiant thinking, and a technique called mind mapping, inspired by techniques used by Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Joseph D. Novak's "concept mapping" techniques.

The MU puzzle is a puzzle stated by Douglas Hofstadter and found in Gödel, Escher, Bach involving a simple formal system called "MIU". Hofstadter's motivation is to contrast reasoning within a formal system (ie., deriving theorems) against reasoning about the formal system itself. MIU is an example of a Post canonical system and can be reformulated as a string rewriting system.