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🔗 Visual arts

A cyclorama is a panoramic image on the inside of a cylindrical platform, designed to give viewers standing in the middle of the cylinder a 360° view, and also a building designed to show a panoramic image. The intended effect is to make viewers, surrounded by the panoramic image, feel as if they were standing in the midst of the place depicted in the image.

🔗 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.

🔗 Mathematics

In geometry, a 65537-gon is a polygon with 65,537 (2¹⁶ + 1) sides. The sum of the interior angles of any non–self-intersecting 65537-gon is 11796300°.

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Some of the many ways to read Wikipedia while offline:

• Kiwix: (§ Kiwix) – index of images (2024)
• XOWA: (§ XOWA) – index of images (2015)
• WikiTaxi: § WikiTaxi (for Windows)
• aarddict: § Aard Dictionary / Aard 2
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• WikiFilter: § WikiFilter
• Wikipedia on rockbox: § Wikiviewer for Rockbox
• Selected Wikipedia articles as a printed document: Help:Printing

Some of them are mobile applications – see "List of Wikipedia mobile applications".

The Stigler diet is an optimization problem named for George Stigler, a 1982 Nobel Laureate in economics, who posed the following problem:

For a moderately active man weighing 154 pounds, how much of each of 77 foods should be eaten on a daily basis so that the man’s intake of nine nutrients will be at least equal to the recommended dietary allowances (RDAs) suggested by the National Research Council in 1943, with the cost of the diet being minimal?

The nutrient RDAs required to be met in Stigler’s experiment were calories, protein, calcium, iron, as well as vitamins A, B₁, B₂, B₃, and C. The result was an annual budget allocated to foods such as evaporated milk, cabbage, dried navy beans, and beef liver at a cost of approximately $0.11 a day in 1939 U.S. dollars.

While the name “Stigler Diet” was applied after the experiment by outsiders, according to Stigler, “No one recommends these diets for anyone, let alone everyone.” The Stigler diet has been much ridiculed for its lack of variety and palatability; however, his methodology has received praise and is considered to be some of the earliest work in linear programming.

🔗 History of Science 🔗 Transhumanism

The Drexler–Smalley debate on molecular nanotechnology was a public dispute between K. Eric Drexler, the originator of the conceptual basis of molecular nanotechnology, and Richard Smalley, a recipient of the 1996 Nobel prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the nanomaterial buckminsterfullerene. The dispute was about the feasibility of constructing molecular assemblers, which are molecular machines which could robotically assemble molecular materials and devices by manipulating individual atoms or molecules. The concept of molecular assemblers was central to Drexler's conception of molecular nanotechnology, but Smalley argued that fundamental physical principles would prevent them from ever being possible. The two also traded accusations that the other's conception of nanotechnology was harmful to public perception of the field and threatened continued public support for nanotechnology research.

The debate was carried out from 2001 to 2003 through a series of published articles and open letters. It began with a 2001 article by Smalley in Scientific American, which was followed by a rebuttal published by Drexler and coworkers later that year, and two open letters by Drexler in early 2003. The debate was concluded in late 2003 in a "Point–Counterpoint" feature in Chemical & Engineering News in which both parties participated.

The debate has been often cited in the history of nanotechnology due to the fame of its participants and its commentary on both the technical and social aspects of nanotechnology. It has also been widely criticized for its adversarial tone, with Drexler accusing Smalley of publicly misrepresenting his work, and Smalley accusing Drexler of failing to understand basic science, causing commentators to go so far as to characterize the tone of the debate as similar to "a pissing match" and "reminiscent of [a] Saturday Night Live sketch".

🔗 Visual arts

SONATA VI are two paintings, Stellar sonata. Allegro and Stellar sonata. Andante, of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis from 1908.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Cold War

Project West Ford (also known as Westford Needles and Project Needles) was a test carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory on behalf of the United States Military in 1961 and 1963 to create an artificial ionosphere above the Earth. This was done to solve a major weakness that had been identified in US military communications.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Systems/Visualization

Clifford Alan Pickover (born August 15, 1957) is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, science fiction, innovation, and creativity. For many years, he was employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York where he was Editor-in-Chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He has been granted more than 500 U.S. patents, is an elected Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and is author of more than 50 books, translated into more than a dozen languages.

🔗 Linguistics

Initial-stress derivation is a phonological process in English that moves stress to the first syllable of verbs when they are used as nouns or adjectives. (This is an example of a suprafix.) This process can be found in the case of several dozen verb-noun and verb-adjective pairs and is gradually becoming more standardized in some English dialects, but it is not present in all. The list of affected words differs from area to area, and often depends on whether a word is used metaphorically or not. At least 170 verb-noun or verb-adjective pairs exist. Some examples are:

• record.

as a verb, "Remember to recórd the show!".

as a noun, "I'll keep a récord of that request."

• permit.

as a verb, "I won't permít that."

as a noun, "We already have a pérmit."