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Lithops is a genus of succulent plants in the ice plant family, Aizoaceae. Members of the genus are native to southern Africa. The name is derived from the Ancient Greek words λίθος (líthos), meaning "stone," and ὄψ (óps), meaning "face," referring to the stone-like appearance of the plants. They avoid being eaten by blending in with surrounding rocks and are often known as pebble plants or living stones. The formation of the name from the Ancient Greek "-ops" means that even a single plant is called a Lithops.

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH), or pumped hydroelectric energy storage (PHES), is a type of hydroelectric energy storage used by electric power systems for load balancing. The method stores energy in the form of gravitational potential energy of water, pumped from a lower elevation reservoir to a higher elevation. Low-cost surplus off-peak electric power is typically used to run the pumps. During periods of high electrical demand, the stored water is released through turbines to produce electric power.

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity allows energy from intermittent sources (such as solar, wind) and other renewables, or excess electricity from continuous base-load sources (such as coal or nuclear) to be saved for periods of higher demand. The reservoirs used with pumped storage can be quite small when contrasted with the lakes of conventional hydroelectric plants of similar power capacity, and generating periods are often less than half a day.

The round-trip efficiency of PSH generally varies between 70%–80%. Although the losses of the pumping process make the plant a net consumer of energy overall, the system increases revenue by selling more electricity during periods of peak demand, when electricity prices are highest. If the upper lake collects significant rainfall or is fed by a river then the plant may be a net energy producer in the manner of a traditional hydroelectric plant.

Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, PSH accounts for around 95% of all active storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW and a total installed storage capacity of over 1.6 TWh.

The main requirement for PSH is hilly country. The global greenfield pumped hydro atlas lists more than 600,000 potential sites around the world, which is about 100 times more than needed to support 100% renewable electricity. Most are closed-loop systems away from rivers. Areas of natural beauty and new dams on rivers can be avoided because of the very large number of potential sites. Some projects utilise existing reservoirs (dubbed "bluefield") such as the 350 Gigawatt-hour Snowy 2.0 scheme under construction in Australia. Some recently proposed projects propose to take advantage of "brownfield" locations such as disused mines such as the Kidston project under construction in Australia.

Water requirements for PSH are small: about 1 gigalitre of initial fill water per gigawatt-hour of storage. This water is recycled uphill and back downhill between the two reservoirs for many decades, but evaporation losses (beyond what rainfall and any inflow from local waterways provide) must be replaced. Land requirements are also small: about 10 hectares per gigawatt-hour of storage, which is much smaller than the land occupied by the solar and windfarms that the storage might support. Closed loop (off-river) pumped hydro storage has the smallest carbon emissions per unit of storage of all candidates for large-scale energy storage.

Squirrel is a high level imperative, object-oriented programming language, designed to be a lightweight scripting language that fits in the size, memory bandwidth, and real-time requirements of applications like video games.

MirthKit, a simple toolkit for making and distributing open source, cross-platform 2D games, uses Squirrel for its platform. It is used extensively by Code::Blocks for scripting and was also used in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King. It is also used in Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2 and Thimbleweed Park for scripted events and in NewDark, an unofficial Thief 2: The Metal Age engine update, to facilitate additional, simplified means of scripting mission events, aside of the regular C scripting.

Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski (Russian: Анатолий Петрович Бугорский), born 25 June 1942, is a Russian scientist.

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar".

Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150. Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

Dunbar theorised that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size [...] the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained". On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint himself or herself if they met again.

The Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world is a map, or more precisely, a scatter plot created by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel based on the World Values Survey. It depicts closely linked cultural values that vary between societies in two predominant dimensions: traditional versus secular-rational values on the vertical y-axis and survival versus self-expression values on the horizontal x-axis. Moving upward on this map reflects the shift from traditional values to secular-rational ones and moving rightward reflects the shift from survival values to self-expression values.

According to the authors: "These two dimensions explain more than 70 percent of the cross-national variance in a factor analysis of ten indicators—and each of these dimensions is strongly correlated with scores of other important orientations."

The authors stress that socio-economic status is not the sole factor determining a country's location, as their religious and cultural historical heritage is also an important factor.

The Bogle–Chandler case refers to the mysterious deaths of Gilbert Bogle and Margaret Chandler on the banks of the Lane Cove River in Sydney, Australia on 1 January 1963. The case became famous because of the circumstances in which the bodies were found and because the cause of death could not be established. In 2006 a filmmaker discovered evidence to suggest the cause of death was hydrogen sulphide gas. In the early hours of 1 January an eruption of gas from the polluted river bed may have occurred, causing the noxious fumes to pool in deadly quantities in the grove.

Tupper's self-referential formula is a formula that visually represents itself when graphed at a specific location in the (x, y) plane.

The Erlang distribution is a two-parameter family of continuous probability distributions with support ${\displaystyle x\in [0,\infty )}$. The two parameters are:

• a positive integer ${\displaystyle k,}$ the "shape", and
• a positive real number ${\displaystyle \lambda ,}$ the "rate". The "scale", ${\displaystyle \mu ,}$ the reciprocal of the rate, is sometimes used instead.

The Erlang distribution with shape parameter ${\displaystyle k=1}$ simplifies to the exponential distribution. It is a special case of the gamma distribution. It is the distribution of a sum of ${\displaystyle k}$ independent exponential variables with mean ${\displaystyle 1/\lambda }$ each.

The Erlang distribution was developed by A. K. Erlang to examine the number of telephone calls which might be made at the same time to the operators of the switching stations. This work on telephone traffic engineering has been expanded to consider waiting times in queueing systems in general. The distribution is also used in the field of stochastic processes.

The naming law in Sweden (Swedish: lag om personnamn) is a Swedish law which requires approval of the government agency for names to be given to Swedish children. The parents must submit the proposed name of a child within three months of birth. The current law was enacted in 2017, replacing a 1982 law. The Swedish Tax Agency administers the registration of names in Sweden. The law has been revised since originally enacted; in 1983, it was made possible for men to adopt their wife's or partner's name, as well as for women to adopt their husband's name.

The 1982 law states, in part: "First names shall not be approved if they can cause offense or can be supposed to cause discomfort for the one using it, or names which for some obvious reason are not suitable as a first name" (§ 34). This text applies both when parents name their children and when an adult wants to change their own name. When changing a name, the first change is free of charge as long as at least one of the names given at birth is kept, and such a change is only allowed once per person. Further name changes require fee payment. The law states nothing about registering which name is used on a daily basis, but the tax authority can register that if requested.