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🔗 Computing

A long-running debate in computer science known as the Protocol Wars occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust computer networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite ("TCP/IP") by the mid-1990s and has since resulted in most other protocols disappearing.

The pioneers of packet switching technology built computer networks to research data communications in the early 1970s. As public data networks emerged in the mid to late 1970s, the debate about interface standards was described as a "battle for access standards". An international collaboration between several national postal, telegraph and telephone ("PTT") providers and commercial operators developed the X.25 standard in 1976, which was adopted on public networks providing global coverage. Several proprietary standards also emerged, most notably IBM's Systems Network Architecture.

The United States Department of Defense developed and tested TCP/IP during the 1970s in collaboration with universities and researchers in the United States, United Kingdom and France. IPv4 was released in 1981 and the DoD made it standard for all military computer networking. By 1984, an international reference model known as the OSI model had been agreed on, with which TCP/IP was not compatible. Many governments in Europe – particularly France, West Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Economic Community – and also the United States Department of Commerce mandated compliance with the OSI model and the US Department of Defense planned to transition away from TCP/IP to OSI.

Meanwhile, the development of a complete Internet protocol suite by 1989, and partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry to incorporate TCP/IP software into various operating systems laid the foundation for the widespread adoption of TCP/IP as a comprehensive protocol suite. While OSI developed its networking standards in the late 1980s, TCP/IP came into widespread use on multi-vendor networks for internetworking and as the core component of the emerging Internet.

🔗 Japan 🔗 Paranormal 🔗 Baseball 🔗 Japan/Japanese baseball 🔗 Japan/Mythology

The Curse of the Colonel (Japanese: カーネルサンダースの呪い, romanisation: Kāneru Sandāsu no Noroi) refers to a 1985 Japanese urban legend regarding a reputed curse placed on the Japanese Kansai-based Hanshin Tigers baseball team by the ghost of deceased KFC founder and mascot Colonel Sanders.

The curse was said to be placed on the team because of the Colonel's anger over treatment of one of his store-front statues, which was thrown into the Dōtonbori River by celebrating Hanshin fans before their team's victory in the 1985 Japan Championship Series. As is common with sports-related curses, the Curse of the Colonel was used to explain the team's subsequent 18-year losing streak. Some fans believed the team would never win another Japan Series until the statue had been recovered. They have appeared in the Japan Series three times since then, losing in 2003, 2005 and 2014.

Comparisons are often made between the Hanshin Tigers and the Boston Red Sox, who were said to be under the Curse of the Bambino until they won the World Series in 2004. The "Curse of the Colonel" has also been used as a bogeyman threat to those who would divulge the secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices that result in the unique taste of his chicken.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 New York (state) 🔗 New York (state)/Western New York

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in American English, often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.

The sentence employs three distinct meanings of the word buffalo:

• as a proper noun to refer to a specific place named Buffalo, the city of Buffalo, New York, being the most notable;
• as a verb (uncommon in regular usage) to buffalo, meaning "to bully, harass, or intimidate" or "to baffle"; and
• as a noun to refer to the animal, bison (often called buffalo in North America). The plural is also buffalo.

An expanded form of the sentence which preserves the original word order is: "Buffalo bison, that other Buffalo bison bully, also bully Buffalo bison."

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles or domains, each storing one bit of data. The material is arranged to form a series of parallel tracks that the bubbles can move along under the action of an external magnetic field. The bubbles are read by moving them to the edge of the material, where they can be read by a conventional magnetic pickup, and then rewritten on the far edge to keep the memory cycling through the material. In operation, bubble memories are similar to delay-line memory systems.

Bubble memory started out as a promising technology in the 1970s, offering performance similar to core memory, memory density similar to hard drives, and no moving parts. This led many to consider it a contender for a "universal memory" that could be used for all storage needs. The introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips in the early 1970s pushed bubble into the slow end of the scale and it began to be considered mostly as a replacement for disks. The equally dramatic improvements in hard-drive capacity through the early 1980s made it uncompetitive in price terms for mass storage.

Bubble memory was used for some time in the 1970s and 1980s in applications where its non-moving nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The introduction of flash storage and similar technologies rendered even this niche uncompetitive, and bubble disappeared entirely by the late 1980s.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Lists 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Military history/Military land vehicles

This page contains a list of military tactics.

The meaning of the phrase is context sensitive, and has varied over time, like the difference between "strategy" and "tactics".

🔗 Solar System/Mars 🔗 Solar System

The Mars monolith is a rectangular object (possibly a boulder) discovered on the surface of Mars. It is located near the bottom of a cliff, from which it likely fell. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of it from orbit, roughly 180 miles (300 km) away.

Around the same time, the Phobos monolith made international news.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sexology and sexuality 🔗 Evolutionary biology

The sexy son hypothesis in evolutionary biology and sexual selection, proposed by Patrick J. Weatherhead and Raleigh J. Robertson of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1979, states that a female's ideal mate choice among potential mates is one whose genes will produce males with the best chance of reproductive success. This implies that other benefits the father can offer the mother or offspring are less relevant than they may appear, including his capacity as a parental caregiver, territory and any nuptial gifts. Fisher's principle means that the sex ratio (except in certain eusocial insects) is always near 1:1 between males and females, yet what matters most are her "sexy sons'" future breeding successes, more likely if they have a promiscuous father, in creating large numbers of offspring carrying copies of her genes. This sexual selection hypothesis has been researched in species such as the European pied flycatcher.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/relativity

The ladder paradox (or barn-pole paradox) is a thought experiment in special relativity. It involves a ladder, parallel to the ground, travelling horizontally at relativistic speed (near the speed of light) and therefore undergoing a Lorentz length contraction. The ladder is imagined passing through the open front and rear doors of a garage or barn which is shorter than its rest length, so if the ladder was not moving it would not be able to fit inside. To a stationary observer, due to the contraction, the moving ladder is able to fit entirely inside the building as it passes through. On the other hand, from the point of view of an observer moving with the ladder, the ladder will not be contracted, and it is the building which will be Lorentz contracted to an even smaller length. Therefore, the ladder will not be able to fit inside the building as it passes through. This poses an apparent discrepancy between the realities of both observers.

This apparent paradox results from the mistaken assumption of absolute simultaneity. The ladder is said to fit into the garage if both of its ends can be made to be simultaneously inside the garage. The paradox is resolved when it is considered that in relativity, simultaneity is relative to each observer, making the answer to whether the ladder fits inside the garage also relative to each of them.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/19th century 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 New Zealand 🔗 Sociology

Erewhon: or, Over the Range () is a novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published anonymously in 1872, set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.

The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand, where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (1860–64), and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).

The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence, as influenced by Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species (1859) and the machines developed out of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th to early 19th centuries). Specifically, it concerns itself, in the three-chapter "Book of the Machines", with the potentially dangerous ideas of machine consciousness and self-replicating machines.

🔗 Video games

In video games, grinding is performing repetitive tasks, usually for a gameplay advantage or loot but in some cases for purely aesthetic or cosmetic benefits. Many video games use different tactics to implement, or reduce, the amount of grinding in the gameplay. The general use of grinding is for "experience points", or to improve a character's level. In addition, the behavior is sometimes referred to as pushing the bar (leveling up), farming (acquiring loot repeatedly from one source), or catassing.