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🔗 Disambiguation

A rat king is a rare phenomenon where a group of rats' tails become entangled.

Rat King or Ratking may also refer to:

🔗 Video games

Don't Buy This (also known as Don't Buy This: Five of the Worst Games Ever) is a compilation of video games for the ZX Spectrum released on 1 April 1985. As described on the box, it contains five of the poorest games submitted to publisher Firebird. Instead of rejecting the submissions, they decided to mock the original developers by releasing them together and publicly brand it as "unoriginal" and "awful". Firebird even disowned all their copyright to the game and encouraged buyers to pirate it at will.

Reviews for the game were universally negative, with critics questioning how to critique the game due to its publicity being based on it being a collection of bad games. Despite the negative reception, the game was a commercial success.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography

William Robert Sutherland (May 10, 1936 – February 18, 2020) was an American computer scientist who was the longtime manager of three prominent research laboratories, including Sun Microsystems Laboratories (1992–1998), the Systems Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC (1975–1981), and the Computer Science Division of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. which helped develop the ARPANET.

In these roles, Sutherland participated in the creation of the personal computer, the technology of advanced microprocessors, the Smalltalk programming language, the Java programming language and the Internet.

Unlike traditional corporate research managers, Sutherland added individuals from fields like psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology to enhance the work of his technology staff. He also directed his scientists to take their research, like the Xerox Alto "personal" computer, outside of the laboratory to allow people to use it in a corporate setting and to observe their interaction with it.

In addition, Sutherland fostered a collaboration between the researchers at California Institute of Technology developing techniques of very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI) — his brother Ivan and Carver Mead — and Lynn Conway of his PARC staff. With PARC resources made available by Sutherland, Mead and Conway developed a textbook and university syllabus that helped expedite the development and distribution of a technology whose effect is now immeasurable.

Sutherland said that a research lab is primarily a teaching institution, "teaching whatever is new so that the new can become familiar, old, and used widely."

Sutherland was born in Hastings, Nebraska on May 10, 1936, to a father from New Zealand; his mother was from Scotland. The family moved to Wilmette, Illinois, then Scarsdale, New York, for his father's career. Bert Sutherland graduated from Scarsdale High School, then received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and his master's degree and Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); his thesis advisor was Claude Shannon. During his military service in the United States Navy, he was awarded the Legion of Merit as a Carrier ASW plane commander. He was the older brother of Ivan Sutherland. Bert Sutherland died on February 18, 2020, aged 83.

🔗 Statistics

In probability theory, although simple examples illustrate that linear uncorrelatedness of two random variables does not in general imply their independence, it is sometimes mistakenly thought that it does imply that when the two random variables are normally distributed. This article demonstrates that assumption of normal distributions does not have that consequence, although the multivariate normal distribution, including the bivariate normal distribution, does.

To say that the pair ${\displaystyle (X,Y)}$ of random variables has a bivariate normal distribution means that every linear combination ${\displaystyle aX+bY}$ of ${\displaystyle X}$ and ${\displaystyle Y}$ for constant (i.e. not random) coefficients ${\displaystyle a}$ and ${\displaystyle b}$ has a univariate normal distribution. In that case, if ${\displaystyle X}$ and ${\displaystyle Y}$ are uncorrelated then they are independent. However, it is possible for two random variables ${\displaystyle X}$ and ${\displaystyle Y}$ to be so distributed jointly that each one alone is marginally normally distributed, and they are uncorrelated, but they are not independent; examples are given below.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 History 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Spaceflight/Timeline of spaceflight working group 🔗 Physics 🔗 Lists 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Rocketry 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

Spaceflight as a practical endeavor began during World War II with the development of operational liquid-fueled rockets. Beginning life as a weapon, the V-2 was pressed into peaceful service after the war at the United States' White Sands Missile Range as well as the Soviet Union's Kapustin Yar. This led to a flourishing of missile designs setting the stage for the exploration of space. The small American WAC Corporal rocket was evolved into the Aerobee, a much more powerful sounding rocket. Exploration of space began in earnest in 1947 with the flight of the first Aerobee, 46 of which had flown by the end of 1950. These and other rockets, both Soviet and American, returned the first direct data on air density, temperature, charged particles and magnetic fields in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

By 1948, the United States Navy had evolved the V-2 design into the Viking capable of more than 100 miles (160 km) in altitude. The first Viking to accomplish this feat, number four, did so 10 May 1950. The Soviet Union developed a virtual copy of the V-2 called the R-1, which first flew in 1948. Its longer-ranged successor, the R-2, entered military service in 1950. This event marked the entry of both superpowers into the post-V-2 rocketry era.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Motorcycling

The Daimler Petroleum Reitwagen ("riding car") or Einspur ("single track") was a motor vehicle made by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1885. It is widely recognized as the first motorcycle. Daimler is often called "the father of the motorcycle" for this invention. Even when the three steam powered two wheelers that preceded the Reitwagen, the Michaux-Perreaux and Roper of 1867–1869, and the 1884 Copeland, are considered motorcycles, it remains nonetheless the first petrol internal combustion motorcycle, and the forerunner of all vehicles, land, sea and air, that use its overwhelmingly popular engine type.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Early computers

The Water Integrator (Russian: Гидравлический интегратор) was an early analog computer built in the Soviet Union in 1936 by Vladimir Sergeevich Lukyanov. It functioned by careful manipulation of water through a room full of interconnected pipes and pumps. The water level in various chambers (with precision to fractions of a millimeter) represented stored numbers, and the rate of flow between them represented mathematical operations. This machine was capable of solving inhomogeneous differential equations.

The first versions of Lukyanov's integrators were rather experimental, made of tin and glass tubes, and each integrator could be used to solve only one problem. In the 1930s it was the only computer in the Soviet Union for solving partial differential equations.

In 1941, Lukyanov created a hydraulic integrator of modular design, which made it possible to assemble a machine for solving various problems. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional hydraulic integrators were designed.

In 1949–1955, an integrator in the form of standard unified units was developed at the NIISCHETMASH Institute. In 1955, the Ryazan plant of calculating and analytical machines began the serial production of integrators with the factory brand name “IGL” (russian: Интегратор Гидравлический Лукьянова - integrator of the Lukyanov hydraulic system). Integrators were widely distributed, delivered to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and China.

A water integrator was used in the design of the Karakum Canal in the 1940s, and the construction of the Baikal–Amur Mainline in the 1970s. Water analog computers were used in the Soviet Union until the 1980s for large-scale modelling. They were used in geology, mine construction, metallurgy, rocket production and other fields.

Currently, two hydraulic integrators are kept in the Polytechnic Museum in Moscow.

🔗 Linguistics

A mondegreen ( ) is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray", and mishearing the words "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen".

"Mondegreen" was included in the 2000 edition of the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, and in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary added the word in 2008.

🔗 United States 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Physics

Project Longshot was a conceptual interstellar spacecraft design. It would have been an unmanned probe, intended to fly to and enter orbit around Alpha Centauri B powered by nuclear pulse propulsion.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 United States/Utah

The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. Its purpose is to support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), though its precise mission is classified. The National Security Agency (NSA) leads operations at the facility as the executive agent for the Director of National Intelligence. It is located at Camp Williams near Bluffdale, Utah, between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake and was completed in May 2019 at a cost of $1.5 billion.

The Utah Data Center, code-named Bumblehive, is the first Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative (IC CNCI) data center designed to support the US intelligence community. The "massive data repository" is designed to cope with the large increase in digital data that has accompanied the rise of the global internet.