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🔗 United States 🔗 Germany 🔗 Canada 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Canada/Ontario 🔗 Hawaii

Hawaiian pizza is a pizza topped with tomato sauce, cheese, pineapple, and ham.

🔗 Mathematics

The expression "casting out nines" may refer to any one of three arithmetical procedures:

• Adding the decimal digits of a positive whole number, while optionally ignoring any 9s or digits which sum to a multiple of 9. The result of this procedure is a number which is smaller than the original whenever the original has more than one digit, leaves the same remainder as the original after division by nine, and may be obtained from the original by subtracting a multiple of 9 from it. The name of the procedure derives from this latter property.
• Repeated application of this procedure to the results obtained from previous applications until a single-digit number is obtained. This single-digit number is called the "digital root" of the original. If a number is divisible by 9, its digital root is 9. Otherwise, its digital root is the remainder it leaves after being divided by 9.
• A sanity test in which the above-mentioned procedures are used to check for errors in arithmetical calculations. The test is carried out by applying the same sequence of arithmetical operations to the digital roots of the operands as are applied to the operands themselves. If no mistakes are made in the calculations, the digital roots of the two resultants should be the same. If they are different, therefore, one or more mistakes must have been made in the calculations.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computer science/Computing

Lucid is a dataflow programming language designed to experiment with non-von Neumann programming models. It was designed by Bill Wadge and Ed Ashcroft and described in the 1985 book Lucid, the Dataflow Programming Language.

pLucid was the first interpreter for Lucid.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Comedy

A Request for Comments (RFC), in the context of Internet governance, is a type of publication from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Society (ISOC), usually describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.

Almost every April Fools' Day (1 April) since 1989, the Internet RFC Editor has published one or more humorous Request for Comments (RFC) documents, following in the path blazed by the June 1973 RFC 527 called ARPAWOCKY, a parody of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "Jabberwocky". The following list also includes humorous RFCs published on other dates.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History

Ala al-Dīn Ali ibn Muhammed (1403 – 16 December 1474), known as Ali Qushji (Ottoman Turkish/Persian language: علی قوشچی, kuşçu – falconer in Turkish; Latin: Ali Kushgii) was an astronomer, mathematician and physicist originally from Samarkand, who settled in the Ottoman Empire some time before 1472. As a disciple of Ulugh Beg, he is best known for the development of astronomical physics independent from natural philosophy, and for providing empirical evidence for the Earth's rotation in his treatise, Concerning the Supposed Dependence of Astronomy upon Philosophy. In addition to his contributions to Ulugh Beg's famous work Zij-i-Sultani and to the founding of Sahn-ı Seman Medrese, one of the first centers for the study of various traditional Islamic sciences in the Ottoman caliphate, Ali Kuşçu was also the author of several scientific works and textbooks on astronomy.

🔗 Physics

In quantum field theory, the Casimir effect and the Casimir–Polder force are physical forces arising from a quantized field. They are named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir who predicted them in 1948.

The Casimir effect can be understood by the idea that the presence of conducting metals and dielectrics alters the vacuum expectation value of the energy of the second quantized electromagnetic field. Since the value of this energy depends on the shapes and positions of the conductors and dielectrics, the Casimir effect manifests itself as a force between such objects.

Any medium supporting oscillations has an analogue of the Casimir effect. For example, beads on a string as well as plates submerged in turbulent water or gas illustrate the Casimir force.

In modern theoretical physics, the Casimir effect plays an important role in the chiral bag model of the nucleon; in applied physics it is significant in some aspects of emerging microtechnologies and nanotechnologies.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Automobiles

A gyrocar is a two-wheeled automobile. The difference between a bicycle or motorcycle and a gyrocar is that in a bike, dynamic balance is provided by the rider, and in some cases by the geometry and mass distribution of the bike itself, and the gyroscopic effects from the wheels. Steering a motorcycle is done by precessing the front wheel. In a gyrocar, balance was provided by one or more gyroscopes, and in one example, connected to two pendulums by a rack and pinion.

The concept was originally described in fiction in 1911 "Two Boys in a Gyrocar: The story of a New York to Paris Motor Race" by Kenneth Brown, (Houghton Mifflin Co). However the first prototype Gyrocar, The Shilovski Gyrocar, was commissioned in 1912 by the Russian Count Pyotr Shilovsky, a lawyer and member of the Russian royal family. It was manufactured to his design by the Wolseley Tool and Motorcar Company in 1914 and demonstrated in London the same year. The gyrocar was powered by a modified Wolseley C5 engine of 16–20 hp, with a bore of 90 mm and a stroke of 121 mm. It was mounted ahead of the radiator, driving the rear wheel through a conventional clutch and gear box. A transmission brake was fitted after the gearbox – there were no brakes on the wheels themselves. The weight of the vehicle was 2.75 tons and it had a very large turning radius.

In 1927 Louis Brennan, funded to the tune of £12,000 (plus a £2000 per year) by John Cortauld built a rather more successful gyrocar. Two contra-rotating gyros were housed under the front seats, spun in a horizontal plane at 3500 rpm by 24V electric motors powered from standard car batteries. This was the greatest speed obtainable with the electric motors available, and meant that each rotor had to weigh 200 lb (91 kg) to generate sufficient forces. Precession was in the vertical fore-aft plane. The car had a Morris Oxford engine, engine mountings, and gearbox. Two sidewheels (light aircraft tailwheels were used) were manually lowered on stopping; if the driver forgot and switched off the gyros and walked away, the car would continue to balance itself using the gyro momentum for a few minutes, and then the wheels would automatically be dropped to stop tipping.

🔗 Biography 🔗 New York (state) 🔗 New York (state)/Columbia University

Randolph Silliman Bourne (; May 30, 1886 – December 22, 1918) was a progressive writer and intellectual born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and a graduate of Columbia University. He is considered to be a spokesman for the young radicals living during World War I. His articles appeared in journals including The Seven Arts and The New Republic. Bourne is best known for his essays, especially his unfinished work "The State," discovered after he died. From this essay (which was published posthumously and included in Untimely Papers) comes the phrase "war is the health of the state" which laments the success of governments in arrogating authority and resources during conflicts.

🔗 Electronics

A plugtest or plugfest is an event based on a certain technical standard where the designers of electronic equipment or software test the interoperability of their products or designs with those of other manufacturers. It could be literally plugging company A's cable into company B's socket, or a more elaborate test resembling a realistic scenario.

The technical goal is twofold: check compliance with the standard, and test the effectiveness of the standard. The latter could be the case when the standard is ambiguous. A simplified example is: the width of a plug is prescribed, but vendors use different lengths.

Plugtests can be formal and have public test scores or informal and private. Besides helping vendors improve their interoperability, plugtests help create awareness about the standard and can improve transparency on compliance.

🔗 Sports

Naismith's rule helps with the planning of a walking or hiking expedition by calculating how long it will take to travel the intended route, including any extra time taken when walking uphill. This rule of thumb was devised by William W. Naismith, a Scottish mountaineer, in 1892. A modern version can be formulated as follows:

Allow one hour for every 3 miles (5 km) forward, plus an additional hour for every 2,000 feet (600 m) of ascent.