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π Calisthenics
Calisthenics (American English) or callisthenics (British English) is a form of exercise consisting of a variety of movements that exercise large muscle groups (gross motor movements), such as running, standing, grasping, pushing, etc. These exercises are often performed rhythmically and with minimal equipment, as bodyweight exercises. They are intended to increase strength, fitness, and flexibility, through movements such as pulling, pushing, bending, jumping, or swinging, using one's body weight for resistance. Calisthenics can provide the benefits of muscular and aerobic conditioning, in addition to improving psychomotor skills such as balance, agility, and coordination.
Urban calisthenics is a form of street workout; calisthenics groups perform exercise routines in urban areas. Individuals and groups train to perform advanced calisthenics skills such as muscle-ups, levers, and various freestyle moves such as spins and flips.
Sports teams and military units often perform leader-directed group calisthenics as a form of synchronized physical training (often including a customized "call and response" routine) to increase group cohesion and discipline. Calisthenics is also popular as a component of physical education in primary and secondary schools over much of the globe.
In addition to general fitness, calisthenic exercises are often used as baseline physical evaluations for military organizations around the world. Two examples are the U.S. Army Physical Fitness Test and the U.S.M.C. Physical Fitness Test.
Discussed on
- "Calisthenics" | 2020-10-04 | 13 Upvotes 3 Comments
π Randolph Bourne
Randolph Silliman Bourne (; May 30, 1886 β 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.
Discussed on
- "Randolph Bourne" | 2023-10-24 | 20 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Wim Taymans: PipeWire Inventor
Wim Odilia Georges Taymans is a Belgian software developer based in Malaga, Spain. He is the original developer behind GStreamer and Pipewire technologies, which provide core multimedia processing capabilities to many modern operating systems.
Taymans started his career in multimedia development on the Commodore 64 and the Amiga writing various games and demos. In 1994 he installed the Linux operating system on his Amiga and has since been involved with the development of various multimedia technologies for the Linux platform. His first efforts on Linux were some assembly optimizations for the rtjpeg library; later, he worked on the Trinity video editor before teaming up with Erik Walthinsen to create the GStreamer multimedia framework.
In 2004 he started working for Fluendo in Spain as employee number 3. While working for Fluendo he designed and wrote most of the 0.10 release series of GStreamer. In July 2007 he left Fluendo and joined with Collabora. As part of his job at Collabora he maintained and developed GStreamer further. In November 2013, Taymans started as a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat spending most of his time working on upstream GStreamer.
Taymans was the main architect and developer behind the GStreamer 1.0 release which came out on September 24, 2012.
In July 2015, Taymans announced that he was designing Pinos, which became PipeWire, from his position as Principal Engineer at Red Hat. PipeWire is a server for handling audio and video streams on Linux.
Discussed on
- "Wim Taymans: PipeWire Inventor" | 2024-10-13 | 24 Upvotes 4 Comments
π The Volfefe Index
The Volfefe Index is a stock market index of volatility in market sentiment for US Treasury bonds caused by tweets by President Donald Trump.
Bloomberg News observed Volfefe was created due to the statistical significance of Trump tweets on bond prices. ABC News Online posited Volfefe could help analyze interest rate risk in the face of "unpredictable" activity on social media by Trump.
Discussed on
- "The Volfefe Index" | 2019-09-11 | 63 Upvotes 22 Comments
π Whistler (Radio)
A whistler is a very low frequency or VLF electromagnetic (radio) wave generated by lightning. Frequencies of terrestrial whistlers are 1Β kHz to 30Β kHz, with a maximum amplitude usually at 3Β kHz to 5Β kHz. Although they are electromagnetic waves, they occur at audio frequencies, and can be converted to audio using a suitable receiver. They are produced by lightning strikes (mostly intracloud and return-path) where the impulse travels along the Earth's magnetic field lines from one hemisphere to the other. They undergo dispersion of several kHz due to the slower velocity of the lower frequencies through the plasma environments of the ionosphere and magnetosphere. Thus they are perceived as a descending tone which can last for a few seconds. The study of whistlers categorizes them into Pure Note, Diffuse, 2-Hop, and Echo Train types.
Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft detected whistler-like activity in the vicinity of Jupiter known as "Jovian Whistlers", implying the presence of lightning there.
Discussed on
- "Whistler (Radio)" | 2020-06-09 | 25 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Possible explanations for the slow progress of AI research
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the hypothetical intelligence of a machine that has the capacity to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and a common topic in science fiction and futures studies. AGI can also be referred to as strong AI, full AI, or general intelligent action. (Some academic sources reserve the term "strong AI" for machines that can experience consciousness.)
Some authorities emphasize a distinction between strong AI and applied AI (also called narrow AI or weak AI): the use of software to study or accomplish specific problem solving or reasoning tasks. Weak AI, in contrast to strong AI, does not attempt to perform the full range of human cognitive abilities.
As of 2017, over forty organizations were doing research on AGI.
Discussed on
- "Possible explanations for the slow progress of AI research" | 2019-11-25 | 19 Upvotes 15 Comments
π Polybius (Urban Legend)
Polybius is an urban legend that emerged in early 2000. It has served as inspiration for several free and commercial games by the same name.
The legend describes the game as part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment based in Portland, Oregon, during 1981. Gameplay supposedly produced intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player. These few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data-mining the machines and analyzing these effects. Eventually, all of these Polybius arcade machines allegedly disappeared from the arcade market.
Polybius is also the name of a Greek historian born in Arcadia, who was, coincidentally, known for his assertion that historians should never report what they cannot verify through interviews with witnesses.
Discussed on
- "Polybius (Urban Legend)" | 2019-04-17 | 48 Upvotes 14 Comments
π The Peter Principle
The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. The concept was elucidated in the book The Peter Principle (William Morrow and Company, 1969) by Dr Peter and Raymond Hull.
Peter and Hull intended the book to be satire, but it became popular as it was seen to make a serious point about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within hierarchical organizations. Hull wrote the text, based on Peter's research. The Peter principle has been the subject of much subsequent commentary and research.
Discussed on
- "Every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence" | 2024-03-27 | 280 Upvotes 180 Comments
- "Peter Principle" | 2022-12-04 | 17 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "The Peter Principle" | 2020-09-10 | 11 Upvotes 1 Comments
π USS Liberty Incident (1967) β 34 killed, 171 injured, gag order on survivors
The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship (spy ship), USSΒ Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War. The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two marines, and one civilian NSA employee), wounded 171 crew members, and severely damaged the ship. At the time, the ship was in international waters north of the Sinai Peninsula, about 25.5 nautical miles (47.2Β km; 29.3Β mi) northwest from the Egyptian city of Arish.
Israel apologized for the attack, saying that the USS Liberty had been attacked in error after being mistaken for an Egyptian ship. Both the Israeli and U.S. governments conducted inquiries and issued reports that concluded the attack was a mistake due to Israeli confusion about the ship's identity. Others, including survivors of the attack, have rejected these conclusions and maintain that the attack was deliberate.
In May 1968, the Israeli government paid US$3.32Β million (equivalent to US$29.1Β million in 2023) to the U.S. government in compensation for the families of the 34 men killed in the attack. In March 1969, Israel paid a further $3.57Β million ($29.6Β million in 2023) to the men who had been wounded. In December 1980, it agreed to pay $6Β million ($22.2Β million in 2023) as the final settlement for material damage to the ship plus 13 years of interest.
Discussed on
- "USS Liberty Incident (1967) β 34 killed, 171 injured, gag order on survivors" | 2024-05-31 | 18 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Millipede Memory
Millipede memory is a form of non-volatile computer memory. It promised a data density of more than 1 terabit per square inch (1 gigabit per square millimeter), which is about the limit of the perpendicular recording hard drives. Millipede storage technology was pursued as a potential replacement for magnetic recording in hard drives and a means of reducing the physical size of the technology to that of flash media.
IBM demonstrated a prototype millipede storage device at CeBIT 2005, and was trying to make the technology commercially available by the end of 2007. However, because of concurrent advances in competing storage technologies, no commercial product has been made available since then.