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In decision theory, the sure-thing principle states that a decision maker who would take a certain action if he knew that event E has occurred, and also if he knew that the negation of E has occurred, should also take that same action if he knows nothing about E.

The principle was coined by L.J. Savage:

A businessman contemplates buying a certain piece of property. He considers the outcome of the next presidential election relevant. So, to clarify the matter to himself, he asks whether he would buy if he knew that the Democratic candidate were going to win, and decides that he would. Similarly, he considers whether he would buy if he knew that the Republican candidate were going to win, and again finds that he would. Seeing that he would buy in either event, he decides that he should buy, even though he does not know which event obtains, or will obtain, as we would ordinarily say. It is all too seldom that a decision can be arrived at on the basis of this principle, but except possibly for the assumption of simple ordering, I know of no other extralogical principle governing decisions that finds such ready acceptance.

He formulated the principle as a dominance principle, but it can also be framed probabilistically. Richard Jeffrey and later Judea Pearl showed that Savage's principle is only valid when the probability of the event considered (e.g., the winner of the election) is unaffected by the action (buying the property). Under such conditions, the sure-thing principle is a theorem in the do-calculus (see Bayes networks). Blyth constructed a counterexample to the sure-thing principle using sequential sampling in the context of Simpson's paradox, but this example violates the required action-independence provision.

The principle is closely related to independence of irrelevant alternatives, and equivalent under the axiom of truth (everything the agent knows is true). It is similarly targeted by the Ellsberg and Allais paradoxes, in which actual people's choices seem to violate this principle.

In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, the Brownian ratchet or Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet is an apparent perpetual motion machine of the second kind, first analysed in 1912 as a thought experiment by Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski. It was popularised by American Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman in a physics lecture at the California Institute of Technology on May 11, 1962, during his Messenger Lectures series The Character of Physical Law in Cornell University in 1964 and in his text The Feynman Lectures on Physics as an illustration of the laws of thermodynamics. The simple machine, consisting of a tiny paddle wheel and a ratchet, appears to be an example of a Maxwell's demon, able to extract mechanical work from random fluctuations (heat) in a system at thermal equilibrium, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Detailed analysis by Feynman and others showed why it cannot actually do this.

In professional wrestling, kayfabe (also called work or worked) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or predetermined nature of any kind. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.

Kayfabe is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Also, since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with. In general, everything in a professional wrestling show is to some extent scripted, or "kayfabe", even though at times it is portrayed as real-life.

Kayfabe was fiercely maintained for decades, but with the advent of the Internet wrestling community, and the sports entertainment movement, the pro wrestling industry has become less concerned with protecting so-called backstage secrets and typically maintains kayfabe only during the shows. Kayfabe is, however, occasionally broken during shows, usually when dealing with genuine injuries during a match or paying tribute to wrestlers.

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.

The Begum's Fortune (French: Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum, literally "the 500 millions of the begum"), also published as The Begum's Millions, is an 1879 novel by Jules Verne, with some utopian elements and other elements that seem clearly dystopian. It is noteworthy as the first published book in which Verne was cautionary, and somewhat pessimistic about the development of science and technology.

Long after The Begum's Fortune was published, it came out that its story is based on a manuscript by Paschal Grousset, a Corsican revolutionary who had participated in the Paris Commune and was at the time living in exile in the United States and London. It was bought by Pierre-Jules Hetzel, the publisher of most of Verne's books. The attribution of plot elements between Grousset's original text and Verne's work on it has not been completely defined. Later, Verne worked similarly on two more books by Grousset and published them under his name, before the revolutionary finally got a pardon and was able to return to France and resume publication in his own name.

The book first appeared in a hasty and poorly done English translation soon after its publication in French—one of the bad translations considered to have damaged Verne's reputation in the English-speaking world. W. H. G. Kingston was near death and deeply in debt at the time. His wife, Mrs. A. K. Kingston, who did the translation for him, was certainly otherwise preoccupied than with the accuracy of the text and may have had to rely on outside help. In 2005 a new translation from the French was made by Stanford Luce and published by Wesleyan University.

I. O. Evans, in his introduction to his "Fitzroy Edition" of The Begum's Fortune, suggested a connection between the creation of artificial satellites in this novel and the publication of The Brick Moon by Edward Everett Hale in 1869.

The Privilegium maius (German: Großer Freiheitsbrief 'greater privilege') was a medieval document forged in 1358 or 1359 at the behest of Duke Rudolf IV of Austria (1358–65) of the House of Habsburg, claiming the family has the right to rule Rome because of land rights granted to them by Nero and Julius Caesar. It was essentially a modified version of the Privilegium minus issued by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa in 1156, which had elevated the former March of Austria into a duchy. In a similar way, the Privilegium maius elevated the duchy into an Archduchy of Austria.

The privileges described in the document had great influence on the Austrian political landscape, and created a unique connection between the House of Habsburg and Austria.

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used. The concept of functional fixedness originated in Gestalt psychology, a movement in psychology that emphasizes holistic processing. Karl Duncker defined functional fixedness as being a "mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem". This "block" limits the ability of an individual to use components given to them to complete a task, as they cannot move past the original purpose of those components. For example, if someone needs a paperweight, but they only have a hammer, they may not see how the hammer can be used as a paperweight. Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer's use as anything other than for pounding nails; the person couldn't think to use the hammer in a way other than in its conventional function.

When tested, 5-year-old children show no signs of functional fixedness. It has been argued that this is because at age 5, any goal to be achieved with an object is equivalent to any other goal. However, by age 7, children have acquired the tendency to treat the originally intended purpose of an object as special.

Marchetti's constant is the average time spent by a person for commuting each day, which is approximately one hour. It is named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, though Marchetti himself attributed the "one hour" finding to transportation analyst and engineer Yacov Zahavi. Marchetti posits that although forms of urban planning and transport may change, and although some live in villages and others in cities, people gradually adjust their lives to their conditions (including location of their homes relative to their workplace) such that the average travel time stays approximately constant. Ever since Neolithic times, people have kept the average time spent per day for travel the same, even though the distance may increase due to the advancements in the means of transportation. In his 1934 book Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford attributes this observation to Bertrand Russell:

Mr. Bertrand Russell has noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now—by driving him to a more distant residential area—effectually cancels out the gain.

A related concept is that of Zahavi, who also noticed that people seem to have a constant "travel time budget", that is, "a stable daily amount of time that people make available for travel." David Metz, former chief scientist at the Department of Transport, UK, cites data of average travel time in Britain drawn from the British National Travel Survey in support of Marchetti's and Zahavi's conclusions. The work casts doubt on the contention that investment in infrastructure saves travel time. Instead, it appears from Metz's figures that people invest travel time saved in travelling a longer distance, a particular example of Jevons paradox described by the Lewis–Mogridge position. Because of the constancy of travel times as well as induced travel, Robert Cervero has argued that the World Bank and other international aid agencies evaluate transportation investment proposals in developing and rapidly motorizing cities less on the basis of potential travel-time savings and more on the accessibility benefits they confer.

In Japanese culture, a hatsuyume (Japanese: 初夢) is the first dream one has in the new year. Traditionally, the contents of such a dream would foretell the luck of the dreamer in the ensuing year. In Japan, the night of December 31 was often passed without sleeping, so the hatsuyume is often experienced during the night of January 1; the day after the night of the "first dream" is also known as the hatsuyume. This day is January 2 in the Gregorian calendar, but was different in the traditional Japanese calendar.

It is considered to be particularly good luck to dream of Mount Fuji, a hawk, and an eggplant. This belief has been in place since the early Edo period but there are various theories regarding the origins as to why this particular combination was considered to be auspicious. One theory suggests that this combination is lucky because Mount Fuji is Japan's highest mountain, the hawk is a clever and strong bird, and the word for eggplant (茄子, nasu or nasubi) suggests achieving something great (成す nasu). Another theory suggests that this combination arose because Mount Fuji, falconry, and early eggplants were favorites of the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Although this superstition is well known in Japan, often memorized in the form ichi-Fuji, ni-taka, san-nasubi (一富士、二鷹、三茄子; 1. Fuji, 2. Hawk, 3. Eggplant), the continuation of the list is not as well known. The continuation is yon-sen, go-tabako, roku-zatō (四扇、五煙草、六座頭; 4. Fan, 5. Tobacco, 6. Blind acupressurer). The origins of this trio are less well known, and it is unclear whether they were added after the original three or whether the list of six originated at the same time.

The Seattle windshield pitting epidemic is a phenomenon which affected Bellingham, Seattle, and other communities of Washington state in April, 1954; it is considered an example of a mass delusion. It was characterized by widespread observation of previously unnoticed windshield holes, pits and dings, leading residents to believe that a common causative agent was at work. It was originally thought to be the work of vandals but the rate of pitting was so great that residents began to attribute it to everything from sand flea eggs to nuclear bomb testing.

Originating in Bellingham in March, police initially believed the work to be vandals using BB guns. However the pitting was soon observed in the nearby towns of Sedro Woolley and Mount Vernon and by mid-April, appeared to have spread to the town of Anacortes on Fidalgo Island.

Within a week, the news and the so-called "pitting epidemic" had reached metropolitan Seattle. As the newspapers began to feature the story, more and more reports of pitting were called in. Motorists began stopping police cars to report damage. Car lots and parking garages reported particularly severe attacks.

Several hypotheses for the widespread damage were postulated:

• Some thought that a new million-watt radio transmitter at nearby Jim Creek Naval Radio Station was producing waves that caused physical oscillations in glass;
• Some believed it to be the work of cosmic rays;
• Some reported seeing glass bubbles form right before their eyes, believing it to be the work of sand fleas.

By April 15, close to 3,000 windshields had been reported as affected. Mayor Allan Pomeroy contacted Washington Governor Arthur B. Langlie, then President Dwight D. Eisenhower asking for assistance.

Finally, Sergeant Max Allison of the Seattle police crime laboratory stated that the pitting reports consisted of "5 per cent hoodlum-ism, and 95 per cent public hysteria." By April 17, the pitting suddenly stopped.

The "Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic" as it is called has become a textbook case of collective delusion (not "mass hysteria" as reported). Although natural windshield pitting had been going on for some time, it was only when the media called public attention to it that people actually looked at their windshields and saw damage they had never noticed before.