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🔗 Biography 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Literature 🔗 Poland 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

Stanisław Herman Lem (Polish: [staˈɲiswaf ˈlɛm] (listen); 12 or 13 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire. Lem's books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 45 million copies. From the 1950s to 2000s, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. The total print of Lem's books is over 30 million copies.

Lem's works explore philosophical themes through speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books.

Translating his works is difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, idiomatic wordplay, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.

🔗 Education

The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition is a model of how learners acquire skills through formal instruction and practicing, used in the fields of education and operations research. Brothers Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus proposed the model in 1980 in an 18-page report on their research at the University of California, Berkeley, Operations Research Center for the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The model proposes that a student passes through five distinct stages and was originally determined as: novice, competence, proficiency, expertise, and mastery.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Comedy

An esoteric programming language (sometimes shortened to esolang) is a programming language designed to test the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, as software art, as a hacking interface to another language (particularly functional programming or procedural programming languages), or as a joke. The use of esoteric distinguishes these languages from programming languages that working developers use to write software. Usually, an esolang's creators do not intend the language to be used for mainstream programming, although some esoteric features, such as visuospatial syntax, have inspired practical applications in the arts. Such languages are often popular among hackers and hobbyists.

Usability is rarely a goal for esoteric programming language designers—often the design leads to quite the opposite. Their usual aim is to remove or replace conventional language features while still maintaining a language that is Turing-complete, or even one for which the computational class is unknown.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Chicago

Windy City Heat is a made-for-TV reality film produced by Comedy Central. It first aired on October 12, 2003.

🔗 Telecommunications

Procedure words or prowords are words or phrases limited to radio telephone procedure used to facilitate communication by conveying information in a condensed standard verbal format. Prowords are voice versions of the much older prosigns for Morse code first developed in the 1860s for Morse telegraphy, and their meaning is identical. The NATO communications manual ACP-125 contains the most formal and perhaps earliest modern (post-WW-II) glossary of procedure words, but its definitions have been adopted by many other organizations, including the United Nations Development Programme, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Rhode Island Department of Emergency Management, Civil Air Patrol, Military Auxiliary Radio System, and others.

Procedure words are one of several structured parts of radio voice procedures, including Brevity codes and Plain language radio checks. The vast majority of the brevity codes from the U.S. military's Multiservice tactical brevity code are inappropriate for any civilian use, owing to their focus on large weapons (missiles, etc.) and other war-related issues. However, a few are used frequently enough in media to be memorable, including ABORT, BOGEY, BANDIT, FEET WET, FEET DRY, NEGATIVE CONTACT, and NO JOY.

🔗 Biography

John Socha-Leialoha (born 1958) is a software developer best known for creating Norton Commander, the first orthodox file manager. The original Norton Commander was written for DOS. Over the years, Socha's design for file management has been extended and cloned many times.

John grew up in the woods of Wisconsin, earned a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his PhD in Applied Physics from Cornell University. He now lives in Bellevue, Washington with his wife. His son, John Avi, is a graduate of the University of Washington.

Starting in September 2010, John began working at Microsoft officially.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

In 1983, David H. D. Warren designed an abstract machine for the execution of Prolog consisting of a memory architecture and an instruction set. This design became known as the Warren Abstract Machine (WAM) and has become the de facto standard target for Prolog compilers.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Death 🔗 Lists 🔗 Photography 🔗 Photography/History of photography

This is a list of serious injuries and deaths in which one or more subjects of a selfie were killed or injured, either before, during or after having taken a photo of themselves, with the accident at least in part attributed to the taking of the photo.

The United States Department of Transportation estimated that during 2014, the so-called "year of the selfie", 33,000 people were injured while driving and using a cell-phone in some fashion, which can include talking, listening, and "manual button/control actuation" including taking, uploading, downloading, editing, or opening of selfies. A 2015 survey by Erie Insurance Group found that 4% of all drivers admitted to taking selfies while driving.

The Washington Post reported in January 2016 that "about half" of at least 27 "selfie related" deaths in 2015 had occurred in India. No official datasets on the number of people who died taking selfies in India exists, but reports show from 2014 up to August 2016, there have been at least 54 deaths in India while taking selfies. The Indian Ministry of Tourism asked states to identify and barricade 'selfie danger' areas, its first national attempt to deal with the selfie deaths. Mumbai Police identified at least 16 danger zones after a man drowned attempting to save a selfie-taker. No-selfie zones were also established in certain areas of the Kumbh Mela because organizers feared bottlenecks caused by selfie-takers could spark stampedes.

A 2018 study of news reports showed that between October 2011 and November 2017, there were 259 selfie deaths in 137 incidents reported globally, with the highest occurrences in India, followed by Russia, United States, and Pakistan. The mean age was 23 years old, with male deaths outnumbering female about three to one.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Russia/language and literature of Russia

Padonkaffsky jargon (Russian: язык падонкафф, yazyk padonkaff) or Olbanian (олбанский, olbanskiy) is a cant language developed by a subculture of Runet called padonki (Russian: падонки). It started as an Internet slang language originally used in the Russian Internet community. It is comparable to the English-based Leet. Padonkaffsky jargon became so popular that the former President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev jokingly suggested that Olbanian be taught in schools.

🔗 United States 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Early computers 🔗 United States/Iowa

The Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC) was the first automatic electronic digital computer. Limited by the technology of the day, and execution, the device has remained somewhat obscure. The ABC's priority is debated among historians of computer technology, because it was neither programmable, nor Turing-complete. Conventionally, the ABC would be considered the first electronic ALU (arithmetic logic unit) – which is integrated into every modern processor's design.

Its unique contribution was to make computing faster by being the first to use vacuum tubes to do the arithmetic calculations. Prior to this, slower electro-mechanical methods were used by Konrad Zuse's Z1, and the simultaneously developed Harvard Mark I. The first electronic, programmable, digital machine, the Colossus computer from 1943 to 1945, used similar tube-based technology as ABC.