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🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Chaos theory

In mathematics, the lakes of Wada (和田の湖, Wada no mizuumi) are three disjoint connected open sets of the plane or open unit square with the counterintuitive property that they all have the same boundary. In other words, for any point selected on the boundary of one of the lakes, the other two lakes' boundaries also contain that point.

More than two sets with the same boundary are said to have the Wada property; examples include Wada basins in dynamical systems. This property is rare in real-world systems.

The lakes of Wada were introduced by Kunizō Yoneyama (1917, page 60), who credited the discovery to Takeo Wada. His construction is similar to the construction by Brouwer (1910) of an indecomposable continuum, and in fact it is possible for the common boundary of the three sets to be an indecomposable continuum.

🔗 Politics 🔗 Pirate Politics 🔗 Sweden 🔗 Politics/Political parties

The Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet) is a political party in Sweden founded in 2006. Its sudden popularity has given rise to parties with the same name and similar goals in Europe and worldwide, forming the International Pirate Party movement.

The Pirate Party was initially formed to reform laws regarding copyright and patents. The party agenda includes support for strengthening the individual's right to privacy, both on the Internet and in everyday life, and the transparency of state administration. The Pirate Party has intentionally chosen to be bloc independent of the traditional left-right scale to pursue their political agenda with all mainstream parties. The party originally stayed neutral on other matters, but started broadening into other political areas in 2012.

The Pirate Party participated in the 2006 Riksdag elections and gained 0.63% of the votes, making them the third largest party outside parliament. In terms of membership, it passed the Green Party in December 2008, the Left Party in February 2009, the Liberal People's Party and the Christian Democrats in April 2009, and the Centre Party in May 2009, making it, for the time being, the third largest political party in Sweden by membership. The Pirate Party's associated youth organisation, Young Pirate (Swedish: Ung Pirat), was, for a part of 2009 and 2010, the largest political youth organisation in Sweden by membership count.

The Pirate Party came 5th in the 2009 European Parliament elections with 7.13% of the vote and 1 MEP (increasing to 2 after ratification of the Lisbon Treaty). Christian Engström became the first MEP for the party, and Amelia Andersdotter took the second seat on 1 December 2009.

Rick Falkvinge, founder of the party, stepped down on 1 January 2011 after five years as party leader, making vice leader Anna Troberg the party leader.

On 1 December 2014, Anna Troberg announced that she would not be available for re-election in 2015 after her term ended on 31 December 2014.

🔗 Ships

CS Alert, or HMTS Alert, was a cable-laying ship that had a significant role in World War I. She was launched in 1871 for the Submarine Telegraph Company with the name The Lady Carmichael. In 1890 the ship was acquired by the General Post Office (GPO) as part of the nationalisation of the British telegraph network. At the outbreak of World War I, Alert was immediately dispatched to cut German telegraph cables in the English Channel, seriously damaging Germany's ability to securely communicate with the rest of the world. Alert was taken out of service as a cable ship in 1915 but her cable-handling gear was retained for fitting on her replacement. After the war, she worked as a merchant ship under various names, finally being wrecked at Redcar under the name Norham in 1932.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Primates

The hundredth monkey effect is a hypothetical phenomenon in which a new behaviour or idea is said to spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behaviour or acknowledge the new idea.

One of the primary factors in the promulgation of the story is that many authors quote secondary, tertiary or post-tertiary sources which have themselves misrepresented the original observations.

In the electronics industry, dark silicon is the amount of circuitry of an integrated circuit that cannot be powered-on at the nominal operating voltage for a given thermal design power (TDP) constraint. This is a challenge in the era of nanometer semiconductor nodes, where transistor scaling and voltage scaling are no longer in line with each other, resulting in the failure of Dennard scaling. This discontinuation of Dennard scaling has led to sharp increases in power densities that hamper powering-on all the transistors simultaneously at the nominal voltage, while keeping the chip temperature in the safe operating range. According to recent studies, researchers from different groups have projected that, at 8 nm technology nodes, the amount of Dark Silicon may reach up to 50–80% depending upon the processor architecture, cooling technology, and application workloads. Dark Silicon may be unavoidable even in server workloads with abundance of inherent client request-level parallelism.

🔗 Books 🔗 Mongols

The Tartar Relation (Latin: Hystoria Tartarorum, "History of the Tartars") is an ethnographic report on the Mongol Empire composed by a certain C. de Bridia in Latin in 1247. It is one of the most detailed accounts of the history and customs of the Mongols to appear in Europe around that time.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion

"Turtles all the way down" is an expression of the problem of infinite regress. The saying alludes to the mythological idea of a World Turtle that supports the earth on its back. It suggests that this turtle rests on the back of an even larger turtle, which itself is part of a column of increasingly large world turtles that continues indefinitely (i.e., "turtles all the way down").

The exact origin of the phrase is uncertain. In the form "rocks all the way down", the saying appears as early as 1838. References to the saying's mythological antecedents, the World Turtle and its counterpart the World Elephant, were made by a number of authors in the 17th and 18th centuries. This mythology is frequently assumed to have originated in ancient India and other Hinduist beliefs.

The expression has been used to illustrate problems such as the regress argument in epistemology.

🔗 United States 🔗 Television 🔗 Law 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Animation 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 South Park 🔗 United States/American television 🔗 United States/Colorado 🔗 Star Wars 🔗 United States/Animation - American animation

In a jury trial, a Chewbacca defense is a legal strategy in which a criminal defense lawyer tries to confuse the jury rather than refute the case of the prosecutor. It is an intentional distraction or obfuscation.

As a Chewbacca defense distracts and misleads, it is an example of a red herring. It is also an example of an irrelevant conclusion, a type of informal fallacy in which one making an argument fails to address the issue in question. Often an opposing counsel can legally object to such arguments by declaring them irrelevant, character evidence, or argumentative.

The name Chewbacca defense comes from "Chef Aid", an episode of the American animated series South Park. The episode, which premiered on October 7, 1998, satirizes the O. J. Simpson murder trial—particularly attorney Johnnie Cochran's closing argument for the defense. In the episode, Cochran (voiced by Trey Parker) bases his argument on a false premise about the 1983 film Return of the Jedi. He asks the jury why a Wookiee like Chewbacca would want to live on Endor with the much smaller Ewoks when "it does not make sense". He argues that if Chewbacca living on Endor does not make sense—and if even mentioning Chewbacca in the case does not make sense—then the jury must acquit.

In the Simpson murder trial, the real Johnnie Cochran tried to convince jurors that a glove found at the crime scene, alleged to have been left by the killer, could not be Simpson's because it did not fit Simpson's hand. Because the prosecution relied on the glove as evidence of Simpson's presence at the scene, Cochran argued that the lack of fit proved Simpson's innocence: "It makes no sense; it doesn't fit; if it doesn't fit, you must acquit." "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit" was a refrain that Cochran also used in response to other points of the case.