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🔗 Physics 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Professional sound production

Pink noise or ​¹⁄_f noise is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density (energy or power per frequency interval) is inversely proportional to the frequency of the signal. In pink noise, each octave (halving or doubling in frequency) carries an equal amount of noise energy.

Pink noise is one of the most common signals in biological systems.

The name arises from the pink appearance of visible light with this power spectrum. This is in contrast with white noise which has equal intensity per frequency interval.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction

Dreadful Sanctuary is a science fiction novel by British author Eric Frank Russell. After its serialization in the American magazine Astounding Science Fiction in 1948, it was first published in book form in 1951 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 2,975 copies. Russell rewrote the novel for the first American paperback edition, published by Lancer Books in 1963. Editorial interference forced Russell to replace the original ending with a more tragic conclusion in this edition. A British hardcover was issued in 1953, with a paperback incorporating further "minor revisions" following in 1967. Italian translations of Dreadful Sanctuary were published in 1953 and 1986; a German translation appeared in 1971, and a French translation in 1978.

Partly inspired by Fortean ideas, the novel concerns an international conspiracy to prevent humanity from achieving space travel.

🔗 Physics

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Florida

The Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle (WEAV) is a heavier than air flight system developed at the University of Florida, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The WEAV was invented in 2006 by Dr. Subrata Roy, plasma physicist, aerospace engineering professor at the University of Florida, and has been a subject of several patents. The WEAV employs no moving parts, and combines the aircraft structure, propulsion, energy production and storage, and control subsystems into one integrated system.

🔗 United States 🔗 United States Public Policy 🔗 Virginia 🔗 United States/West Virginia

The National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ) is a large area of land in the United States designated as a radio quiet zone, in which radio transmissions are heavily restricted by law to facilitate scientific research and the gathering of military intelligence. Roughly half of the zone is located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of west-central Virginia while the other half is the Allegheny Mountains of east-central West Virginia; a small part of the zone is in the southernmost tip of the Maryland panhandle.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Europe 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Wine 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia

The alcohol belts of Europe divide Europe by their traditional alcoholic beverages: beer, wine, or spirits. They do not necessarily correspond with current drinking habits, as beer has become the most popular alcoholic drink world-wide. The definitions of these belts are not completely objective.

🔗 United States 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Food and drink/Foodservice

The Pizza Meter refers to sudden increases of pizza orders from U.S. government offices, such as the White House and The Pentagon, before large events such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Panama Invasion, and the Grenada invasion.

On the night of August 1, 1990, the night before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, military personnel at The Pentagon came together to discuss issues in the Middle East. According to Frank Meeks, the owner of Washington, D.C.'s Domino's Pizza franchise of 45 restaurants, the CIA ordered a record-breaking 21 pizzas from Domino's that night. Between January 7 to January 16, 1991, the number of pizza deliveries to the Pentagon past 10 p.m reached 101, with another 55 pizzas delivered to the White House on January 16 between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.

Meeks tied the influx of pizza orders from the Pentagon, White House, and the CIA to oncoming major announcements from the White House, publicizing his observations. Consequently, the public nicknamed the event "The Pizza Meter". Shortly after Meeks' comments were released, government offices no longer ordered from Domino's branches in Washington, opting to buy pizza at separate times or at different pizza joints.

🔗 Transport

Smeed's Law, named after R. J. Smeed, who first proposed the relationship in 1949, is a purported empirical rule relating traffic fatalities to traffic congestion as measured by the proxy of motor vehicle registrations and country population. The law proposes that increasing traffic volume (an increase in motor vehicle registrations) leads to an increase in fatalities per capita, but a decrease in fatalities per vehicle.

Smeed also predicted that the average speed of traffic in central London would always be nine miles per hour, because that is the minimum speed that people tolerate. He predicted that any intervention intended to speed traffic would only lead to more people driving at this "tolerable" speed unless there were any other disincentives against doing so.

His hypothesis in relation to road traffic safety has been refuted by several authors, who point out that fatalities per person have decreased in many countries, when the "Law" requires that they should increase as long as the number of vehicles per person continues to rise.

Alternative Title: Just because you have some money, that doesn't mean that you have to spend it.

In biology, the hallmarks of an aggressive cancer include limitless multiplication of ordinarily beneficial cells, even when the body signals that further multiplication is no longer needed. The Wikipedia page on the wheat and chessboard problem explains that nothing can keep growing forever. In biology, the unwanted growth usually terminates with the death of the host. Ever-increasing spending can often lead to the same undesirable result in organizations.

🔗 Robotics

Micromouse is an event where small robot mice solve a 16×16 maze. It began in the late 1970s. Events are held worldwide, and are most popular in the UK, U.S., Japan, Singapore, India, South Korea and becoming popular in subcontinent countries such as Sri Lanka.

The maze is made up of a 16×16 grid of cells, each 180 mm square with walls 50 mm high. The mice are completely autonomous robots that must find their way from a predetermined starting position to the central area of the maze unaided. The mouse needs to keep track of where it is, discover walls as it explores, map out the maze and detect when it has reached the goal. Having reached the goal, the mouse will typically perform additional searches of the maze until it has found an optimal route from the start to the finish. Once the optimal route has been found, the mouse will run that route in the shortest possible time.

Competitions and conferences are still run regularly.