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🔗 Computing 🔗 Systems 🔗 Business 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Systems/Systems engineering

Parkinson's law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.

The law has been applied to software development and other activities. The terms bicycle-shed effect, bike-shed effect, and bike-shedding were coined as metaphors to illuminate the law of triviality; it was popularised in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by the Danish software developer Poul-Henning Kamp in 1999 and has spread from there to the whole software industry.

🔗 Extinction

Breeding back is a form of artificial selection by the deliberate selective breeding of domestic animals, in an attempt to achieve an animal breed with a phenotype that resembles a wild type ancestor, usually one that has gone extinct. Breeding back is not to be confused with dedomestication.

It must be kept in mind that a breeding-back breed may be very similar to the extinct wild type in phenotype, ecological niche, and to some extent genetics, but the original gene pool of that wild type was eliminated with its extinction. A breeding-back attempt cannot actually recreate the extinct wild type of the breeding target, as an extinct wild type cannot be resurrected through it. Furthermore, even the superficial authenticity of a bred-back animal depends on the quality of the stock used to breed the new lineage. As a result of this, some breeds, like Heck cattle, are at best a vague look-alike of the extinct wild type aurochs, according to the literature.

🔗 Finance & Investment

A credit card imprinter, colloquially known as a ZipZap machine, click-clack machine or Knuckle Buster, is a manual device that was used by merchants to record payment card transactions before the advent of payment terminals.

The device works by placing the customer’s credit card into a bed in the machine, then layering carbon paper forms over the card. A bar is slid back and forth over the paper to create an impression of the embossed card data and the merchant information on the imprinter. The customer signs these paper forms, with one copy as the customer receipt and the other kept by the merchant.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Solar System

The Pioneer anomaly or Pioneer effect was the observed deviation from predicted accelerations of the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft after they passed about 20 astronomical units (3×10⁹ km; 2×10⁹ mi) on their trajectories out of the Solar System. The apparent anomaly was a matter of much interest for many years but has been subsequently explained by an anisotropic radiation pressure caused by the spacecraft's heat loss.

Both Pioneer spacecraft are escaping the Solar System but are slowing under the influence of the Sun's gravity. Upon very close examination of navigational data, the spacecraft were found to be slowing slightly more than expected. The effect is an extremely small acceleration towards the Sun, of (8.74±1.33)×10⁻¹⁰ m/s², which is equivalent to a reduction of the outbound velocity by 1 km/h over a period of ten years. The two spacecraft were launched in 1972 and 1973. The anomalous acceleration was first noticed as early as 1980 but not seriously investigated until 1994. The last communication with either spacecraft was in 2003, but analysis of recorded data continues.

Various explanations, both of spacecraft behavior and of gravitation itself, were proposed to explain the anomaly. Over the period from 1998 to 2012, one particular explanation became accepted. The spacecraft, which are surrounded by an ultra-high vacuum and are each powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG), can shed heat only via thermal radiation. If, due to the design of the spacecraft, more heat is emitted in a particular direction by what is known as a radiative anisotropy, then the spacecraft would accelerate slightly in the direction opposite of the excess emitted radiation due to the recoil of thermal photons. If the excess radiation and attendant radiation pressure were pointed in a general direction opposite the Sun, the spacecraft's velocity away from the Sun would be decreasing at a rate greater than could be explained by previously recognized forces, such as gravity and trace friction due to the interplanetary medium (imperfect vacuum).

By 2012 several papers by different groups, all reanalyzing the thermal radiation pressure forces inherent in the spacecraft, showed that a careful accounting of this explains the entire anomaly; thus the cause is mundane and does not point to any new phenomenon or need for a different physical paradigm. The most detailed analysis to date, by some of the original investigators, explicitly looks at two methods of estimating thermal forces, concluding that there is "no statistically significant difference between the two estimates and [...] that once the thermal recoil force is properly accounted for, no anomalous acceleration remains."

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Mathematics

CORDIC (for COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer), also known as Volder's algorithm, or: Digit-by-digit method Circular CORDIC (Jack E. Volder), Linear CORDIC, Hyperbolic CORDIC (John Stephen Walther), and Generalized Hyperbolic CORDIC (GH CORDIC) (Yuanyong Luo et al.), is a simple and efficient algorithm to calculate trigonometric functions, hyperbolic functions, square roots, multiplications, divisions, and exponentials and logarithms with arbitrary base, typically converging with one digit (or bit) per iteration. CORDIC is therefore also an example of digit-by-digit algorithms. CORDIC and closely related methods known as pseudo-multiplication and pseudo-division or factor combining are commonly used when no hardware multiplier is available (e.g. in simple microcontrollers and FPGAs), as the only operations it requires are additions, subtractions, bitshift and lookup tables. As such, they all belong to the class of shift-and-add algorithms. In computer science, CORDIC is often used to implement floating-point arithmetic when the target platform lacks hardware multiply for cost or space reasons.

🔗 United States 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Invention 🔗 United States/American television

"You Will" was an AT&T marketing campaign that launched in 1993, consisting of commercials directed by David Fincher. Each ad presented a futuristic scenario beginning with "Have you ever…" and ending with "…you will. And the company that will bring it to you: AT&T."

The ads were narrated by Tom Selleck.

The creative team that created the ad campaign at N.W. Ayer & Partners were Copy Supervisor Gordon Hasse, Art Supervisor Nick Scordato and Producer Gaston Braun.

One of the first web banner ads ever sold was part of an AT&T campaign that ran on HotWired starting October 27, 1994, asking "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? You Will".

In 2016, technology writer Timothy B. Lee commented that "overall, the ads were remarkably accurate in predicting the cutting-edge technologies of the coming decades. But the ads were mostly wrong about one thing: the company that brought these technologies to the world was not AT&T. At least not on its own. AT&T does provide some of the infrastructure on which the world's communications flow. But the gadgets and software that brought these futuristic capabilities to consumers were created by a new generation of Silicon Valley companies that mostly didn't exist when these ads were made."

The ads won a few different awards at the time, notably the first annual David Ogilvy Award for the most effective campaign supported by research, the 1994 PCIA (Personal Communications Industry Award), and two ADDY Awards.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology

Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The objective of Foldit is to fold the structures of selected proteins as perfectly as possible, using tools provided in the game. The highest scoring solutions are analyzed by researchers, who determine whether or not there is a native structural configuration (native state) that can be applied to relevant proteins in the real world. Scientists can then use these solutions to target and eradicate diseases and create biological innovations. A 2010 paper in the science journal Nature credited Foldit's 57,000 players with providing useful results that matched or outperformed algorithmically computed solutions.

🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Military history/French military history 🔗 Military history/Military land vehicles 🔗 Military history/European military history

The Boirault machine (French: Appareil Boirault), was an early French experimental landship, designed in 1914 and built in early 1915. It has been considered as "another interesting ancestor of the tank", and described as a "rhomboid-shaped skeleton tank without armour, with single overhead track". Ultimately, the machine was deemed impractical and was nicknamed Diplodocus militaris. It preceded the design and development of the English Little Willie tank by six months.

🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Languages 🔗 Anthroponymy

Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. The term was first used in the magazine New Scientist in 1994, after the magazine's humorous Feedback column noted several studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames. These included a book on polar explorations by Daniel Snowman and an article on urology by researchers named Splatt and Weedon. These and other examples led to light-hearted speculation that some sort of psychological effect was at work. Since the term appeared, nominative determinism has been an irregularly recurring topic in New Scientist, as readers continue to submit examples. Nominative determinism differs from the related concept aptronym, and its synonyms aptonym, namephreak, and Perfect Fit Last Name, in that it focuses on causality. "Aptronym" merely means the name is fitting, without saying anything about why it has come to fit.

The idea that people are drawn to professions that fit their name was suggested by psychologist Carl Jung, citing as an example Sigmund Freud who studied pleasure and whose surname means "joy". A few recent empirical studies have indicated that certain professions are disproportionately represented by people with appropriate surnames (and sometimes given names), though the methods of these studies have been challenged. One explanation for nominative determinism is implicit egotism, which states that humans have an unconscious preference for things they associate with themselves. An alternative explanation is genetic: a person might be named Smith or Taylor because that was originally their occupation, and they would pass on their genes to their descendants, including an aptitude for activities involving strength in the case of Smith, or dexterity in the case of Taylor.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Organized Labour

The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization or PATCO was a United States trade union that operated from 1968 until its decertification in 1981 following an illegal strike that was broken by the Reagan Administration. According to labor historian Joseph A. McCartin, the 1981 strike and defeat of PATCO was "one of the most important events in late twentieth century U.S. labor history".