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🔗 Music theory

The Parsons code, formally named the Parsons code for melodic contours, is a simple notation used to identify a piece of music through melodic motion — movements of the pitch up and down. Denys Parsons developed this system for his 1975 book The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes. Representing a melody in this manner makes it easier to index or search for pieces, particularly when the notes values are unknown.

The book was also published in Germany in 2002 and reprinted by Piatkus as The Directory of Classical Themes in 2008.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Energy 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Science Policy

The Kyshtym disaster, sometimes referred to as the Mayak disaster or Ozyorsk disaster in newer sources, was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozyorsk) in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union.

The disaster was the second worst nuclear incident (by radioactivity released) after the Chernobyl disaster. It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), making it the third highest on the INES (which ranks by population impact), behind Chernobyl (evacuated 335,000 people) and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (evacuated 154,000 people) which are both Level 7 on the INES. At least twenty-two villages were exposed to radiation from the Kyshtym disaster, with a total population of around 10,000 people evacuated. Some were evacuated after a week, but it took almost two years for evacuations to occur at other sites.

The disaster spread hot particles over more than 52,000 square kilometres (20,000 sq mi), where at least 270,000 people lived. Since Chelyabinsk-40 (later renamed Chelyabinsk-65 until 1994) was not marked on maps, the disaster was named after Kyshtym, the nearest known town.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics

Finger binary is a system for counting and displaying binary numbers on the fingers of one or more hands. It is possible to count from 0 to 31 (2⁵ − 1) using the fingers of a single hand, from 0 through 1023 (2¹⁰ − 1) if both hands are used, or from 0 to 1,048,575 (2²⁰ − 1) if the toes on both feet are used as well.

🔗 Books 🔗 Business 🔗 Comics 🔗 Comics/Comic strips

The Dilbert principle is a concept in management developed by Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, which states that companies tend to systematically promote incompetent employees to management to get them out of the workflow. The Dilbert principle is inspired by the Peter principle, which holds that employees are promoted based on success in their current position until they reach their "level of incompetence" and are no longer promoted. Under the Dilbert principle, employees who were never competent are promoted to management to limit the damage they can do. Adams first explained the principle in a 1995 Wall Street Journal article, and expanded upon it in his 1996 business book The Dilbert Principle.

🔗 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.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Energy

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH), or pumped hydroelectric energy storage (PHES), is a type of hydroelectric energy storage used by electric power systems for load balancing. The method stores energy in the form of gravitational potential energy of water, pumped from a lower elevation reservoir to a higher elevation. Low-cost surplus off-peak electric power is typically used to run the pumps. During periods of high electrical demand, the stored water is released through turbines to produce electric power.

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity allows energy from intermittent sources (such as solar, wind) and other renewables, or excess electricity from continuous base-load sources (such as coal or nuclear) to be saved for periods of higher demand. The reservoirs used with pumped storage can be quite small when contrasted with the lakes of conventional hydroelectric plants of similar power capacity, and generating periods are often less than half a day.

The round-trip efficiency of PSH generally varies between 70%–80%. Although the losses of the pumping process make the plant a net consumer of energy overall, the system increases revenue by selling more electricity during periods of peak demand, when electricity prices are highest. If the upper lake collects significant rainfall or is fed by a river then the plant may be a net energy producer in the manner of a traditional hydroelectric plant.

Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, PSH accounts for around 95% of all active storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW and a total installed storage capacity of over 1.6 TWh.

The main requirement for PSH is hilly country. The global greenfield pumped hydro atlas lists more than 600,000 potential sites around the world, which is about 100 times more than needed to support 100% renewable electricity. Most are closed-loop systems away from rivers. Areas of natural beauty and new dams on rivers can be avoided because of the very large number of potential sites. Some projects utilise existing reservoirs (dubbed "bluefield") such as the 350 Gigawatt-hour Snowy 2.0 scheme under construction in Australia. Some recently proposed projects propose to take advantage of "brownfield" locations such as disused mines such as the Kidston project under construction in Australia.

Water requirements for PSH are small: about 1 gigalitre of initial fill water per gigawatt-hour of storage. This water is recycled uphill and back downhill between the two reservoirs for many decades, but evaporation losses (beyond what rainfall and any inflow from local waterways provide) must be replaced. Land requirements are also small: about 10 hectares per gigawatt-hour of storage, which is much smaller than the land occupied by the solar and windfarms that the storage might support. Closed loop (off-river) pumped hydro storage has the smallest carbon emissions per unit of storage of all candidates for large-scale energy storage.

🔗 Law

Jury nullification, also known in the United Kingdom as jury equity, or a perverse verdict, is when the jury in a criminal trial gives a verdict of not guilty even though they think a defendant has broken the law. The jury's reasons may include the belief that the law itself is unjust, that the prosecutor has misapplied the law in the defendant's case, that the punishment for breaking the law is too harsh, or general frustrations with the criminal justice system. Some juries have also refused to convict due to their own prejudices in favor of the defendant. Such verdicts are possible because a jury has an absolute right to return any verdict it chooses. Nullification is not an official part of criminal procedure but is the logical consequence of two rules governing the systems in which it exists:

1. Jurors cannot be punished for passing an incorrect verdict.
2. In many jurisdictions, a defendant who is acquitted cannot be tried a second time for the same offense.

A jury verdict that is contrary to the letter of the law pertains only to the particular case before it; however, if a pattern of acquittals develops in response to repeated attempts to prosecute a particular offence, this can have the de facto effect of invalidating the law. Such a pattern may indicate public opposition to an unwanted legislative enactment. It may also happen that a jury convicts a defendant even if no law was broken, although such a conviction may be overturned on appeal. Nullification can also occur in civil trials; unlike in criminal trials, if the jury renders a not liable verdict that is clearly at odds with the evidence, the judge can issue a judgment notwithstanding the verdict or order a new trial.

🔗 Technology

A moving walkway, also known as an autowalk, moving sidewalk, moving pavement, people-mover, travolator, or travelator, is a slow-moving conveyor mechanism that transports people across a horizontal or inclined plane over a short to medium distance. Moving walkways can be used by standing or walking on them. They are often installed in pairs, one for each direction.

🔗 History 🔗 Germany 🔗 Greece 🔗 Austria 🔗 Netherlands 🔗 Christianity 🔗 European history 🔗 Greece/Byzantine world 🔗 Christianity/Catholicism 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Czech Republic 🔗 Frisia 🔗 Former countries/Holy Roman Empire 🔗 Silesia 🔗 Christianity/Lutheranism 🔗 Christianity/Reformed Christianity

The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved on 6 August 1806, when the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, abdicated his title and released all Imperial states and officials from their oaths and obligations to the empire. Since the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire had been recognized by Western Europeans as the legitimate continuation of the ancient Roman Empire due to its emperors having been proclaimed as Roman emperors by the papacy. Through this Roman legacy, the Holy Roman Emperors claimed to be universal monarchs whose jurisdiction extended beyond their empire's formal borders to all of Christian Europe and beyond. The decline of the Holy Roman Empire was a long and drawn-out process lasting centuries. The formation of the first modern sovereign territorial states in the 16th and 17th centuries, which brought with it the idea that jurisdiction corresponded to actual territory governed, threatened the ostensibly universal nature of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire by the time of the 18th century was widely regarded by contemporaries, both inside and outside the empire, as a highly "irregular" monarchy and "sick," having an "unusual" form of government. The empire lacked both a central standing army and a central treasury and its monarchs, formally elective rather than hereditary, could not exercise effective central control. Even then, most contemporaries believed that the empire could be revived and modernized. For example, the Reichstag passed the Imperial Recess as late as 1803.

The Holy Roman Empire finally began its true terminal decline during and after its involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Although the empire defended itself quite well initially, war with France and Napoleon proved catastrophic. In 1804, Napoleon proclaimed himself as the Emperor of the French, which Francis II responded to by proclaiming himself the Emperor of Austria, in addition to already being the Holy Roman Emperor, an attempt at maintaining parity between France and Austria while also illustrating that the Holy Roman title outranked them both. Austria's defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805 and the secession of a large number of Francis II's German vassals in July 1806 to form the Confederation of the Rhine, a French satellite state, effectively meant the end of the Holy Roman Empire. The abdication in August 1806, combined with a dissolution of the entire Imperial hierarchy and its institutions, was seen as necessary to prevent the possibility of Napoleon proclaiming himself Holy Roman Emperor, something which would have reduced Francis II to Napoleon's vassal.

Reactions to the empire's dissolution ranged from indifference to despair. The populace of Vienna, capital of the Habsburg monarchy, were horrified at the loss of the empire. Many of Francis II's former subjects questioned the legality of his actions; though his abdication was agreed to be perfectly legal, the dissolution of the empire and the release of all its vassals were seen as beyond the emperor's authority. As such, many of the empire's princes and subjects refused to accept that the empire was gone, with some commoners going so far as to believe that news of its dissolution was a plot by their local authorities. In Germany, the dissolution was widely compared to the ancient and legendary Fall of Troy and some associated the end of the Holy Roman Empire with the end times and the apocalypse.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Physics 🔗 Lists 🔗 Anthroponymy

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) is the eponym of all of the topics listed below. There are over 100 topics all named after this German mathematician and scientist, all in the fields of mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The English eponymous adjective Gaussian is pronounced GOWSS-ee-ən.