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🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Energy 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language

Long-term nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the American Human Interference Task Force in 1981.

A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories recommended that such messages be constructed at several levels of complexity. They suggested that the sites should include foreboding physical features which would immediately convey to future visitors that the site was both man-made and dangerous, as well as providing pictographic information attempting to convey some details of the danger, and written explanations for those able to read it.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Television 🔗 The Simpsons

Flanderization is the process through which a fictional character's essential traits are exaggerated over the course of a serial work. The term flanderization was coined by TV Tropes in reference to Ned Flanders of The Simpsons, who was caricatured over the show's run from a good neighbor who was religious among other characteristics into an evangelical "bible-thumper". Flanderization has been analyzed as an aspect of serial works, especially television comedies, that shows a work's decline.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Law Enforcement

The iron law of prohibition is a term coined by Richard Cowan in 1986 which posits that as law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances increases. Cowan put it this way: "the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs."

This law is an application of the Alchian–Allen effect; Libertarian judge James P. Gray calls the law the "cardinal rule of prohibition", and notes that is a powerful argument for the legalization of drugs. It is based on the premise that when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more money. Economist Mark Thornton writes that the iron law of prohibition undermines the argument in favor of prohibition, because the higher potency forms are less safe for the consumer.

🔗 Environment 🔗 London 🔗 History of Science

Fumifugium, or, The inconveniencie of the aer and smoak of London dissipated together with some remedies humbly proposed by J.E. esq. to His Sacred Majestie, and to the Parliament now assembled is a pamphlet published in London, 1661 (see 1661 in literature), by John Evelyn. It is one of the earliest known works on air pollution and is broken down into three parts which explain the problem, a proposed solution, and a way of improvement upon the air in London. The letter was specifically addressed to King Charles II of England and discussed problems with the capital's air pollution dating back to medieval times. Evelyn refers to Greek philosophers, who once believed that air was the principle of the earth and primary substance of the soul up until the time that air pollution began to cause ill health.

Evelyn was appointed to the newly formed Royal Society, and both Society and pamphlet are celebrated in the 1663 "Ballad of Gresham College". Stanza 23 (given here in modern English) describes how Evelyn

[...] shows that 'tis the sea-coal smoke

That always London does environ,
Which does our lungs and spirits choke,
Our hanging spoil, and rust our iron.
Let none at Fumifuge be scoffing

Who heard at Church our Sunday's coughing.

The sea-coal to which Evelyn referred was appropriately named because it came by sea from Newcastle. When burned, it gave off a terrible smell because of high amounts of sulfur in its composition. When burned the sea coal released sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, soot, and particulates of organic matter into the atmosphere. The pamphlet suggests that burning wood, particularly aromatic woods, will be less harmful to the lungs and recommends relocating some of London's more polluting industries outside the capital, in particular lime-burning and brewing.

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Elections and Referendums 🔗 United States/U.S. presidential elections

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome. As of March 2020, it has been adopted by fifteen states and the District of Columbia. Together, they have 196 electoral votes, which is 36% of the Electoral College and 73% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force. Certain legal questions, however, may affect implementation of the compact.

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.

In theoretical computer science, the PACELC theorem is an extension to the CAP theorem. It states that in case of network partitioning (P) in a distributed computer system, one has to choose between availability (A) and consistency (C) (as per the CAP theorem), but else (E), even when the system is running normally in the absence of partitions, one has to choose between latency (L) and consistency (C).

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics

Zipf's law (, not as in German) is an empirical law formulated using mathematical statistics that refers to the fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions. Zipf distribution is related to the zeta distribution, but is not identical.

Zipf's law was originally formulated in terms of quantitative linguistics, stating that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.: the rank-frequency distribution is an inverse relation. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word the is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's Law, the second-place word of accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by and (28,852). Only 135 vocabulary items are needed to account for half the Brown Corpus.

The law is named after the American linguist George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950), who popularized it and sought to explain it (Zipf 1935, 1949), though he did not claim to have originated it. The French stenographer Jean-Baptiste Estoup (1868–1950) appears to have noticed the regularity before Zipf. It was also noted in 1913 by German physicist Felix Auerbach (1856–1933).

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Altered States of Consciousness

The Dreamachine (a contraction of Dream Machine) is a stroboscopic flickering light art device that produces eidetic visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs' "systems adviser" Ian Sommerville created the Dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Lists 🔗 Countries

This is a list of purchases of territory by a sovereign nation from another sovereign nation.