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🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Florida 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography 🔗 Firefighting

Joseph "Bum" Farto (July 3, 1919 – February 16, 1976) was a fire chief and convicted drug dealer in Key West, Florida who disappeared in 1976.

🔗 Game theory

Parrondo's paradox, a paradox in game theory, has been described as: A combination of losing strategies becomes a winning strategy. It is named after its creator, Juan Parrondo, who discovered the paradox in 1996. A more explanatory description is:

There exist pairs of games, each with a higher probability of losing than winning, for which it is possible to construct a winning strategy by playing the games alternately.

Parrondo devised the paradox in connection with his analysis of the Brownian ratchet, a thought experiment about a machine that can purportedly extract energy from random heat motions popularized by physicist Richard Feynman. However, the paradox disappears when rigorously analyzed. Winning strategies consisting of a combinations of losing strategies have been explored in biology before Parrondo's paradox was published. More recently, problems in evolutionary biology and ecology have been modeled and explained in terms of the paradox.

🔗 Fictional characters 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Measurement

Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre is a fictional character created in 1978 by Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo to justify the use of a capital L to denote litres.

The International System of Units usually only permits the use of a capital letter when a unit is named after a person. The lower-case character l might be difficult to distinguish from the upper-case character I or the digit 1 in certain fonts and styles, and therefore both the lower-case (l) and the upper-case (L) are allowed as the symbol for litre. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology now recommends the use of the uppercase letter L, a practice that is also widely followed in Canada and Australia.

Woolner perpetrated the April Fools' Day hoax in the April 1978 issue of "CHEM 13 News", a newsletter concerned with chemistry for school teachers. According to the hoax, Claude Litre was born on 12 February 1716, the son of a manufacturer of wine bottles. During Litre's extremely distinguished fictional scientific career, he purportedly proposed a unit of volume measurement that was incorporated into the International System of Units after his death in 1778.

The hoax was mistakenly printed as fact in the IUPAC journal Chemistry International and subsequently retracted.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Basic Income

Degrowth (French: décroissance) is a political, economic, and social movement based on ecological economics, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas. It is also considered an essential economic strategy responding to the limits-to-growth dilemma (see The Path to Degrowth in Overdeveloped Countries and post-growth). Degrowth thinkers and activists advocate for the downscaling of production and consumption – the contraction of economies – arguing that overconsumption lies at the root of long term environmental issues and social inequalities. Key to the concept of degrowth is that reducing consumption does not require individual martyring or a decrease in well-being. Rather, "degrowthers" aim to maximize happiness and well-being through non-consumptive means—sharing work, consuming less, while devoting more time to art, music, family, nature, culture and community.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Languages

The Swadesh list is a classic compilation of basic concepts for the purposes of historical-comparative linguistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatedness of those languages. The Swadesh list is named after linguist Morris Swadesh. It is used in lexicostatistics (the quantitative assessment of the genealogical relatedness of languages) and glottochronology (the dating of language divergence). Because there are several different lists, some authors also refer to "Swadesh lists".

🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Marketing & Advertising

Fearmongering, or scaremongering, is the act of exploiting feelings of fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger, usually for personal gain.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology

In social psychology, fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual's observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior. This effect has been described as "the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are".

🔗 Animal anatomy 🔗 Comics 🔗 Comics/Comic strips 🔗 Dinosaurs

A thagomizer () is the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurine dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.

The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name; cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name "thagomizer" in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip The Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term used within scientific circles, research, and education.

🔗 Music theory 🔗 Tunings, Temperaments, and Scales

In music theory, the circle of fifths (or circle of fourths) is the relationship among the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, their corresponding key signatures, and the associated major and minor keys. More specifically, it is a geometrical representation of relationships among the 12 pitch classes of the chromatic scale in pitch class space.