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🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Philosophy/Medieval philosophy

Nicole Oresme (French: [nikɔl ɔʁɛm]; c. 1320–1325 – 11 July 1382), also known as Nicolas Oresme, Nicholas Oresme, or Nicolas d'Oresme, was a French philosopher of the later Middle Ages. He wrote influential works on economics, mathematics, physics, astrology, astronomy, philosophy, and theology; was Bishop of Lisieux, a translator, a counselor of King Charles V of France, and one of the most original thinkers of 14th-century Europe.

🔗 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.

🔗 Home Living

An antimacassar is a small cloth placed over the backs or arms of chairs, or the head or cushions of a sofa, to prevent soiling of the permanent fabric underneath. The name also refers to the cloth flap 'collar' on a sailor's shirt or top, used to keep macassar oil off the uniform.

Macassar oil was an unguent for the hair commonly used by men in the early 19th century, and reputed to have been manufactured from ingredients purchased in the port of Makassar in the Dutch East Indies. The poet Byron called it "thine incomparable oil, Macassar". The fashion for oiled hair became so widespread in the Victorian and the Edwardian period that housewives began to cover the arms and backs of their chairs with washable cloths to prevent the fabric coverings from being soiled. Around 1850, these started to be known as antimacassars. They were also installed in theatres, from 1865.

They came to have elaborate patterns, often in matching sets for the various items of parlour furniture; they were either made at home using a variety of techniques such as crochet or tatting, or purchased. The original antimacassars were usually made of stiff white crochet-work, but in the third quarter of the 19th century they became simpler and softer, usually fabric embroidered with a simple pattern in wool or silk.

By the beginning of the 20th century, antimacassars had become so associated in people's minds with the Victorian period that the word briefly became a figurative term for it. For example, antimacassars are suggestive of old-fashioned, Victorian-era women in Rebecca West's novel The Return of the Soldier.

Antimacassars are also used on the seat headrests of commercial passenger transport vehicles, such as trains, buses and, especially, aircraft, to prevent the transmission of hair dressings and conditions between passengers, simplify maintenance, and extend the life of fabrics.

🔗 Computer science

The General Purpose Analog Computer (GPAC) is a mathematical model of analog computers first introduced in 1941 by Claude Shannon. This model consists of circuits where several basic units are interconnected in order to compute some function. The GPAC can be implemented in practice through the use of mechanical devices or analog electronics. Although analog computers have fallen almost into oblivion due to emergence of the digital computer, the GPAC has recently been studied as a way to provide evidence for the physical Church–Turing thesis. This is because the GPAC is also known to model a large class of dynamical systems defined with ordinary differential equations, which appear frequently in the context of physics. In particular it was shown in 2007 that (a deterministic variant of) the GPAC is equivalent, in computability terms, to Turing machines, thereby proving the physical Church–Turing thesis for the class of systems modelled by the GPAC. This was recently strengthened to polynomial time equivalence.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 India 🔗 Rocketry 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/South Asian military history 🔗 India/Karnataka

Mysorean rockets were an Indian military weapon, the first iron-cased rockets successfully deployed for military use. The Mysorean army, under Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, used the rockets effectively against the British East India Company during the 1780s and 1790s. Their conflicts with the company exposed the British to this technology, which was then used to advance European rocketry with the development of the Congreve rocket in 1805.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Buddhism 🔗 Project-independent assessment

The Buddhist games list is a list of games that Gautama Buddha is reputed to have said that he would not play and that his disciples should likewise not play, because he believed them to be a 'cause for negligence'. This list dates from the 6th or 5th century BCE and is the earliest known list of games.

There is some debate about the translation of some of the games mentioned, and the list given here is based on the translation by T. W. Rhys Davids of the Brahmajāla Sutta and is in the same order given in the original. The list is duplicated in a number of other early Buddhist texts, including the Vinaya Pitaka.

1. Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows. This is thought to refer to ashtapada and dasapada respectively, but later Sinhala commentaries refer to these boards also being used with games involving dice.
2. The same games played on imaginary boards. Akasam astapadam was an ashtapada variant played with no board, literally "astapadam played in the sky". A correspondent in the American Chess Bulletin identifies this as likely the earliest literary mention of a blindfold chess variant.
3. Games of marking diagrams on the floor such that the player can only walk on certain places. This is described in the Vinaya Pitaka as "having drawn a circle with various lines on the ground, there they play avoiding the line to be avoided". Rhys Davids suggests that it may refer to parihāra-patham, a form of hop-scotch.
4. Games where players either remove pieces from a pile or add pieces to it, with the loser being the one who causes the heap to shake (similar to the modern game pick-up sticks).
5. Games of throwing dice.
6. "Dipping the hand with the fingers stretched out in lac, or red dye, or flour-water, and striking the wet hand on the ground or on a wall, calling out 'What shall it be?' and showing the form required—elephants, horses, &c."
7. Ball games.
8. Blowing through a pat-kulal, a toy pipe made of leaves.
9. Ploughing with a toy plough.
10. Playing with toy windmills made from palm leaves.
11. Playing with toy measures made from palm leaves.
12. Playing with toy carts.
13. Playing with toy bows.
14. Guessing at letters traced with the finger in the air or on a friend's back.
15. Guessing a friend's thoughts.
16. Imitating deformities.

Although the modern game of chess had not been invented at the time the list was made, earlier chess-like games such as chaturaji may have existed. H.J.R. Murray refers to Rhys Davids' 1899 translation, noting that the 8×8 board game is most likely ashtapada while the 10×10 game is dasapada. He states that both are race games.

🔗 Economics 🔗 European history

The Price Revolution, sometimes known as the Spanish Price Revolution, was a series of economic events that occurred between the second half of the 15th century and the first half of the 17th century, and most specifically linked to the high rate of inflation that occurred during this period across Western Europe. Prices rose on average roughly sixfold over 150 years. This level of inflation amounts to 1–1.5% per year, a relatively low inflation rate for modern-day standards, but rather high given the monetary policy in place in the 16th century.

Generally it is thought that this high inflation was caused by the large influx of gold and silver from the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World, including Mexico, Peru, and the rest of the Spanish Empire.

Specie flowed through Spain, increasing Spanish prices, and then spread over Western Europe as a result of Spanish balance of payments deficit. This enlarged the monetary supply and price levels of many European countries. Combined with this influx of gold and silver, population growth and urbanization perpetuated the price revolution. According to this theory, too many people with too much money chased too few goods.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Systems 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Systems/Systems engineering

The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a systems thinking heuristic coined by Stafford Beer, who observed that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do." The term is widely used by systems theorists, and is generally invoked to counter the notion that the purpose of a system can be read from the intentions of those who design, operate, or promote it. When a system's side effects or unintended consequences reveal that its behavior is poorly understood, then the POSIWID perspective can balance political understandings of system behavior with a more straightforwardly descriptive view.