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🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Systems 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics

In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was popularised in the twentieth century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton.

Unintended consequences can be grouped into three types:

• Unexpected benefit: A positive unexpected benefit (also referred to as luck, serendipity or a windfall).
• Unexpected drawback: An unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy (e.g., while irrigation schemes provide people with water for agriculture, they can increase waterborne diseases that have devastating health effects, such as schistosomiasis).
• Perverse result: A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse).

🔗 Africa 🔗 Highways 🔗 Highways/Road transport 🔗 Highways/African Highways

The Trans-African Highway network comprises transcontinental road projects in Africa being developed by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), the African Development Bank (ADB), and the African Union in conjunction with regional international communities. They aim to promote trade and alleviate poverty in Africa through highway infrastructure development and the management of road-based trade corridors. The total length of the nine highways in the network is 56,683 km (35,221 mi).

In some documents the highways are referred to as "Trans-African Corridors" or "Road Corridors" rather than highways. The name Trans-African Highway and its variants are not in wide common usage outside of planning and development circles, and as of 2014 one does not see them signposted as such or labelled on maps, except in Kenya and Uganda where the Mombasa–Nairobi–Kampala–Fort Portal section (or the Kampala–Kigali feeder road) of Trans-African Highway 8 is sometimes referred to as the "Trans-Africa Highway".

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Business

War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the 1915–1934 United States occupation of Haiti.

After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War Is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. His work was condensed in Reader's Digest as a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the Reader's Digest version, Lowell Thomas, who wrote Butler’s oral autobiography, praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".

🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Business

Ronald Crawford Conway (born March 9, 1951) is an American angel investor and philanthropist, often described as one of Silicon Valley's "super angels". Conway is recognized as a strong networker.

🔗 Michigan 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Finland

Sisu is a Finnish concept described as stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness and is held by Finns themselves to express their national character. It is generally considered not to have a literal equivalent in English.

🔗 Sports

Naismith's rule helps with the planning of a walking or hiking expedition by calculating how long it will take to travel the intended route, including any extra time taken when walking uphill. This rule of thumb was devised by William W. Naismith, a Scottish mountaineer, in 1892. A modern version can be formulated as follows:

Allow one hour for every 3 miles (5 km) forward, plus an additional hour for every 2,000 feet (600 m) of ascent.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

This article compares variety of different X window managers. For an introduction to the topic, see X Window System.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Literature 🔗 Poland 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

Stanisław Herman Lem (Polish: [staˈɲiswaf ˈlɛm] (listen); 12 or 13 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire. Lem's books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 45 million copies. From the 1950s to 2000s, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. The total print of Lem's books is over 30 million copies.

Lem's works explore philosophical themes through speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books.

Translating his works is difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, idiomatic wordplay, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.

🔗 Comics

Potrzebie (; Polish pronunciation: [pɔtˈʂɛbʲe] dative/locative of potrzeba, "a need") is a Polish word popularized by its non sequitur use as a running gag in the early issues of Mad not long after the comic book began in 1952.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

In philosophy and psychology, an alief is an automatic or habitual belief-like attitude, particularly one that is in tension with a person's explicit beliefs.

For example, a person standing on a transparent balcony may believe that they are safe, but alieve that they are in danger. A person watching a sad movie may believe that the characters are completely fictional, but their aliefs may lead them to cry nonetheless. A person who is hesitant to eat fudge that has been formed into the shape of feces, or who exhibits reluctance in drinking from a sterilized bedpan may believe that the substances are safe to eat and drink, but may alieve that they are not.

The term alief was introduced by Tamar Gendler, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University, in a pair of influential articles published in 2008. Since the publication of these original articles, the notion of alief has been utilized by Gendler and others — including Paul Bloom and Daniel Dennett — to explain a range of psychological phenomena in addition to those listed above, including the pleasure of stories, the persistence of positive illusions, certain religious beliefs, and certain psychiatric disturbances, such as phobias and obsessive–compulsive disorder.