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🔗 Game theory

The Price of Anarchy (PoA) is a concept in economics and game theory that measures how the efficiency of a system degrades due to selfish behavior of its agents. It is a general notion that can be extended to diverse systems and notions of efficiency. For example, consider the system of transportation of a city and many agents trying to go from some initial location to a destination. Let efficiency in this case mean the average time for an agent to reach the destination. In the 'centralized' solution, a central authority can tell each agent which path to take in order to minimize the average travel time. In the 'decentralized' version, each agent chooses its own path. The Price of Anarchy measures the ratio between average travel time in the two cases.

Usually the system is modeled as a game and the efficiency is some function of the outcomes (e.g. maximum delay in a network, congestion in a transportation system, social welfare in an auction, ...). Different concepts of equilibrium can be used to model the selfish behavior of the agents, among which the most common is the Nash equilibrium. Different flavors of Nash equilibrium lead to variations of the notion of Price of Anarchy as Pure Price of Anarchy (for deterministic equilibria), Mixed Price of Anarchy (for randomized equilibria), and Bayes–Nash Price of Anarchy (for games with incomplete information). Solution concepts other than Nash equilibrium lead to variations such as the Price of Sinking.

The term Price of Anarchy was first used by Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou, but the idea of measuring inefficiency of equilibrium is older. The concept in its current form was designed to be the analogue of the 'approximation ratio' in an approximation algorithm or the 'competitive ratio' in an online algorithm. This is in the context of the current trend of analyzing games using algorithmic lenses (algorithmic game theory).

🔗 Canada 🔗 Death 🔗 Law Enforcement 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 Canada/Saskatchewan

The Saskatoon freezing deaths were a series of deaths of Indigenous Canadians in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the early 2000s, which were confirmed to have been caused by members of the Saskatoon Police Service. The police officers would arrest Indigenous people, usually men, for alleged drunkenness and/or disorderly behaviour, sometimes without cause. The officers would then drive them to the outskirts of the city at night in the winter, and abandon them, leaving them stranded in sub-zero temperatures.

The practice was known as taking Indigenous people for "starlight tours" and dates back to 1976. As of 2021, despite convictions for related offences, no Saskatoon police officer has been convicted specifically for having caused freezing deaths.

🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 United States/North Dakota

The Bank of North Dakota (BND) is a state-owned, state-run financial institution based in Bismarck, North Dakota. It is the only government-owned general-service bank in the United States. It is the legal depository for all state funds in North Dakota, and uses these deposits to fund development, agriculture, and small businesses.

The bank was established in the early 20th century to promote agriculture, commerce, and industry in the state. It has received praise and media attention in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. and for their actions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to available data, the bank has turned a profit every year since its founding. The BND has a favorable reputation among North Dakotans. Other states have tried to replicate the BND elsewhere, but have been limited by political gridlock and the power dynamics in banking.

🔗 United States 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

Ballistic Recovery Systems, Inc. (commonly referred to as BRS Aerospace, or simply BRS) is a manufacturer of aircraft ballistic parachutes.

The company was formed in 1980 by Boris Popov of Saint Paul, Minnesota, after he survived a 400-foot (120 m) fall in a partially collapsed hang glider in 1975. As a result, Popov invented a parachute system that could lower an entire light aircraft to the ground in the event of loss of control, failure of the aircraft structure, or other in-flight emergencies.

Popov was granted a U.S. patent on 26 August 1986 for the so-called Ballistic Recovery System (BRS) - patent US 4607814 A.

The company has two divisions: BRS Aviation and BRS Defense.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs

Psychedelic agents in creative problem-solving experiment was a study designed to evaluate whether the use of a psychedelic substance with supportive setting can lead to improvement of performance in solving professional problems. The altered performance was measured by subjective reports, questionnaires, the obtained solutions for the professional problems and psychometric data using the Purdue Creativity, the Miller Object Visualization, and the Witkins Embedded Figures tests. This experiment was a pilot that was to be followed by control studies as part of exploratory studies on uses for psychedelic drugs, that were interrupted early in 1966 when the Food and Drug Administration declared a moratorium on research with human subjects, as a strategy in combating illicit use.

🔗 Mathematics

Gabriel's horn (also called Torricelli's trumpet) is a geometric figure which has infinite surface area but finite volume. The name refers to the Abrahamic tradition identifying the archangel Gabriel as the angel who blows the horn to announce Judgment Day, associating the divine, or infinite, with the finite. The properties of this figure were first studied by Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli in the 17th century.

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Languages

The pre-Greek substrate (or substratum) consists of the unknown pre-Greek language or languages (either Pre-Indo-European or other Indo-European languages) spoken in prehistoric Greece prior to the emergence of the Proto-Greek language in the region c. 3200–2200 BC, during the Early Helladic period. About 1,000 words of Greek vocabulary cannot be adequately explained as derivatives from Proto-Greek or Proto-Indo-European, leading to the substratum hypothesis.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Christianity/Catholicism 🔗 Christianity/Eastern Orthodoxy 🔗 Christianity/Jesus 🔗 Christianity/Oriental Orthodoxy

The Immovable Ladder is a wooden ladder leaning against the right window on the second tier of the facade of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem. The ladder rests on a ledge and is attached to a window owned by the Armenian Apostolic Church. The ladder is a symbol of inter-confessional disputes within Christianity. Its presence in its current location signifies the adherence to an agreement among six Christian denominations, who collectively own the church, not to move, repair, or alter anything in the church without the consent of all six denominations.

🔗 United States 🔗 California 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Oregon 🔗 United States/Utah 🔗 Weather 🔗 Weather/Non-tropical storms 🔗 Weather/Floods

The Great Flood of 1862 was the largest flood in the recorded history of Oregon, Nevada, and California, occurring from December 1861 to January 1862. It was preceded by weeks of continuous rains and snows in the very high elevations that began in Oregon in November 1861 and continued into January 1862. This was followed by a record amount of rain from January 9–12, and contributed to a flood that extended from the Columbia River southward in western Oregon, and through California to San Diego, and extended as far inland as Idaho in the Washington Territory, Nevada and Utah in the Utah Territory, and Arizona in the western New Mexico Territory. The event dumped an equivalent of 10 feet (3.0 m) of water in California, in the form of rain and snow, over a period of 43 days. Immense snowfalls in the mountains of far western North America caused more flooding in Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, as well as in Baja California and Sonora, Mexico the following spring and summer, as the snow melted.

The event was capped by a warm intense storm that melted the high snow load. The resulting snow-melt flooded valleys, inundated or swept away towns, mills, dams, flumes, houses, fences, and domestic animals, and ruined fields. It has been described as the worst disaster ever to strike California. The storms caused approximately $100 million (1861 USD) in damage, approximately equal to $3.117 billion (2021 USD). The governor, state legislature, and state employees were not paid for a year and a half. At least 4,000 people were estimated to have been killed in the floods in California, which was roughly 1% of the state population at the time.

🔗 Germany

Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz listen  (RkReÜAÜG) (literally, Cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law) was a law of the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern of 1999, repealed in 2013. It dealt with the supervision of the labeling of beef.

The name is an example of the virtually unlimited compounding of nouns that is possible in many Germanic languages. German orthography uses "closed" compounds, concatenating nouns to form one long word. This is unlike most English compounds, which are separated using spaces or hyphens.

Strictly speaking, it is made up of two words, because a hyphen at the end of a word is used to show that the word will end in the same way as the following. Consequently, the two words would be Rinderkennzeichnungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz and Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz.

This is the official short title of the law; its full name is Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung, corresponding to Law on delegation of duties for supervision of cattle marking and beef labeling. Most German laws have a short title consisting of a composite noun.

Words as long as this are not at all common in German. When the law was proposed in the state parliament, the members reacted with laughter and the responsible minister Till Backhaus apologized for the "possibly excessive length". In 1999, the German Language Society nominated Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz for its Word of the Year award, but it lost to das Millennium, a Latin word that gained in usage at that time, complementing the German word for millennium, Jahrtausend.

In 2003, a decree was established that modified some real estate-related regulations; its name was longer than the above law: Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung (long title: Verordnung zur Übertragung der Zuständigkeiten des Oberfinanzpräsidenten der Oberfinanzdirektion Berlin nach § 8 Satz 2 der Grundstücksverkehrsordnung auf das Bundesamt zur Regelung offener Vermögensfragen, GrundVZÜV), roughly Regulation on the delegation of authority concerning land conveyance permissions. At 67 letters, it surpassed the RkReÜAÜG, but was repealed in 2007.