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🔗 Books

The Autumn of the Middle Ages, The Waning of the Middle Ages, or Autumntide of the Middle Ages (published in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen and translated into English in 1924, German in 1924, and French in 1932), is the best-known work by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.

In the book, Huizinga presents the idea that the exaggerated formality and romanticism of late medieval court society was a defense mechanism against the constantly increasing violence and brutality of general society. He saw the period as one of pessimism, cultural exhaustion, and nostalgia, rather than of rebirth and optimism.

His main conclusion is that the combination of required modernization of statehood governance, stuck in traditionalism, in combination with the exhausting inclusion of an ever-growing corpus of Catholic rites and popular beliefs in daily life, led to the implosion of late medieval society. This provided light to the rise of (religious) individualism, humanism and scientific progress: the renaissance.

The book was nominated for the 1939 Nobel Prize for Literature, but lost to the Finnish writer Frans Eemil Sillanpää.

Huizinga's work later came under some criticism, especially for relying too heavily on evidence from the rather exceptional case of the Burgundian court. Other criticisms include the writing of the book being "old-fashioned" and "too literary".

A new English translation of the book was published in 1996 because of perceived deficiencies in the original translation. The new translation, by Rodney Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch, was based on the second edition of the Dutch publication in 1921 and compared with the German translation published in 1924.

To mark the centenary of Herfsttij, a new translation by Diane Webb appeared in 2020, published by Leiden University Press: Autumntide of the Middle Ages. According to Benjamin Kaplan, this translation "captures Huizinga's original voice better than either of the two previous English editions". This new English edition also includes for the first time 300 full-colour illustrations of all the works of art Huizinga mentions in his text.

In the 1970s, Radio Netherlands produced an audio series about the book, entitled "Autumn of the Middle Ages: A Six-part History in Words and Music from the Low Countries".

🔗 United States 🔗 Library of Congress 🔗 Geography 🔗 Maps 🔗 Libraries

The Waldseemüller map or Universalis Cosmographia ("Universal Cosmography") is a printed wall map of the world by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, originally published in April 1507. It is known as the first map to use the name "America". The name America is placed on what is now called South America on the main map. As explained in Cosmographiae Introductio, the name was bestowed in honor of the Italian Amerigo Vespucci.

The map is drafted on a modification of Ptolemy's second projection, expanded to accommodate the Americas and the high latitudes. A single copy of the map survives, presently housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Waldseemüller also created globe gores, printed maps designed to be cut out and pasted onto spheres to form globes of the Earth. The wall map, and his globe gores of the same date, depict the American continents in two pieces. These depictions differ from the small inset map in the top border of the wall map, which shows the two American continents joined by an isthmus.

🔗 Visual arts

SONATA VI are two paintings, Stellar sonata. Allegro and Stellar sonata. Andante, of Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis from 1908.

🔗 Economics

A job guarantee (JG) is an economic policy proposal aimed at providing a sustainable solution to the dual problems of inflation and unemployment. Its aim is to create full employment and price stability, by having the state promise to hire unemployed workers as an employer of last resort (ELR).

The economic policy stance currently dominant around the world uses unemployment as a policy tool to control inflation; when inflation rises, the government pursues contractionary fiscal or monetary policy, creating a buffer stock of unemployed people, reducing wage demands, and ultimately inflation. When inflationary expectations subside, expansionary policy aims to produce the opposite effect. In Marxian terms, the unemployed serve as a reserve army of labor. By contrast, in a job guarantee program, a buffer stock of employed people (employed in the job guarantee program) provides the same protection against inflation without the social costs of unemployment, hence potentially fulfilling the dual mandate of full employment and price stability.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Lists

A nuclear close call is an incident that could lead to, or could have led to at least one unintended nuclear detonation/explosion. These incidents typically involve a perceived imminent threat to a nuclear-armed country which could lead to retaliatory strikes against the perceived aggressor. The damage caused by international nuclear exchange is not necessarily limited to the participating countries, as the hypothesized rapid climate change associated with even small-scale regional nuclear war could threaten food production worldwide—a scenario known as nuclear famine.

Despite a reduction in global nuclear tensions and major nuclear arms reductions after the end of the Cold War (in 1989), estimated nuclear warhead stockpiles total roughly 15,000 worldwide, with the United States and Russia holding 90% of the total.

Though exact details on many nuclear close calls are hard to come by, the analysis of particular cases has highlighted the importance of a variety of factors in preventing accidents. At an international level, this includes the importance of context and outside mediation; at the national level, effectiveness in government communications, and involvement of key decision-makers; and, at the individual level, the decisive role of individuals in following intuition and prudent decision-making, often in violation of protocol.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Business 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Energy 🔗 Home Living

The Phoebus cartel existed to control the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs. They appropriated market territories and fixed the useful life of such bulbs. Corporations based in Europe and America founded the cartel on January 15, 1925 in Geneva. They had intended the cartel to last for thirty years (1925 to 1955). The cartel ceased operations in 1939 owing to the outbreak of World War II. The cartel included manufacturers Osram, General Electric, Associated Electrical Industries, and Philips, among others.

The Phoebus cartel created a notable landmark in the history of the global economy because it engaged in large-scale planned obsolescence to generate repeated sales and maximize profit. It also reduced competition in the light bulb industry for almost fifteen years. Critics accused the cartel of preventing technological advances that would produce longer-lasting light bulbs. Phoebus based itself in Switzerland. The corporation named itself Phœbus S.A. Compagnie Industrielle pour le Développement de l'Éclairage (French for "Phoebus, Inc. Industrial Company for the Development of Lighting").

🔗 Spaceflight

A porkchop plot (also pork-chop plot) is a chart that shows contours of equal characteristic energy (C₃) against combinations of launch date and arrival date for a particular interplanetary flight.

By examining the results of the porkchop plot, engineers can determine when launch opportunities exist (a launch window) that is compatible with the capabilities of a particular spacecraft. A given contour, called a porkchop curve, represents constant C₃, and the center of the porkchop the optimal minimum C₃. The orbital elements of the solution, where the fixed values are the departure date, the arrival date, and the length of the flight, were first solved mathematically in 1761 by Johann Heinrich Lambert, and the equation is generally known as Lambert's problem (or theorem).

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Economics 🔗 Engineering

In multi-objective optimization, the Pareto front (also called Pareto frontier or Pareto curve) is the set of all Pareto efficient solutions. The concept is widely used in engineering.^{: 111–148} It allows the designer to restrict attention to the set of efficient choices, and to make tradeoffs within this set, rather than considering the full range of every parameter.^{: 63–65 : 399–412}

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 Technology 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Internet 🔗 History 🔗 Computing 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Websites 🔗 Websites/Computing 🔗 Stanford University 🔗 Google

Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm at first known as "BackRub" in 1996, with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg. The search engine soon proved successful and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011 (which was shut down in April 2019), in addition to many other products. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc.

The search engine went through many updates in attempts to eradicate search engine optimization.

Google has engaged in partnerships with NASA, AOL, Sun Microsystems, News Corporation, Sky UK, and others. The company set up a charitable offshoot, Google.org, in 2005.

The name Google is a misspelling of Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.

🔗 Systems 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Globalization

World-systems theory (also known as world-systems analysis or the world-systems perspective) is a multidisciplinary, macro-scale approach to world history and social change which emphasizes the world-system (and not nation states) as the primary (but not exclusive) unit of social analysis.

"World-system" refers to the inter-regional and transnational division of labor, which divides the world into core countries, semi-periphery countries, and the periphery countries. Core countries focus on higher skill, capital-intensive production, and the rest of the world focuses on low-skill, labor-intensive production and extraction of raw materials. This constantly reinforces the dominance of the core countries. Nonetheless, the system has dynamic characteristics, in part as a result of revolutions in transport technology, and individual states can gain or lose their core (semi-periphery, periphery) status over time. This structure is unified by the division of labour. It is a world-economy rooted in a capitalist economy. For a time, certain countries become the world hegemon; during the last few centuries, as the world-system has extended geographically and intensified economically, this status has passed from the Netherlands, to the United Kingdom and (most recently) to the United States.

World-systems theory has been examined by many political theorists and sociologists to explain the reasons for the rise and fall of nations, income inequality, social unrest, and imperialism.