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🔗 The Baghdad Battery
The Baghdad Battery or Parthian Battery is a set of three artifacts which were found together: a ceramic pot, a tube of copper, and a rod of iron. It was discovered in modern Khujut Rabu, Iraq, close to the metropolis of Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian (150 BC – 223 AD) and Sasanian (224–650 AD) empires of Persia, and it is considered to date from either of these periods.
Its origin and purpose remain unclear. It was hypothesized by some researchers that the object functioned as a galvanic cell, possibly used for electroplating, or some kind of electrotherapy, but there is no electroplated object known from this period. An alternative explanation is that it functioned as a storage vessel for sacred scrolls.
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- "The Baghdad Battery" | 2019-04-28 | 76 Upvotes 19 Comments
🔗 Epiousios
Epiousios (ἐπιούσιος) is a Greek adjective used in the Lord's Prayer verse "Τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον" 'Give us today our epiousion bread'. Because the word is used nowhere else, its meaning is unclear. It is traditionally translated as "daily", but most modern scholars reject that interpretation.
Since it is a Koine Greek dis legomenon found only in the New Testament passages Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3, its interpretation relies upon morphological analysis and context. The traditional and most common English translation is daily, although most scholars today reject this in part because all other New Testament passages with the translation "daily" include the word hemera (ἡμέρᾱ, 'day').
The difficulty in understanding epiousios goes at least as far back as AD 382. At that time, St. Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus I to renew and consolidate the various collections of biblical texts in the Vetus Latina ("Old Latin") then in use by the Church. Jerome accomplished this by going back to the original Greek of the New Testament and translating it into Latin; his translation came to be known as the Vulgate. In the identical contexts of Matthew and Luke—that is, reporting the Lord's Prayer—Jerome translated epiousios in two different ways: by morphological analysis as 'supersubstantial' (supersubstantialem) in Matthew 6:11, but retaining 'daily' (quotidianum) in Luke 11:3.
The modern Catholic Catechism holds that there are several ways of understanding epiousios, including the traditional 'daily', but most literally as 'supersubstantial' or 'superessential', based on its morphological components. Alternative theories are that—aside from the etymology of ousia, meaning 'substance'—it may be derived from either of the verbs einai (εἶναι), meaning "to be", or ienai (ἰέναι), meaning both "to come" and "to go".:172
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- "Epiousios" | 2021-09-13 | 538 Upvotes 201 Comments
🔗 Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after “somewhat-viral” tweet
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- "Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after “somewhat-viral” tweet" | 2022-10-31 | 479 Upvotes 334 Comments
🔗 NEEMO
NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO, is a NASA analog mission that sends groups of astronauts, engineers and scientists to live in Aquarius underwater laboratory, the world's only undersea research station, for up to three weeks at a time in preparation for future space exploration.
Aquarius is an underwater habitat 3.5 miles (5.6 km) off Key Largo, Florida, in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. It is deployed on the ocean floor next to deep coral reefs 62 feet (19 m) below the surface.
NASA has used it since 2001 for a series of space exploration simulation missions, usually lasting 7 to 14 days, with space research mainly conducted by international astronauts. The mission had cost about 500 million U.S. dollars. The crew members are called aquanauts (as they live underwater at depth pressure for a period equal to or greater than 24 continuous hours without returning to the surface), and they perform EVAs in the underwater environment. A technique known as saturation diving allows the aquanauts to live and work underwater for days or weeks at a time. After twenty four hours underwater at any depth, the human body becomes saturated with dissolved gas. With saturation diving, divers can accurately predict exactly how much time they need to decompress before returning to the surface. This information limits the risk of decompression sickness. By living in the Aquarius habitat and working at the same depth on the ocean floor, NEEMO crews are able to remain underwater for the duration of their mission.
For NASA, the Aquarius habitat and its surroundings provide a convincing analog for space exploration. Much like space, the undersea world is a hostile, alien place for humans to live. NEEMO crew members experience some of the same challenges there that they would on a distant asteroid, planet (i.e. Mars) or Moon. During NEEMO missions, the aquanauts are able to simulate living on a spacecraft and test spacewalk techniques for future space missions. Working in space and underwater environments requires extensive planning and sophisticated equipment. The underwater condition has the additional benefit of allowing NASA to "weight" the aquanauts to simulate different gravity environments.
Until 2012, Aquarius was owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and operated by the National Undersea Research Center (NURC) at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington as a marine biology study base.
Since 2013, Aquarius is owned by Florida International University (FIU). As part of the FIU Marine Education and Research Initiative, the Medina Aquarius Program is dedicated to the study and preservation of marine ecosystems worldwide and is enhancing the scope and impact of FIU on research, educational outreach, technology development, and professional training. At the heart of the program is the Aquarius Reef Base.
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- "NEEMO" | 2022-12-10 | 74 Upvotes 16 Comments
🔗 Happy Men's Day! :)
International Men's Day (IMD) is a global awareness day for many issues that men face, including parental alienation, abuse, homelessness, suicide, and violence, celebrated annually on November 19. The objectives of celebrating an International Men's Day are set out in 'All the Six Pillars of International Men's Day'. It is also an occasion to celebrate boys' and men's lives, achievements and contributions, in particular for their contributions to nation, union, society, community, family, marriage, and childcare.
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- "Happy Men's Day! :)" | 2024-11-19 | 17 Upvotes 16 Comments
🔗 Broken Windows Theory
In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.
The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. It was popularized in the 1990s by New York City police commissioner William Bratton and mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose policing policies were influenced by the theory.
The theory became subject to debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. Broken windows policing has been enforced with controversial police practices, such as the high use of stop-and-frisk in New York City in the decade up to 2013. In response, Bratton and Kelling have written that broken windows policing should not be treated as "zero tolerance" or "zealotry", but as a method that requires "careful training, guidelines, and supervision" and a positive relationship with communities, thus linking it to community policing.
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- "Broken Windows Theory" | 2022-07-27 | 18 Upvotes 43 Comments
🔗 Wallpaper group
A wallpaper group (or plane symmetry group or plane crystallographic group) is a mathematical classification of a two-dimensional repetitive pattern, based on the symmetries in the pattern. Such patterns occur frequently in architecture and decorative art, especially in textiles and tiles as well as wallpaper.
The simplest wallpaper group, Group p1, applies when there is no symmetry other than the fact that a pattern repeats over regular intervals in two dimensions, as shown in the section on p1 below.
Consider the following examples of patterns with more forms of symmetry:
Examples A and B have the same wallpaper group; it is called p4m in the IUC notation and *442 in the orbifold notation. Example C has a different wallpaper group, called p4g or 4*2 . The fact that A and B have the same wallpaper group means that they have the same symmetries, regardless of details of the designs, whereas C has a different set of symmetries despite any superficial similarities.
The number of symmetry groups depends on the number of dimensions in the patterns. Wallpaper groups apply to the two-dimensional case, intermediate in complexity between the simpler frieze groups and the three-dimensional space groups. Subtle differences may place similar patterns in different groups, while patterns that are very different in style, color, scale or orientation may belong to the same group.
A proof that there were only 17 distinct groups of such planar symmeries was first carried out by Evgraf Fedorov in 1891 and then derived independently by George Pólya in 1924. The proof that the list of wallpaper groups was complete only came after the much harder case of space groups had been done. The seventeen possible wallpaper groups are listed below in § The seventeen groups.
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- "Wallpaper group" | 2014-03-04 | 62 Upvotes 7 Comments
🔗 Quantum vacuum plasma thruster
A quantum vacuum thruster (QVT or Q-thruster) is a theoretical system hypothesized to use the same principles and equations of motion that a conventional plasma thruster would use, namely magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), to make predictions about the behavior of the propellant. However, rather than using a conventional plasma as a propellant, a QVT would interact with quantum vacuum fluctuations of the zero-point field.
The concept is controversial and generally not considered physically possible. However, if QVT systems were possible they could eliminate the need to carry propellant, being limited only by the availability of energy.
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- "Quantum vacuum plasma thruster" | 2014-02-01 | 44 Upvotes 24 Comments
🔗 Hydraulic Telegraph
A hydraulic telegraph (Greek: υδραυλικός τηλέγραφος) is either of two different hydraulic-telegraph telecommunication systems. The earliest one was developed in 4th-century BC Greece, while the other was developed in 19th-century AD Britain. The Greek system was deployed in combination with semaphoric fires, while the latter British system was operated purely by hydraulic fluid pressure.
Although both systems employed water in their sending and receiver devices, their transmission media were completely different. The ancient Greek system transmitted its semaphoric information to the receiver visually, which limited its use to line-of-sight distances in good visibility weather conditions only. The 19th-century British system used water-filled pipes to effect changes to the water level in the receiver unit (similar to a transparent water-filled flexible tube used as a level indicator), thus limiting its range to the hydraulic pressure that could be generated at the transmitter's device.
While the Greek device was extremely limited in the codes (and hence the information) it could convey, the British device was never deployed in operation other than for very short-distance demonstrations. Although the British device could be used in any visibility within its range of operation, it could not work in sub-zero temperatures without additional infrastructure to heat the pipes. This contributed to its impracticality.
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- "Hydraulic Telegraph" | 2020-02-26 | 38 Upvotes 27 Comments
🔗 Mosuo Women
The Mosuo (Chinese: 摩梭; pinyin: Mósuō) are a small ethnic group living in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in China, close to the border with Tibet. Dubbed the 'Kingdom of Women' by the Chinese, the Mosuo population of about 50,000 live near Lugu Lake in the Tibetan Himalayas 27°42′35.30″N 100°47′4.04″E.
Scholars use diverse terms and spellings to designate the Mosuo culture. Most prefer 'Mosuo' some spell it 'Moso', while a minority use neither term, but refer to them as the Na people.
The Mosuo people are known as the 'Kingdom of Women' because the Na are a matrilineal society: heterosexual activity occurs only by mutual consent and mostly through the custom of the secret nocturnal 'visit'; men and women are free to have multiple partners, and to initiate or break off relationships when they please.
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- "Mosuo Women" | 2019-06-07 | 105 Upvotes 62 Comments