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Meta is a company performing big data analysis of scientific literature. Company is headquartered in Redwood City, California (formerly Toronto, Ontario, Canada) and operates Meta Science, a literature discovery platform. The company was acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2017.

🔗 Death 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Post-hardcore

The emo killings in Iraq were a string of homicides that were part of a campaign against Iraqi teenage boys who dressed in a Westernized emo style. Between 6 and 70 young men were kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Baghdad and Iraq during March 2012. In September 2012, BBC News reported that gay men in Baghdad said the killings had not abated.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Philosophy/Modern philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics 🔗 Philosophy/Analytic philosophy 🔗 Folklore

In the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The concept is one of the oldest in Western philosophy, having been discussed by the likes of Heraclitus and Plato by ca. 500-400 BC.

🔗 United States 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Rocketry

The Lockheed Martin X-33 was an uncrewed, sub-scale technology demonstrator suborbital spaceplane developed in the 1990s under the U.S. government–funded Space Launch Initiative program. The X-33 was a technology demonstrator for the VentureStar orbital spaceplane, which was planned to be a next-generation, commercially operated reusable launch vehicle. The X-33 would flight-test a range of technologies that NASA believed it needed for single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicles (SSTO RLVs), such as metallic thermal protection systems, composite cryogenic fuel tanks for liquid hydrogen, the aerospike engine, autonomous (uncrewed) flight control, rapid flight turn-around times through streamlined operations, and its lifting body aerodynamics.

Failures of its 21-meter wingspan and multi-lobed, composite-material fuel tank during pressure testing ultimately led to the withdrawal of federal support for the program in early 2001. Lockheed Martin has conducted unrelated testing, and has had a single success after a string of failures as recently as 2009 using a 2-meter scale model.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Meteorology 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Geology 🔗 Limnology and Oceanography 🔗 Materials

Ice is water frozen into a solid state. Depending on the presence of impurities such as particles of soil or bubbles of air, it can appear transparent or a more or less opaque bluish-white color.

In the Solar System, ice is abundant and occurs naturally from as close to the Sun as Mercury to as far away as the Oort cloud objects. Beyond the Solar System, it occurs as interstellar ice. It is abundant on Earth's surface – particularly in the polar regions and above the snow line – and, as a common form of precipitation and deposition, plays a key role in Earth's water cycle and climate. It falls as snowflakes and hail or occurs as frost, icicles or ice spikes.

Ice molecules can exhibit eighteen or more different phases (packing geometries) that depend on temperature and pressure. When water is cooled rapidly (quenching), up to three different types of amorphous ice can form depending on the history of its pressure and temperature. When cooled slowly correlated proton tunneling occurs below −253.15 °C (20 K, −423.67 °F) giving rise to macroscopic quantum phenomena. Virtually all the ice on Earth's surface and in its atmosphere is of a hexagonal crystalline structure denoted as ice I_h (spoken as "ice one h") with minute traces of cubic ice denoted as ice I_c. The most common phase transition to ice I_h occurs when liquid water is cooled below 0 °C (273.15 K, 32 °F) at standard atmospheric pressure. It may also be deposited directly by water vapor, as happens in the formation of frost. The transition from ice to water is melting and from ice directly to water vapor is sublimation.

Ice is used in a variety of ways, including cooling, winter sports and ice sculpture.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Systems/Visualization 🔗 Graphic design

Edward Rolf Tufte (; born March 14, 1942) is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Transhumanism

Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Moon 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Solar System 🔗 Solar System/Moon

Project A119, also known as A Study of Lunar Research Flights, was a top-secret plan developed in 1958 by the United States Air Force. The aim of the project was to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon, which would help in answering some of the mysteries in planetary astronomy and astrogeology. If the explosive device detonated on the surface, not in a lunar crater, the flash of explosive light would have been faintly visible to people on Earth with their naked eye, a show of force resulting in a possible boosting of domestic morale in the capabilities of the United States, a boost that was needed after the Soviet Union took an early lead in the Space Race and was also working on a similar project.

The project was never carried out, being cancelled primarily out of a fear of a negative public reaction, with the potential militarization of space that it would also have signified, and because a Moon landing would undoubtedly be a more popular achievement in the eyes of the American and international public alike. A similar project by the Soviet Union also never came to fruition.

The existence of the US project was revealed in 2000 by a former executive at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Leonard Reiffel, who led the project in 1958. A young Carl Sagan was part of the team responsible for predicting the effects of a nuclear explosion in vacuum and low gravity and in evaluating the scientific value of the project. The project documents remained secret for nearly 45 years, and despite Reiffel's revelations, the United States government has never officially recognized its involvement in the study.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/relativity

The ladder paradox (or barn-pole paradox) is a thought experiment in special relativity. It involves a ladder, parallel to the ground, travelling horizontally at relativistic speed (near the speed of light) and therefore undergoing a Lorentz length contraction. The ladder is imagined passing through the open front and rear doors of a garage or barn which is shorter than its rest length, so if the ladder was not moving it would not be able to fit inside. To a stationary observer, due to the contraction, the moving ladder is able to fit entirely inside the building as it passes through. On the other hand, from the point of view of an observer moving with the ladder, the ladder will not be contracted, and it is the building which will be Lorentz contracted to an even smaller length. Therefore, the ladder will not be able to fit inside the building as it passes through. This poses an apparent discrepancy between the realities of both observers.

This apparent paradox results from the mistaken assumption of absolute simultaneity. The ladder is said to fit into the garage if both of its ends can be made to be simultaneously inside the garage. The paradox is resolved when it is considered that in relativity, simultaneity is relative to each observer, making the answer to whether the ladder fits inside the garage also relative to each of them.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Economics 🔗 Books 🔗 Politics 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Medicine/Psychiatry

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a 2007 book by the Canadian author and social activist Naomi Klein. In the book, Klein argues that neoliberal free market policies (as advocated by the economist Milton Friedman) have risen to prominence in some developed countries because of a deliberate strategy of "shock therapy". This centers on the exploitation of national crises (disasters or upheavals) to establish controversial and questionable policies, while citizens are excessively distracted (emotionally and physically) to engage and develop an adequate response, and resist effectively. The book suggests that some man-made events, such as the Iraq War, were undertaken with the intention of pushing through such unpopular policies in their wake.

Some reviewers criticized the book for making what they viewed as simplifications of political phenomena, while others lauded it as a compelling and important work. The book served as the main source of a 2009 documentary feature film with the same title directed by Michael Winterbottom.