Wikipedia
Wikipedia articles, each with what it's about and how it begins.
180 articles.
Is–ought problem
The is–ought problem is the question of whether moral statements about what ought to be can be inferred from objective statements about what is. It was first articulated by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who saw a significant difference between descriptive statements and prescriptive statements. He argued that it is not obvious how one can coherently transition from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, neo-orthodox theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity's role in the secular world have become widely influential; his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship is described as a modern classic. Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Nazi euthanasia program and genocidal…
Abhinavagupta
Abhinavagupta was a philosopher, mystic and aesthetician from Kashmir. He was also considered an influential musician, poet, dramatist, exegete, theologian, and logician – a polymathic personality who exercised strong influences on Indian culture.
Cloudsplitter
Cloudsplitter is a 1998 historical novel by Russell Banks relating the story of abolitionist John Brown.
Dignāga
Dignāga was an Indian Buddhist philosopher and logician. He is credited as one of the Buddhist founders of Indian logic and atomism. Dignāga's work laid the groundwork for the development of deductive logic in India and created the first system of Buddhist logic and epistemology (pramāṇa).
Hemachandra
Hemachandra was an 11-12th century Śvetāmbara Jaina ācārya, scholar, poet, mathematician, philosopher, yogi, grammarian, law theorist, historian, lexicographer, rhetorician, logician, and prosodist. Noted as a prodigy by his contemporaries, he gained the title kalikālasarvajña, "the knower of all knowledge in his times" and is also regarded as father of the Gujarati language.
Delphic maxims
The Delphic maxims are a set of moral precepts that were inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in the ancient Greek precinct of Delphi. The three best known maxims – "Know thyself", "Nothing in excess", and "Surety is ruin" – were prominently located at the entrance to the temple, and were traditionally said to have been authored by the legendary Seven Sages of Greece, or even by Apollo. In fact, they are more likely to have simply been popular proverbs. Each maxim has a long history of…
Jakob Lorber
Jakob Lorber was a Christian mystic and self-professed visionary from the Duchy of Styria who promoted liberal Universalism, and who referred to himself as "God's scribe". He wrote that, on 15 March 1840, he began hearing an "inner voice" from the "region" of his heart, thereafter transcribing what it said. By the time of his death, 24 years later, he had written over 10,000 pages of detailed manuscripts.
International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during the 19th century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan, William Jones, Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress, in September 1894. IAST makes it possible for the reader to…
Martial race
Martial race was a designation which was created by army officials in British India after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, in which they classified each caste as belonging to one of two categories, the 'martial' castes and the 'non-martial' castes. The ostensible reason for this system of classification was the belief that a 'martial race' was typically brave and well-built for fighting, while the 'non-martial races' were those races which the British considered unfit for battle because of their…
Percolation threshold
The percolation threshold is a mathematical concept in percolation theory that describes the formation of long-range connectivity in random systems. Below the threshold a giant connected component does not exist; while above it, there exists a giant component of the order of system size. In engineering and coffee making, percolation represents the flow of fluids through porous media, but in the mathematics and physics worlds it generally refers to simplified lattice models of random systems or…
Namagiri Thayar
The Narasimhaswamy temple is a temple located in Namakkal, a town in the Namakkal district in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is dedicated to the Hindu god Narasimha, considered an avatar of Vishnu. The temple displays Dravidian style of architecture and Rock-cut architecture construction.
Alexander Herzen
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian writer and thinker known as the precursor of Russian socialism and one of the main precursors of agrarian populism. With his writings, many composed while exiled in London, he attempted to influence the situation in Russia, contributing to a political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. He published the important social novel Who is to Blame? (1845–46). His autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, is often considered one of the best…
Dnyaneshwar
Sant Dnyaneshwar, , also referred to as Jñāneśvara, Jñānadeva, Dnyandev or Mauli or Dnyandev Vitthal Kulkarni, was a 13th-century Indian Marathi saint, poet, philosopher and yogi of the Nath and Varkari tradition. In his short life of 21 years, he authored Dnyaneshwari and Amrutanubhav. These are the oldest surviving literary works in the Marathi language, and considered to be milestones in Marathi literature. Sant Dnyaneshwar's ideas reflect the non-dualistic Advaita Vedanta philosophy and an…
Timur
Timur, also known as Tamerlane, was a Turco-Mongol conqueror, first ruler of the Timurid dynasty, and the founder of the Timurid Empire, which ruled over modern-day Afghanistan, Iran, and Central Asia. He was undefeated in most battles and is widely regarded as one of the greatest military leaders and tacticians in history, as well as one of the most brutal and deadly. Timur is also considered a great patron of the arts, for he interacted with scholars and poets such as ibn Khaldun, Hafez, and…
Wannsee Conference
The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of senior government officials of Nazi Germany and Schutzstaffel (SS) leaders, held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee on 20 January 1942. The purpose of the conference, called by the director of the Reich Security Main Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, was to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, whereby most of the Jews of…
Lake Wobegon
Lake Wobegon is a fictional town created by Garrison Keillor as the setting of the recurring segment "News from Lake Wobegon" for the radio program A Prairie Home Companion broadcast from Saint Paul, Minnesota. The fictional town serves as the setting for many of Keillor's stories and novels, gaining an international audience with Lake Wobegon Days in 1985. Described as a small rural town in central Minnesota, the events and adventures of the townspeople provided Keillor with a wealth of…
Michael Spinks
Michael Spinks is an American former professional boxer who competed from 1977 to 1988. He held world championships in two weight classes, including the undisputed light heavyweight title from 1983 to 1985, and the lineal heavyweight title from 1985 to 1988. As an amateur he won a gold medal in the middleweight division at the 1976 Summer Olympics.
Theodore Dalrymple
Anthony Malcolm Daniels, also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is a conservative English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the East End of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.
Glockenspiel
The glockenspiel or bells is a percussion instrument consisting of pitched aluminum or steel bars arranged in a keyboard layout. This makes the glockenspiel a type of metallophone, similar to the vibraphone.
Hua Mulan
Hua Mulan is a legendary folk heroine from the Northern and Southern dynasties era of Chinese history. Hua Mulan is depicted in the Wu Shuang Pu by Jin Guliang.
Bobby soxer (music)
Bobby-soxers were a subculture of American young women in the mid-to-late 1940s. Their interests included popular music, in particular that of singer Frank Sinatra, and wearing loose-fitting clothing, notably bobby socks. Their manner of dress, which diverged sharply from earlier ideals of feminine beauty, was controversial. As a teenager, actress Shirley Temple played a stereotypical bobby soxer in the film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947).
Appellation d'origine contrôlée
In France, the label appellation d'origine contrôlée identifies an agricultural product whose stages of production and processing are carried out in a defined geographical area – the terroir – and using recognized and traditional production methods. The specificity of an AOC product is determined by the combination of a physical and biological environment with established production techniques transmitted within a human community. Together, these give the product its distinctive qualities.
Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke was an American philosopher and logician. He was a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a professor emeritus at Princeton University. From the 1960s until his death, he was a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical and modal logic, philosophy of language and mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and recursion theory.
Alexander von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography, while his advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.…
Janissaries series
Janissaries are an American series of military and political-based science fiction novels are set in an interstellar confederation of races, in which humans are a slave race entrusted with military affairs and law enforcement. They were written by Jerry Pournelle, with Roland J. Green co-authoring the second two books.
Robert Plomin
Robert Plomin is an American-British psychologist and geneticist best known for his research in behavioral genetics and the genetic basis of cognitive abilities, personality, and mental health. Since 1994, he has been a Research Professor at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre (SGDP), a department in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. Plomin is widely recognized as an influential figure in behavioral science, particularly for…
Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961
The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 (SBA); is a U.S. federal statute that amended antitrust laws to allow professional sports leagues to pool the broadcasting rights held by all their teams and sign league-wide exclusive contracts with national television networks. It also added provisions limiting the days, times, and locations of when and where professional football games could be telecast under this antitrust exemption so they avoid competing with most high school football and college…
Peterburgian Vedism
Peterburgian Vedism or Peterburgian Rodnovery, or more broadly Russian Vedism and Slavic Vedism, is one of the earliest branches of Rodnovery and one of the most important schools of thought within it, founded by Viktor Nikolayevich Bezverkhy in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in the 1970s. Early Peterburgian Vedism developed independently from other Rodnover movements in the inland of Russia, due to the distinguished culture of the city of Saint Petersburg itself, and represents one of the most…
Slavic Native Faith
The Slavic Native Faith, commonly known as Rodnovery, is a polytheistic religion. Classified as a new religious movement, its practitioners hearken back to the historical belief systems of the Slavic peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, though the movement is inclusive of external influences and hosts a variety of currents. "Rodnovery" is a widely accepted self-descriptor within the community, although there are Rodnover organisations which further characterise the religion as Vedism,…
Maimonides
Moses ben Maimon, commonly known as Maimonides and also referred to by the Hebrew acronym Rambam, was a Sephardic Jewish rabbi who is widely acknowledged as one of the most prolific and influential Torah scholars of the Middle Ages.
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher and political theorist, best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy.
Mahāvīra (mathematician)
Mahāvīra was a 9th-century Indian Jain mathematician possibly born in Mysore, in India. He authored Gaṇita-sāra-saṅgraha or the Compendium on the gist of Mathematics in 850 CE. He was patronised by the Rashtrakuta emperor Amoghavarsha. He separated astrology from mathematics. It is the earliest Indian text entirely devoted to mathematics. He expounded on the same subjects on which Aryabhata and Brahmagupta contended, but he expressed them more clearly. His work is a highly syncopated approach…
Zugzwang
Zugzwang is a situation found in chess and other turn-based games wherein one player is put at a disadvantage because of their obligation to make a move; a player is said to be "in zugzwang" when any legal move will worsen their position.
Ateshgah of Baku
The Ateshgah of Baku, Azerbaijani: Atəşgah), often called the "Fire Temple of Baku", is a syncretic temple in Surakhany town. Sarah Ashurbeyli notes that the Atsh is distorted Atesh (“fire”) and Atshi-Baguan means “Fires of Baguan”, referring to Baku. The word Baguan comes from the word Baga, which means “God” in Old Persian, and Bhaga. Baku gets its name from Bagavan/Bagawan/Baguan/Bhagawan. It was called Bagavan during the Sassanian rule.
Edward Behr (journalist)
Edward Samuel Behr was a foreign correspondent and war journalist best known for his many years of work for Newsweek.
Dhalgren
Dhalgren is a 1975 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. Delany. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe. It is number 33 on the 20th Century's Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction list.
Fernando Rey
Fernando Casado Arambillet, best known as Fernando Rey, was a Spanish actor of film, theatre, and televisionwho worked in both Europe and the United States. Known for his suave image, Rey was best-known for his roles in the films of surrealist director Luis Buñuel and as the drug lord Alain Charnier in The French Connection (1971) and French Connection II (1975). He appeared in more than 150 films over half a century.
Jeff Hawkins - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jeffrey Hawkins is an American businessman, computer scientist, neuroscientist and engineer. He co-founded Palm Computing where he co-created the PalmPilot, the Palm Treo and Handspring.
Cavalry tactics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For much of history, humans have used some form of cavalry for war and, as a result, cavalry tactics have evolved over time. Tactically, the main advantages of cavalry over infantry were greater mobility, a larger impact, and a higher riding position.
Personal Software Process - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Personal Software Process (PSP) is a structured software development process that is designed to help software engineers better understand and improve their performance by bringing discipline to the way they develop software and tracking their predicted and actual development of the code. It clearly shows developers how to manage the quality of their products, how to make a sound plan, and how to make commitments. It also offers them the data to justify their plans. They can evaluate their…
Trachtenberg system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Trachtenberg system is a system of rapid mental calculation. The system consists of a number of readily memorized operations that allow one to perform arithmetic computations very quickly. It was developed by the Ukrainian-Jewish mathematician and engineer Jakow Trachtenberg in order to keep his mind occupied while being held prisoner in a German Nazi concentration camp.
The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art is a Chinese mathematics book, composed by several generations of scholars from the 10th–2nd century BCE, its latest stage being from the 1st century CE. This book is one of the earliest surviving mathematical texts from China, the others being the Suan shu shu and Zhoubi Suanjing. It lays out an approach to mathematics that centres on finding the most general methods of solving problems, which may be contrasted with the approach common to ancient Greek…
Passive house - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Passive house or Passivhaus is a voluntary building performance standard designed to have high energy efficiency and thermal comfort while substantially reduces a building’s carbon footprint. Buildings certified to the standard are ultra-low energy and typically require very little energy for space heating or cooling. The approach is used for housing and for non-residential buildings such as offices, schools, kindergartens and healthcare facilities. Energy efficiency is integral to…
Digital Visual Interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video display interface developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). The digital interface is used to connect a video source, such as a video display controller, to a display device, such as a computer monitor. It was developed with the intention of creating an industry standard for the transfer of uncompressed digital video content.
Industrial archaeology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Industrial archaeology (IA) is the systematic study of material and immaterial evidence associated with past and present industrial processes. This can be either the material culture of a manufacturing process from any period or, more often, the study of the process of industrialisation through material evidence. This evidence includes buildings, machinery, artifacts, sites, infrastructure, documents, and other items associated with the production, manufacture, extraction, transport, or…
Michel Foucault - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Paul-Michel Foucault, known as Michel Foucault, was a French philosopher, literary critic, and historian of ideas who analyzed the relationships between power, knowledge, and liberty, and how they are used as a form of social control through institutions. Sometimes called a structuralist or postmodernist, he rejected these labels and sought to critique authority without limiting himself. His thought has influenced academics in many areas of study, including anthropology, communication studies,…
Look Around You - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Look Around You is a comedic parody of British science television shows, devised and written by Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, and narrated in the first series by Nigel Lambert. The first series of eight 10-minute shorts was shown in 2002, and the second series of six 30-minute episodes in 2005, both on BBC Two. The first series of Look Around You was nominated for a BAFTA award in 2003.
Schönhage–Strassen algorithm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Schönhage–Strassen algorithm is an asymptotically fast multiplication algorithm for large integers, published by Arnold Schönhage and Volker Strassen in 1971. It works by recursively applying fast Fourier transform (FFT) over the integers modulo. The run-time bit complexity to multiply two n-digit numbers using the algorithm is in big O notation.
Hamming(7,4) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In coding theory, Hamming(7,4) is a linear error-correcting code that encodes four bits of data into seven bits by adding three parity bits. It is a member of a larger family of Hamming codes, but the term Hamming code often refers to this specific code that Richard W. Hamming introduced in 1950. At the time, Hamming worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories and was frustrated with the error-prone punched card reader, which is why he started working on error-correcting codes.