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Clarke's Third Law
British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke's three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited. They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future. The laws The laws are: # When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. # The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. # Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Origins One account claimed that Clarke's "laws" were developed after the editor of his works in French started numbering the author's assertions. All three laws appear in Clarke's essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination", first published in ''Profiles of the Future'' (1962). However, they were not all published at the same time. Clarke ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur C
Arthur is a common male given name of Brythonic origin. Its popularity derives from it being the name of the legendary hero King Arthur. The etymology is disputed. It may derive from the Celtic ''Artos'' meaning “Bear”. Another theory, more widely believed, is that the name is derived from the Roman clan '' Artorius'' who lived in Roman Britain for centuries. A common spelling variant used in many Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages is Artur. In Spanish and Italian it is Arturo. Etymology The earliest datable attestation of the name Arthur is in the early 9th century Welsh-Latin text ''Historia Brittonum'', where it refers to a circa 5th to 6th-century Briton general who fought against the invading Saxons, and who later gave rise to the famous King Arthur of medieval legend and literature. A possible earlier mention of the same man is to be found in the epic Welsh poem ''Y Gododdin'' by Aneirin, which some scholars assign to the late 6th century, though this is still a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linotype Machine
The Linotype machine ( ) is a "line casting" machine used in printing; manufactured and sold by the former Mergenthaler Linotype Company and related It was a hot metal typesetting system that cast lines of metal type for individual uses. Linotype became one of the mainstay methods to set type, especially small-size body text, for newspapers, magazines, and posters from the late 19th century to the 1970s and 1980s, when it was largely replaced by phototypesetting and digital typesetting. The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a ''line-o'-type''. It was a significant improvement over the previous industry standard of manual, letter-by-letter typesetting using a composing stick and shallow subdivided trays, called "cases". The Linotype machine operator enters text on a 90-character keyboard. The machine assembles ''matrices'', which are molds for the letter forms, in a line. The assembled line is then cast ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Technology Folklore
Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, industry, communication, transportation, and daily life. Technologies include physical objects like utensils or machines and intangible tools such as software. Many technological advancements have led to societal changes. The earliest known technology is the stone tool, used in the prehistoric era, followed by fire use, which contributed to the growth of the human brain and the development of language in the Ice Age. The invention of the wheel in the Bronze Age enabled wider travel and the creation of more complex machines. Recent technological developments, including the printing press, the telephone, and the Internet have lowered communication barriers and ushered in the knowledge economy. While technology contributes to econom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adages
An adage (; Latin: adagium) is a memorable and usually philosophical aphorism that communicates an important truth derived from experience, custom, or both, and that many people consider true and credible because of its longeval tradition, i.e. being handed down generation to generation, or memetic replication. Variations and nature An adage may warn against a failure to plan, be interesting observations, ethical rules, or skeptical comments on life in general, such as "do not count your chickens before they hatch", "do not burn your bridges", and . Some adages are products of folk wisdom that attempt to summarize a basic truth; these are generally known as "proverbs" or "bywords". An adage that describes a general moral rule is a "maxim". A pithy expression that has not necessarily gained credibility by tradition, but is distinguished by especial depth or excellent style is denominated an "aphorism", while one distinguished by wit or irony is often denominated an "epigram ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contrapositive
In logic and mathematics, contraposition refers to the inference of going from a conditional statement into its logically equivalent contrapositive, and an associated proof method known as proof by contraposition. The contrapositive of a statement has its antecedent and consequent inverted and flipped. Conditional statement P \rightarrow Q. In formulas: the contrapositive of P \rightarrow Q is \neg Q \rightarrow \neg P . If ''P'', Then ''Q''. — If not ''Q'', Then not ''P''. ''"''If ''it is raining,'' then ''I wear my coat" —'' "If ''I don't wear my coat,'' then ''it isn't raining."'' The law of contraposition says that a conditional statement is true if, and only if, its contrapositive is true. The contrapositive ( \neg Q \rightarrow \neg P ) can be compared with three other statements: ;Inversion (the inverse), \neg P \rightarrow \neg Q:"If ''it is not raining,'' then ''I don't wear my coat''." Unlike the contrapositive, the inverse's truth value is not at all depe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magic In Fiction
Magic in fiction is the endowment of characters or objects in works of fiction or fantasy with powers that do not naturally occur in the real world. Magic often serves as a plot device and has long been a component of fiction, since writing was invented. Historical beliefs Historically, witches such as the Weird Sisters in William Shakespeare's ''Macbeth,'' wizards such as Prospero in '' The Tempest'' or characters like Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe's play of the same name were widely considered to be real. Contemporary authors tend to treat magic as an imaginary idea, opting to build their worlds with a blank slate where the laws of reality do not carry as much weight. Function Within a work of fantasy, magic can help to advance the plot, often providing power to heroes or to their opponents. The use of magic frequently manifests itself in a transformation of a character, if not the transformation of the fictional world. For magic to carry out its functions, it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fictional Universe
A fictional universe, or fictional world, is a self-consistent setting with events, and often other elements, that differ from the real world. It may also be called an imagined, constructed, or fictional realm (or world). Fictional universes may appear in novels, comics, films, television shows, video games, and other creative works. The subject is most commonly addressed in reference to fictional universes that differ markedly from the real world, such as those that introduce entire fictional cities, countries, or even planets, or those that contradict commonly known facts about the world and its history, or those that feature fantasy or science fiction concepts such as magic or faster than light travel—and especially those in which the deliberate development of the setting is a substantial focus of the work. When a large franchise of related works has two or more somewhat different fictional universes that are each internally consistent but not consistent with each other (su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andrew Gelman
Andrew Eric Gelman (born February 11, 1965) is an American statistician and professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. Gelman received bachelor of science degrees in mathematics and in physics from MIT, where he was a National Merit Scholar, in 1986. He then received a master of science in 1987 and a doctor of philosophy in 1990, both in statistics from Harvard University, under the supervision of Donald Rubin. Career Gelman is the Higgins Professor of Statistics and Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He is a major contributor to statistical philosophy and methods especially in Bayesian statistics and hierarchical models. He is one of the leaders of the development of the statistical programming framework Stan. Perspective on Statistical Inference and Hypothesis Testing Gelman's approach to statistical inference emphasizes studying variation and the associations between data, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' of Oxford University Press defines artificial intelligence as: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Tesla), automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SPIE—The International Society For Optical Engineering
SPIE (formerly the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, later the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers) is an international not-for-profit professional society for optics and photonics technology, founded in 1955. It organizes technical conferences, trade exhibitions, and continuing education programs for researchers and developers in the light-based fields of physics, including: optics, photonics, and imaging engineering. The society publishes peer-reviewed scientific journals, conference proceedings, monographs, tutorial texts, field guides, and reference volumes in print and online. SPIE is especially well-known for Photonics West, one of the laser and photonics industry's largest combined conferences and tradeshows which is held annually in San Francisco. SPIE also participates as partners in leading educational initiatives, and in 2020, for example, provided more than $5.8 million in support of optics education and outreach programs around the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
