omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Henschel Hs 117. The Henschel Hs 117 Schmetterling (German for Butterfly) was a radio-guided German surface-to-air missile project developed during World War II. There was also an air-to-air version, the Hs 117H.

The operators used a telescopic sight and a joystick to guide the missile by radio control, which was detonated by acoustic and photoelectric proximity fuses, at .

Development 
In 1941, Professor Herbert A. Wagner (who was previously responsible for the Henschel Hs 293 anti-ship missile) invented the Schmetterling missile and submitted it to the Reich Air Ministry (RLM), who rejected the design because there was no need for more anti-aircraft weaponry.

However, by 1943 the large-scale bombing of Germany caused the RLM to change its mind, and Henschel was given a contract to develop and manufacture it. The team was led by Professor Wagner, and it produced a weapon somewhat resembling a bottlenose dolphin with swept wings and cruciform tail.

In May 1944, 59 Hs 117 missiles were tested, some from beneath a Heinkel He 111; over half the trials failed. Mass production was ordered in December 1944, with deployment to start in March 1945. Operational missiles were to be launched from a 37mm gun carriage.

In January 1945, a prototype for mass production was completed, and production of 3,000 missiles a month was anticipated, but on 6 February, SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler cancelled the project.

Variants 
The Hs 117H was an air-launched variant, designed to be launched from a Dornier Do 217, Junkers Ju 188, or Junkers Ju 388. This version was designed to attack enemy aircraft up to  above the launching aircraft.

See also

References

External links

 Henschel Hs117 Schmettering (Butterfly) - Royal Air Force Museum, Cosford (UK)
 German language page on the Hs 117 Schmetterling SAM missile

World War II guided missiles of Germany
Surface-to-air missiles of Germany
Electrokinetics. Electrokinetics or electrokinetic may refer to:

 Electrohydrodynamics, the study of the dynamics of electrically charged fluids
 Electrokinetic phenomena, a family of several different effects that occur in heterogeneous fluids
 Zeta potential, a scientific term for electrokinetic potential 
 Electrokinetic remediation, a technique of using direct electrical current to remove particles from the soil 
 Electro-kinetic road ramp, a method of generating electricity
 Micellar electrokinetic chromatography, a chromatography technique used in analytical chemistry
 Elektrokinesis, a purported psychic ability to manipulate electricity; see List of psychic abilities
Encoder. Encoder may refer to:

Electronic circuits
 Audio encoder, converts digital audio to analog audio signals
 Video encoder, converts digital video to analog video signals
 Simple encoder, assigns a binary code to an active input line
 Priority encoder, outputs a binary code representing the highest-priority active input
 8b/10b encoder, creates DC balance on a communication transmission line

Media compression
 Compressor, encodes data (e.g., audio/video/images) into a smaller form (see codec)

Sensors 
 Encoder (position)
 Rotary encoder, converts rotary position to electronic signals
 Linear encoder, converts linear position to electronic signals
 Absolute encoder, outputs the absolute position
 Incremental encoder, converts position changes to electronic signals in real time
 Altitude encoder

See also
 Decoder (disambiguation)
 Encode (disambiguation)
Scandinavian Multi Access Reservations for Travel Agents. SMART, Scandinavian Multi Access Reservations for Travel Agents, is a computerized system for ticket reservation.

History
It was created in 1979 by SAS, Braathens and Swedish State Railways. Many travel companies had computerized their systems at the time, and provided terminal interfaces for travel agencies. Each had their own system, often involving widely different codes and procedures. It was cumbersome and expensive for a travel agency to have multiple terminals, each one connected to a different provider. SMART solved this, by providing a single interface over the public data network Datex.

It worked by having a Host Interface Processor (HIP) at each travel company. These would emulate a number of terminals, translate the messages, codes and addresses, wrap them in SMARTs own communications protocol, and provide the interface over Datex to the various travel agencies. There was, of course, functionality to limit access.

On the travel agency side, there would be SMART Terminal Equipment (STE) with the reverse function, emulating a server and providing interfaces for terminals. Now however, a travel agent could easily switch between screens for the different companies. The interfaces were similar to those for direct connections, but provided some standardization for codes to ease the transition between the systems.

The STE would also allow printing of documents, tickets, bills and similar, as well as interfacing with the accounting system.

The third component in the SMART system was the SMART Control Centre (SCC). It constantly monitored the status of all STEs and reported suspected errors in the STE hardware or communication lines. Furthermore, it could remotely configure the STEs, download application software and/or operating system, and reboot the computers - all automatically without any intervention.

All three SMART system components were delivered by Philips Data Systems. The HIP processors were Philips PTS 6813 and 6824 minicomputers, the STE travel agent front-office computers were Philips PTS 6911 workstation controllers and the SCC consisted of a Philips PTS 6813 minicomputer.

SMART could utilize some of Datex extra features like queuing and group numbers, and a logical connection (session) was not dependent on the physical connection (which could go up and down for instance during idle times to save money). Parallel sessions could be held with different or the same provider.

SMART spawned off into a company centered in Stockholm in 1984, SMART AB, with the subsidiaries SMART Sverige AB, SMART Danmark A/S, and SMART Norge AS (in Sweden, Denmark and Norway respectively).

SMART is still in use, though not over Datex. It has been widely replaced by Amadeus, by the same company. In 2003, SMART AB changed its name to Amadeus Scandinavia.

See also
 Travel technology

References

Scandinavia
Travel technology
Block (data storage). In computing (specifically data transmission and data storage), a block, sometimes called a physical record, is a sequence of bytes or bits, usually containing some whole number of records, having a maximum length; a block size. Data thus structured are said to be blocked. The process of putting data into blocks is called blocking, while deblocking is the process of extracting data from blocks. Blocked data is normally stored in a data buffer, and read or written a whole block at a time. Blocking reduces the overhead and speeds up the handling of the data stream. For some devices, such as magnetic tape and CKD disk devices, blocking reduces the amount of external storage required for the data. Blocking is almost universally employed when storing data to 9-track magnetic tape, NAND flash memory, and rotating media such as floppy disks, hard disks, and optical discs.

Most file systems are based on a block device, which is a level of abstraction for the hardware responsible for storing and retrieving specified blocks of data, though the block size in file systems may be a multiple of the physical block size. This leads to space inefficiency due to internal fragmentation, since file lengths are often not integer multiples of block size, and thus the last block of a file may remain partially empty. This will create slack space. Some newer file systems, such as Btrfs and FreeBSD UFS2, attempt to solve this through techniques called block suballocation and tail merging.  Other file systems such as ZFS support variable block sizes.

Block storage is normally abstracted by a file system or database management system (DBMS) for use by applications and end users. The physical or logical volumes accessed via block I/O may be devices internal to a server, directly attached via SCSI or Fibre Channel, or distant devices accessed via a storage area network (SAN) using a protocol such as iSCSI, or AoE. DBMSes often use their own block I/O for improved performance and recoverability as compared to layering the DBMS on top of a file system.

References 

Computer data storage
Data transmission
Big dumb booster. Big Dumb Booster (BDB) is a general class of launch vehicle based on the premise that it is cheaper to operate large rockets of simple design than it is to operate smaller, more complex ones regardless of the lower payload efficiency. As referred to by the Office of Technology Assessment:

Even though the large minimum-cost design (MCD) booster is less efficient for all around operation, its total cost of operation is cheaper because it is easier to build, operate and maintain, with the benefit of high reliability because of reduced parts counts.

History 

Concept work was led by proponents at Aerospace Corporation, TRW, and Aerojet General, beginning in the late 1950s.  The typical approach included maraging steel (HY-140) for structure, pressure-fed engines using  / UDMH, later LOX /RP-1, with pintle injectors scaled up from TRW's Lunar Module Descent Engine (LMDE).

The Sea Dragon was an extremely large BDB/MCD 2-stage launch vehicle defined by Robert Truax and others at Aerojet.  Space Technology Laboratories, Inc. (TRW) contributed to the design effort.  It was to be able to carry a payload of over 500 metric tons into low Earth orbit.

TRW (now Northrop Grumman) developed and fired several engines, including their TR-106, a robust, low-cost engine of 2890 kN (650 klb) thrust to demonstrate the engine technology readiness.  TRW also defined a low-cost shuttle-surrogate booster to launch 29 metric tons into a 28-degree orbit at a cost of about $59 million.

Beal Aerospace furthered the quintessential BDB/MCD with their BA-1 and BA-2 launch vehicles.

Minimum cost design

The MCD methodology was developed by Arthur Schnitt.  It is a process of making trade analyses to understand the cost versus mass implications.  It is not a specific design choice like pressure-fed engines or single engine per stage.  The process shows how to reduce costs by allowing mass to increase where there is a favorable impact on life-cycle cost.  Some of the early design concepts were referred to as big dumb boosters, not necessarily in a favorable manner.

The cost of a launch vehicle relative to the payload mass (e.g. dollars per kilogram to orbit) can be determined from the rocket equation, along with mass ratios and cost ratios.  As low-tech rocket hardware gets heavier (such as the mass of tanks relative to propellants and the mass of engines relative to thrust), the cost of that hardware (dollars per kg of material) must become vastly cheaper, which explains why a big dumb booster would likely be impractical.

See also

References and notes 

Spacecraft propulsion
Raoul Pictet. Raoul-Pierre Pictet (4 April 1846 – 27 July 1929) was a Swiss physicist. Pictet is co-credited with French scientist Louis-Paul Cailletet as the first to produce liquid oxygen in 1877.

Biography 
Pictet was born in Geneva. He served as professor in the university of that city. He devoted himself largely to problems involving the production of low temperatures and the liquefaction and solidification of gases.

On December 22, 1877, the Academy of Sciences in Paris received a telegram from Pictet in Geneva reading as follows: Oxygen liquefied to-day under 320 atmospheres and 140 degrees of cold by combined use of sulfurous and carbonic acid. This announcement was almost simultaneous with that of Cailletet who had liquefied oxygen by a completely different process.

Pictet died in Paris in 1929.

Works 
 
 
 Nouvelles machines frigorifiques basées sur l'emploi de phénomènes physicochimiques (1895)
 Étude critique du matérialisme et du spiritualisme par la physique expérimentale (1896)
 L'acétylène (1896)
 Le carbide (1896)
 Zur mechanischen Theorie der Explosivstoffe (1902)
 Die Theorie der Apparate zur Herstellung flüssiger Luft mit Entspannung (1903)

See also
Liquefaction of gases
Timeline of low-temperature technology
Pictet Family Archives  — includes a family tree since 1344
Pictet's apparatus
Production of oxygen under pressure in a retort
Two pre-cooling refrigeration cycles: 1. SO2(-10 °C) 2. CO2 (-78 °C) oxygen flow is pre–cooled by the means of heat exchangers  and expands to atmosphere via a  hand valve

References 

1846 births
1929 deaths
Scientists from Geneva
Swiss physicists
Swiss non-fiction writers
Swiss male non-fiction writers
Louis Paul Cailletet. Louis-Paul Cailletet (21 September 1832 – 5 January 1913) was a French physicist and inventor.

Life and work 

Cailletet was born in Châtillon-sur-Seine, Côte-d'Or.  Educated in Paris, Cailletet returned to Châtillon to manage his father's ironworks. In an effort to determine the cause of accidents that occurred while tempering incompletely forged iron, Cailletet found that heating the iron put it in a highly unstable state, with gases dissolved in it. He then analyzed the gases from blast furnaces, which helped him understand the role of heat in the changes of states (phases) of metals. This brought him to the work of liquefying the various gases.

Cailletet succeeded in producing droplets of liquid oxygen in 1877 by a different method than Raoul Pictet: He used the Joule-Thomson effect; oxygen was cooled while highly compressed, then allowed to rapidly expand, cooling it further, resulting in the production of small droplets of liquid oxygen.

Among his other achievements, Cailletet installed a 300-m/985-ft high manometer on the Eiffel Tower; conducted an investigation of air resistance on falling bodies; made a study of a liquid-oxygen breathing apparatus for high-altitude ascents; and developed numerous devices, including automatic cameras, an altimeter, and air-sample collectors for sounding-balloon studies of the upper atmosphere.

See also
Liquefaction of gases
Timeline of low-temperature technology

References 

1832 births
1913 deaths
People from Châtillon-sur-Seine
French physicists
Members of the French Academy of Sciences
Mines Paris - PSL alumni
Game Developer (magazine). Game Developer was a magazine for video game creators, originally started in March 1994 by Miller Freeman, Inc as quarterly, later bimonthly, and finally monthly. In each issue, industry leaders and experts shared technical solutions, reviewed new game development tools, and discussed strategies for creating innovative, successful video games. Monthly postmortems dissected the industry's leading games, from AAA console to social and mobile games and beyond, and columns gave insight into deeper development practices from across all disciplines, from design, to programming, to art, to business, and audio. It was closed in 2013 as part of a restructuring at parent company UBM Tech (part of UBM plc) that included the closing of all print publications owned by that company.

Contents

The magazine contained articles on professional game development topics relating to game programming, art, audio, quality control, design, and production. Monthly columns from industry veterans offered in depth discussion on a variety of topics. It had articles by notable video game industry figures and reviews on game development related books, tools, and software packages. The back page "Soapbox" was also a popular feature but moved to sister site to Gamasutra circa 2004. It was replaced by a splash art page called "Thousand Words" and then replaced again with a regular column "Arrested Development".

Game Developer'''s most popular feature was probably its monthly "Postmortem" column which discusses the recent development of a video game with the top five each of "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong". It provided a frank, first-hand account of the lessons learned in the development process. The first Postmortem was featured in October 1997 and written by Andre Vrignaud on Dark Sun Online.

Starting in 1998, Game Developer recognized exceptional game development tools with their "Front Line Awards" which were given annually. Winners included software (such as Photoshop and VTune), game engines (Unreal Engine), middleware (Havok physics), hardware (GeForce 3), and books (Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice).Gamasutra, the sister publication web site of Game Developer, acts as an online resource for game developers, as well as a job posting board for employment in the game development field. It was not part of the closure that resulted in Game Developer's cessation and continued some features from the magazine. Gamasutra rebranded itself to Game Developer'' on August 26, 2021.

See also 
Video game publisher
Game programmer
Game designer
Game producer

References

External links
 Game Developer Magazine official site
 Archive of all issues at GDC Vault
 Front Line Awards official site 

Monthly magazines published in the United States
Defunct video game magazines published in the United States
Informa brands
Magazines established in 1994
Magazines disestablished in 2013
Defunct magazines published in San Francisco
Professional and trade magazines
Video game development
JSF. JSF may refer to:

 JavaServer Faces (now Jakarta Faces), a specification for building web application user interfaces
 Jabber Software Foundation, now the XMPP Standards Foundation
 Japan Skating Federation, the national body for ice skating in Japan
 Joint Strike Fighter program, a military aircraft acquisition program which began in the 1990s
 F-35 JSF, alternative name of the resulting Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II
 United States Joint Strike Force, a faction in the video game Tom Clancy's EndWar
 Joint Strike Fighter (video game)
 Jatio Sramik Federation, a trade union federation in Bangladesh
 Jeux sans frontières, a European-wide television game show
 Jonathan Safran Foer (born 1977), American author
Newel. A newel, also called a central pole or support column, is the central supporting pillar of a staircase.  It can also refer to an upright post that supports and/or terminates the handrail of a stair banister (the "newel post"). In stairs having straight flights it is the principal post at the foot of the staircase, but the term can also be used for the intermediate posts on landings and at the top of a staircase. Although its primary purpose is structural, newels have long been adorned with decorative trim and designed in different architectural styles.

Newel posts turned on a lathe are solid pieces that can be highly decorative, and they typically need to be fixed to a square newel base for installation.  These are sometimes called solid newels in distinction from hollow newels due to varying techniques of construction. Hollow newels are known more accurately as box newel posts. In historic homes, folklore holds that the house plans were placed in the newel upon completion of the house before the newel was capped.

The most common means of fixing a newel post to the floor is to use a newel post fastener, which secures a newel post to a timber joist through either concrete or wooden flooring.

In popular culture 
A loose ball cap finial on the newel post at the base of the stairway is a plot device in the 1946 classic It's a Wonderful Life. The same is used in jest in the 1989 film Christmas Vacation, in which Clark Griswold, in an emotional meltdown, cuts a loose finial off a newel post with a chainsaw.  He casually exclaims, "Fixed the newel post!" and carries on. 

In Family Guy Season 17, Episode 16, “You Can’t Handle the Booth”, Stewie and Brian argue over the semantics of Peter getting stuck in what Stewie calls “banister slats” and Brian corrects him by saying they are called “baluster slats”. Stewie then asks if the “baluster” is the big, round thing at the bottom of the stairs where the staircase begins, to which Brian laughs at him and corrects him by saying “I believe what you are referring to is a newel post”.

The comedy duo Nichols and May performed a routine about a frustrating attempt to obtain operator assistance from a trio of unhelpful telephone operators, the first of whom uses a bizarre phonetic alphabet to clarify the spelling of the requested name, where "newel post" represents the letter N: "'K' as in 'knife'; 'A' as in 'aardvark'; 'P' as in 'pneumonia'; 'L' as in 'luscious'; 'A' as in 'aardvark' again; 'N' as in 'newel post', Kaplan?"

Gallery

See also 

 Mortgage button

References

External links

 

Stairways
Architectural elements
Stairs
LaMarcus Adna Thompson. LaMarcus Adna Thompson (March 8, 1848 – May 8, 1919) was an American inventor and businessman most famous for developing a variety of gravity rides and roller coasters.

Early years

Thompson was born in Jersey, Licking County, Ohio on March 8, 1848. His parents were Adna Thompson (father), and Nancy D. Thompson (mother). He had a brother named Olvid. In his adolescence, he became a skilled carpenter. In 1873 he began operating a grocery store in Elkhart, Indiana. There he began designing a device to manufacture seamless stockings and tights for women. He made a fortune in that business, but failing health forced him to quit.

Father of the gravity ride and the roller coaster

Thompson is best known for his early work developing roller coasters and for inventing the scenic railway genre of rides. He is known as the "Father of the American Roller Coaster" and is often also called the "Father of the Gravity Ride". Over his lifetime, Thompson accumulated nearly thirty patents related to roller coaster technologies. An example is the patent granted December 22, 1884, for the Gravity Switch-back Railway. Thompson's work built upon an earlier patent for an "Inclined Plane Railway", filed in 1878 by Richard Knudson.

Thompson's breakthrough ride was the "Gravity Switchback Railway", which opened at Coney Island in 1884. A (6 mph) ride cost 5 cents. In 1887, along with designer James A. Griffiths, he opened the Scenic Railway on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J. Thompson's scenic railway concept initially was intended to give riders a scenic view of the surrounding landscape; later, Thompson created elaborate painted backgrounds and scenes so that riders would feel like they were touring the Swiss Alps or other foreign landscapes.

Thompson was managing director of the L. A. Thompson Scenic Railway Company, 220 West 42nd St., incorporated in 1895. Thompson's scenic railways were immensely popular during the first and second decade of the 1900s, and his company operated six major scenic railways at Coney Island alone during that time. Dozens of scenic railways operated throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Eventually, the scenic railway was eclipsed by faster and more thrilling roller coaster rides made possible by improvements in roller coaster safety technology.

Thompson died at his home, Thompson Park, Glen Cove, Long Island, on May 8, 1919, at age 71.

References

External links
Coney Island History: Roller Coasters, Shows and Attractions (c. 1905) at Heart of Coney Island
Stories About the Invention of the Roller Coaster – quotes multiple obits
UltimateRollerCoaster.com, Roller Coaster History

Amusement ride manufacturers
American inventors
Roller coaster designers
1848 births
1919 deaths