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🔗 Languages 🔗 Constructed languages 🔗 Taoism

Toki Pona is a philosophical artistic constructed language known for its small vocabulary. It was created by Canadian linguist and translator Sonja Lang for the purpose of simplifying thoughts and communication. It was first published online in 2001 as a draft, and later in complete form in the book Toki Pona: The Language of Good in 2014. A small community of speakers developed in the early 2000s. The community grew after the release of the official book and has continued to grow larger since its publication. While activity mostly takes place online in chat rooms, on social media, and in other groups, there were a few organized in-person meetings during the 2010s.

The underlying feature of Toki Pona is minimalism. It focuses on simple universal concepts, making use of very little to express the most. The language is isolating and has 120–125 root words and 14 phonemes that are easy to pronounce across different languages. However, it was not created to be an international auxiliary language. Inspired by Taoist philosophy, the language is designed to help users concentrate on basic things and to promote positive thinking, in accordance with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Despite the small vocabulary, speakers are able to understand and communicate with each other, mainly relying on context and combinations of several words to express more specific meanings.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Horror

Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. It won the Seiun Award for the best novel in Japanese translation (where it is published by Tokyo Sogensha) and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian comet dubbed "Burns-Caulfield" that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.

Blindsight is available online under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Its sequel (or "sidequel"), Echopraxia, came out in 2014.

🔗 Spaceflight

STS-51-F (also known as Spacelab 2) was the 19th flight of NASA's Space Shuttle program and the eighth flight of Space Shuttle Challenger. It launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on July 29, 1985, and landed eight days later on August 6, 1985.

While STS-51-F's primary payload was the Spacelab 2 laboratory module, the payload that received the most publicity was the Carbonated Beverage Dispenser Evaluation, which was an experiment in which both Coca-Cola and Pepsi tried to make their carbonated drinks available to astronauts. A helium-cooled infrared telescope (IRT) was also flown on this mission, and while it did have some problems, it observed 60% of the galactic plane in infrared light.

During launch, Challenger experienced multiple sensor failures in its Engine 1 Center SSME, which led to it shutting down. As a result, the shuttle had to perform an "Abort to Orbit" (ATO) emergency procedure. It is the only Shuttle mission to have carried out an abort after launching. As a result of the ATO, the mission was carried out at a slightly lower orbital altitude.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System 🔗 Astronomy/Mars

The planet Mars has distinctive areas of chaos terrain, a topography unlike any on Earth. Chaos terrain generally consists of irregular groups of large blocks, some reaching tens of kilometers across and a hundred or more meters high. The tilted and flat topped blocks form depressions hundreds of metres deep. A chaotic region can be recognized by a rat's nest of mesas, buttes, and hills, chopped through with valleys which in places look almost patterned. Some parts of this chaotic area have not collapsed completely—they are still formed into large mesas, so they may still contain water ice. Chaos regions formed long ago. By counting craters (more craters in any given area means an older surface) and by studying the valleys' relations with other geological features, scientists have concluded the channels formed 2.0 to 3.8 billion years ago.

🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Linguistics

A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, commonly used to quell cognitive dissonance. Depending on context in which a phrase (or cliché) is used, it may actually be valid and not qualify as thought-terminating; it does qualify as such when its application intends to dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic. Its only function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, in other words "end the debate with a cliche... not a point." The term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, who called the use of the cliché, along with "loading the language", as "The language of Non-thought".

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Energy 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language

Long-term nuclear waste warning messages are intended to deter human intrusion at nuclear waste repositories in the far future, within or above the order of magnitude of 10,000 years. Nuclear semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of research, first done by the American Human Interference Task Force in 1981.

A 1993 report from Sandia National Laboratories recommended that such messages be constructed at several levels of complexity. They suggested that the sites should include foreboding physical features which would immediately convey to future visitors that the site was both man-made and dangerous, as well as providing pictographic information attempting to convey some details of the danger, and written explanations for those able to read it.

🔗 Espionage 🔗 Books 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage is a 1989 book written by Clifford Stoll. It is his first-person account of the hunt for a computer hacker who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Stoll's use of the term extended the metaphor Cuckoo's egg from brood parasitism in birds to malware.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Glass

A Bologna bottle, also known as a Bologna phial or philosophical vial, is a glass bottle which has great external strength, often used in physics demonstrations and magic tricks. The exterior is generally strong enough that one could pound a nail into a block of wood using the bottle as a hammer; however, even a small scratch on the interior would cause it to crumble.

It is created by heating a glass bottle and then rapidly cooling the outside whilst slowly cooling the inside. This causes external compression and internal tension such that even a scratch on the inside is sufficient to shatter the bottle.

The effect is utilized in several magic effects, including the "Devil's Flask".

🔗 Technology 🔗 Computing 🔗 France 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Computing/Networking

Minitel, officially known as TELETEL, was an interactive videotex online service accessible through telephone lines. It was the world's first and most successful mass-market online service prior to the World Wide Web. It was developed in Cesson-Sévigné, Brittany, by government-owned France Télécom.

The service was initially launched on an experimental basis in July 1980 in Saint-Malo and extended to other regions in late 1980. It was commercially introduced throughout France in 1982 by the Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones (PTT), since 1991, divided into France Télécom and La Poste. From its inception, users were able to make online purchases, book train tickets, access business information services, search the telephone directory, maintain a mailbox, and utilize chat functionalities similar to those now supported by the World Wide Web.

In February 2009, France Télécom reported that the Minitel network still maintained 10 million monthly connections. The service was discontinued by France Télécom on 30 June 2012.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Microsoft

The Ballmer Peak is a humorous concept invented by Randall Munroe in the xkcd webcomic, joking that a programmer who is appropriately intoxicated (between 0.129-0.138% BAC) will achieve a high level of programming productivity; the peak occurs at 0.1337%, a reference to leet. The concept is loosely tied to former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, and is likely a play on Balmer series of hydrogen spectral lines named for the scientist Johann Balmer.

A San Francisco organization, Originate, has organized a "Ballmer Peak-A-Thon", an open bar event where people were given "5 hours to find the elusive Ballmer peak, and build the best worst business possible."

There is no scientific basis for the Ballmer Peak, though researchers have studied adjacent topics, such as the impact of inebriation on problem solving. One study identified worse programming performance with increasing blood alcohol content, but joked in a footnote that as "the prescribed BAC in this experiment did not reach the Ballmer Peak", they did not technically refute the concept. In addition, the Ballmer Peak has been the subject of satirical academic studies, including a 2024 paper presented at SIGBOVIK, a satirical computer science conference organized by Carnegie Mellon students, which caught broader attention in the programming community. That study, which tested blood alcohol levels of only one male subject tackling competitive computer programming questions, found no evidence of a sudden "peak" of programming ability but did generally find that speed of solving the challenges increased with some alcohol consumption before a rapid decline.

By the time of Ballmer's 2013 announcement of his retirement from Microsoft, the concept of the "Ballmer Peak" was entrenched enough that media joked that the actual Ballmer Peak was the resulting jump in stock price.