To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

The MD6 Message-Digest Algorithm is a cryptographic hash function. It uses a Merkle tree-like structure to allow for immense parallel computation of hashes for very long inputs. Authors claim a performance of 28 cycles per byte for MD6-256 on an Intel Core 2 Duo and provable resistance against differential cryptanalysis. The source code of the reference implementation was released under MIT license.

Speeds in excess of 1 GB/s have been reported to be possible for long messages on 16-core CPU architecture.

In December 2008, Douglas Held of Fortify Software discovered a buffer overflow in the original MD6 hash algorithm's reference implementation. This error was later made public by Ron Rivest on 19 February 2009, with a release of a corrected reference implementation in advance of the Fortify Report.

MD6 was submitted to the NIST SHA-3 competition. However, on July 1, 2009, Rivest posted a comment at NIST that MD6 is not yet ready to be a candidate for SHA-3 because of speed issues, a "gap in the proof that the submitted version of MD6 is resistant to differential attacks", and an inability to supply such a proof for a faster reduced-round version, although Rivest also stated at the MD6 website that it is not withdrawn formally. MD6 did not advance to the second round of the SHA-3 competition. In September 2011, a paper presenting an improved proof that MD6 and faster reduced-round versions are resistant to differential attacks was posted to the MD6 website.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Engineering

Overengineering (or over-engineering, or over-kill) is the act of designing a product to be more robust or have more features than often necessary for its intended use, or for a process to be unnecessarily complex or inefficient.

Overengineering is often done to increase a factor of safety, add functionality, or overcome perceived design flaws that most users would accept.

Overengineering can be desirable when safety or performance is critical (e.g. in aerospace vehicles and luxury road vehicles), or when extremely broad functionality is required (e.g. diagnostic and medical tools, power users of products), but it is generally criticized in terms of value engineering as wasteful of resources such as materials, time and money.

As a design philosophy, it is the opposite of the minimalist ethos of "less is more" (or: “worse is better”) and a disobedience of the KISS principle.

Overengineering generally occurs in high-end products or specialized markets. In one form, products are overbuilt and have performance far in excess of expected normal operation (a city car that can travel at 300 km/h, or a home video recorder with a projected lifespan of 100 years), and hence are more expensive, bulkier, and heavier than necessary. Alternatively, they may become overcomplicated – the extra functions may be unnecessary, and potentially reduce the usability of the product by overwhelming lesser experienced and technically literate end users, as in feature creep.

Overengineering can decrease the productivity of design teams, because of the need to build and maintain more features than most users need.

A related issue is market segmentation – making different products for different market segments. In this context, a particular product may be more or less suited (and thus considered over- or under-engineered) for a particular market segment.

🔗 Video games

SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation is a management simulation video game, developed by Thinking Tools and published by Maxis with assistance from the Markle Foundation for MS-DOS in 1994. It is a simulation of the U.S. Healthcare system. The game was released during Congressional debates on the Clinton health care plan.

Due to the complexity of the game, SimHealth was seen as being very difficult. Armed with none of the tongue-in-cheek humor that Maxis's prior games were known for, the only real link to the franchise was the SimCity 2000-inspired user interface. The game was seen as more serious than other Maxis games. Noel Fritzinger, who with Lyman Orton first conceptualized CommunityViz, says that his inspiration came from seeing SimHealth and wondering if the same concepts could be applied to real-world land-use planning.

🔗 Civil engineering 🔗 Water

A qanat or kariz is a gently sloping underground channel to transport water from an aquifer or water well to surface for irrigation and drinking, acting as an underground aqueduct. This is an old system of water supply from a deep well with a series of vertical access shafts. The qanats still create a reliable supply of water for human settlements and irrigation in hot, arid, and semi-arid climates, but the value of this system is directly related to the quality, volume, and regularity of the water flow. Traditionally qanats are built by a group of skilled laborers, muqannīs, with hand labor. The profession historically paid well and was typically handed down from father to son. According to most sources, the qanat technology was developed in ancient Iran by the Persian people sometime in the early 1st millennium BCE, and spread from there slowly westward and eastward. However, some other sources suggest a Southeast Arabian origin.

🔗 Video games

In video games, grinding is performing repetitive tasks, usually for a gameplay advantage or loot but in some cases for purely aesthetic or cosmetic benefits. Many video games use different tactics to implement, or reduce, the amount of grinding in the gameplay. The general use of grinding is for "experience points", or to improve a character's level. In addition, the behavior is sometimes referred to as pushing the bar (leveling up), farming (acquiring loot repeatedly from one source), or catassing.

🔗 Music theory 🔗 Tunings, Temperaments, and Scales

In music theory, the circle of fifths (or circle of fourths) is the relationship among the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, their corresponding key signatures, and the associated major and minor keys. More specifically, it is a geometrical representation of relationships among the 12 pitch classes of the chromatic scale in pitch class space.

🔗 England 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Languages 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom

Linguistic purism in English is the preference for using words of native origin rather than foreign-derived ones. "Native" can mean "Anglo-Saxon" or it can be widened to include all Germanic words. Linguistic purism in English primarily focuses on words of Latinate and Greek origin, due to their prominence in the English language and the belief that they may be difficult to understand. In its mildest form, it merely means using existing native words instead of foreign-derived ones (such as using begin instead of commence). In a less mild form, it also involves coining new words from Germanic roots (such as wordstock for vocabulary). In a more extreme form, it also involves reviving native words which are no longer widely used (such as ettle for intend). The resulting language is sometimes called Anglish (coined by the author and humorist Paul Jennings), or Roots English (referring to the idea that it is a "return to the roots" of English). The mild form is often advocated as part of Plain English, but the more extreme form has been and is still a fringe movement; the latter can also be undertaken as a form of constrained writing.

English linguistic purism is discussed by David Crystal in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. The idea dates at least to the inkhorn term controversy of the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 19th century, writers such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and William Barnes advocated linguistic purism and tried to introduce words like birdlore for ornithology and bendsome for flexible. A notable supporter in the 20th century was George Orwell, who had a preference for plain Saxon words over complex Latin or Greek ones, and the idea continues to have advocates today.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Africa 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Military history/African military history 🔗 Africa/Tanzania 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a military conflict fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on 27 August 1896. The conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, marking it as the shortest recorded war in history. The immediate cause of the war was the death of the pro-British Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini on 25 August 1896 and the subsequent succession of Sultan Khalid bin Barghash. The British authorities preferred Hamud bin Muhammed, who was more favourable to British interests, as sultan. In accordance with a treaty signed in 1886, a condition for accession to the sultanate was that the candidate obtain the permission of the British consul, and Khalid had not fulfilled this requirement. The British considered this a casus belli and sent an ultimatum to Khalid demanding that he order his forces to stand down and leave the palace. In response, Khalid called up his palace guard and barricaded himself inside the palace.

The ultimatum expired at 09:00 East Africa Time (EAT) on 27 August, by which time the British had gathered three cruisers, two gunboats, 150 marines and sailors, and 900 Zanzibaris in the harbour area. The Royal Navy contingent were under the command of Rear-Admiral Harry Rawson and the pro-Anglo Zanzibaris were commanded by Brigadier-General Lloyd Mathews of the Zanzibar army (who was also the First Minister of Zanzibar). Around 2,800 Zanzibaris defended the palace; most were recruited from the civilian population, but they also included the sultan's palace guard and several hundred of his servants and slaves. The defenders had several artillery pieces and machine guns, which were set in front of the palace sighted at the British ships. A bombardment, opened at 09:02, set the palace on fire and disabled the defending artillery. A small naval action took place, with the British sinking the Zanzibari royal yacht HHS Glasgow and two smaller vessels. Some shots were also fired ineffectually at the pro-British Zanzibari troops as they approached the palace. The flag at the palace was shot down and fire ceased at 09:40.

The sultan's forces sustained roughly 500 casualties, while only one British sailor was injured. Sultan Khalid received asylum in the German consulate before escaping to German East Africa (in the mainland part of present Tanzania). The British quickly placed Sultan Hamud in power at the head of a puppet government. The war marked the end of the Zanzibar Sultanate as a sovereign state and the start of a period of heavy British influence.

🔗 Role-playing games 🔗 Horror 🔗 Games

Mafia (also known as The Werewolves) is a social deduction game, created by Dimitry Davidoff in 1986. The game models a conflict between two groups: an informed minority (the mafiosi or the werewolves), and an uninformed majority (the villagers). At the start of the game, each player is secretly assigned a role affiliated with one of these teams. The game has two alternating phases: first, a night role, during which those with night killing powers may covertly kill other players, and second, a day role, in which surviving players debate the identities of players and vote to eliminate a suspect. The game continues until a faction achieves its win condition; for the village, this usually means eliminating the evil minority, while for the minority this usually means reaching numerical parity with the village and eliminating any rival evil groups.