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

🔗 Palaeontology

The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America. The cause of the "cat gap" is disputed, but may have been caused by changes in the climate (global cooling), changes in the habitat and environmental ecosystem, the increasingly hypercarnivorous trend of the cats (especially the nimravids), volcanic activity, evolutionary changes in dental morphology of the Canidae species present in North America, or a periodicity of extinctions called van der Hammen cycles.

🔗 Gastropods

Elysia chlorotica (common name the eastern emerald elysia) is a small-to-medium-sized species of green sea slug, a marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusc. This sea slug superficially resembles a nudibranch, yet it does not belong to that clade. Instead it is a member of the clade Sacoglossa, the sap-sucking sea slugs. Some members of this group use chloroplasts from the algae they eat for photosynthesis, a phenomenon known as kleptoplasty. Elysia chlorotica is one species of such "solar-powered sea slugs". It lives in a subcellular endosymbiotic relationship with chloroplasts of the marine heterokont alga Vaucheria litorea.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Linux

Finnix is a Debian-based Live CD operating system, developed by Ryan Finnie and intended for system administrators for tasks such as filesystem recovery, network monitoring and OS installation. Finnix is a relatively small distribution, with an ISO download size of approximately 500 MiB, and is available for the X86-64 architecture. Finnix can be run off a bootable CD, a USB flash drive, a hard drive, or network boot (PXE).

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Computing 🔗 Australia 🔗 New Zealand 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Computing/Computer Security 🔗 Computing/Networking

XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst.

In July 2013, Edward Snowden publicly revealed the program's purpose and use by the NSA in The Sydney Morning Herald and O Globo newspapers. The code name was already public knowledge because it was mentioned in earlier articles, and, like many other code names, it appears in job postings and online résumés of employees.

On July 3, 2014, German public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, a member of ARD, published excerpts of XKeyscore's source code. A team of experts analyzed the source code.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer Security

Christmas Tree EXEC was the first widely disruptive computer worm, which paralyzed several international computer networks in December 1987. The malware ran on the IBM VM/CMS operating system.

Written by a student at the Clausthal University of Technology in the REXX scripting language, it drew a crude Christmas tree as text graphics, then sent itself to each entry in the target's email contacts file. In this way it spread onto the European Academic Research Network (EARN), BITNET, and IBM's worldwide VNET. On all of these systems it caused massive disruption.

The core mechanism of the ILOVEYOU worm of 2000 was essentially the same as Christmas Tree, although it ran on PCs rather than mainframes, was spread over a different network, and was scripted using VBScript rather than REXX.

🔗 Vietnam

The Đông Yên Châu inscription is an Old Cham inscription written in Pallava script, found in 1936 at Đông Yên Châu, northwest of Trà Kiệu, which used to be the old Champa capital known as Simhapura, in central Vietnam. The inscription was written in prose, is the oldest document of Cham (and indeed of any Austronesian language), and testifies to the existence of indigenous beliefs among the ancient Cham people of the Champa kingdom. Though not itself dated, the phrasing of the inscription is identical to those of dated Sanskrit inscriptions of Bhadravarman I of the second dynasty, who ruled Champa at the end of the 4th century CE. It contains an imprecatory formula ordering respect for the "naga of the king", undoubtedly a reference to the protective divinity of a spring or well. This vernacular text shows that in the 4th century, the land that now constitutes modern-day central Vietnam was inhabited by an Austronesian-speaking population. The evidence, both monumental and palaeographic, also suggests that Hinduism was the predominant religious system.

The fact that the language in the inscription shares some basic grammar and vocabulary with Malay has led some scholars to argue that the inscription contains the oldest specimen of Malay words in the form of Old Malay, older by three centuries than the earliest Srivijayan inscriptions from southeastern Sumatra. However, most scholars consider it established that this inscription was written in Old Cham instead. The shared basic grammar and vocabulary comes as no surprise, since Chamic and Malayic languages are closely related; both are the two subgroups of a Malayic–Chamic group within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family.

🔗 Typography

Word spacing in typography is space between words, as contrasted with letter-spacing (space between letters of words) and sentence spacing (space between sentences). Typographers may modify the spacing of letters or words in a body of type to aid readability and copy fit, or for aesthetic effect. In web browsers and standardized digital typography, word spacing is controlled by the CSS1 word-spacing property.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Amiga

The Joyboard is a balance board peripheral for the Atari 2600 home video game console. It was released in 1983 and was used by standing on top of it and leaning in a certain direction. Skier Suzy Chaffee appeared on television and at toy fairs demonstrating its use.

🔗 Food and drink

Gastronorm (GN), sometimes spelled Gastro-Norm, is a European standard for kitchenware tray and container sizes that is commonly seen worldwide in the catering and professional food industry, as well as in certain parts of the high-end consumer market. Gastronorm is generally used worldwide except in most of the United States and Canada, which have their own domestic systems. The Gastronorm standard was first introduced in Switzerland in 1964 and became an official European standard in 1993 with the EN 631 standard.

The basic format is called "GN 1/1" and measures 530×325 mm, with other Gastronorm sizes being multiples and fractions of this basic module size. Gastronorm containers allow for flexible, place efficient, and compatible storage, transport, processing, and serving and can be adapted for shelving, transport on trolleys and conveyor belts, secure temporary placement in compatible sinks, working tables, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, hot water baths, and compatible dishwashers, or display. Other products that have adopted the Gastronorm format include cutting boards and non-stick mats. Many professional food products are even packaged for optimal compatibility with Gastronorm containers, such as pizza base sizes, pre-baked breads, or frozen vegetables.

The most commonly used materials for the containers are stainless steel and (transparent or non-transparent) plastic. Stackable baking trays and stainless steel containers are commonly used for cooking in an oven, while polycarbonate and polypropylene variants are suited for storage of cold foods. Porcelain or melamine containers are used for display.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Dhrystone is a synthetic computing benchmark program developed in 1984 by Reinhold P. Weicker intended to be representative of system (integer) programming. The Dhrystone grew to become representative of general processor (CPU) performance. The name "Dhrystone" is a pun on a different benchmark algorithm called Whetstone, which emphasizes floating point performance.

With Dhrystone, Weicker gathered meta-data from a broad range of software, including programs written in FORTRAN, PL/1, SAL, ALGOL 68, and Pascal. He then characterized these programs in terms of various common constructs: procedure calls, pointer indirections, assignments, etc. From this he wrote the Dhrystone benchmark to correspond to a representative mix. Dhrystone was published in Ada, with the C version for Unix developed by Rick Richardson ("version 1.1") greatly contributing to its popularity.