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🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Microsoft Windows 🔗 Microsoft Windows/Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 IRC

Microsoft Comic Chat (later Microsoft Chat, but not to be confused with Windows Chat, or WinChat) is a graphical IRC client created by Microsoft, first released with Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996. Comic Chat was developed by Microsoft Researcher David Kurlander, with Microsoft Research's Virtual Worlds Group and later a group he managed in Microsoft's Internet Division.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Children's literature 🔗 Dogs 🔗 Novels/19th century

A Dog of Flanders is an 1872 novel by English author Marie Louise de la Ramée published with her pseudonym "Ouida". It is about a Flemish boy named Nello and his dog, Patrasche and is set in Antwerp.

In Japan, Korea and the Philippines, the novel has been an extremely popular children's classic for decades and has been adapted into several Japanese films and anime. Since the 1980s, the Belgian board of tourism caught on to the phenomenon and built two monuments honoring the story to please East-Asian tourists. There is a small statue of Nello and Patrasche at the Kapelstraat in the Antwerp suburb of Hoboken, and a commemorative plaque in front of the Antwerp Cathedral donated by Toyota, that was later replaced by a marble statue of the two characters covered by a cobblestone blanket, created by the artist Batist Vermeulen.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Australia/Western Australia 🔗 Military history/Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific military history 🔗 Australia/Australian history

The Emu War, also known as the Great Emu War, was a nuisance wildlife management military operation undertaken in Australia over the latter part of 1932 to address public concern over the number of emus said to be running amok in the Campion district of Western Australia. The unsuccessful attempts to curb the population of emus, a large flightless bird indigenous to Australia, employed soldiers armed with Lewis guns—leading the media to adopt the name "Emu War" when referring to the incident. While a number of the birds were killed, the emu population persisted and continued to cause crop destruction.

🔗 Physics

A Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter (also called the fifth state of matter) which is typically formed when a gas of bosons at low densities is cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (-273.15 °C). Under such conditions, a large fraction of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state, at which point microscopic quantum phenomena, particularly wavefunction interference, become apparent macroscopically. A BEC is formed by cooling a gas of extremely low density, about one-hundred-thousandth (1/100,000) the density of normal air, to ultra-low temperatures.

This state was first predicted, generally, in 1924–1925 by Albert Einstein following a paper written by Satyendra Nath Bose, although Bose came up with the pioneering paper on the new statistics.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

occam is a programming language which is concurrent and builds on the communicating sequential processes (CSP) process algebra, and shares many of its features. It is named after philosopher William of Ockham after whom Occam's razor is named.

occam is an imperative procedural language (such as Pascal). It was developed by David May and others at Inmos (trademark INMOS), advised by Tony Hoare, as the native programming language for their transputer microprocessors, but implementations for other platforms are available. The most widely known version is occam 2; its programming manual was written by Steven Ericsson-Zenith and others at Inmos.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Economics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Globalization

In economics, the Gini coefficient ( JEE-nee), sometimes called the Gini index or Gini ratio, is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income or wealth distribution of a nation's residents, and is the most commonly used measurement of inequality. It was developed by the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini and published in his 1912 paper Variability and Mutability (Italian: Variabilità e mutabilità).

The Gini coefficient measures the inequality among values of a frequency distribution (for example, levels of income). A Gini coefficient of zero expresses perfect equality, where all values are the same (for example, where everyone has the same income). A Gini coefficient of one (or 100%) expresses maximal inequality among values (e.g., for a large number of people, where only one person has all the income or consumption, and all others have none, the Gini coefficient will be very nearly one). For larger groups, values close to one are very unlikely in practice. Given the normalization of both the cumulative population and the cumulative share of income used to calculate the Gini coefficient, the measure is not overly sensitive to the specifics of the income distribution, but rather only on how incomes vary relative to the other members of a population. The exception to this is in the redistribution of income resulting in a minimum income for all people. When the population is sorted, if their income distribution were to approximate a well-known function, then some representative values could be calculated.

The Gini coefficient was proposed by Gini as a measure of inequality of income or wealth. For OECD countries, in the late 20th century, considering the effect of taxes and transfer payments, the income Gini coefficient ranged between 0.24 and 0.49, with Slovenia being the lowest and Mexico the highest. African countries had the highest pre-tax Gini coefficients in 2008–2009, with South Africa the world's highest, variously estimated to be 0.63 to 0.7, although this figure drops to 0.52 after social assistance is taken into account, and drops again to 0.47 after taxation. The global income Gini coefficient in 2005 has been estimated to be between 0.61 and 0.68 by various sources.

There are some issues in interpreting a Gini coefficient. The same value may result from many different distribution curves. The demographic structure should be taken into account. Countries with an aging population, or with a baby boom, experience an increasing pre-tax Gini coefficient even if real income distribution for working adults remains constant. Scholars have devised over a dozen variants of the Gini coefficient.

🔗 Mathematics

In number theory, a weird number is a natural number that is abundant but not semiperfect.

In other words, the sum of the proper divisors (divisors including 1 but not itself) of the number is greater than the number, but no subset of those divisors sums to the number itself.

🔗 Physics

The Einstein–Szilard or Einstein refrigerator is an absorption refrigerator which has no moving parts, operates at constant pressure, and requires only a heat source to operate. It was jointly invented in 1926 by Albert Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd, who patented it in the U.S. on November 11, 1930 (U.S. Patent 1,781,541). The three working fluids in this design are water, ammonia and butane. The Einstein refrigerator is a development of the original three-fluid patent by the Swedish inventors Baltzar von Platen and Carl Munters.

🔗 France 🔗 Languages

Verlan (French pronunciation: ​[vɛʁlɑ̃]), (verlan is the reverse of the expression "l'envers") is a type of argot in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words. The name verlan itself is an example: it is derived from inverting the sounds of the syllables in l'envers ([lɑ̃vɛʁ], "the inverse", frequently used in the sense of "back-to-front").

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Delphi is an event-driven programming language based on Object Pascal and an associated integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development of desktop, mobile, web, and console software, currently developed and maintained by Embarcadero Technologies.

Delphi's compilers generate native code for Microsoft Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Linux (x64 only). Since 2016, there have been new releases of Delphi every six months, with new platforms being added approximately every second release.

Delphi includes a code editor, a visual designer, an integrated debugger, a source code control component, and support for third-party plugins. The code editor features Code Insight (code completion), Error Insight (real-time error-checking), and refactoring. The visual forms designer has traditionally used Visual Component Library (VCL) for native Windows development, but the FireMonkey (FMX) platform was later added for cross-platform development. Database support in Delphi is very strong. A Delphi project of a million lines of code can compile in a few seconds – one benchmark compiled 170,000 lines per second.

Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows as the successor of Turbo Pascal. Delphi added full object-oriented programming to the existing language, and since then the language has grown to support generics and anonymous methods, and native Component Object Model (COM) support. In 2006, Borland’s developer tools section was transferred from Borland to a wholly owned subsidiary known as CodeGear, which was sold to Embarcadero Technologies in 2008. In 2015, Embarcadero was purchased by Idera Software, but the Embarcadero mark was retained for the developer tools division.

Delphi and its C++ counterpart, C++Builder, are interoperable. They share many core components, notably the IDE, VCL, and much of the runtime library. In addition, they can be used jointly in a project. For example, C++Builder 6 and later can consume Delphi source code and C++ in one project, while packages compiled with C++Builder can be used from within Delphi. In 2007, the products were released jointly as RAD Studio, a shared host for Delphi and C++Builder, which can be purchased with either or both.