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🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Literature

Foetry.com, sometimes referred to as just Foetry, was a website that attempted to identify fraudulent and unethical practices in poetry contests. It was active from April 1, 2004 until May 18, 2007.

🔗 Computing

Refal ("[of] Recursive functions' algorithmic language") "is functional programming language oriented toward symbolic computations", including "string processing, language translation, [and] artificial intelligence". It is one of the oldest members of this family, first conceived of in 1966 as a theoretical tool, with the first implementation appearing in 1968. Refal was intended to combine mathematical simplicity with practicality for writing large and sophisticated programs.

One of the first functional programming languages to do so, and unlike Lisp of its time, Refal is based on pattern matching. Its pattern matching works in conjunction with term rewriting.

The basic data structure of Lisp and Prolog is a linear list built by cons operation in a sequential manner, thus with O(n) access to list's nth element. Refal's lists are built and scanned from both ends, with pattern matching working for nested lists as well as the top-level one. In effect, the basic data structure of Refal is a tree rather than a list. This gives freedom and convenience in creating data structures while using only mathematically simple control mechanisms of pattern matching and substitution.

Refal also includes a feature called the freezer to support efficient partial evaluation.

Refal can be applied to the processing and transformation of tree structures, similarly to XSLT.

🔗 Electronics

Wire wrap was invented to wire telephone crossbar switches, and later adapted to construct electronic circuit boards. Electronic components mounted on an insulating board are interconnected by lengths of insulated wire run between their terminals, with the connections made by wrapping several turns of uninsulated sections of the wire around a component lead or a socket pin.

Wires can be wrapped by hand or by machine, and can be hand-modified afterwards. It was popular for large-scale manufacturing in the 1960s and early 1970s, and continues today to be used for short runs and prototypes. The method eliminates the design and fabrication of a printed circuit board. Wire wrapping is unusual among other prototyping technologies since it allows for complex assemblies to be produced by automated equipment, but then easily repaired or modified by hand.

Wire wrap construction can produce assemblies which are more reliable than printed circuits: connections are less prone to fail due to vibration or physical stresses on the base board, and the lack of solder precludes soldering faults such as corrosion, cold joints and dry joints. The connections themselves are firmer and have lower electrical resistance due to cold welding of the wire to the terminal post at the corners.

Wire wrap was used for assembly of high frequency prototypes and small production runs, including gigahertz microwave circuits and supercomputers. It is unique among automated prototyping techniques in that wire lengths can be exactly controlled, and twisted pairs or magnetically shielded twisted quads can be routed together.

Wire wrap construction became popular around 1960 in circuit board manufacturing, and use has now sharply declined. Surface-mount technology has made the technique much less useful than in previous decades. Solder-less breadboards and the decreasing cost of professionally made PCBs have nearly eliminated this technology.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Mainline DHT is the name given to the Kademlia-based Distributed Hash Table (DHT) used by BitTorrent clients to find peers via the BitTorrent protocol. The idea of utilizing a DHT for distributed tracking was first implemented in Azureus 2.3.0.0 (now known as Vuze) in May 2005, from which it gained significant popularity. Unrelated but similarly timed BitTorrent, Inc. released their own similar DHT into their client, called Mainline DHT and thus popularized the use of distributed tracking in the BitTorrent Protocol. Measurement shows by 2013 users of Mainline DHT is from 10 million to 25 million, with a daily churn of at least 10 million.

🔗 Trains 🔗 Bridges and Tunnels

The Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT; German: Gotthard-Basistunnel, Italian: Galleria di base del San Gottardo, Romansh: Tunnel da basa dal Son Gottard) is a railway tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland. It opened on 1 June 2016, and full service began on 11 December 2016. With a route length of 57.09 km (35.5 mi), it is the world's longest railway and deepest traffic tunnel and the first flat, low-level route through the Alps. It lies at the heart of the Gotthard axis and constitutes the third tunnel connecting the cantons of Uri and Ticino, after the Gotthard Tunnel and the Gotthard Road Tunnel.

The link consists of two single-track tunnels connecting Erstfeld (Uri) with Bodio (Ticino) and passing below Sedrun (Graubünden). It is part of the New Railway Link through the Alps (NRLA) project, which also includes the Ceneri Base Tunnel further south (scheduled to open late 2020) and the Lötschberg Base Tunnel on the other main north–south axis. It is referred to as a "base tunnel" since it bypasses most of the existing Gotthard railway line, a winding mountain route opened in 1882 across the Saint-Gotthard Massif, which was operating at its capacity before the opening of the GBT. The new base tunnel establishes a direct route usable by high-speed rail and heavy freight trains.

The main purpose of the Gotthard Base Tunnel is to increase local transport capacity through the Alpine barrier, especially for freight, notably on the Rotterdam–Basel–Genoa corridor, and more specifically to shift freight volumes from trucks to freight trains. This both significantly reduces the danger of fatal road crashes involving trucks, and reduces the environmental damage caused by heavy trucks. The tunnel provides a faster connection between the canton of Ticino and the rest of Switzerland, as well as between northern and southern Europe, cutting the Basel/Zürich–Lugano–Milan journey time for passenger trains by one hour (and from Lucerne to Bellinzona by 45 minutes).

After 64 percent of Swiss voters accepted the NRLA project in a 1992 referendum, first preparatory and exploratory work began in 1996. The official start of construction began on 4 November 1999 at Amsteg. Drilling operations in the eastern tunnel were completed on 15 October 2010 in a breakthrough ceremony broadcast live on Swiss TV, and in the western tunnel on 23 March 2011. The tunnel's constructor, AlpTransit Gotthard AG, originally planned to hand over the tunnel to Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS) in operating condition in December 2016 but, on 4 February 2014, the handover date was changed to 5 June 2016 with the start of an 850-day opening countdown calendar on the AlpTransit homepage. As of 1998, the total projected cost of the project was CHF 6.323 billion; as of December 2015, the final cost is projected as CHF 9.560 billion. Nine people died during construction.

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Crime 🔗 Law 🔗 England

R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273 DC is a leading English criminal case which established a precedent throughout the common law world that necessity is not a defence to a charge of murder. It concerned survival cannibalism following a shipwreck and its purported justification on the basis of a custom of the sea. It marked the culmination of a long history of attempts by the law, in the face of public opinion sympathetic to castaways, to outlaw the custom and it became something of a cause célèbre in Victorian Britain.

Dudley and Stephens were shipwrecked along with two other men. When one of them, the cabin boy Richard Parker, fell into a coma, Dudley and Stephens decided to kill him for food.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Norway 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

Arne Dekke Eide Næss ( AR-nə NESS; Norwegian: [ˈnɛsː]; 27 January 1912 – 12 January 2009) was a Norwegian philosopher who coined the term "deep ecology" and was an important intellectual and inspirational figure within the environmental movement of the late twentieth century. Næss cited Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring as being a key influence in his vision of deep ecology. Næss combined his ecological vision with Gandhian nonviolence and on several occasions participated in direct action.

Næss averred that while western environmental groups of the early post-war period had raised public awareness of the environmental issues of the time, they had largely failed to have insight into and address what he argued were the underlying cultural and philosophical background to these problems. Naess believed that the environmental crisis of the twentieth century had arisen due to certain unspoken philosophical presuppositions and attitudes within modern western developed societies which remained unacknowledged.

He thereby distinguished between what he called deep and shallow ecological thinking. In contrast to the prevailing utilitarian pragmatism of western businesses and governments, he advocated that a true understanding of nature would give rise to a point of view that appreciates the value of biological diversity, understanding that each living thing is dependent on the existence of other creatures in the complex web of interrelationships that is the natural world.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Brands

Cell is a multi-core microprocessor microarchitecture that combines a general-purpose PowerPC core of modest performance with streamlined coprocessing elements which greatly accelerate multimedia and vector processing applications, as well as many other forms of dedicated computation.

It was developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM, an alliance known as "STI". The architectural design and first implementation were carried out at the STI Design Center in Austin, Texas over a four-year period beginning March 2001 on a budget reported by Sony as approaching US$400 million. Cell is shorthand for Cell Broadband Engine Architecture, commonly abbreviated CBEA in full or Cell BE in part.

The first major commercial application of Cell was in Sony's PlayStation 3 game console, released in 2006. In May 2008, the Cell-based IBM Roadrunner supercomputer became the first TOP500 LINPACK sustained 1.0 petaflops system. Mercury Computer Systems also developed designs based on the Cell.

The Cell architecture includes a memory coherence architecture that emphasizes power efficiency, prioritizes bandwidth over low latency, and favors peak computational throughput over simplicity of program code. For these reasons, Cell is widely regarded as a challenging environment for software development. IBM provides a Linux-based development platform to help developers program for Cell chips.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Arachne is a discontinued Internet suite containing a graphical web browser, email client, and dialer. Originally, Arachne was developed by Michal Polák under his xChaos label, a name he later changed into Arachne Labs. It was written in C and compiled using Borland C++ 3.1. Arachne has since been released under the GPL as Arachne GPL.

Arachne primarily runs on DOS-based operating systems, but includes builds for Linux as well. The Linux version relies on SVGALib and therefore does not require a display server.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Whitespace is an esoteric programming language developed by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris at the University of Durham (also developers of the Kaya and Idris programming languages). It was released on 1 April 2003 (April Fool's Day). Its name is a reference to whitespace characters. Unlike most programming languages, which ignore or assign little meaning to most whitespace characters, the Whitespace interpreter ignores any non-whitespace characters. Only spaces, tabs and linefeeds have meaning. A consequence of this property is that a Whitespace program can easily be contained within the whitespace characters of a program written in another language, except possibly in languages which depend on spaces for syntax validity such as Python, making the text a polyglot.

The language itself is an imperative stack-based language. The virtual machine on which the programs run has a stack and a heap. The programmer is free to push arbitrary-width integers onto the stack (currently there is no implementation of floating point numbers) and can also access the heap as a permanent store for variables and data structures.