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

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Astronomy

J002E3 is the designation given to an object in space discovered on September 3, 2002, by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung. Initially thought to be an asteroid, it has since been tentatively identified as the S-IVB third stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket (designated S-IVB-507), based on spectrographic evidence consistent with the titanium dioxide in the paint used on the rockets. The stage was intended to be injected into a permanent heliocentric orbit in November 1969, but is now believed instead to have gone into an unstable high Earth orbit which left Earth's proximity in 1971 and again in June 2003, with an approximately 40-year cycle between heliocentric and geocentric orbit.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski (Russian: Анатолий Петрович Бугорский), born 25 June 1942, is a Russian scientist.

🔗 Department of Fun

An article about or described by any of the following can be safely assumed to fit into the set of unnecessary articles:

1. You, your family, or the organization you work for.
2. Your band, which has only sold 47 copies of its one album. Even if you think it will sell 48. Or maybe 49! Or, if you get really lucky, you can pay off the record store owner so that he may buy one and your sales will have gone up to fifty!!! Keep dreamin', brotha.
3. Your imaginary friend or your imaginary friends that don't even exist.
4. The religion, language or even country that you made up with your friends in school one day.
5. The street you live on, unless it is on a Monopoly board. But since it is highly unlikely that you live on a Monopoly game board, we suggest that you not even try.
6. Any one of the 16 distinct regions in the Pokémon video game series or lieking mudkipz, or hering dat someon lieks mudkipz. Remember, not everyone is a Pokémon fanatic.
7. A stunt or trick only you have ever attempted, probably unsuccessfully.
8. Any movie you made yourself which has never been seen by more people at one time than can fit in your basement. Even if you have a really big basement.
9. Individual songs that have never been released as a single nor seen radio play, unless they're twenty minutes long or have led to a phone number becoming unusable or even have questioned the essence of music itself.
10. "(Anything) in popular culture." Anything at all.
11. Likewise "Hysterical Realism in the Works of (insert neither hysterical nor realistic author here)".
12. Your dormitory, university residence, or any suite therein.
13. Stuff nobody but that guy who changes his Spock ears more often than his underpants cares about, or the equivalent thereto. For example, a song about a custom map of a video game, unless you are famous and the song managed to release as a single.
14. Anything about which you cannot be buggered to write one complete sent
15. Subjects that cannot be studied, or the knowledge of which amounts only to the fact that it pertains to another topic. A favourite line from a movie or catchy lyric, a potent phrase used in argument, juicy facts of interest to fans, a punch-line or zinger; these are all very interesting, but usually all that can be informatively written about topic "X" is: "X is a _______ found in _______."
16. Just about everything listed on Wikipedia:Millionth topic pool.
17. For that matter, Wikipedia:Millionth topic pool.
18. Anything about your cat or dog and how cute it is (or your hamster, degu, or chinchilla).
19. Exploding Whales, or indeed Exploding Wales, or even Exploding Wales. Or blowing up any other animals, for example, exploding mice, or even exploding Velociraptor, for that matter. Most things that implode are pretty much off the list too, with a few exceptions.
20. Anything written under the influence of recreational substances or while tired and emotional.
21. An article about another article, written after the use of aforementioned substances.
22. A fork of an existing article for the sole purpose of adding some humor.
23. The weather in London. Not even a redirect. (Wowee).
24. Your guild in World of Warcraft or similar time wasters. Just because you have no life a personally fascinating hobby doesn't mean you get to tell the world about it. And don't write about this guy in your guild who wiped your raid, either.
25. Something you just saw on YouTube and, possibly, laughed at.
26. Something you just put on YouTube.
27. An article that haz badly grammar and/or speelling. Including, bad punctuation!!
28. Any meme, no matter how popular or important.
29. Anything you don't know the title of.
30. Your wiki or blog. It's probably not internationally famous. If it is, well go ahead, but let's face it; your blog of cute cats is not internationally famous (three readers is not fame).
31. Your new invention or research paper that will change the world. It will undoubtedly fail.
32. Anything about your cat named Bubba or your dog named Max. No one cares. Trust us.
33. Your nomination for the Noble (or even Nobel) Peace Prize.
34. Anything about how you were abducted by aliens.
35. An article on the dream you had last night. No matter how long you describe it, it will never be interesting: Even if dreaming that you were the inventor of the chalk board who had to overcome obstacles from the evil book binding lobbyists deeply moved you to tears upon waking up.
36. An article on the person that knocked on your door while you was writing the article about your dream last night, causing you to forget about the dream (but I’ll be honest, I feel for you).
37. An article about Wikpiedia, Wikipaedia, Wiokipedia, Wikipeedia, Wikipeadia, or any other Wikis that appear to be Wikipedia but aren't.
38. An article about the media response to the Wikipedia article about the barely notable thing that shouldn't even have an article (recursivity has its limits, even here).
39. The difference between Hoagy Carmichael and Stokely Carmichael.
40. An entry promoting your hilarious web series about Wikipedia.
41. Recreating this dumb list.
42. Anything about hashtags. #IHateHashtags
43. Anything about how fat you are or how much weight you're losing (trust us; no one cares).
44. Headlight flashing – I know, it's preposterous, even for Wikipedia. But when you're done laughing and/or crying, follow the link. It really exists.
45. Assumptions about the conclusions of scientific publications that you have seen the titles of, but not read.
46. Your self-published book.
47. McGannahan Skjellyfetti.
48. An article about your friend's latest selfie. Or, for that matter, selfie stick. They are banned in most places anyway.
49. Lists of times at which commercial breaks occurred during a sporting event.
50. Your personal opinions about your boyfriend or girlfriend.
51. An article on discussing the differences between you and your close friends. It does not matter to most people in the world.
52. An article about how Tyson Foods is run by a bunch of chicken fuckers because the main article is protected from vandalism by the legions of Internet trolls.
53. Yet another list of Google doodles.
54. A new sex position that you and your boys theory-crafted one night.
55. Times Scooby-Doo has defied the laws of reality.
56. A list of celebrity couples names for couples that you wish would get together but as of now haven't.
57. Your stupid esoteric programming language you made up to 'test the boundaries of computer programming language design'.
58. Any article related to odorous gas clouds, but particularly smelly farts.
59. Your youtube channel, unless you have millions of fangirls.
60. Your opinion and/or fascination about outer space, even if there are lots of unusual exoplanets out there. Yes, we know. They're weird. No need to tell us that.
61. Your opinion on time traveling to have dinner with the members of Bone Symphony or Bone Thugs-n-Harmony or Boney M. or The Right Honourable Bonar Law
62. The time you laughed about someone eating a red 5-pound gummy skull while wearing a jetpack while driving a limousine at 5 a.m. on a Tuesday in August 2018.
63. An article that uses templates to perform math for no apparent reason besides your entertainment
64. Your anus and how it had very good funny time with girl.
65. The time you laughed at someone living in Fortnite (Chapter 1), even though I get that they were eaten by a Black hole. Oh well, they came back!
66. Posting a video of yourself saying the n-word.
67. Posting an image of yourself falling off the Burj Khalifa.
68. Singing any Cardi B song.
69. Posting 69 (nice) useless messages made by bored editors of Wikipedia.
70. Your low-effort school play of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!"
71. A list of times you pinged @everyone on your Discord server.

🔗 Websites 🔗 Websites/Computing

Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham's investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".

🔗 Physics 🔗 Meteorology 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Geology 🔗 Limnology and Oceanography 🔗 Materials

Ice is water frozen into a solid state. Depending on the presence of impurities such as particles of soil or bubbles of air, it can appear transparent or a more or less opaque bluish-white color.

In the Solar System, ice is abundant and occurs naturally from as close to the Sun as Mercury to as far away as the Oort cloud objects. Beyond the Solar System, it occurs as interstellar ice. It is abundant on Earth's surface – particularly in the polar regions and above the snow line – and, as a common form of precipitation and deposition, plays a key role in Earth's water cycle and climate. It falls as snowflakes and hail or occurs as frost, icicles or ice spikes.

Ice molecules can exhibit eighteen or more different phases (packing geometries) that depend on temperature and pressure. When water is cooled rapidly (quenching), up to three different types of amorphous ice can form depending on the history of its pressure and temperature. When cooled slowly correlated proton tunneling occurs below −253.15 °C (20 K, −423.67 °F) giving rise to macroscopic quantum phenomena. Virtually all the ice on Earth's surface and in its atmosphere is of a hexagonal crystalline structure denoted as ice I_h (spoken as "ice one h") with minute traces of cubic ice denoted as ice I_c. The most common phase transition to ice I_h occurs when liquid water is cooled below 0 °C (273.15 K, 32 °F) at standard atmospheric pressure. It may also be deposited directly by water vapor, as happens in the formation of frost. The transition from ice to water is melting and from ice directly to water vapor is sublimation.

Ice is used in a variety of ways, including cooling, winter sports and ice sculpture.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Numismatics/Cryptocurrency 🔗 Computing/Computer Security

SHA-3 (Secure Hash Algorithm 3) is the latest member of the Secure Hash Algorithm family of standards, released by NIST on August 5, 2015. Although part of the same series of standards, SHA-3 is internally different from the MD5-like structure of SHA-1 and SHA-2.

SHA-3 is a subset of the broader cryptographic primitive family Keccak (), designed by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters, and Gilles Van Assche, building upon RadioGatún. Keccak's authors have proposed additional uses for the function, not (yet) standardized by NIST, including a stream cipher, an authenticated encryption system, a "tree" hashing scheme for faster hashing on certain architectures, and AEAD ciphers Keyak and Ketje.

Keccak is based on a novel approach called sponge construction. Sponge construction is based on a wide random function or random permutation, and allows inputting ("absorbing" in sponge terminology) any amount of data, and outputting ("squeezing") any amount of data, while acting as a pseudorandom function with regard to all previous inputs. This leads to great flexibility.

NIST does not currently plan to withdraw SHA-2 or remove it from the revised Secure Hash Standard. The purpose of SHA-3 is that it can be directly substituted for SHA-2 in current applications if necessary, and to significantly improve the robustness of NIST's overall hash algorithm toolkit.

The creators of the Keccak algorithms and the SHA-3 functions suggest using the faster function KangarooTwelve with adjusted parameters and a new tree hashing mode without extra overhead for small message sizes.

🔗 Maps 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Paranormal

The Piri Reis map is a world map compiled in 1513 by the Ottoman admiral and cartographer Piri Reis (pronounced [piːˈɾiː ɾeis]). Approximately one third of the map survives; it shows the western coasts of Europe and North Africa and the coast of Brazil with reasonable accuracy. Various Atlantic islands, including the Azores and Canary Islands, are depicted, as is the mythical island of Antillia and possibly Japan.

The map's historical importance lies in its demonstration of the extent of global exploration of the New World by approximately 1510, and in its claim to have used a map of Christopher Columbus, otherwise lost, as a source. Piri also stated that he had used ten Arab sources and four Indian maps sourced from the Portuguese. More recently, the map has been the focus of claims for the pre-modern exploration of the Antarctic coast.

The Piri Reis map is in the Library of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, but is not usually on display to the public.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Birds 🔗 Photography 🔗 Photography/History of photography 🔗 Military history/European military history

Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German apothecary Julius Neubronner, who also used pigeons to deliver medications. A homing pigeon was fitted with an aluminium breast harness to which a lightweight time-delayed miniature camera could be attached. Neubronner's German patent application was initially rejected, but was granted in December 1908 after he produced authenticated photographs taken by his pigeons. He publicized the technique at the 1909 Dresden International Photographic Exhibition, and sold some images as postcards at the Frankfurt International Aviation Exhibition and at the 1910 and 1911 Paris Air Shows.

Initially, the military potential of pigeon photography for aerial reconnaissance appeared interesting. Battlefield tests in World War I provided encouraging results, but the ancillary technology of mobile dovecotes for messenger pigeons had the greatest impact. Owing to the rapid perfection of aviation during the war, military interest in pigeon photography faded and Neubronner abandoned his experiments. The idea was briefly resurrected in the 1930s by a Swiss clockmaker, and reportedly also by the German and French militaries. Although war pigeons were deployed extensively during World War II, it is unclear to what extent, if any, birds were involved in aerial reconnaissance. The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) later developed a battery-powered camera designed for espionage pigeon photography; details of its use remain classified.

The construction of sufficiently small and light cameras with a timer mechanism, and the training and handling of the birds to carry the necessary loads, presented major challenges, as did the limited control over the pigeons' position, orientation and speed when the photographs were being taken. In 2004, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) used miniature television cameras attached to falcons and goshawks to obtain live footage, and today some researchers, enthusiasts and artists similarly deploy crittercams with various species of animals.

🔗 Systems 🔗 Time 🔗 Systems/Chaos theory

A digital sundial is a clock that indicates the current time with numerals formed by the sunlight striking it. Like a classical sundial, the device contains no moving parts. It uses no electricity nor other manufactured sources of energy. The digital display changes as the sun advances in its daily course.