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🔗 Automobiles

The Ford Nucleon is a concept car developed by Ford in 1957 designed as a future nuclear-powered car, one of a handful of such designs during the 1950s and '60s. The concept was only demonstrated as a scale model. The design did not include an internal-combustion engine; rather, the vehicle was to be powered by a small nuclear reactor in the rear of the vehicle, based on the assumption that this would one day be possible by reducing sizes. The car was to use a steam engine powered by uranium fission similar to those found in nuclear submarines.

The mock-up of the car can be viewed at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

🔗 Spaceflight

Mercury-Redstone 1 (MR-1) was the first Mercury-Redstone unmanned flight test in Project Mercury and the first attempt to launch a Mercury spacecraft with the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle. Intended to be an unmanned sub-orbital spaceflight, it was launched on November 21, 1960 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The launch failed in a peculiar fashion which has been referred to as the "four-inch flight".

🔗 Economics 🔗 Basic Income

Degrowth (French: décroissance) is a political, economic, and social movement based on ecological economics, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas. It is also considered an essential economic strategy responding to the limits-to-growth dilemma (see The Path to Degrowth in Overdeveloped Countries and post-growth). Degrowth thinkers and activists advocate for the downscaling of production and consumption – the contraction of economies – arguing that overconsumption lies at the root of long term environmental issues and social inequalities. Key to the concept of degrowth is that reducing consumption does not require individual martyring or a decrease in well-being. Rather, "degrowthers" aim to maximize happiness and well-being through non-consumptive means—sharing work, consuming less, while devoting more time to art, music, family, nature, culture and community.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Thomas Preston-Werner (born October 28, 1979) is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the open-source development community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives.

He is best known as the founder and former CEO of GitHub, a Git repository web-based hosting service, which he co-founded in 2008 with Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett. He resigned from GitHub in 2014 when an internal investigation concluded that he and his wife harassed an employee. Preston-Werner is also the creator of the avatar service Gravatar, the TOML configuration file format and the Semantic Versioning Specification (SemVer)

Preston-Werner lives in San Francisco with his wife Theresa and their sons.

His wife is a former graduate student in cultural anthropology known for her involvement in historical research and social subjects.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Business 🔗 England 🔗 Invention 🔗 Professional sound production

Kane Kramer is a British inventor and businessman. He is credited with the initial invention of the digital audio player, in 1979.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Libraries 🔗 Peru 🔗 Animals

Juliane Koepcke (born 1954), also known by her married name Juliane Diller, is a German Peruvian mammalogist. As a teenager in 1971, Koepcke was the lone survivor of the LANSA Flight 508 plane crash, then survived eleven days alone in the Amazon rainforest.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

A zip bomb, also known as a zip of death or decompression bomb, is a malicious archive file designed to crash or render useless the program or system reading it. It is often employed to disable antivirus software, in order to create an opening for more traditional viruses.

Rather than hijacking the normal operation of the program, a zip bomb allows the program to work as intended, but the archive is carefully crafted so that unpacking it (e.g. by a virus scanner in order to scan for viruses) requires inordinate amounts of time, disk space or memory.

Most modern antivirus programs can detect whether a file is a zip bomb, to avoid unpacking it.

🔗 Energy 🔗 Stanford University/SRI International 🔗 Stanford University

The cubic mile of oil (CMO) is a unit of energy, aiming to give the general public an understanding of large quantities of energy. It is approximately equal to 1.6×10²⁰ joule. It was created by Hew Crane of SRI International to aid in public understanding of global-scale energy consumption and resources.

Large scale sources of energy include wind, solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, nuclear, hydroelectric, oil, coal, natural gas, geothermal, and biomass (primarily the burning of wood). Traditionally, many different units are commonly used to measure these sources (e.g., joules, BTUs, kilowatt hours, therms) but only some of them are familiar to a global general public, and some argue that fewer are needed and a standard should be chosen. Still, these common energy units are mainly sized for everyday activities, for example a joule is the energy required to lift a small apple one metre vertically. For regional, national, and global scales, larger energy units, such as exajoule, terawatt-hour, billion barrels of oil equivalent (BBOE) and quad are used. Derived by multiplying the small common units by large powers of ten these larger units pose additional conceptual difficulties for many citizens.

Crane intended the cubic mile of oil to provide a visualizable scale for comparing the contributions of these diverse energy components as a percentage of total worldwide, energy use.

In 2005, the global economy was consuming approximately 30 billion barrels (4.8 billion cubic metres; 1.3 trillion US gallons) of oil each year. Numbers of this magnitude are difficult to conceive by most people. The volume occupied by 1 trillion US gallons (3.8 billion cubic metres) is about 1 cubic mile (4.2 billion cubic metres). Crane felt that a cubic mile would be an easier concept for the general public than a trillion gallons.

🔗 Mathematics

Toom–Cook, sometimes known as Toom-3, named after Andrei Toom, who introduced the new algorithm with its low complexity, and Stephen Cook, who cleaned the description of it, is a multiplication algorithm for large integers.

Given two large integers, a and b, Toom–Cook splits up a and b into k smaller parts each of length l, and performs operations on the parts. As k grows, one may combine many of the multiplication sub-operations, thus reducing the overall complexity of the algorithm. The multiplication sub-operations can then be computed recursively using Toom–Cook multiplication again, and so on. Although the terms "Toom-3" and "Toom–Cook" are sometimes incorrectly used interchangeably, Toom-3 is only a single instance of the Toom–Cook algorithm, where k = 3.

Toom-3 reduces 9 multiplications to 5, and runs in Θ(n^{log(5)/log(3)}) ≈ Θ(n^1.46). In general, Toom-k runs in Θ(c(k) n^e), where e = log(2k − 1) / log(k), n^e is the time spent on sub-multiplications, and c is the time spent on additions and multiplication by small constants. The Karatsuba algorithm is a special case of Toom–Cook, where the number is split into two smaller ones. It reduces 4 multiplications to 3 and so operates at Θ(n^{log(3)/log(2)}) ≈ Θ(n^1.58). Ordinary long multiplication is equivalent to Toom-1, with complexity Θ(n²).

Although the exponent e can be set arbitrarily close to 1 by increasing k, the function c unfortunately grows very rapidly. The growth rate for mixed-level Toom–Cook schemes was still an open research problem in 2005. An implementation described by Donald Knuth achieves the time complexity Θ(n 2^{√2 log n} log n).

Due to its overhead, Toom–Cook is slower than long multiplication with small numbers, and it is therefore typically used for intermediate-size multiplications, before the asymptotically faster Schönhage–Strassen algorithm (with complexity Θ(n log n log log n)) becomes practical.

Toom first described this algorithm in 1963, and Cook published an improved (asymptotically equivalent) algorithm in his PhD thesis in 1966.