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🔗 Lèse-Majesté in Thailand
In Thailand, lèse-majesté is a crime according to Section 112 of the Thai Criminal Code. It is illegal to defame, insult, or threaten the monarch of Thailand (king, queen, heir-apparent, heir-presumptive, or regent). Modern Thai lèse-majesté law has been on the statute books since 1908. Thailand is the only constitutional monarchy to have strengthened its lèse-majesté law since World War II. With penalties ranging from three to fifteen years imprisonment for each count, it has been described as the "world's harshest lèse majesté law" and "possibly the strictest criminal-defamation law anywhere". Its enforcement has been described as being "in the interest of the palace".: 134 
The law has criminalised acts of insult since 1957. There is substantial room for interpretation, which causes controversy. Broad interpretation of the law reflects the inviolable status of the king, resembling feudal or absolute monarchs. Thailand's Supreme Court decided the law also applies to prior monarchs. Criticism of any privy council member has raised the question whether lèse-majesté applies by association. Even attempting to commit lèse-majesté, making sarcastic comments about the King's pet, and failure to rebuke an offense have been prosecuted as lèse-majesté.
Anyone can file a lèse-majesté complaint, and the police formally investigate all of them. Details of the charges are rarely made public. A Section 112 defendant meets with official obstruction throughout the case. There are months-long pretrial detentions, and courts routinely deny bail to those charged. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention determined that the pretrial detention of an alleged lèse-majesté offender violated international human rights law. The courts seem not to recognise the principle of granting defendants the benefit of the doubt. Judges have said accusers did not have to prove the factuality of the alleged lèse-majesté material but only claim it is defamatory. Pleading guilty, then asking for a royal pardon, is seen as the quickest route to freedom for any accused.
Since the 1976 coup, coup makers have regularly cited a surge of alleged lèse-majesté charges as a reason for overthrowing elected governments. This was cited as one of the major reasons for the 2006 coup and that of 2014. In 2006 and 2007, there were notable changes in the trend. Those targeted by lèse-majesté complaints included more average citizens who were given longer jail sentences. Human rights groups condemned its use as a political weapon and a means to restrict freedom. The 2014 junta government granted authority to army courts to prosecute lèse-majesté, which has usually resulted in secret trials and harsh sentences. Prior to the law's revival in 2020, for three years the Thai government often invoked other laws, such as the Computer Crimes Act and sedition laws, to deal with perceived damages and insults to the monarchy. The longest recorded sentence was in 2021: 87 years imprisonment, reduced to 43 years because the defendant pleaded guilty. In 2023, the Supreme Court ordered a female politician from the Move Forward Party to be banned from politics for life due to her alleged lèse-majesté posts on social media.
Discussed on
- "Lèse-Majesté in Thailand" | 2024-01-19 | 16 Upvotes 14 Comments
🔗 Bucket Argument for Absolute Space
Isaac Newton's rotating bucket argument (also known as Newton's bucket) was designed to demonstrate that true rotational motion cannot be defined as the relative rotation of the body with respect to the immediately surrounding bodies. It is one of five arguments from the "properties, causes, and effects" of "true motion and rest" that support his contention that, in general, true motion and rest cannot be defined as special instances of motion or rest relative to other bodies, but instead can be defined only by reference to absolute space. Alternatively, these experiments provide an operational definition of what is meant by "absolute rotation", and do not pretend to address the question of "rotation relative to what?" General relativity dispenses with absolute space and with physics whose cause is external to the system, with the concept of geodesics of spacetime.
Discussed on
- "Bucket Argument for Absolute Space" | 2024-01-17 | 29 Upvotes 16 Comments
🔗 Cancer Alley
Cancer Alley (French: Allée du Cancer) is the regional nickname given to an 85-mile (137 km) stretch of land along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, in the River Parishes of Louisiana, which contains over 200 petrochemical plants and refineries. This area accounts for 25% of the petrochemical production in the United States. Environmentalists consider the region a sacrifice zone where rates of cancer caused by air pollution exceed the federal government's own limits of acceptable risk. Others have referred to the same region as "Death Alley".
Community leaders such as Sharon Lavigne have led the charge in protesting the expansion of the petrochemical industry in Cancer Alley, as well as addressing the associated racial and economic disparities.
Discussed on
- "Cancer Alley" | 2024-01-17 | 181 Upvotes 87 Comments
🔗 Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx
The mathematical manuscripts of Karl Marx are a manuscript collection of Karl Marx's mathematical notes where he attempted to derive the foundations of infinitesimal calculus from first principles.
The notes that Marx took have been collected into four independent treatises: On the Concept of the Derived Function, On the Differential, On the History of Differential Calculus, and Taylor's Theorem, MacLaurin's Theorem, and Lagrange's Theory of Derived Functions, along with several notes, additional drafts, and supplements to these four treatises. These treatises attempt to construct a rigorous foundation for calculus and use historical materialism to analyze the history of mathematics.
Marx's contributions to mathematics did not have any impact on the historical development of calculus, and he was unaware of many more recent developments in the field at the time, such as the work of Cauchy. However, his work in some ways anticipated, but did not influence, some later developments in 20th century mathematics. These manuscripts, which are from around 1873–1883, were not published in any language until 1968 when they were published in the Soviet Union alongside a Russian translation. Since their publication, Marx's independent contributions to mathematics have been analyzed in terms of both his own historical and economic theories, and in light of their potential applications of nonstandard analysis.
Discussed on
- "Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx" | 2024-01-17 | 18 Upvotes 11 Comments
🔗 6174
The number 6174 is known as Kaprekar's constant after the Indian mathematician D. R. Kaprekar. This number is renowned for the following rule:
- Take any four-digit number, using at least two different digits (leading zeros are allowed).
- Arrange the digits in descending and then in ascending order to get two four-digit numbers, adding leading zeros if necessary.
- Subtract the smaller number from the bigger number.
- Go back to step 2 and repeat.
The above process, known as Kaprekar's routine, will always reach its fixed point, 6174, in at most 7 iterations. Once 6174 is reached, the process will continue yielding 7641 – 1467 = 6174. For example, choose 1459:
The only four-digit numbers for which Kaprekar's routine does not reach 6174 are repdigits such as 1111, which give the result 0000 after a single iteration. All other four-digit numbers eventually reach 6174 if leading zeros are used to keep the number of digits at 4. For numbers with three identical numbers and a fourth number that is one number higher or lower (such as 2111), it is essential to treat 3-digit numbers with a leading zero; for example: 2111 – 1112 = 0999; 9990 – 999 = 8991; 9981 – 1899 = 8082; 8820 – 288 = 8532; 8532 – 2358 = 6174.
Discussed on
- "6174" | 2024-01-16 | 511 Upvotes 102 Comments
🔗 Why Y is pronounced as "igrek"
Y, or y, is the 25th and penultimate letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. According to some authorities, it is the sixth (or seventh if including W) vowel letter of the English alphabet. In the English writing system, it mostly represents a vowel and seldom a consonant, and in other orthographies it may represent a vowel or a consonant. Its name in English is wye (pronounced ), plural wyes.
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- "Why Y is pronounced as "igrek"" | 2024-01-16 | 63 Upvotes 59 Comments
🔗 Cat Drop
Operation Cat Drop is the name given to the delivery of some 14,000 cats by the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force to remote regions of the then-British colony of Sarawak (today part of Malaysia), on the island of Borneo in 1960. The cats were flown out of Singapore and delivered in crates dropped by parachutes as part of a broader program of supplying cats to combat a plague of rats. The operation was reported as a "success" at the time. Some newspaper reports published soon after the Operation reference only 23 cats being used. However, later reports state as many as 14,000 cats were used. An additional source references a "recruitment" drive for 30 cats a few days prior to Operation Cat Drop.
Discussed on
- "Cat Drop" | 2024-01-15 | 42 Upvotes 14 Comments
🔗 Beaver Drop
The beaver drop was a 1948 Idaho Department of Fish and Game program to relocate beavers (Castor canadensis). The program involved moving 76 beavers by airplane and parachuting them to new areas in Central Idaho. The program was initiated to both reduce cost and decrease mortality rates during the relocation. Alleviating complaints about "nuisance beavers" and their activities were an underlying reason for it.
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- "Beaver Drop" | 2024-01-15 | 123 Upvotes 48 Comments
🔗 Decimal Time
Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used specifically to refer to the French Republican calendar time system used in France from 1794 to 1800, during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds (100000 decimal seconds per day), as opposed to the more familiar standard time, which divides the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds (86400 SI seconds per day).
The main advantage of a decimal time system is that, since the base used to divide the time is the same as the one used to represent it, the representation of hours, minutes and seconds can be handled as a unified value. Therefore, it becomes simpler to interpret a timestamp and to perform conversions. For instance, 1h23m45s is 1 decimal hour, 23 decimal minutes, and 45 decimal seconds, or 1.2345 decimal hours, or 123.45 decimal minutes or 12345 decimal seconds; 3 hours is 300 minutes or 30,000 seconds. This property also makes it straightforward to represent a timestamp as a fractional day, so that 2024-01-15.54321 can be interpreted as five decimal hours and 43 decimal minutes and 21 decimal seconds after the start of that day, or a fraction of 0.54321 (54.321%) through that day (which is shortly after traditional 13:00). It also adjusts well to digital time representation using epochs, in that the internal time representation can be used directly both for computation and for user-facing display.
Discussed on
- "Decimal Time" | 2024-01-13 | 42 Upvotes 47 Comments
🔗 Light Pillar
A light pillar is an atmospheric optical phenomenon in which a vertical beam of light appears to extend above and/or below a light source. The effect is created by the reflection of light from tiny ice crystals that are suspended in the atmosphere or that comprise high-altitude clouds (e.g. cirrostratus or cirrus clouds). If the light comes from the Sun (usually when it is near or even below the horizon), the phenomenon is called a sun pillar or solar pillar. Light pillars can also be caused by the Moon or terrestrial sources, such as streetlights and erupting volcanoes.