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

🔗 Africa 🔗 Spain 🔗 Africa/Western Sahara 🔗 Morocco 🔗 Limited recognition

Western Sahara is a United Nations–designated non-self-governing territory in north-western Africa. It has a surface area of 272,000 square kilometres (105,000 sq mi). Western Sahara is the last African colonial state yet to achieve independence and has been dubbed "Africa's last colony". With an estimated 600,000 inhabitants, it is the most sparsely populated territory in Africa and the second most sparsely populated territory in the world after Greenland, consisting mainly of desert flatlands.

Francoist Spain previously colonized the territory as the Spanish Sahara until 1975–1976. Spain attempted to transfer its administration to Morocco and Mauritania despite an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that those countries had no sovereignty over Western Sahara; a war erupted and the pro-independence Polisario Front proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). Mauritania withdrew its claims in 1979, and Morocco secured de facto control of most of the territory, including all major cities and most natural resources. The SADR established a government-in-exile in Tindouf, Algeria. A UN-sponsored ceasefire agreement was reached in 1991, though a planned referendum monitored by the UN's MINURSO mission has since stalled.

Approximately 30% of the Western Sahara is controlled by the Polisario Front and the remaining 70% is occupied by Morocco. Morocco maintains the Berm, a 2,700 km-long (1,700 mi) wall lined with land mines that splits the territory. The Polisario Front is recognized by the UN as the legitimate representative of the people of Western Sahara and is primarily supported by Algeria. The SADR has received partial international recognition and membership in the African Union. Morocco is supported by France and the United States; several states and the United Nations Security Council began expressing support for its autonomy proposal in the 2020s.

🔗 Books 🔗 Amphibians and Reptiles 🔗 Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs 🔗 Altered States of Consciousness

Bufo Alvarius: the Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert is an underground pamphlet written by Albert Most (real name Ken Nelson (1954–2019)), illustrated by Gail Patterson, and published by Venom Press in 1984. It described how to extract the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad (formerly Bufo alvarius, now Incilius alvarius), which contains the serotonergic psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT, and administer the venom to produce hallucinogenic effects. The pamphlet was responsible for the start of the recreational use of the toad venom and of 5-MeO-DMT. Subsequently, Andrew Weil and Wade Davis, in part citing the pamphlet, described the psychoactive effects of the toad in the scientific literature in 1992. In addition, they described the finding as the first instance of a psychedelic from an animal source to be discovered. Following the publication of the pamphlet, recreational use of the toads was encountered by the late 1980s and became a media sensation.

The pamphlet was originally published pseudonymously. Journalist Hamilton Morris described becoming obsessed with identifying the author of the pamphlet. Morris came upon a man named Alfred Savinelli, who claimed to be the author, and published this in his documentary series Hamilton's Pharmacopeia in 2017. Savinelli as the author, however, ultimately proved to be incorrect. The real author, Ken Nelson, subsequently contacted Morris and proved his identity. In 2020, a new episode of Hamilton's Pharmacopeia revealed Nelson as the true author, and Morris apologized for the mistake. Nelson died due to Parkinson's disease in 2019 prior to the airing. In 2021, with Nelson's permission, Morris (and two producers: Justin Clark and Soren Shade) published a revised and expanded edition of the pamphlet that included a chemical synthesis for 5-MeO-DMT. The inclusion of the synthesis of 5-MeO-DMT was prompted by concerns about endangerment and reduction of the toad population.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Paranormal

Nobel disease or Nobelitis is the embracing of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise, although it is unknown whether Nobel Prize winners are more prone to this tendency than other individuals. Paul Nurse, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, warned later laureates against "believing you are expert in almost everything, and being prepared to express opinions about most issues with great confidence, sheltering behind the authority that the Nobel Prize can give you". Nobel disease has been described as a "tongue in cheek" term.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Philosophy/Modern philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics 🔗 Philosophy/Analytic philosophy 🔗 Folklore

In the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The concept is one of the oldest in Western philosophy, having been discussed by the likes of Heraclitus and Plato by ca. 500-400 BC.

🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Syria 🔗 Archaeology

Tell Abu Hureyra (Arabic: تل أبو هريرة) is a prehistoric archaeological site in the Upper Euphrates valley in Syria. The tell was inhabited between 13,300 and 7,800 cal. BP in two main phases: Abu Hureyra 1, dated to the Epipalaeolithic, was a village of sedentary hunter-gatherers; Abu Hureyra 2, dated to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, was home to some of the world's first farmers. This almost continuous sequence of occupation through the Neolithic Revolution has made Abu Hureyra one of the most important sites in the study of the origins of agriculture.

The site is significant because the inhabitants of Abu Hureyra started out as hunter-gatherers but gradually moved to farming, making them the earliest known farmers. Cultivation started at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period at Abu Hureyra. Evidence uncovered at Abu Hureyra suggests that rye was the first cereal crop to be systematically cultivated. In light of this, it is now believed that the first systematic cultivation of cereal crops was around 13,000 years ago.

During the Late Glacial Interstadial, Abu Hureyra site experienced climatic change. Due to lake level changes and aridity, the vegetation expanded into lower areas of the fields. Abu Hureyra accumulated vegetation that consisted of grasses, oaks, and Pistacia atlantica trees. The climate changed from warm and dry months to abruptly cold and dry months.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Crime 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Business 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography

A scandal erupted in 2005 regarding Sony BMG's implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and "phone home" with reports on the user's private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software's existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.

Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files visible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user and introduced further security vulnerabilities.

Following public outcry, government investigations and class-action lawsuits in 2005 and 2006, Sony BMG partially addressed the scandal with consumer settlements, a recall of about 10% of the affected CDs and the suspension of CD copy-protection efforts in early 2007.

🔗 California 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Trains 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Trains/Rapid transit 🔗 Buses 🔗 Trains/Streetcars

The notion of a General Motors streetcar conspiracy emerged after General Motors (GM) and other companies were convicted of monopolizing the sale of buses and supplies to National City Lines (NCL) and its subsidiaries. In the same case, the defendants were accused of conspiring to own or control transit systems, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust act. The suit created lingering suspicions that the defendants had in fact plotted to dismantle streetcar systems in many cities in the United States as an attempt to monopolize surface transportation.

Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities. Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland. NCL often converted streetcars to bus operations in that period, although electric traction was preserved or expanded in some locations. Other systems, such as San Diego's, were converted by outgrowths of the City Lines. Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry.

The story as an urban legend has been written about by Martha Bianco, Scott Bottles, Sy Adler, Jonathan Richmond, and Robert Post. It has been explored several times in print, film, and other media, notably in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Taken for a Ride, Internal Combustion, and The End of Suburbia.

Only a handful of U.S. cities, including San Francisco, New Orleans, Newark, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Boston, have surviving legacy rail urban transport systems based on streetcars, although their systems are significantly smaller than they once were. Other cities are re-introducing streetcars. In some cases, the streetcars do not actually ride on the street. Boston had all of its downtown lines elevated or buried by the mid-1920s, and most of the surviving lines at grade operate on their own right of way. However, San Francisco's and Philadelphia's lines do have large portions of the route that ride on the street as well as using tunnels.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles or domains, each storing one bit of data. The material is arranged to form a series of parallel tracks that the bubbles can move along under the action of an external magnetic field. The bubbles are read by moving them to the edge of the material, where they can be read by a conventional magnetic pickup, and then rewritten on the far edge to keep the memory cycling through the material. In operation, bubble memories are similar to delay-line memory systems.

Bubble memory started out as a promising technology in the 1970s, offering performance similar to core memory, memory density similar to hard drives, and no moving parts. This led many to consider it a contender for a "universal memory" that could be used for all storage needs. The introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips in the early 1970s pushed bubble into the slow end of the scale and it began to be considered mostly as a replacement for disks. The equally dramatic improvements in hard-drive capacity through the early 1980s made it uncompetitive in price terms for mass storage.

Bubble memory was used for some time in the 1970s and 1980s in applications where its non-moving nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The introduction of flash storage and similar technologies rendered even this niche uncompetitive, and bubble disappeared entirely by the late 1980s.

🔗 Death 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Politics 🔗 LGBTQ+ studies

Necropolitics is a sociopolitical theory of the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. The deployment of necropolitics creates what Achille Mbembe calls deathworlds, or "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead." Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony, was the first scholar to explore the term in depth in his 2003 article, and later, his 2019 book of the same name. Mbembe identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, stating that racialized people's lives are systemically cheapened and habituated to loss.

🔗 Books 🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Organizations

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. The concept was elucidated in the book The Peter Principle (William Morrow and Company, 1969) by Dr Peter and Raymond Hull.

Peter and Hull intended the book to be satire, but it became popular as it was seen to make a serious point about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within hierarchical organizations. Hull wrote the text, based on Peter's research. The Peter principle has been the subject of much subsequent commentary and research.