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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer science

The Zero one infinity (ZOI) rule is a rule of thumb in software design proposed by early computing pioneer Willem van der Poel. It argues that arbitrary limits on the number of instances of a particular type of data or structure should not be allowed. Instead, an entity should either be forbidden entirely, only one should be allowed, or any number of them should be allowed. Although various factors outside that particular software could limit this number in practice, it should not be the software itself that puts a hard limit on the number of instances of the entity.

Examples of this rule may be found in the structure of many file systems' directories (also known as folders):

• 0 – The topmost directory has zero parent directories; that is, there is no directory that contains the topmost directory.
• 1 – Each subdirectory has exactly one parent directory (not including shortcuts to the directory's location; while such files may have similar icons to the icons of the destination directories, they are not directories at all).
• Infinity – Each directory, whether the topmost directory or any of its subdirectories, according to the file system's rules, may contain any number of files or subdirectories. Practical limits to this number are caused by other factors, such as space available on storage media and how well the computer's operating system is maintained.

In real-world software design, violations of this rule of thumb are common. For example, the FAT16 file system imposes a limit of 65,536 files to a directory.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Education 🔗 Game theory 🔗 Games

A simulation game is "a game that contains a mixture of skill, chance, and strategy to simulate an aspect of reality, such as a stock exchange". Similarly, Finnish author Virpi Ruohomäki states that "a simulation game combines the features of a game (competition, cooperation, rules, participants, roles) with those of a simulation (incorporation of critical features of reality). A game is a simulation game if its rules refer to an empirical model of reality". A properly built simulation game used to teach or learn economics would closely follow the assumptions and rules of the theoretical models within this discipline.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views

The dead Internet theory is a theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content, marginalizing human activity. The date given for this "death" is generally around 2016 or 2017.

In 2012, YouTube removed billions of video views from major record labels, such as Sony and Universal, as a result of discovering that they had used fraudulent services to artificially increase the views of their content. The removal of the inflated views aimed to restore credibility to the platform and improve the accuracy of view counts. The move by YouTube also signaled a change in the way the platform would tackle fake views and bot traffic.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Solar System/Mars 🔗 Solar System

The Mars trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning almost two centuries. Ultimately more utopian than dystopian, the story focuses on egalitarian, sociological, and scientific advances made on Mars, while Earth suffers from overpopulation and ecological disaster.

The three novels are Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996). The Martians (1999) is a collection of short stories set in the same fictional universe. Red Mars won the BSFA Award in 1992 and Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1993. Green Mars won the Hugo Award for Best Novel and Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1994. Blue Mars also won the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1997.

Icehenge (1984), Robinson's first novel about Mars, is not set in this universe but deals with similar themes and plot elements. The trilogy shares some similarities with Robinson's more recent novel 2312 (2012); for instance, the terraforming of Mars and the extreme longevity of the characters in both novels.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad is a 2002 science fiction novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, set in the fictional Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. It is the first book in the Legends of Dune prequel trilogy, which takes place over 10,000 years before the events of Frank Herbert's celebrated 1965 novel Dune. The series chronicles the fictional Butlerian Jihad, a crusade by the last free humans in the universe against the thinking machines, a violent and dominating force led by the sentient computer Omnius.

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad rose to #7 on The New York Times Best Seller list in its second week of publication.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Military history/Roman and Byzantine military history 🔗 Military history/Classical warfare 🔗 Eastern Europe 🔗 Albania 🔗 Illyria

The Bellum Batonianum (Latin for 'War of the Batos') was a military conflict fought in the Roman province of Illyricum in the 1st century AD, in which an alliance of native peoples of the two regions of Illyricum, Dalmatia and Pannonia, revolted against the Romans. The rebellion began among native peoples who had been recruited as auxiliary troops for the Roman army. They were led by Bato the Daesitiate, a chieftain of the Daesitiatae in the central part of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, and were later joined by the Breuci, a tribe in Pannonia led by Bato the Breucian. Many other tribes in Illyria also joined the revolt.

The Romans referred to the conflict as Bellum Batonianum ("Batonian War") after these two leaders with the same name; Velleius Paterculus called it the Pannonian and Dalmatian War because it involved both regions of Illyricum, and in English it has also been called the Great Illyrian Revolt, Pannonian–Dalmatian uprising, and Bato uprising.

The four-year war lasted from AD 6 to AD 9 and witnessed a large deployment of Roman forces in the province, with whole armies operating across the western Balkans and fighting on more than one front. In AD 8, the Breuci of the Sava valley surrendered, but it took a winter blockade and another season of fighting before the surrender in Dalmatia in AD 9. The Roman historian Suetonius described the uprising as the most difficult conflict faced by Rome since the Punic Wars two centuries earlier.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

Usury () is the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender. The term may be used in a moral sense—condemning taking advantage of others' misfortunes—or in a legal sense, where an interest rate is charged in excess of the maximum rate that is allowed by law. A loan may be considered usurious because of excessive or abusive interest rates or other factors defined by the laws of a state. Someone who practices usury can be called a usurer, but in modern colloquial English may be called a loan shark.

In many historical societies including ancient Christian, Jewish, and Islamic societies, usury meant the charging of interest of any kind, and was considered wrong, or was made illegal. During the Sutra period in India (7th to 2nd centuries BC) there were laws prohibiting the highest castes from practicing usury. Similar condemnations are found in religious texts from Buddhism, Judaism (ribbit in Hebrew), Christianity, and Islam (riba in Arabic). At times, many states from ancient Greece to ancient Rome have outlawed loans with any interest. Though the Roman Empire eventually allowed loans with carefully restricted interest rates, the Catholic Church in medieval Europe, as well as the Reformed Churches, regarded the charging of interest at any rate as sinful (as well as charging a fee for the use of money, such as at a bureau de change). Religious prohibitions on usury are predicated upon the belief that charging interest on a loan is a sin.

🔗 Trains 🔗 Trains/UK Railways 🔗 Trains/Locomotives

LNER Peppercorn Class A1 No. 60163 Tornado is a 4-6-2 steam locomotive completed in 2008 to an original design by Arthur Peppercorn. It is the first new build British mainline steam locomotive since 1960, and the only Peppercorn Class A1 in existence after the original batch were scrapped. In 2017, Tornado became the first steam locomotive to officially reach 100 mph (160 km/h) on British tracks in over 50 years.

After the project was founded by the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust in 1990, construction of Tornado began in 1994 and mostly took place at Darlington Works, with other components manufactured elsewhere. The project was financed through fundraising initiatives, public donations, sponsorship deals, and hiring out Tornado itself for special services. The locomotive was granted its mainline certificate in January 2009, having been designed in compliance with modern safety and certification standards. Tornado has worked on heritage and mainline trains across Britain since 2008. In 2022, it was withdrawn for overhaul.

🔗 Law

In legal parlance, a peppercorn is a metaphor for a very small cash payment or other nominal consideration, used to satisfy the requirements for the creation of a legal contract. It is featured in Chappell & Co Ltd v Nestle Co Ltd ([1960] AC 87), which stated that "a peppercorn does not cease to be good consideration if it is established that the promisee does not like pepper and will throw away the corn". However, the cited passage is mere dicta, and not the basis for the decision.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Sixel, short for "six pixels", is a bitmap graphics format supported by terminals and printers from DEC. It consists of a pattern six pixels high and one wide, resulting in 64 possible patterns. Each possible pattern is assigned an ASCII character, making the sixels easy to transmit on 7-bit serial links.

Sixel was first introduced as a way of sending bitmap graphics to DEC dot matrix printers like the LA50. After being put into "sixel mode" the following data was interpreted to directly control six of the pins in the nine-pin print head. A string of sixel characters encodes a single 6-pixel high row of the image.

The system was later re-used as a way to send bitmap data to the VT200 series and VT320 terminals when defining custom character sets. A series of sixels are used to transfer the bitmap for each character. This feature is known as soft character sets or dynamically redefinable character sets (DRCS). With the VT240, VT241, VT330, and VT340, the terminals could decode a complete sixel image to the screen, like those previously sent to printers.