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🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Primates

The hundredth monkey effect is a hypothetical phenomenon in which a new behaviour or idea is said to spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behaviour or acknowledge the new idea.

One of the primary factors in the promulgation of the story is that many authors quote secondary, tertiary or post-tertiary sources which have themselves misrepresented the original observations.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Islam 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Syria 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy

Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī (Arabic: أبو العلاء المعري‎‎, full name أبو العلاء أحمد بن عبد الله بن سليمان التنوخي المعري‎ Abū al-ʿAlāʾ Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sulaymān al-Tanūkhī al-Maʿarrī; December 973 – May 1057) was a blind Arab philosopher, poet, and writer. Despite holding a controversially irreligious worldview, he is regarded as one of the greatest classical Arabic poets.

Born in the city of Ma'arra during the Abbasid era, he studied in nearby Aleppo, then in Tripoli and Antioch. Producing popular poems in Baghdad, he nevertheless refused to sell his texts. In 1010, he returned to Syria after his mother began declining in health, and continued writing which gained him local respect.

Described as a "pessimistic freethinker", al-Ma'arri was a controversial rationalist of his time, citing reason as the chief source of truth and divine revelation. He was pessimistic about life, describing himself as "a double prisoner" of blindness and isolation. He attacked religious dogmas and practices, was equally critical and sarcastic about Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism, and became a Deist.

He advocated social justice and lived a secluded, ascetic lifestyle. He was a vegan, known in his time as moral vegetarianism, entreating: "do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals / Or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught / for their young". Al-Ma'arri held an antinatalist outlook, in line with his general pessimism, suggesting that children should not be born to spare them of the pains and suffering of life.

Al-Ma'arri wrote three main works that were popular in his time. Among his works are The Tinder Spark, Unnecessary Necessity, and The Epistle of Forgiveness. Al-Ma'arri never married and died at the age of 83 in the city where he was born, Ma'arrat al-Nu'man. In 2013, a statue of al-Ma'arri located in his Syrian hometown was beheaded by jihadists from the al-Nusra Front.

🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture

Chindōgu (珍道具) is the practice of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem to be ideal solutions to particular problems, but which may cause more problems than they solve. The term is of Japanese origin.

🔗 Australia 🔗 United States History 🔗 Australia/Australian history 🔗 Australia/South Australia

Rain follows the plow is the conventional name for a now-discredited theory of climatology that was popular throughout the American West and Australia during the late 19th century. The phrase was employed as a summation of the theory by Charles Dana Wilber:

God speed the plow. ... By this wonderful provision, which is only man's mastery over nature, the clouds are dispensing copious rains ... [the plow] is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a desert into a farm or garden. ... To be more concise, Rain follows the plow.

The basic premise of the theory was that human habitation and agriculture through homesteading effected a permanent change in the climate of arid and semi-arid regions, making these regions more humid. The theory was widely promoted in the 1870s as a justification for the settlement of the Great Plains, a region previously known as the "Great American Desert". It was also used to justify the expansion of wheat growing on marginal land in South Australia during the same period.

According to the theory, increased human settlement in the region and cultivation of soil would result in an increased rainfall over time, rendering the land more fertile and lush as the population increased. As later historical records of rainfall indicated, the theory was based on faulty evidence arising from brief climatological fluctuations that happened to coincide with settlement, an example of the logical fallacy that correlation means causation. The theory was later refuted by climatologists and is now definitively regarded as pure superstition.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Microsoft Windows 🔗 Microsoft Windows/Computing 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Bush hid the facts is a common name for a bug present in some versions of Microsoft Windows, which causes text encoded in ASCII to be interpreted as if it were UTF-16LE, resulting in garbled text. When the string "Bush hid the facts", without newline or quotes, was put in a new Notepad document and saved, closed, and reopened, the nonsensical sequence of Chinese characters "畂桳栠摩琠敨映捡獴" would appear instead.

While "Bush hid the facts" is the sentence most commonly presented on the Internet to induce the error, the bug can be triggered by many strings with letters and spaces in the same positions, for example "hhhh hhh hhh hhhhh". Other sequences trigger the bug as well, including even the text "a ".

The bug occurs when the string is passed to the Win32 charset detection function IsTextUnicode. IsTextUnicode sees that the bytes match the UTF-16LE encoding of valid (if nonsensical) Chinese Unicode characters, concludes that the text is valid UTF-16LE Chinese and returns true, and the application then incorrectly interprets the text as UTF-16LE.

The bug had existed since IsTextUnicode was introduced with Windows NT 3.5 in 1994, but was not discovered until early 2004. Many text editors and tools exhibit this behavior on Windows because they use IsTextUnicode to determine the encoding of text files. As of Windows Vista, Notepad has been modified to use a different detection algorithm that does not exhibit the bug, but IsTextUnicode remains unchanged in the operating system, so any other tools that use the function are still affected.

🔗 Novels

In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell, the Two Minutes Hate is the daily, public period during which members of the Outer Party of Oceania must watch a film depicting the enemies of the state, specifically Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers, to openly and loudly express hatred for them. The political purpose of the Two Minutes Hate is to allow the citizens of Oceania to vent their existential anguish and personal hatreds towards politically expedient enemies: Goldstein and the enemy superstate of the moment. In re-directing the members' subconscious feelings away from the Party's government of Oceania, and towards non-existent external enemies, the Party minimises thoughtcrime and the consequent, subversive behaviours of thoughtcriminals.

An animated image showing the definition of pi. A number line is marked off by a circle of unit diameter. Starting from zero, the circle "unrolls" its circumference. At one full turn, the unrolled circumference has extended to the point we call π. This number is real but irrational, transcendental, and cannot be constructed with compass and straightedge.

Animation credit: John Reid
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🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia

David J. DeWitt is a computer scientist specializing in database management system research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to moving to MIT, DeWitt was the John P. Morgridge Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was also a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, leading the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab at Madison, Wisconsin. Professor DeWitt received a B.A. degree from Colgate University in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1976. He then joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison and started the Wisconsin Database Group, which he led for more than 30 years.

Professor DeWitt is known for his research in the areas of parallel databases, benchmarking, object-oriented databases, and XML databases. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (1998), and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

He received the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award (now renamed SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award) in 1995 for his contributions to the database systems field. In 2009, ACM recognized the seminal contributions of his Gamma parallel database system project with the ACM Software System Award. Also in 2009, he received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award for his contributions to the database systems field.

🔗 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.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Geology 🔗 Weather 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System 🔗 Weather/Weather 🔗 Weather/Space weather

A Miyake event is an observed sharp enhancement of the production of cosmogenic isotopes by cosmic rays. It can be marked by a spike in the concentration of radioactive carbon isotope ¹⁴
C in tree rings, as well as ¹⁰
Be and ³⁶
Cl in ice cores, which are all independently dated. At present, five significant events are known (7176 BCE, 5259 BCE, 660 BCE, 774 CE, 993 CE) for which the spike in ¹⁴
C is quite remarkable, i.e. above 1% rise over a period of 2 years, and four more events (12,350 BCE, 5410 BCE, 1052 CE, 1279 CE) need independent confirmation. It is not known how often Miyake events occur, but from the available data it is estimated to be every 400–2400 years.

There is strong evidence that Miyake events are caused by extreme solar particle events and they are likely related to super-flares discovered on solar-like stars. Although Miyake events are based on extreme year-to-year rises of ¹⁴
C concentration, the duration of the periods over which the ¹⁴
C levels increase or stay at high levels is longer than one year. However, a universal cause and origin of all the events is not yet established in science, and some of the events may be caused by other phenomena coming from outer space (such as a gamma-ray burst).

A recently reported sharp spike in ¹⁴
C that occurred between 12,350 and 12,349 BCE, may represent the largest known Miyake event. This event was identified during a study conducted by an international team of researchers who measured radiocarbon levels in ancient trees recovered from the eroded banks of the Drouzet River, near Gap, France, in the Southern French Alps. According to the initial study the new event is roughly twice the size of the Δ¹⁴
C increase for more recent 774 CE and 993 CE events, but the strength of the corresponding solar storm is not yet assessed. However, the newly discovered 12,350 BCE event has not yet been independently confirmed in wood from other regions, nor it is reliably supported by a clear corresponding spike in other isotopes (such as Beryllium-10) that are usually used in combination for absolute radiometric dating.

A Miyake event occurring in modern conditions might have significant impacts on global technological infrastructure such as satellites, telecommunications, and power grids.