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🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing

Nuclear Gandhi is an Internet meme and an urban legend about the video game Civilization. According to the legend, there was a bug in Civilization that eventually forced the pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi to be extremely aggressive and to use nuclear weapons heavily.

The bug was first mentioned in 2012, two years after the release of Civilization V, and eventually became one of the most recognizable video game glitches; it has been used as an example of integer overflow in computer science and was included in other Civilization games as an easter egg.

In 2020, Sid Meier contradicted the urban legend, stating there had never been a bug of this sort in the original 1991 game. Nuclear Gandhi was first implemented in Civilization V (2010) as a joke.

🔗 Psychology

The 'doorway effect' or ‘location updating effect’ is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another. We tend to forget items of recent significance immediately after crossing a boundary and often forget what we were thinking about or planning on doing upon entering a different room. Research suggests that this phenomenon occurs both at literal boundaries (e.g., moving from one room to another via a door) and metaphorical boundaries (e.g., imagining traversing a doorway, or even when moving from one desktop window to another on a computer).

Memory is organized around specific events or episodes, such as attending a lecture or having a family meal, rather than being a continuous stream interrupted by sleep. This organization is called episodic memory, which involves receiving and storing information about events that are temporarily dated, along with their time and place relationships.

Numerous psychological studies have indicated that the external context, including the location where events occur, plays a significant role in how memories are separated. This context helps establish distinctions between different remembered events. Memories of events that happen in the environment we're currently in are easier to access compared to those from different places. As a result, when we experience spatial changes and move to a different location, it can act as a boundary marker that separates and categorizes our continuous flow of memories into distinct segments.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Christianity/Catholicism 🔗 Christianity/Eastern Orthodoxy 🔗 Christianity/Jesus 🔗 Christianity/Oriental Orthodoxy

The Immovable Ladder is a wooden ladder leaning against the right window on the second tier of the facade of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem. The ladder rests on a ledge and is attached to a window owned by the Armenian Apostolic Church. The ladder is a symbol of inter-confessional disputes within Christianity. Its presence in its current location signifies the adherence to an agreement among six Christian denominations, who collectively own the church, not to move, repair, or alter anything in the church without the consent of all six denominations.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Physics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Physics/Biographies 🔗 United States/Washington - Seattle 🔗 Buddhism 🔗 Invention

Chester Floyd Carlson (February 8, 1906 – September 19, 1968) was an American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney born in Seattle, Washington.

He is best known for inventing electrophotography, the process performed today by millions of photocopiers worldwide. Carlson's process produced a dry copy, as contrasted with the wet copies then produced by the mimeograph process. Carlson's process was renamed xerography, a term that means "dry writing."

🔗 Computing

The Owner-Free File System (OFF System, or OFF for short) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system in which all shared files are represented by randomized multi-used data blocks. Instead of anonymizing the network, the data blocks are anonymized and therefore, only data garbage is ever exchanged and stored and no forwarding via intermediate nodes is required. OFF claims to have been created with the expressed intention "to cut off some gangrene-infested bits of the copyright industry."

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/relativity 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

Cherenkov radiation (; Russian: Эффект Вавилова — Черенкова, Vavilov-Cherenkov effect) is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wavefront in a medium) of light in that medium. A classic example of Cherenkov radiation is the characteristic blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor. Its cause is similar to the cause of a sonic boom, the sharp sound heard when faster-than-sound movement occurs. The phenomenon is named after Soviet physicist Pavel Cherenkov.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Computing/Computer Security

Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that allows computation on ciphertexts, generating an encrypted result which, when decrypted, matches the result of the operations as if they had been performed on the plaintext.

Homomorphic encryption can be used for privacy-preserving outsourced storage and computation. This allows data to be encrypted and out-sourced to commercial cloud environments for processing, all while encrypted. In highly regulated industries, such as health care, homomorphic encryption can be used to enable new services by removing privacy barriers inhibiting data sharing. For example, predictive analytics in health care can be hard to apply due to medical data privacy concerns, but if the predictive analytics service provider can operate on encrypted data instead, these privacy concerns are diminished.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Law 🔗 Open

Patentleft (also patent left, copyleft-style patent license or open patent) is the practice of licensing patents (especially biological patents) for royalty-free use, on the condition that adopters license related improvements they develop under the same terms. Copyleft-style licensors seek "continuous growth of a universally accessible technology commons" from which they, and others, will benefit.

Patentleft is analogous to copyleft, a license which allows distribution of a copyrighted work and derived works, but only under the same or equivalent terms.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Norway 🔗 European Union

Norway is not a member state of the European Union (EU). However, it is associated with the Union through its membership in agreements in the European Economic Area (EEA) established in 1994, and by virtue of being a founding member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) which was founded in 1960, one of the two historically dominant western European trade blocs. Norway had considered joining the European Community and the European Union twice, but opted to decline following referendums in 1972 and 1994.

🔗 United States 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Education 🔗 United States/Massachusetts 🔗 Higher Education

Math 55 is a two-semester long first-year undergraduate mathematics course at Harvard University, founded by Lynn Loomis and Shlomo Sternberg. The official titles of the course are Honors Abstract Algebra (Math 55a) and Honors Real and Complex Analysis (Math 55b). Previously, the official title was Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra.